On Friday I had to do two quickie mixes for a label prospect. One of the songs may not be completely finished tracking wise, but the band needed to strike while the iron was hot. So we mixed the more difficult of the two in about 5 hours, and then brought up the second song.
This particular song has strings (well, cello od's) that come in over the last chorus. In this case the arrangement was written and performed by the same person and was overdubbed in several passes. This culminated in having many more tracks than outputs, so I elected to mix everything OTB without the cellos, and then sub mix them in ITB.
So at the end of the night I felt pretty good about the mix. The main tracks had come together very quickly and summing in the cellos seemed to yield good results on the NS-10's.
However, upon further inspection I feel like the cello sounds really hot on my car stereo. Again, no big deal, I can recall it very easily and since the record is being shopped this definitely isn't the final mix. In part, it may be that I’m losing a lot of center in the car given the opposing parallel orientation of the speakers. That would make sense, as the vox, kick, and snare are in large part what I’m balancing the overall level of the cello against. Not to mention that driver side is going to be left heavy. Also, they’re stock Toyota speakers and have a nasty upper mid peak.
But it got me thinking about alternate listening environments. Had I checked the mix in the car that night I might have made changes right away-- even though it sat just right on the nearfields.
I kind of got out of the habit of checking things in the car, I mean inevitably I listen to a copy on the drive home (if I make one,) but I don't often do it as part of the process any longer.
I might rethink that a little, especially for projects with less commonly encountered elements (for me) like multiple cello passes.
Whoa, long post. Hope I don't offend anyone with my largesse.