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Live Sound Engineer's Perspective...
#1
Here's my one-hour mix in Logic X, with my live sound engineer's hat on.


.mp3    Corine Corine.mp3 --  (Download: 6.32 MB)


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#2
Hey fohman, I like your hat.
You have achieved a great sound here. Listening with headphones it sounds natural, dynamic and most of all, exciting. You have managed the sections well. The only issue I'm hearing is with the vocal and perhaps the reverb choice within. For me it's sounding a little mismatched with the orchestra room sound and seems to be placing some extra distance between the singer and the listener. If that makes any sense.
Great work all the same.

Dave.
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#3
Dave, that's a great observation! Thanks for your opinion. If I went on to spend more than an hour with this mix, I'd definitely devote some time to that. As it is, I've built a few simple IR verbs through the years that I use at almost every live show, because I know they can get me about 90% there without thinking about it. That was my technique here, and probably what you are noticing is the fact that I snuck in a little "room" sound to the horns along with the IR verb, but the vocal had no such room sound and only the verb?

Also, I high passed the vocal a bit more than most of the other mixes in this thread... I felt that the lower register was oddly resonant and didn't fit well with the rest of the mix, almost making it artificially present. What do you think about that?
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#4
Good sounds!
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#5
(17-06-2016, 01:33 PM)fohman Wrote: Dave, that's a great observation! Thanks for your opinion. If I went on to spend more than an hour with this mix, I'd definitely devote some time to that. As it is, I've built a few simple IR verbs through the years that I use at almost every live show, because I know they can get me about 90% there without thinking about it. That was my technique here, and probably what you are noticing is the fact that I snuck in a little "room" sound to the horns along with the IR verb, but the vocal had no such room sound and only the verb?

Also, I high passed the vocal a bit more than most of the other mixes in this thread... I felt that the lower register was oddly resonant and didn't fit well with the rest of the mix, almost making it artificially present. What do you think about that?

I think your vocal tone is pretty good and suits the style of the song. Just wondering if drying up the verb on the vocal would help bring the singer front and center of the whole performance. This is purely subjective though.Smile

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#6
I'm committed to presenting here my "one-hour live sound" attempt, but I went ahead and updated the file with a -2dB reduction in the vocal verb... didn't seem to violate my rule too much.
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#7
(19-06-2016, 01:11 PM)fohman Wrote: I'm committed to presenting here my "one-hour live sound" attempt, but I went ahead and updated the file with a -2dB reduction in the vocal verb... didn't seem to violate my rule too much.

Sounds great fohman, I reckon it's made all the difference, more importantly though, what do you think? I can now picture the singer centre stage in front on the band.
Dave
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#8
(19-06-2016, 01:27 PM)Dangerous Wrote: Sounds great fohman, I reckon it's made all the difference, more importantly though, what do you think? I can now picture the singer centre stage in front on the band.
Dave

I think it sounds good enough, but I really am interested in hearing from others, because it is very rare for a live engineer to get honest feedback, since most of my coworkers aren't about to do that... I'm their competitor! This is also a great resource because of the consistency among variables: we can all know that everyone started from the same spot in the mixing process... again very rare especially for live engineers. Someone should write a program that automatically takes the same three seconds of everyone's mixes here and plays them all right in a row so we can all hear the differences clearly!

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#9
The mix is perfect!
Here's one little mastering tip that is perfect for songs like this. Try to pan the whole mix a bit(5%) to the left. You will find that it is more live like that. It just sounds better when you finish a song like this and pan it to the one side. Try it. And yeah, once again you did very very good job on mixing this song! I really like it. Big Grin
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