vocal levels compared to other instruments

  • Thread starter Thread starter BassyBassyBass
  • Start date Start date
BassyBassyBass said:
I'm going to the clinic, I swear. I just gotta get it as good as I can first. Otherwise you'll be all "this shit's wrong, and that shit's wrong!" and I'll be all "I was gonna fix it but you guys insisted I come to the clinic RIGHT NOW." In other words, I'd rather have the problems I don't know about or don't have a way to resolve critiqued rather than put it out there when there's still things I can fix.
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How can you know if the vocals work or not if you know there are problems with the rest of the mix? I don't think you quite understand what a mix is. To a small extent, yes you can have one part of the mix that is good and another part that is bad. But for the most part, the mix is either good or bad.

It's kind of like tuning a floating bridge guitar. You can't change one part without effecting another. On a floating bridge guitar, if you flatten your low E the other strings have to take up the slack to resist the spring tension and they all sharpen. You can break your high E string without even touching it by loosening the low strings. A mix is the same way. If you lower the volume of one part, you very literally raise the volume of all the other parts since either the headroom will be removed in mastering or the end listener will do a rough normalization with his own volume knob.

So don't approach a mix as "nail this down then nail that down and keep nailing until it's all nailed". A mix is more of a push and pull. Move this end and then tweak what it messed up on that end and then go back to the first end and tweak that back into place yet again. If your bass guitar is too loud and you make it quieter, maybe now your drums are too loud and your guitars are simultaneously too thin and too shrill. So you fix the drums and guitars and now the bass guitar is too loud again...but not AS "too loud" as it was before you lowered it in the the first place. You keep iterating, pushing it all into place and hoping the other end doesn't spill out.

My point is that you cannot possibly know that your vocals are mixed wrong if you know other parts of the song are mixed wrong. So just put what you got up in the clinic and everybody will work it out together.
 
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Great thread, I think it is simply volume in Pop music. I think theres a reason the audition on American Idol is a vocal demo. The average listener doesnt even know what kick and snare means. People want to hear the singer. There are lots of hits through out the years with the vocal(s) way louder than anything else. If the vocal is mediocre, it only makes sense to "blend" them in. If they're outstanding, they should be loud.
 
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PDP said:
The average listener doesnt even know what kick and snare means.
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Those rap/hip-hop kids do... they call it "the beat".... drives me crazy.

They're like, "I like the beat!"

I'm like... you like the quarter notes? The beats that occur 120 times per minute? So you like the tempo? Oh.. cool.
 
I get your point. . .but nevertheless, there are places where I say "oh, that could be tweaked this way" and when I tweak it, I don't notice a compromise anywhere else.

At any rate, I've gotten it as far as I can on my own (though I haven't done the "car listen" yet.

I will post in your clinic when I get this thing uploaded.
 
I should have done this a while ago, but it's up in the clinic now, if you gentlemen/ladies are interested in taking a listen.
 
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