Some new interesting questions from the musician for the engineer mixing, mastering

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nonreversebird

New member
Ok I have been working with some new eq settings and volume changes of my original tracks. OH, I also wised up and decided I would mixdown to my CardDeluxe instead of my CreativeLabs Live Platinum. Yes it made a huge difference. But now I have a very good question for you guys into recording Hard Rock music.

Alright lets face it were dealing with very distorted guitar first off. My personal preferance for a bass sound is P bass into an Ampeg which is what I tried to emulate with my Squire P bass and my Behringer Vamp. I am pretty happy with the tracks.

My QUESTION IS: When you play music loud as hell vs. quite as heaven what intruments do you expect to be less prevelent. For my personal listening when I crank the music VERY loud I want the bass and Guitar and Drums to be louder than the vocals. I cant stand hearing singing blaring loud. What do you guys think? Also it seems when I mix, at low volumes the most difficult intrument to get the right volume at is the vox. I have a local studio in Jax Fl that will charge me like 350 for my entire CD to Master. I want to make sure I have done the absolute best on my mixes. Any help will be so appreciated. I appreciate everyones help incedentily and I in fact have taken everyones advise and tried to use and it seems like it has really improved my music a lot. I know it will all come down to mastering but I dont want to lose particular levels of intruments when they start messing with lets say panning like I have :-)

thanks
 
nonreversebird said:
For my personal listening when I crank the music VERY loud I want the bass and Guitar and Drums to be louder than the vocals. I cant stand hearing singing blaring loud. What do you guys think? Also it seems when I mix, at low volumes the most difficult intrument to get the right volume at is the vox. I have a local studio in Jax Fl that will charge me like 350 for my entire CD to Master. I want to make sure I have done the absolute best on my mixes.
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What you should do, then, is send the Mastering guy your work as "stems."

In other words, send him a completed mixdown of the music for each song ... but with the vocals as a separate track. And see if he wouldn't mind working with it that way.
 
chessrock said:
What you should do, then, is send the Mastering guy your work as "stems."

In other words, send him a completed mixdown of the music for each song ... but with the vocals as a separate track. And see if he wouldn't mind working with it that way.
Click to expand...

I agree with chessrock. Since you seem a bit unsure about your mix, and it doesn't appear that you have had much experience with mastering the stem route would be your best bet. I do this with a local studio in my area and have him send me submixes of:

Vox - stereo file
Bass - mono track
drums - stereo
gtrs, keys, etc - stereo

The tracks should have all effects printed on them, I wouldn't expect the ME to do much in the area of effects otherwise you're crossing the line between mastering and mixing (mastering in stems is already too close to this). Basically it will allow the ME to make adjustments in levels between the tracks, as well as compress and EQ separately.
 
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a lot of times at different volumes you notice different tonal aspects of an instrument.

the kick is the most simple explination

at hi volumes you hear/feel the punch more
at low you register the click more
 
masteringhouse said:
I do this with a local studio in my area and have him send me submixes of:

Vox - stereo file
Bass - mono track
drums - stereo
gtrs, keys, etc - stereo
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Ya know ... we call that "mixing" where I come from. :D
 
I just sent a mix to get mastered and I'm wondering if I should have gone with the stem route, because the room I'm in is so bad acoustically I'm second guessing everything. Maybe I'll consider that next time, although I would miss doing that final mix.

Just wondering about how that works with the effects: normally compression is the first in my chain cause I find it weird to compress my reverb plugins considering they're not that great in the first place. Is this a standard chain order, in which case, wouldn't it be weird to apply my reverb and leave the instrument compression to be done at mastering? Or am I totally off here (ie. won't the compression increase the apparent reverb by bringing down the attack and bringing up the decay?)
 
chessrock said:
Ya know ... we call that "mixing" where I come from. :D
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Yeah know watcha mean, the lines are definitely blurred. When using stems where does mixing and mastering leave off?

However even from an ME's point of view I would rather mix a couple of stems that try to pull a rabbit out of a hat getting the drums to sit nicely with guitars and bass on just a stereo pair and a questionable mix. If the levels are set correctly then just feed them all to a bus and nothing more need be done other than processing on the bus (just as if it were a 2 track mix).
 
i mix in a shite room too. but when i'm finished i listen to it on as many stereos as possible (the one at the local music store is my favorite because it hates me more than any other)
feel free to correct me but...

the way i figure it if thare's a problem on 1 out of 10 systems it's not so bad
but at 5 out of 10 it's diffenately my problem.

ear buds-systems with subs
 
corban said:
I just sent a mix to get mastered and I'm wondering if I should have gone with the stem route, because the room I'm in is so bad acoustically I'm second guessing everything. Maybe I'll consider that next time, although I would miss doing that final mix.

Just wondering about how that works with the effects: normally compression is the first in my chain cause I find it weird to compress my reverb plugins considering they're not that great in the first place. Is this a standard chain order, in which case, wouldn't it be weird to apply my reverb and leave the instrument compression to be done at mastering? Or am I totally off here (ie. won't the compression increase the apparent reverb by bringing down the attack and bringing up the decay?)
Click to expand...

Instrument compression should be done during mixing and effects, etc. done as usual. The only difference with stems is that rather than mixing to 2 tracks you would bus out submixes and store those as separate files. That way you will not need to do a vocal up/down mixes or any combination of the other instruments. The ME just raises the level of that submix as required during the mastering process.
 
if the place will do stems at a reasonable rate I would go with that because after tracking it yourself, if you can't get the levels right, which I think is understandable, you will get a better end product. a very well mastered cd that came from a poor mix will still sound poor.

I find that it is easier to get the vocal volume right at lower volumes. really low volumes.
 
masteringhouse said:
Basically it will allow the ME to make adjustments in levels between the tracks, as well as compress and EQ separately.
Click to expand...

OK, that sounds like a good deal. I was just wondering about the part where the ME will compress and EQ separately, which could possibly change the mix the mixer was going for. But in most cases I'm guessing the ME isn't going to do something that's going to sound bad, and if they go against what you want they might be willing to tweak it a bit after the fact. I just wish I had known this was an option two days ago. :o Well, thanks for the info.
 
Hey again, Massive Master mentioned that my mixes on myspace site in my sig had the "Slushies" , something like that. I didnt know what that was so I listened and I think it was because I was using the "smooth/enhance" process on my final mix in Sound Forge. I remixed 4 songs and put them on that site if anyone is interested. I would be. I did some eq changes and I DID not use that process. The mixes on the site are cranked as loud really as I feel I could get them BUT I have the mixes recorded under 6 db to be mastered. But if anyone cares to listen to my new mixes as well as 2 new songs I posted that would be great. Any comments or suggestions about the overall mix would be much appreciated.
 
The slushies are mostly the (MP3?) encoding...

The only thing you can really do about it is to use much a much higher bitrate (which the site/player probably doesn't allow due to bandwidth restrictions).
 
our ears hear frequencies differently at different volumes, ears are non linear devices and their frequency response is anything but flat.
the fletcher munson equal loudness contour curves graphically display the ears frequency response, generally it's the flattest it gets around 85 db. and some consider that an optimum level for mixing.
however it is good to listen to the mix at many different levels, particularly very low, if the balance of bass to highs is there at very low volumes is something to check.
we hear 1-4 khz. better than any other frequencys (range of human voice).
if a mix is monitored too high it'll probably be bass and treble shy at lower levels.
the loudness of a tone can also affect our ears perception of pitch, not a good idea to tune at high volume.
 
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