j.hall wrote on Mon, 18 May 2009 17:46 |
iCombs wrote on Mon, 18 May 2009 14:46 |
...... it felt like the brightness of the kick was kinda coming and going...so much so that I actually automated the gain on my top EQ band on the kick track. I thought that the played dynamics were actually really good...nothing that a little fader riding couldn't take care of.
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exactly the reason you use a sample.
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I really kinda shudder at the thought of samples with drums that are tracked like these.
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see above.
you're chasing your tail. being "against" samples cause the guy can play defeats the purpose of being a "mixer" IMO. you aren't changing the fact that he can play, you're controlling the fact that he isn't consistent and there is a HUGE wall of guitar that simply won't back down.
the amount of work you went through to automate the EQ could have been spent elsewhere.
i get a lot of projects that includes samples off the live drums. if the kick is good, i'll use the sample of the exact kick on the project. it's all about control. these huge dense rock mixes just don't have any wiggle room for drum hits (especially the kick) to be changing tone on you.
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See...I guess I don't necessarily buy the consistency for consistency's sake argument...I don't want to hear static levels and I don't mind the drum changing tone so long as it does so the way it should...in this particular case, the brickwalling of the kick in mic made the kick drum do weird things dynamically ESPECIALLY against the kick out mic. THAT was my biggest issue, and IMO I think it worked out just fine in my mix without the sample. Not saying what I did is perfect by any means, but that aspect of my mix seemed to be more a success than a failure.
And really...automating the EQ took me all of 10 minutes tops. It probably took me 10-15 passes of the mix once I got everything in place to decide that it was a big enough issue for me to find a way to "fix" it. Because I'm silly and anal retentive about my sample replacement triggering, I hand cut samples so that I don't have to dick with phase anomalies and flamming and false triggers...which generally takes me an hour or so per drum to be replaced. I know in some ways I'm going to start contradicting myself...but there seems to be a distinction in my head between this scenario and one where I though the track sounded like ass and there was just no way that I was going to make the drum sound like anything acceptable without samples. I knew I could use this drum and make it work without. So I chose an automation tack. Really, had I wanted to get stupid with EQ, I probably could have made it work with the kick out mic alone.
I guess what I'm saying is that for me, for this track, sample replacement didn't even spring to mind because I felt like I could work with what I was given, and I'd rather deal with that particular issue the way I did vx. sample replacement.
And as far as being "against samples because the guy can play" is concerned, perhaps it wasn't my best description of the scenario, but at a gut level I still think it's true. There's something that effects me emotionally when I hear sample replaced drums...probably because I know enough about what real drums sound like and what really good players sound like that when I hear the samples I have trouble hearing past them. And again, the played dynamics weren't "consistent." They were "right." Let us not necessarily confuse those two conditions. His playing was excellent but the processing to tape altered the interaction between the mics...and...well...yadda yadda yadda...you know what I'm talking about.
With this mix, I wanted to do everything I could to reveal the players and the instruments inside the song rather than create new realities.
As a sort of aside to this tack, I didn't think it was a backbreaker because, really, who gives 2 shits about the kick drum when this song is obviously a vocal oriented track? I mean...I don't want it to sound BAD, but it really doesn't matter WHAT it sounds like so long as it supports the vocal (or creates the structure for the stuff that supports the vocal).
I'd be really interested to dig into this tack a little further. I mean...if you listen to the mix I did, you know damn well what I thought of the vocal! It's WAY too damn loud! I put it too far out front, but in listening back to it, that doesn't ruin the song for me. But there were a lot of mixes that really had the guitars way up front to the point where the vocal was kinda in the second row behind the guitars and fighting with the snare drum and I'm just curious as to how everyone kinda views the functional parts of this mix and how they stack up in terms of a hierarchy for lack of a better word.
Lemme try to make a little sense of this: If you had to rank the basic elements of this mix (the basic elements being drumx, bass, guitars, lead vocal, harmony vocal, backing vocals) in order of importance, how would that list shake down?
I think the answers could be really telling.