Hello all,
A new monitor mix!
I thought I would experiment with this one and try and clean it up and remove as much ambience sound as possible. I found a lot of the bleed quite difficult to deal with, particularly with the high frequencies of the drums and the bass guitar which I found phasing issues with almost all the mic'ed tracks. I also found that to get a level of consistency with the vocals required some heavy handed compression moves which exacerbated the bleed levels through this track to a level that required a compromise of sorts. Terrible swelling of the drum sounds were also becoming excessive between the vocal passages with these heavy compression levels present. I ended up opting for some frequency selective parallel compression to shore up the vocals along side some more gentle downwards compression. This proved to be my best and most natural sounding option here.
My biggest challenge with this mix was dealing with the bass guitar and drying and tightening it up to a level I was happy with. This involved high passing most of the mic'ed tracks to a level much higher than I would normally do and phase aligning these tracks to the bass track for the best consistency. I also tried to key it into the kick the best I could with eq.
What have I achieved? It's always going to be a compromise taking a mix down this path and fighting with some of the live elements that are naturally present in a recording like this. As I said, it was more of an experiment than anything else just to see how much I could dry this mix up. It's always a great exercise for me anyway, to play around with these live recording and experiment with different methods of processing and dealing with the pros and cons of each. A great exercise for making one "think outside the box" ITB.
I am playing around with some new monitors, lucky me!, so the tonal balance may be a little skewed. Hopefully not too much so. I think I'm pretty happy with where I've ended up with this one.
Thanks to Jackie Greene and the band, a killer song, well performed.
Thanks for listening,
Dave
A new monitor mix!
I thought I would experiment with this one and try and clean it up and remove as much ambience sound as possible. I found a lot of the bleed quite difficult to deal with, particularly with the high frequencies of the drums and the bass guitar which I found phasing issues with almost all the mic'ed tracks. I also found that to get a level of consistency with the vocals required some heavy handed compression moves which exacerbated the bleed levels through this track to a level that required a compromise of sorts. Terrible swelling of the drum sounds were also becoming excessive between the vocal passages with these heavy compression levels present. I ended up opting for some frequency selective parallel compression to shore up the vocals along side some more gentle downwards compression. This proved to be my best and most natural sounding option here.
My biggest challenge with this mix was dealing with the bass guitar and drying and tightening it up to a level I was happy with. This involved high passing most of the mic'ed tracks to a level much higher than I would normally do and phase aligning these tracks to the bass track for the best consistency. I also tried to key it into the kick the best I could with eq.
What have I achieved? It's always going to be a compromise taking a mix down this path and fighting with some of the live elements that are naturally present in a recording like this. As I said, it was more of an experiment than anything else just to see how much I could dry this mix up. It's always a great exercise for me anyway, to play around with these live recording and experiment with different methods of processing and dealing with the pros and cons of each. A great exercise for making one "think outside the box" ITB.
I am playing around with some new monitors, lucky me!, so the tonal balance may be a little skewed. Hopefully not too much so. I think I'm pretty happy with where I've ended up with this one.
Thanks to Jackie Greene and the band, a killer song, well performed.
Thanks for listening,
Dave
Listening back now I would probably up the drums a little and or add some extra weight to the snare perhaps. Otherwise I'm still pretty happy with how this one ended up.
