Your first mix

T

timvdwest

New member
I was going through a bunch of CD's the other day and discovered some of my first mixes, just when I started getting interested in recording.

I was amazed how horrible it was, but then thought of re-doing a bunch of them just for the hell of it. I'm going to post the original track and then post the new mix a bit later just for fun, thought it would be a cool project.

My first setup was with a some crappy Cyrix PC and a sound blaster live. Recording with Cool Edit Pro. I think I ripped some small mic out of a boom-box type radio and used it to record my first spanish guitar.

I would love to know if there are other people out there that did the same sort of thing and it would be nice to see how things have progressed.

So if you are willing to post your VERY first mix (I'm talking about the first thing you recorded to your pc) just for the laugh go ahead!

I'll post my first one shortly - its about 8 years old - please have a chuckle with me:)

Here it is:


feel free to laugh. hehe - listening to it again makes me believe that this was my pre-soundblaster live days. hehe
 
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Believe me...You don't want to hear my first mix, let alone the first 100. :D
 
I have an old mix of one of the first things I ever. did Vestifire 4-track cassette. I don't have any place to post it and link to it though. It was just a 3 part harmony version of Tell me why (the old standard, not the Beatles song).
 
Wow, totally annoying! :D

But not bad considering you didn't know what you were doing...



And trust me, you don't want to hear my first mixes...
 
Ok. I'm game: Llamamall - An Assessment of Skill

I recorded this 8 years ago when I was 15.
I didn't know the first thing about percussion, so I just threw whatever I thought sounded good (at the time) into a drum machine.
I didn't know the first thing about panning, so I just swung everything as far to the side as I could.
I put reverb on this one, but only because my dad (who was helping me record) recommended it. The rest of that "album" does not have reverb.

At least I knew enough to re-record each instrument until I got it "right."
 
VomitHatSteve said:
Ok. I'm game: Llamamall - An Assessment of Skill

I recorded this 8 years ago when I was 15.
I didn't know the first thing about percussion, so I just threw whatever I thought sounded good (at the time) into a drum machine.
I didn't know the first thing about panning, so I just swung everything as far to the side as I could.
I put reverb on this one, but only because my dad (who was helping me record) recommended it. The rest of that "album" does not have reverb.

At least I knew enough to re-record each instrument until I got it "right."
Click to expand...
I can't get a thing to load.... am I missing something?
 
ooh, I want in. These are my earliest mixes that I have. I think my true earliest mixes consisted of putting those old crappy mac mics in a garbage can and playing the drums, while my brother sang into the garbage can. That way we could get the levels right.

I have 2 first mixes. I'm not sure which came first.

1)


All guitars direct.
I think I had 2 mics on the drums, maybe 4.
Everything panned dead center.
I couldn't play more than 2 measures on the guitar without screwing up. A lot of cutting and pasting.
Truly a work of art. I can't believe I got an A on this in high school.

2)


Recorded live.
Guitar and bass recorded direct out of amp.
Drums had 4 mics, running into the mixer/amp with spring reverb. True class.
Everything panned dead center.

To think I used to show these recordings and be proud of them. I guess someday I will say the same thing about my recordings today.
 
Oops. The link was broken. Turns out I can't spell the word 'assessment' consistently.

Correct link here.

Bozmillar, for first recordings from high school those are freaking good! I'd still be proud of those.
 
bozmillar said:
ooh, I want in. These are my earliest mixes that I have. I think my true earliest mixes consisted of putting those old crappy mac mics in a garbage can and playing the drums, while my brother sang into the garbage can. That way we could get the levels right.

I have 2 first mixes. I'm not sure which came first.

1)


All guitars direct.
I think I had 2 mics on the drums, maybe 4.
Everything panned dead center.
I couldn't play more than 2 measures on the guitar without screwing up. A lot of cutting and pasting.
Truly a work of art. I can't believe I got an A on this in high school.

2)


Recorded live.
Guitar and bass recorded direct out of amp.
Drums had 4 mics, running into the mixer/amp with spring reverb. True class.
Everything panned dead center.

To think I used to show these recordings and be proud of them. I guess someday I will say the same thing about my recordings today.
Click to expand...

Yeah, those are pretty good for first recordings (in high school, no less). My favorite part though, is the "trash can" description. At least you recognize it. You'd be surprised at how many worse things I've heard from folks who think they've nailed a great sound. :eek:
 
VomitHatSteve said:
Oops. The link was broken. Turns out I can't spell the word 'assessment' consistently.

Correct link here.

Bozmillar, for first recordings from high school those are freaking good! I'd still be proud of those.
Click to expand...

Y'know, each track is sonically okay--it's your stereo placement that is so--well, unique. All drums and guits on the right, all vox and bass on the left. Quite interesting...

What would you expect? :D

Fun stuff. Thanks for posting.
 
Here is one of my first recordings. Is is of a band that i did live sound fore. We recorded this in their prcatice room. I was in a room accross the hall so I would have some isolation from the drums and guitar. If memory serves my well, the bass play went direct into the Mackie 1604 in the same room I was in along with the singer. This was a live mix in that it went straight to my two track recorder (MiniDisc). As long as the song is, I cut about the last two minutes of the recording, doing a quick fade.

Metaphor of Reality
 
Perhaps a little off target.. More than few times I've revived a mix after not hearing a project for for long time with the initial reaction of 'Wow, I should be able to this or that way better..
Then open it up, poke around a while and all the 'issues we had to fix' and the reasons we made the compromises in the first place- come back to memory. ;):D
 
One of my first mixes on a PC was called "Spain Six" and can be heard on this soundclick page about half way down:

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=355705&content=music

My real first mixes I did on a Tascam or Fostex (can't recall which coz I ended up owning one of each for a while there back in the early days...about the year 2001)...and those mixes are on some cassette tape somewhere.

