Dark Ride: 'Hammer Down'

[mikej]

Yeah, I think I see your point of view. To add to the discussion here are my thoughts for what they are worth:

But, really, what do you listen to? Here are my reasons against (for mixing purposes) it, and yeah, save me, man, if you think I am heading in the wrong direction.

1. It's already mastered.

Fair enough.  Mike Senior has kindly taken the time to upload plenty of unmixed UNMASTERED mixes to the library site to use for reference as well as mastering practice though.

There are also a lot of mastering type videos available on youtube too, which enable you to see what mastering engineers do to a mix.  You can do the same to your mixes too, and you'll get a sense of what can be done to enhance a mix, and be able to sort of 'listen through' the mastering layer to hear the mix moves underneath.

I'm not a big fan of analogies, but:

I no longer drink coffee.  When I did, I didn't take sugar.  I sometimes drank black coffee, sometimes with milk.  After many years of drinking many different cups of coffee made by many different people and machines - I found I could tell how strong any given cup of coffee was, and get a sense of how much milk/water/sugar/syrups might have been added, etc.  I could use all this information to create a cup of coffee at home to my own taste/mood.  You know, even though I don't take sugar myself, I could tell if sugar had been added and that maybe I'd prefer the coffee without...

I mean, I'm no Gordon Ramsay, but it's kind of nice to have picture of the finished recipe in a cook book, for example? Or to see the picture of the cooked noodles on the Ramen packet in my case .

2. These are professionally done

Exactly.  This is the goal, no?  If your mix is comparable then mission accomplished.  For me, If my mix sucks in comparison (as is usually the case), then there's still work to be done.

so what are we looking for? Everything is just perfect to me. I don't hear anything that I shouldn't hear.

Exactly!

A small selection of some of the things I listen for:

Do I like it?
Are there things I don't like and want to change to my taste?
Overall tonality
Mix loudness
Does it sound heavily processed? Or is it a more natural light touch sound?
Instrument Balance
Panning
Effects
Mix Moments - any spot delays and clever effects that grab the ear that I can try and reverse engineer and replicate?
Mix moves (how parts move back and forward in the mix)
Does it have a standout kick/guitar/snare/vocal sound that I want to copy
Does the chorus open up? How is that done? Which parts get louder/wider?
etc...

I do, however, use references but for different reasons, mostly to calibrate the rattling of my bottom end when compared. In general, frequencies balance. But I only do that when I want my mix to be loud.

I find you can also use reference mixes to help calibrate your ears before you start mixing.  Also helps to calibrate the ears to the mixing conventions for different genres of music too?

I don't mind changing my mind tho if someone comes up with a convincing and practical reason(s) for it. After all my only purpose here is to learn.

Are your mixes beating the library mixes and pro mixes?  How do you know if you don't listen and compare to them?

Convincing enough?  It's just my point of view though of course. It's not a prescription.

I am specifically looking for tips and tricks bc I don't feel I know enough. My hearing is getting much better but that's about it. Hearing it and controlling it are two entirely different things, right? I hear all my processors and their reactions, some very clearly, some not so, but I am not worried about it bc I have enough to build momentum on. Learning is a logarithmic curve. All I need is practice and time. I have both. Now that I can hear them, it's the making the decisions that confuses me. Sometimes lengthen the release makes the same pleasant sound as shorten it, so which one? Not to mention lengthen it make another instrument sound better while shorten it bring out the best in a diff one. What to do? When to stop? Which one?...

Maybe check some reference mixes and listen out for those things? Is the kick long/short/punchy? Do you think it works for that mix or not? Might help you to decide what you want for your own mix.

You can always do a few versions of a mix too, print one with a long kick, one with short kick and see which one you prefer.  You could always ask the specific question on here too.  Sometimes it might not matter.  I suppose if you've got a busy mix you might want things shorter so they don't step on other parts, as opposed to a more sparse mix where there is more space for things to spread out a bit.

You see, I face a much bigger problem now than before. When I first started it, it was the not hearing it that confused me. I stumbled in the dark in unfamiliar terrain with minimum guidance, only the internet+books for roughly 6 years. I just barely begin recently, the hearing part. I am somewhat still outside peeking in the land I fear most, the land of adjectives. This is where the pro talks a bout warmth, punch, sizzles, etc, I think. And this is only the first inch of a thousand mile long journey. I must love mixing. I also love to learn new things equally, if not more.

Not sure if this is what you mean, but to me:

Warmth could mean EQ? More Low mids, Rolled off top end? Muddy?  Added harmonics from saturation or wavefolder or whatever?

Punch could be compression - slow attack/fast release.  It could be gating - removing the tail.  It could be transient designer...

Sizzle could be distortion, or top end eq? Or both? To get sizzle on strings, you could send them to a parallel track, roll off the low end, distort the top end, and blend it back in, for example? You might use a multiband compressor and just squash the top end? etc....

People talk about tape emulations, but to me it's just a rolled off top end and an eq bump at 50 Hz, maybe a little compression, maybe a little saturation/distortion.  To me a lot of these things are built up from the same set of basic ingredients, so to speak?

Does that help?

Btw, I checked out all the links you sent. I knew some of them. Thanks. I cannot listen to the mixes you recommend. Links said I have no authorization or something to that effect. Perhaps bc of the old Mountain Lion iOS. Bummer, but will try again later.

Let me know which links don't work. I think they all work for me.  Do they work if you are not logged in? I checked when I wasn't logged in and they were all ok.

I hope you won't take offense to anything I wrote bc it's not my intention. More like, if you allowed, 2 peers, perhaps with me as a junior, on the children table, discussing a common topic. There will be disagreement (I am very inquisitive by nature) but I hope it's for the sake of learning. Thanks, man. I appreciate what you did. I'll regroup and chew on what you said for a bit and see what remains.

Well, exactly.  No offense taken.  It's cool to have a different opinion.  That's why I said at the start of my previous post that your mileage may vary.  It's as simple as I listened to your mixes, and thought of some things that I felt helped me in some way that I thought might help you.  If things that worked for me don't work for you, that's ok! Everyone's different.  Maybe someone else reading this might have some thoughts and ideas of their own and get something from this discussion, who knows?

I will say though that these last two posts do kind of sum up pretty much all the key things that I've picked up to date that I felt made the biggest difference to my mixes so far.

Cheers!