Preach Right Here - LSS Mix

[LSS]

Hey, I'm new here, and this is my first ever attempt at a mix.

I started off by trimming all the levels to -18 to give me some headroom, then adjusted the trim and pan to separate out the mix a bit, then starting adding PEQs and compressors where necessary. I fiddled about with the stereo image as well in places, to add a bit of clarity.

I love the intro, but unfortunately there's a huge amount of noise covering it. This is my first time mixing, but I've been doing sound for theatre productions for five years, and eliminating noise takes up a lot of my time. I went through all the tracks and checked the noise level: the lead vocals were between -180 and -300, so nothing audible; most were between -110 and -130, so just in the background as long as you've got good speakers; a few were around -100, which is where it starts to become noticeable; the tambourine, shaker, bass1, and the SFX were all between -100 and -85, which is loud for noise. I started off by just muting every track when all it was outputting was noise, which worked quite well, and then I noticed that in almost every case the noise and the instrument in any given track were at different frequencies, so I used PEQs to take care of the remaining noise (although this step was only really necessary on the tracks with the loudest noise).

As it's my first ever mix, I didn't really dabble too much in modulation or reverb or anything like that (except for some thickening reverb on the first backing vocals track), for the moment I just want to get the basics nailed down, so all I've done here is try to make the mix as clear, separated, and balanced as I can using only gain, pan, PEQs, and compressors.

(Annoyingly MP3 makes the noise still present in the intro a bit digital and metallic, the same thing exported to wave sounds much more like natural static.)


-LSS

[pauli]

Hey LSS, very nice work for a first mix. I think you understand the fundamentals

A few things I'm noticing:

The acoustic guitar and dulcimer are rather odd sounding in the mid range area... they sound very nasal. This is generally the result of having a bit too much from 250 to 800 and not enough around 1000 or so, relative to the rest of the mix... although they sound rather odd in solo in the intro, as well. If you're using compressors on any acoustic instrument, bec very careful with the attack and release times, as well as the ratio, because compression artifacts are very apparent on instruments with a natural sound. Parallel compression is often a better strategy for bringing up low level details in these cases (especially when the instrument is so important to the music)... and transients can often be reined in more subtly with a tape saturation emulation, which exhibits a gentle, natural sounding leveling effect when used correctly.

The vocal is a rather harsh in the upper mids through to the treble ranges. This is often the natural byproduct of close miking with an inexpensive condenser mic, which often have "presence boosts" in those regions. In this case though, it sounds to me like you may have boosted in this range quite heavily to make up for the somewhat dull tone. It's easy to get ear-drunk and overdo it when you find yourself needing to boost, so take lots of breaks Also beware the heavy use of any EQ on a vocal or acoustic instrument, because artifacts and overprocessing will be very obvious, since most people have a pretty solid idea how those things should sound. If you use a PEQ for noise reduction, you're much better off with a linear phase model because the processing side effects will be fewer and less obvious. In the even your PC can't handle the extra load from linear phase processing, try putting the track in a separate instance of your DAW, killing the noise, then bouncing it as a stem, which you can then process normally in the mix without the extra processing load.

As far as mp3 and noise are concerned... the problem certainly exists, but there are measures you can take to reduce this effect, and in most listening situations these metallic artifacts won't be very audible because they'll be quiet relative to the good signal and there will be a concealing level of environmental noise... as long as you don't overcompress the master buss! Make sure you're applying dither when you render, as this will reduce artifacts from conversion to 16 bit, and render mp3s at 320 kbps to get the least data compression... and yet fewer artifacts. My strategy of applying a low level tape hiss (though I overdid it) was primarily to prevent the conversion to mp3 from overemphasizing noise in this manner.

In terms of overall mix balance, which is really the most important thing and you're right to focus on it, things are a bit skewed, but I've heard worse. It's hard to give useful advice to a newbie in this respect, but you can train your ears very quickly using a spectral analyzer (voxengo span is free and my favorite). Try and identify the regions most important to each instruments sound, and decide where sacrifices should be made elsewhere to make room. It's generally a good idea to set your levels right after highpass filtering, but before any serious mix processing, and your EQ/compression settings will be a bit easier and you won't have to adjust them as much in the endgame.

Good work, keep it up, and I hope some of this advice helps!