The only rule is that there are no rules

  • Thread starter Thread starter Vurt
  • Start date Start date
V

Vurt

New member
I hear and tell myself that all the time, but realized a few weeks ago that I don't follow it. I've more or less conformed to a standard routine in terms of recording approach, mic placement, signal processing, mixing, etc... and the result, although good most of the time, is beginning to bore me.

Friday night I cracked a bottle of Crown Royal and decided to excise everything I've learned about "overprocessing" with a particular song I had been looking forward to mixing.

I misused everything. I ran a guitar track through obnoxious reverb levels, a limiter, a gate, two compressors, and back. I blasted another guitar track through a plywood box built around a car stereo speaker and mic'd it out of phase. I normalized tracks. I compressed before preamps. I EQ'd tracks that sounded fine. I abandoned mono and panned shit everywhere like a madman, and then I went to bed.

Nursing a slight headache, I listened to it Saturday morning and realized I hadn't been as drunk as I thought. It actually sounds good. Very good, in fact. The levels and panning need a lot of help, but the tracks themselves are some of the best I've done in a long time.

Just wanted to encourage anyone in a rut to let the shit fly and see what happens...
 
Yo Vurt:

You are SO RIGHT! Creativity is kind like the dude who dropped rubber on a hot plate and created vulcanized rubbers. What a great invention for us--NO LIE!

When you mix or do tracks or whatever, a simple twist of the wriste on a reverb or a vocoder or whatever can give you a great sound, the ONE YOU WANT, and let you sleep at the PM, after a few martinis.

Do it that way brother -- knowledge is key -- creativity is the key to knowledge.

Green Hornet:D :D :p :p :p :cool: :cool:
 
It's fun to shake things up - I do it every so often with my drum mic'ing. These days I'm using Recorderman's Overhead Mic postions, with condensers close mic'ing the toms. Been using that approach for about a year now... soon it might be time to move on to something else.
 
Drums are an area in dire need of some change for me. My room is so bad that once I found an acceptable sound, I burned the process of getting it into my head and haven't made many changes since. I do some odd things with the kik, but that's about it. I'm house shopping right and a critical factor is the basement and how conducive it might be to a good drum sound. Pathetic, but fun.
 
Vurt was it better than what you had been doing or is it just different and new?
 
It's definitely better than it was before, and better than what it would have been if I had given it my typical mixing treatment. That's not to say that everything I did contributed to that, but the things that did work worked very well and compensated for things tht didn't.

If I had to pick the most beneficial treatment I used, I would say compression. I compressed the living shit out of 2 of the 6 guitar tracks and 1 of the 3 vocal tracks. I wouldn't squash a mixed down 2 track song, but individual tracks are another story. I'll be doing much more of it in the future.
 
Back
Top