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Flesh and Bone Reference Mix
#1
I read a lot about how hard this is to mix and how much cleanup is required. I also read about how hard the accordion is to mix into the song.

You all read Mike's chapter about using the Mute button, right? Just because we recorded it doesn't mean you have to use it.

You should listen to the original to get a sense of how we mixed all these elements together.

http://wesleymorgan.bandcamp.com/track/flesh-and-bone

By the way, Oz did most of the work on Backroom In Tulsa. When it came time to mix Flesh and Bone, we only spent 2-3 hours on it at most. Everything used outboard equipment and we rode the faders by hand. He had compressors, gates, and eq to fix everything.

A good exercise would be to set up the original mix in your DAW and try to make your mix sound like that at first. Compare your bass to the original bass. Same with guitar and vocals. Once you are close, you can add your own dust and make it unique.
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#2
The main difficulty I'm having is managing all of the room resonances... Notch them all out and the mix goes wafer thin... But leaving any of them is equally problematic, especially on the guitar tracks, which are very noisy. Do you have any insight as to how your engineer tackled that issue? Fader rides, gates, compressors... I dig all that... But the noise is proving above my abilities.

Am I just way overthinking this?
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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#3
I can't remember the exact steps. We did everything in the analog world, so he didn't have a crazy amount of parametric EQ or multiband compressors. Most of the cleaning up of the noise happened in the mastering phase I believe. Not sure what the ME did because I wasn't there.

But you can get close by referencing against the final mastered mix.

Get a version of the final mix and set it up in your DAW along with the other tracks and loop the first 7 seconds. Now bring up the different levels of the three guitar tracks while A/B'ing against the final mix. You should be able to play with levels and panning until you get something close to the final mix. Take note how much bass there is in the final compared to yours. Mute all the tracks and bring them in one by one and hear how the bass changes.

By doing this, you will start to hear how we combined these tracks.

TO my ear it sounds like the DRY or acoustic track is high-passed a little bit and is the primary track. The Amp'd version provides mids, sustain, and tremolo. Notch out some of the noise and bring it up until it fleshes out the dry sound but doesn't overtake it. . The room version probably has the basses reduced and is used almost like a reverb send. Bring up just enough to give it the right vibe.

There are all sorts of noises and creaking from the guitar moving against my body. That's ok. If you don't like them, just turn down the dry track more.

If people really want it, I have the unmastered version that I could upload.

(16-07-2014, 03:43 AM)pauli Wrote: The main difficulty I'm having is managing all of the room resonances... Notch them all out and the mix goes wafer thin... But leaving any of them is equally problematic, especially on the guitar tracks, which are very noisy. Do you have any insight as to how your engineer tackled that issue? Fader rides, gates, compressors... I dig all that... But the noise is proving above my abilities.

Am I just way overthinking this?

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#4
Hey Wesley, thank you for a very detailed response. From the sounds of it I'm definitely thinking too hard about the noise factor... maybe you and your team were going for a grittier sound, making a little noise an important part of the equation. I really like this song a lot, so this will be a great learning experience for tastefully managing noise... keeping the good stuff and discreetly masking the rest.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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#5
(16-07-2014, 06:40 PM)WesleyMorgan Wrote: If people really want it, I have the unmastered version that I could upload.

Yes please, it would be extremely interesting


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