You all kno you love ska

  • Thread starter Thread starter Harlequin Man
  • Start date Start date
Pretty cool song man.
Dig the horns :D
If anything the mix sounds a bit muddy to me, maybe reduce the mid range via EQ and maybe raise the vox a tad
Cheers man, good stuff
 
Yeah man this mix sounds wayyyyy heavy in the low mids. Vox are a bit muddy.


Simon
 
Ok, as a guy who spent 8 years in a ska band and recorded us a bunch of different ways I felt the need to chime in... Not really about the mix but in general recording a ska band. This is just basic stuff that might go against some theories but here goes.

Drummers should try to play to a click track. If you have a lot of tempo changes you can free form it, but if it is a nice standard tempo a click track makes a huge improvement. Everything else can got to scratch tracks while he records.

Next overdub everything else...

Bass... If you want to give the track a laid back feel get your bass player to play behind the beat, if he stays on top of it you can move the waveform back a couple notches and it will drag the beat back enough to mellow it out, this also works vice versa to put energy into parts.

Guitar...ahhh my old guitarist loved to track a lot of guitars. Track the clean sounds seperate from the distortion. If the guitarist can keep those up beats going pretty steady you can double them and it will fatten things up nicely. Also ska really prefers your guitarist to use the f chord instead of the standard e bar chord when moving up the neck. It really gives the note it's chank.

Horns are always a pain in the ass. Just make sure they tune. If they like to play together then you can do that. Doing them seperately is sometimes tough because they will always complain somebody is playing the wrong harmony or whatever... and usually they are.

Vox... I think harmonies go a long way in ska bands. If you can add some well placed harmonies its always nice. No real tips here, every singer is different.

Also, less can be more in a good ska tune. Drummers don't have to play timbale fills every 2 measures, bass players don't have to walk all over the place. A killer drum/bass/upbeat guitar can go a long way. Horns don't have to play all the time either. A tasty fill here or there and a nice melody line are great. Another thing about ska bass. I think too many people mix it thin in mixes trying to accentuate every note the guy is playing. Give it some balls.

Recording ska bands is hard. Hope this helps.
 
Also, the above was sort of recording suggestions and producing suggestions and also assumed you were doing this into some sort of digital means... but now about the mix.

I loaded it up in Har-Bal (worth every penny... the one plug in I recomend anyone to get) and saw some interesting stuff. Moving left to right in the spectrum... Everything lower than 50hz is gone almost and everything in the 70 to 250 range is quite high. At 332hz you have a spike that can be brought down a bit as well. At 406hz and 1k you have a small dip. You also have a big spike around 1.8k and 2.4k then it dips. Then from 3k to 8k there is a huge dip where you are losing a lot of crispness. Most of the changes are 1 to 2 db changes except for the low end stuff that looks to be a 3db+ change.

I made some adjustments just for fun and it sounded a lot more natural. The vocals are still buried but it wasn't as muddy. Give it a shot...
 
hey.. im 15.. first try...

need monitors still...

but working on it..

everything ran into a BR-864
seperate tracks..
 
Ah shoot... sorry dude. Just trying to give you some specifics to help to out. You're 15 getting paid for mixes? not too shabby...
 
what should i get to fix those problems

i got a behri mixer going into a BR-864 i got all nice mics.. but just the whole process needs to be redone...
 
Checked out your myspace... shows in the basement, recording, promotion. Seems like you got a lot of things going on for 15.

Ok, sometimes you just have to do the best you can with what you have. I don't know everything you are trying to accomplish but I can say that when I started out the best thing i ever bought to improve my mixes was a pair of studio monitors. They help for tracking, mixing, quick mastering. Just to listen to something that isn't muddied by bad heaphones (or those boomboxes with crazy eq presets) can really help.

I do have to warn you that all of this is an addiction and every cent you earn from now till you get married will be blown on equipment, software, books etc. So tomorrow you get some monitors, for your birthday you get a condenser mic, then you save for a preamp... it never ends.
 
Hey. Yeah, to get rid of the muddy, try to make sure that the spectrum looks *roughly equal throughout the entire range. This will probably mean that you need to boost the highs on the SNARE and cymbals and highhats. Also find the muddy frequencies on each instrument separately and cut them out via eq. Usually you will find the mud to be somewhere between 200Hz and 1000Hz. Make sure you (for the most part) only have one instrument dominating a particular range of frequencies. Bass drum should be at the extremely low end, then bass, then vocals, then guitar/horns etc...Also, the song gets extremely loud at the beginning and gets clipped. If you reduce the conflict between these instruments for the mid-range, I think that will mostly solve itself.
 
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