Anyway...Spain Six...I really like the song...it's not without it's charm...I just wish I could redo it now and make it more quailty in sound capture and in tone and in mix....but I'm too lazy to work out all the parts again. I just made it up as I went along...was great being able to delete takes and redo so easily...way better than the 4 track cassette decks I slaved over.

Tim: Your first mix started to hurt my ears (headphones) and I already have them turned down…some crunchy hiss and a rough edit or two…what the dillio is that alarm siren thing…sounds like an alarm in some town that’s occupied by zombies. Also some crazy panning edits and a hot hot hot acoustic guitar. Thanks for putting it up.

Bozmiller: Sounds ok…maybe a little hot. Anyway it’s a long way from a tragedy. Johnny B Goode sounds ok…maybe some guitar fluffs and not the greatest singing but it’s not without it’s charm.

VomitHatSteve: What’s with the vocals hiding over there on the left? Trying to get away from the guitar on the right? I expected higher quality from a 13 year old doing his first song. I expected original lyrics and new ideas. Bass hanging out with the vocals, drums hanging out with the guitars. It all makes sense.

Fishmed: This song sounds pretty sweet. The mix is too pro ;)

Anyway...who wants to be some crazy wash your hands a thousand times a day mixer? Just record it and slap it together right? She'll be right
 
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I believe I mentioned that I didn't know how to pan with any kind of subtlety.

You seem to have very high standards for teenage songwriters. :D
 
timvdwest: OMFG!! HAHAHAHAHAH Thanks for sharing, dude!

@the others, they got steadily less hilarious as I went along... Definitely should have listened to them in reverse order :D

I've never really thought much about it until now, but in all the recordings I've made - I've only ever recorded *3* of my own songs. They were, naturally, the first 3 recordings I ever made. Sadly, I can't find my first mix (which I made when I was 14)... But I do have the second and third songs I ever recorded - which were both projects done at the same time, like bozmillar.

I played all the music in both of these tracks, and (with the exception of the girl singing in the second link) I did all these vocals, too... so don't listen to loudly or your ears might bleed, heh.

Guitars and bass were both DI into my SoundBlaster Audigy (LOL!), and the vocals were an SM57 with an XLR-1/4" TRS adapter cable into the same input that I DI'd guitar and bass. Drums, strings, pianos, and brass were all played (or programmed) with one of those 99$ Casio keyboards that has "A Whole New World" built into it (it did have a MIDI output...), The MIDI was run through the on-board MIDI soundbanks of the SoundBlaster, and the only way to record that into digital audio which could be edited and mixed was to actually, physically run a cable from the output of the soundcard to an input of the soundcard (I shit you not) - because the MIDI soundbanks were after the last point that the audio driver had control of the sound output, if I recall correctly... I got all the weird synthy sounds for the intro using some freeware softsynth (with one of those really basic interfaces like a student made it or something... It was just like those free guitar amp-modeler plugs). I remember being amazed that I could just render the softsynth straight to an audio track, no cable required!

It was so goddamn ghetto...the whole hardware setup was 1 soundblaster Audigy thing with the 5.25" bay, 1 SM57, 1 XLR-1/4" TRS cable, and one 1/8" stereo cable... On the software side the OB-Tune demo actually made this loud BEEEEEEP every few seconds as a limitation of the demo, so I had to render the tuned output several times and edit the rendered wavs together, lol...

This one I spent an unbelievable amount of time on (easily over a year... but that doesn't stop it from being pretty hard on the ears, hahahhaa..). It was really my main learning project, I suppose, trying out every imaginable way to polish the turds of tracks I had recorded - the music is chaotic, the recording is bad at best - enjoy a laugh

http://www.lightningmp3.com/live/file.php?id=14719 (the screams/growels after the intro do stop after a few seconds...not that it gets much better sounding - but I know that shit can make some people have hissyfits)

This one I only spent a few days on (in the midst of my massive turd-polishing-experience above) but I didn't get to finish it because the chick broke up with my friend :( It definitely sounds better than the first one (probably because my only vocals are those awkward growels after the intro, lol)... but still - wow, things have changed - you can hear the high-hats cut out every few seconds (which happened ALL THE TIME because the soundblaster couldn't make the high-hat sound at the same time as the snare sound, hahahahahahhaa....) and I didn't even bother doing them one at a time to fix it.

http://www.lightningmp3.com/live/file.php?id=14720

I gave up on songwriting after that song...and joined a band where I had no input :(, rode that train for a while, hopped off after a few years, and started recording others to pay the bills - I'm gonna go dig around in some boxes tonight - I know that I have my very first one somewhere... and it is so amazingly god-awful I just have to share it when, and if, I find it - I mean it makes everything else posted here sound like.... utter perfection :p

This was fun, thanks a lot for this thread... I think I needed these (perhaps humbling) laughs. Also listening to songs that I actually wrote brought back some weird, warm, fuzzy feelings that I haven't felt in years... sorry for my off-on-a-tangent-liness... :o
 
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Maybe not the first, but probably the second. I did these with a VS-840 and a minidisc rack unit in 1998/1999.

Live to track and probably not that different in quality from early recordings of my current band.

http://music.metafilter.com/1663/Lonely-Thoughts

I was 18 or 19 and had like 2 microphones (one vocal and one on the drums/backup vocals) and forgot to press record until the take where I'd already blown out my voice. The guitarist broke a string every song. I never got him to rerecord because the drummer disappeared for a few years (now he's back in Providence doing drums for the next) and the guitarist burned to death at burning man.

I think I was monitoring using a bass amp.

Oh, and my first remix of a friend's song.

http://music.metafilter.com/1775/You-dont-know-me-1997
 
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