01-01-2019, 05:26 PM
(01-01-2019, 01:10 PM)Cranky Emu Wrote: Luke;
I just installed Reaper today and was overly keen to give it a decent run, as such I decided to have a crack at this song.
This song is quite complex, there is a lot going on in it and it takes a bit of taming. My mix is a very rough one and by no means final, I am no Chris Lord-Alge or Bob Clearmountain either.
There are no effects on the mix, nor any EQ. Everything is as it was from the original files. The only automation I used was a fade on the master bus at the end.
Whilst I am not the greatest of mixers and I am sure there are far better than I here, I pay very close attention to levels and try to avoid clipping where and when possible. As Shul said "Louder is not always better".
I feel the mistake you have made is just trying to get everything loud and using a lot of compression, what kind of compression ratios did you use on different tracks?
Why I asked if you were a guitarist (not having a go at you - just an observation), is that I remember back to when I did live FOH mixing and guitarists were always the one's in the band who would constantly be wanting you to 'turn them up'.
Your mix is not bad by any means. Take all the effects off and start with the basics and get the mix going to where you are happy with it. Then add effects if needed, if they will enhance what is there, if they don't - toss em.
Easy to say huh?
I make the same mistake myself with effects to, reverb is my nemesis
Don't know if you picked it up, at around 17 seconds in there is something out of whack, can't put my finger on it just yet, think it may be the snare sample but not sure.
Until I can work out how to get Reaper to stop the cursor at exactly where I stop the track (hit space-bar), I can't really pin it down.
Looking forward to hearing your next mix for sure.
I will keep working on mine, there is a lot of things with my prelim mix I am not happy with. Hopefully together we can come up with something decent!
As for what monitors I'm listening in, I don't have the ideal setup, I mix on AKG's 144P (by for not an ideal headphone for mixing but I know his sound very well) and check everything on my car. I try to do best with what I have.
If compared to the original mix, yeah my guitars are very prominent in the mix, but I guess if you're doing a Pop PUNK you should have rhythm guitars audible in the mix (in the original I can barely hear them so, what was the point of recording them?). I don't know if you realized but, in the mix files there's also DI's for the guitars and in your mix you let the DI's almost as loud as mine, but without the distortion
I can guarantee you, there's no clipping in any faders or plugins in my mix, I learned long ago and pay attention to gain staging (my mix peaks are at -6.4db or so, again, maybe my mistakes were on mastering). I use mostly 4:1 ratio for the compression, going over that just for parallel comp.
I'm not throwing any values at them, I'm following some techniques I've learned from some producers I got on Nail the Mix (mostly metal), i.e my snare has a -9db gain reduction, kick has -6db, toms have -3db on a 2:1 ratio... bass is more compressed and soft limited to tame most transients and make it a consistent wall of sound....
Maybe the techniques don't suit the pop genre as well as they suit metal, but I guess you can treat this song as if it was a metal ballad. At least, this is what I aimed for.