Hope and the Sea

[Mixinthecloud]

Gtrs:
Guitars are a different story. But again nothing unusual. I gated them at a low threshold, panned them hard left and right as you know, and then started cutting and boosting eq until they both were doing what I wanted them to do. The funny thing about cutting and boosting eqs, I've heard people say that you should never boost on an eq. Those same people do some of the worst mixes I've ever heard. I boost all day long! I think on my gtr left (gtr 1) I boosted 2K around 20db. That's what I'm talking about, just do what you gotta do to get it sounding the way you need it to for your mix. And then I compressed it and added a limiter to stop them from taking over. No more than a couple db of gain reduction on the limiter.

Hope that helps!

Nothing unusual...

I need to chime in here and I apologize to Stevens304 for stepping on the discussion of your mix.

I won't go into the debate about boosting or cutting but I do have to ask this: If you need to boost 2K by 20 db, what is wrong with this picture? First, I don't know of many EQs that even gives you the ability to boost by 20 db, and if you need to boost that much, I would conjecture something else is wrong. Either the mic was broken, the guitar player has a very warped sense of humor and needs to taken to the woodshed, or the mixer is taking a very wrong approach. If a guitarist's recorded playing is so far lacking in high end who the hell would work with them if all they were playing was mud. No. That's not it. If you need to boost 20 db @ 2K the approach to the mix is the problem. I'm sorry but if you feel a need to go that far the problem is the mixer not the artist. 20 db of boost at any frequency is a forensic exercise and can hardly be considered musical by any stretch.

Let me ask this. If you ran into a guitarist in a live situation where you needed to boost 2K 20 db, would you? All the crap you would bring up with it would be a real problem at those extremes. Not to mention distortion and clipping, etc.

Going to extremes of a 20 db boost on anything tells me you are trying to make it into something it was never supposed to be. That would be a really good cue you are going down the wrong path. In this genre of music I cannot think how the need to boost a guitar by 20 db @ 2K could ever be considered a benefit to the music. I would need to think the artist would have made that determination well before any note was ever recorded, and acted accordingly. I guess I have enough respect for the recording artist to know when my approach to a song is off if I need to go to such extremes in order to bring it to some kind of aural vision I was going after.

Again, I apologize to Stevens304 for stepping on your post. I will post my review of your mix separately.