Discussion Zone

Hi, this is the mix i made for this music.

please, leave your comments and sugestions.

Hihat is too loud.

I like this mix a lot! It does need some tweaking though.

I must agree with jeremiad666: the hi-hat is definitely too loud!!! Having said that, I would have to say that the mix is a bit on the hot side. I'm wondering if you used a limiter on the bus.

Bring the bass guitar down slightly and open it up a bit: it has great punch, but I feel it needs some clarity and should cut through a bit. This will also allow everything else to shine through and breathe a bit more.

The bass drum is waaayyyy over compressed and too muffled sounding. Re-EQ and use the minimum amount of compression needed; create a pocket for it. This will also allow the rest of the mix to breath a bit more.

You've inspired me, so I'm gonna give this song a shot!

I'm looking forward to hearing the revision.

I started mixing this myself, and the problems the I noticed in your mix were mainly problems in the raw tracks.

The hi-hat is ridiculously LOUD; the the bass drum is waaaaayyyyy over compressed and along with the snare, had to be gain-staged something massive! The lead vocal and the guitars too! Who engineered this session???


I'm almost done with my mix. I'll post it soon.

(11-07-2015, 03:09 AM)Stu Wrote: [ -> ]I started mixing this myself, and the problems the I noticed in your mix were mainly problems in the raw tracks.

The hi-hat is ridiculously LOUD; the the bass drum is waaaaayyyyy over compressed and along with the snare, had to be gain-staged something massive! The lead vocal and the guitars too! Who engineered this session???


I'm almost done with my mix. I'll post it soon.

I think the same way, this song was badly recorded. There are leaks of the other instruments on the mics.

Maybe i'll try again.

Anyway, i'm waiting for your mix!

OK. Here's my mix.

They should be made to re-cut this. They really messed up with the overheads. No matter what I did I couldn't get that damn cymbal out of the way!

Maybe M.S. could give us some suggestions on this cut.

I have to say that if the the bass drum wasn't over compressed, and the the cymbal issue was fixed with the overheads, and some of the bleed-through was reduced, this actually would have turned out to be an alright cut. I muted the two tom tracks because there weren't any tomes on them! Only room!

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Your mix sounds more clean than mine. I liked it.

Two points i've noticed:
-The kick is nice, but needs more enhancement, such as the bass.
-There is too much reverb on the voice. Try to put a ping pong delay for more stereo image. It may sounds better.

I wont comment about the hihat.

Yeah. I think you're right about the delay and the reverb on the vocal. A little less send on the reverb and a touch of delay on the vocal would have worked better. I used the Waves MondoMod on the lead guitars. I never used it before, so I just wanted to give it a whirl. Can't say I really like it. More enhancement on the bass drum would have definitely been over-kill due to the fact that it was over compressed to be gin with--as you know--and would have muffled the bass more.

I did check the mix on Auratone 5cs in stereo and mono and it balanced fine there except the for the vocal reverb issue.

I might clean the vocal up, but this recording was so f'd up (we agree on the hi-hat) that I would rather move on to something better.

let's see what we can do next!

(11-07-2015, 03:09 AM)Stu Wrote: [ -> ]The hi-hat is ridiculously LOUD; the the bass drum is waaaaayyyyy over compressed and along with the snare, had to be gain-staged something massive! The lead vocal and the guitars too! Who engineered this session???

I did. I freely admit, though, that it has its problems. To give some background on it, I did these recordings one afternoon about ten years ago, using a sixth-form college's 'studio' (ie. no acoustic design/treatment and rubbish monitoring), with a band of 14/15-year-olds. I was also experimenting with a number of non-standard mic techniques on the session, as part of my general research at the time.

First things first, I agree there's too much hi-hat over everything. The drummer was thrashing the hat, and the room was so small that it reflected everywhere. The overheads aren't misrepresenting the kit balance (they were omnis either side of the drummer's head) -- that's just the way it sounded in the room! That said, listening back to the raw tracks again, I still rather like the overall tone of the kit through the overheads...

By gain-staging, I'm assuming you're referring to the low level of the signals on the drum mics? It's a bit all over the place, I admit -- the session was a bit of a free-for-all in general, to be honest! -- but even on the snare, which is 18dB down, you're still getting 21-bit audio, which still gives a noise floor miles below that of the environment/gear we used to record. Just stick a gain plug-in at the top of each channel to bring things to a decent starting level and it shouldn't be an issue.

As for overcompression -- I don't think there's actually any compression on any of the mics on this multitrack. I very rarely compress on the way in, in general. The only thing compressed here is the bass track, which was compressed within the Bass Pod XT it was DI'd through.

There's a lot of spill, but that's part of the appeal of the sound for me -- it gives a very indie/garagey vibe, and that's the whole point. If you try to fight against this inherent characteristic of the recording, it's always going to be an uphill struggle. The main challenge here is, of course, the hat balance, but there's plenty you can do about that if you ditch the tom tracks, gate/expand the overhead and room mics from the snare, and edit out the hat spill from the lead vocal (which was only about 10 feet away from the kit). And that's even before using any samples.

Taking a step back from this particular session, though, many of the productions in this multitrack library aren't perfectly recorded, but that's actually rather representative of project-studio work on the whole. If I only posted beautifully recorded tracks, no-one would really have to flex their mixing muscles, and everyone would learn a lot less.

"Taking a step back from this particular session, though, many of the productions in this multitrack library aren't perfectly recorded, but that's actually rather representative of project-studio work on the whole. If I only posted beautifully recorded tracks, no-one would really have to flex their mixing muscles, and everyone would learn a lot less."

Mike:

You're so right.