congrats on expanding your family garret.
garretg wrote on Wed, 06 September 2006 23:12 |
the mix doesn't sound completely glued together (I hear very discrete tracks of sound, rather than a band!)
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right. my mix is completely discrete. all the little bits are summed at one place: [summing!] so i know the 150 or so audio streams mixed together don't add up perfectly...
whatever is "glue" or "togetherness"? yes i needed to increase this. also i used zero reverb, zilch nada...well, this was a way to save time, reverbs are heavy and tweaky i couldn't use only one, i like to use about eight or more. those were the mixes the clients loved most... when i used to mix. the ones that took a month to finish!
but this was to try and be fast, and modern. i used to make these wedding cake mixes... i could play you guys some, they are kinda self serving.. "wow, what a deep atmosphere and all". but also.. were overcooked. also the process was too slow for spur of the moment creative and inspirational urges to find much daylight. i could feel the music kinda fading away as i replaced it with the sound of my gear.
gating the ambience out and replacing it with reverb... i'd do that. but bus compression. not for me. imo, smearing and ringing is not a good "glue" for music. that's how it comes about that i didn't use many bell shaped filters either maybe four total. i ran them backwards.. so they pre-ring.. then i ran them normally and mixed them so the filtered signal would be emphasized by around 6db over any ringing or pre-ringing.
this method affords me a lot of control over tone, but does not provide much in the way of "smeary-tails" to blend with other sounds. eq is delay. enough of it can creep into the time domain and you'll hear delay.
delay can be useful, if it can be controlled, no doubt.. i should have looked into more creative use of delay here. again, not enough time, delay is tweaky.
perhaps i should do some notching and boosting for the guitars when i revise this mix, to let the highish ones soar more, and let the lower ones growl more, overall, a slight bit less of a screaming group.. that would make them more discrete in fact.. but perhaps fill in the gaps that would seem to need "glue".
if there are no gaps, it will fit together without "glue". that is what i think about craftsmanship and mixing, i hope i can get better at this.
bass needs more help too. i think about total bass replacement, or at least augmentation... how can this work with twelve electric guitars and one "not so huge" bass?
bass is a kind of musical glue, imo.. it is not working properly in my mix this way, i think everyone faced that issue. simple compression was not cutting the mustard for me. i already used 2 renbass.. now on to "stage three - manufacturing a new bass tone" ..have done it many times.. i might extract a midi file containing most of the dna from the actual performance, but none of the tone... then exaggerate what is needed to fill in gaps using a synth and/or samples. <
example using melodyne : an audio recording of an arpeggiated synth driven by simple midi data is converted to complex midi data, which is then used to trigger a sampled piano.>
if it comes to making a "my bloody valentine" type record however, that is the opposite of the kind of sound i have in my mind for this.. i think kinda more like offspring or greenday i guess: plenty of "geometric" edges, not very smeary. and "in your face" guitars, which is reflected in a lot of the comments (not always positively though). i agree that the loose vocals kinda work against that...hmm.. strategy.
jeff dinces