Here's the mix I did of this track for Sound On Sound magazine's October 2011 'Mix Rescue' column. The mix was carried out in Reaper using a few third-party plug-ins, and with the assistance of some samples from Nine Volt Audio’s Big Bad Guitars REX loop library and Spectrasonics’s Backbeat cymbal samples. It's quite an aggressive sound (indeed probably a little thrashier than I'd have instinctively gone for myself), but bear in mind that the band's stated references included tracks such as Thrice's 'All The World Is Mad' and QOTSA's 'Avon'. If you'd like to investigate the settings of this remix in more detail, the complete Reaper project can be downloaded from this page.
You know, I gotta say, I like being able to hear a quality pro-mix of one of the tunes I chose to mix here. Puttting that side-by side with what I did really helps illustrate where I made some wrong decisions. (I don't necessarily know how to FIX what I hear but I can definitely hear that there were some better choices...) Like many, I'm also hampered by a less than ideal listening environment combined with trying to keep the landlords at bay.
Interesting on the multimic "doule track" thing. So you set your tone with the phase cancellations lessened but basically still in place, cloned the four tracks, put 'em in a bottle and shook really hard to mix them up a bit and then layered them on top of the originals, spread between the two channels. Never occurred to me to try that with this tune. On some single tracks, I've tried to achieve fake doubles by using 1-2ms random offsets (chopping the clone up into bits and then physically shifting sections about) followed by melodyne followed by EQ followed by very light modulation (like a valve driver or relatively fast, tight, phaser) but the results have always been disappointing. Clearly, it's an art that has to be mastered.
"it took some careful work to bring about a mix sound that was solid and present, but without too much 4‑6kHz abrasiveness or loss of note definition"
Yes! That was my problem exactly! In the end, I settled on sticking in a multiband compressor just so I could hit that specific region and take away some of the harshness while using the makeup gain to control the level of hiss but I think I went too far in trying to beat back the air and lost too much tone. I also didn't handle the tonal blend properly, I now realize. I had gone for trying to remove undesirable room/instrument/amp resonnances and so on from each mic (~128 Hz, ~530 Hz, a *smidge* at 2k, the 4k notch, and then the hiss) and then blend them together but now that I read wha tyou did clearly, finding the relative region where each mic sounded best and doing shelving or band pass would probably have given better results since the four faders would then basically have become a four band EQ at that point.
Similar experience to yours on snare. I sent it through the Sonitus compressor plugin that comes with Sonar (I will use the CLA-76 for stuff like this as well) since it will go sub 1ms, EQing it to get the tone right and, although I did not here, I usually feed the snare mics to a separate reverb processor so I can shape it accordingly apart from the rest of the mix.
Now that I've mixed this tune for myself, I'm first gratified to see that I idenitified a good number of the same problems you encountered and attempted to tackle them as best I could, though my limited experience meant that the results were mixed. Second, a re-read of the mix rescue article is much more eye opening now and gives me a few things to think about for the next mix as well as some that I can apply to a project I'm working on for the recording class I'm taking. (Think modern metal with rather loud--but good--drums recorded in a ~15' x 10' room that's livelier than it should be for a rock drum kit and the same sort of three man band with members doing double duty.)
This has most definitely been a very positive educational experience for me. Thanks a heap for the writeup of your efforts!
(17-04-2012, 08:36 AM)Mike Senior Wrote: Here's the mix I did of this track for Sound On Sound magazine's October 2011 'Mix Rescue' column. The mix was carried out in Reaper using a few third-party plug-ins, and with the assistance of some samples from Nine Volt Audio’s Big Bad Guitars REX loop library and Spectrasonics’s Backbeat cymbal samples. It's quite an aggressive sound (indeed probably a little thrashier than I'd have instinctively gone for myself), but bear in mind that the band's stated references included tracks such as Thrice's 'All The World Is Mad' and QOTSA's 'Avon'. If you'd like to investigate the settings of this remix in more detail, the complete Reaper project can be downloaded from this page.
Guitars could use a little more grit and vocals could be less centred mabye they could be doubled but all ina ll this is a great mix
