Chris93 Tears In The Rain

[Chris93]

Quick question before I give you my thoughts... from my perspective most mix engineers fall under two categories: those who prefer EQ as the first potential solution to balance problems and those who generally try compression first. Where is your leaning on that continuum?

I'm not sure really. What I do tend to do almost by default though is group the mix into drums (may include bass), guitars, and vocals etc. Generally a group for every set of similar instruments. Those will get a compressor, typically an LA2A (not a real one ) on vox, 3A on guitars etc. I'm using the "Antress Modern Plugins" for that mostly.

Input compressors are often "MajorTom" which I believe is supposed to be like a DBX 160. The plugin doesn't have any gain reduction metering which I actually like.

I did have ReaXcomp on the bass, multiband compressor. It was part of my attempt at getting it to sound like an actual bass

When I first put up the mix I normally try to make things fit by turning down channels that are masking other stuff, rather than EQing them. Later I may come back to them and see what I have to cut to allow me to turn it up without causing a fight.

My main focus is on live sound and I've been aware of this concept for a few years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMMmR1u0CFk

I don't necessarily do exactly that, but I like the idea and it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for me to take that sort of approach.

Chris

[pauli]

In my possibly non-existent mental continuum, it sounds like you rely more on compressors than EQs for balance purposes since you're using compression by default on large chunks of the mix. Lots of people like to work that way and there are some styles/songs where I prefer to work that way, too.

Of course I stage gains and do my best to set the levels before the real processing begins much the way you do, though I often find bass guitars and vocals won't balance even roughly without a little gentle compression, and I don't find setting levels very useful until the excess bass has been filtered with EQ, since that effects the volume so much. I LOVE ReaXComp for tricky bass parts and used that for this song, too, actually... and I use either that or IQ4 almost always for upright bass

But in the end you almost always find me checking out whether or not EQ will fix a balance problem before I try using compression... not so much because I don't like to use compression, though. Maybe because I like using it too much, and it gets out of hand in mastering like I talked about for way too long before.

My general process is this: Administration (cleaning, multing, arranging, bussing, so on... I spend about twice as much on this part as actual mixing :/), Filtering (low end nonsense, ugly frequencies), Rough Balance... and then I export the rough balance and use it as a reference against my constant push-and-pull of EQ/dynamics processing. But then mastering is a whole different barrel of monkeys and I'm still learning. How about you?