31-08-2014, 12:17 AM
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
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