Pauls take

[pauli]

I'm new to mixing... learning a lot from these threads though.

Am I on the right track? be free with any criticism. mistakes are nothing but opportunities for improvement!

[thedon]

Hi Pauli
Sounds like you are on the right track with your balance ,the volume of your track is very soft , the bass guitar track out of time in the intro !

[pauli]

Hi Pauli
Sounds like you are on the right track with your balance ,the volume of your track is very soft , the bass guitar track out of time in the intro !

thank you for the reply. I'm not sure whether the bass was tracked out of time or I somehow bumped it accidentally, but I spent a good deal of time fiddling with it (except for the intro apparently ).

as far as softness goes, I was attempting to mix at the recommended low volumes, but I see other posted mixes are generally -6 or -3. is it standard practice on this forum to use a limiter to boost volume for listenability? -18 dB is perfectly listenable on my speakers but I'm finding others are having a hard time catching the quieter details when I'm mixing at those volumes.

as far as track balance, EQ, and compression are concerned, have you any comments or criticisms? please don't hold back!

[pauli]

I'm also noticing after a good night's rest and a day at work that many of the individual tracks sound quite thin. right now I'm thinking I might have overdone it a little bit with the high pass filters. that's probably why it's often said that you should take frequent breaks when mixing!

[Pedaling Prince]

Well. You asked me to check out more of your mixes. So, time permitting, what I've decided to do is check them all out. So, I figure the most logical way to approach this is to work chronologically, which is why I decided to start with this, your first mix on the site.

Actually, I had never mixed this one; I'm not a big fan of jazz. However, I felt I couldn't judge your mix properly without having attempted it myself so I did a mix of this before doing this review; I'll be posting that right after I finish this posting so you can check it out.

So. On to the review:

Sounds like you are on the right track with your balance ,the volume of your track is very soft , the bass guitar track out of time in the intro !

I'm not sure whether the bass was tracked out of time or I somehow bumped it accidentally, but I spent a good deal of time fiddling with it . . .

Yeah, getting a good sound out of that bass was tricky; it had both a nice full bottom end and some great slaps in the higher frequencies. The problem I had was when I got the low end sounding right then the high end suffered; when I got the high end sounding right the low end suffered.

I solved this problem by multing the bass track into two playing in sync. On one, I focused on getting the low frequencies, everything below 500 Hz, sounding good; on the other, I focused on getting the highs, everything above 500 Hz, sounding good. Then I applied low and high pass filters at 500 Hz, the lowpass on the low frequency track and the hipass on the high frequency track, so each track would only be contributing to the frequencies it was optimized for. The approach yielded what I thought was an impressive result, preserving that nice bright slap without sacrificing that full low end.

as far as softness goes, I was attempting to mix at the recommended low volumes, but I see other posted mixes are generally -6 or -3. is it standard practice on this forum to use a limiter to boost volume for listenability? -18 dB is perfectly listenable on my speakers but I'm finding others are having a hard time catching the quieter details when I'm mixing at those volumes.

Actually (and I'm sure you know this by now) mixing at that level is only meant to allow you the extra headroom for mixing purposes. As you also know, I never recommend the use of compressors unless absolutely necessary. The final mixdown of a recording should simply be normalized so the highest peak is at 0 dBFS. At least that's what I do.

as far as track balance, EQ, and compression are concerned, have you any comments or criticisms? please don't hold back!

Actually, aside from being awfully flat (no reverb! Odd for you... ) the balance sounds fine to me, not unlike my own mix. Which I suspect you'll like since it makes pretty good use of reverb to tie the performance together.

If this was your very first mix, sounds to me like you showed a lot of promise even at this early juncture.