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Digital Only Logic Proz 2 Bare Haggis
#1
So, being a live engineer by trade should have made this an easy mix, but it was quite hard translating this old girl to a studio session. So as always, kept it simple and only let the crowd in a smidge.

No outboard. Minimal 3rd parties. Straight up mixing.

Actually did this mix a couple weeks ago but forgot to upload it whoopsie daisies.


.mp3    2 Bare Hands.mp3 --  (Download: 7.56 MB)


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#2
Good emulation of the existing room however I think a lot of the details are getting washed out unnecessarily. Not sure why you did not want the character from the chamber/audience side of this to come through. I thought it added a good deal of location to things. Over all this sounds pretty good. I think the keyboard is not sitting well against the rest of the ensemble. As you said, this should have been a simple get. It was anything but!
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#3
(20-04-2019, 05:07 PM)Mixinthecloud Wrote: Good emulation of the existing room however I think a lot of the details are getting washed out unnecessarily. Not sure why you did not want the character from the chamber/audience side of this to come through. I thought it added a good deal of location to things. Over all this sounds pretty good. I think the keyboard is not sitting well against the rest of the ensemble. As you said, this should have been a simple get. It was anything but!

Yeah, I completely agree with all of your comments. Live is always hard to turn into a usable recording because of the noise bleed. I suppose thats why so many live albums are mostly re-recorded in studio and put through ADR. I've been lucky enough to have done FOH/live recording for a good many bands, and in almost every instance the only things kept were the drums and the audience. That been said, this is a good recording but its still pretty tricky to get to a happy place. And I definitely wasn't happy with this mix, but whatever.
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#4
I thought this mix was pretty amazing. It has really great presence and punch. Good tones and balance. Drums and vocals really do have that cool live edge and feel (nice top end eq). Really great snare sound. Does the 'body' of the snare come from balancing with the overheads, or is it all genius eq? I really couldn't get anywhere close and would really appreciate some tips if you had time to post. Cymbals sound great too - not sure how best to describe it - a really nice 'splash' without sounding harsh and well placed in the mix. I agree the keyboard is probably a little too upfront for my taste, however I really enjoy this mix and have been listening to it a fair bit. I suspect this was a ton of work to achieve. Glad you remembered to post it!
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#5
(21-04-2019, 08:45 PM)mikej Wrote: I thought this mix was pretty amazing. It has really great presence and punch. Good tones and balance. Drums and vocals really do have that cool live edge and feel (nice top end eq). Really great snare sound. Does the 'body' of the snare come from balancing with the overheads, or is it all genius eq? I really couldn't get anywhere close and would really appreciate some tips if you had time to post. Cymbals sound great too - not sure how best to describe it - a really nice 'splash' without sounding harsh and well placed in the mix. I agree the keyboard is probably a little too upfront for my taste, however I really enjoy this mix and have been listening to it a fair bit. I suspect this was a ton of work to achieve. Glad you remembered to post it!

Hello Mike! I'll be happy to help, and though what I did may sound complicated, its a matter of thinking about what you want and what you need to do to get it there. This was a tricky mix, and I wasn't really happy with it, but I didn't spend a great deal of time on it either. Too lazy I guess.

Snare:
So the snare sounds pretty garbage raw, so you can either replace it (youtube this if you don't know how) or you can do what I did and use it.
I start by cleaning it up with a fast attack gate, slower release somewhere between 100-200ms. Doesn't help much, but it helps with what I'm about to do next ...

I then distort the freaking buggery out of it. I do this to increase the tone (especially the low-mids) and the presence without overdoing eq. I do this by splitting the channel into two. First channel I will eq HEAPS of low end in, shelf at max, and also the highs. Scooped to the heck balls. Then I compress it generously. Then I distort it. You can do this with pretty well any plugin that adds distortion the signal, and sometimes if the compressor you use is quick enough att and rel, you won't need distortion. Something like a 1176 compressor or a distressor kinda deal. Sometimes I use standard tape plugins, sometimes overdrives. Whatever. So long as it brings what you want. Then I low pass the fuzz out and you should be left with a muddy distorted crapshit that sounds like your neighbour's playing a snare sample through blown speakers next door. That's when you know you're onto something.

Then take that processed channel and slide the fader all the way down until you can't hear it. Turn up the dry channel (the one that doesn't have any processing on it). Then, ever so gradually, turn the processed channel back up until the original channel has the tone you've been praying for your whole life.

Mix those 2 channels then into a seperate buss. Eq the buss (use reference samples if you don't know what it should sound like) (a little tip: 400hz in a snare is always shite, so eq that our completely, then boost about an octive (200hz) or a little lower (180hz) to compensate for the drop in tone. A nice helping of that resonant tone does magic), compress the buss with a slow easy comp, limit it so it sounds loud but is only making your mix jump by about 3db when the snare cracks. And yer done. Eq as needed in the final scope of things.

That's the snare.

Overheads:
Scoop the eq in a big fat bell at 1k till it sounds full but airy. Eq a little of the harsh out (2.5khz) and boost some sizzle (6khz). Drop 400hz out as nessesary (this is the cardboard box frequency in drums) and don't forget to high pass as desired acording to your taste (sometimes I leave it in if it makes the kick/snare sound fatter).
Then just comp it. Hard and fast. A good 10db of gain reduction at the minimum. Then the trick is to only have the overheads in the mix so it's barely there. Like my father. In the grand scope of things, its a delight. And that's why you compress the eff out of it - so that you still hear everything in the drum kit, but it remains at a low level so it all sounds managed.

That's the key with all good sound. It should all sound managed and controlled (unlike that stupid synth in the mix I did).

And that's it. Let me know if what I mentioned doesn't make sense or whatever. Happy to help.
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#6
Really awesome post - many thanks for taking the time to write it all out. I got it. you've explained it really well.

Thanks for the overheads eq tips too. Great stuff, much appreciated.

I've had another go at this mix today (up as revision 2). I didn't catch your post in time to include the snare trick for that one but I've a feeling I will be revisiting this one again soon, so will be giving the parallel snare thing a go.
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