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Georgia Wonder - Siren
#11
The main deal with the distortion/sizzly stuff is that nearly every track has atrocious amounts of HF content... put a mid/side inspector on each of the tracks and check out the side channel... there's a poopload of printed-on effects on most of the provided tracks, chorus type modulation mainly if I'm remembering correctly, and it's all really active in the HF ranges. And to get a really good idea of how cumulative the problem is, put the same mid/side inspector on the master fader and check out the mids vs. sides on the entire mix, and you'll see the problem is much more apparent.

If you're struggling to hear the high content because you're monitoring on lousy computer speakers like I have to, try turning off your subwoofer when you're doing your high end inspections and reference a spectral analyzer. A good trick is to put a spectral analyzer AFTER the mid/side inspector in the FX chain so when you mute the mids or the size, you can see if they're really disconnected tonally or where/what channel needs the EQ work. Consider stereo narrowing (Dave led me down that road) and you can get a little more control with this method.

Here's some links to plug-ins that worked for me on this one:

http://sleepytimedsp.com/software/str-bundle/ Free bundle of stereo tools and a transient shaper I use on literally every mix. The Dual Panner and Stereo Channel plugins will get your where you need to be with my tips if you decide you want to try that.

http://www.voxengo.com/product/span/ And this is the best spectral analyzer I've used, including some of the paid ones. You probably have this one already but if you don't, give it a try. Any sort of HF stuff that your monitoring situation isn't conveying will be really obvious.

Hopefully I don't sound patronizing Tongue this stuff was all new to me in November when I first started working in earnest on mixing, so what is obvious to some seems worthy of mention to me. Would love to hear your revisions.

I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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