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Oct. 3rd, 2005 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaThis mixing malarkey is really starting to get to me. I know an awful lot more about it now than I did this time three weeks ago, but I'm still not getting final results as good as I'd like.
I can now get mixes that sound pretty exciting, this is cool. It's taken a lot of fiddling to work out what to do with the vocal reverb so that the vocals sit *in* the song, sound like they're part of it, but I think I've got that. The mixes I have at that stage, though, then need generally boosting in volume and a sort of finishing tweak. I was working on the idea of getting the vocals to sit in and then finally bring them back out a little more with the mastering stage. For mastering I'm messing around with a four-band compressor and a nice EQ thingy and these seem to make sense, do something useful while setting up and considering the changes they make, but no matter how minor and subtly augmenting these changes seem at the time, by the time I've got the final version exported and on my main sound system it sounds like I've killed it. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
The problem seems to me to be not least with getting the final volume up. People complain if the track is slightly quieter than the last song they listened to, but if you amplify into the realms of limiting, it sounds dead because the dynamic range has just been shot. I understand that loudness is the standard, I was complaining this time a year ago that all the money we'd paid for mixing and mastering on the SON demo had produced only a limp quiet thing, but knowing any of this still doesn't bring a solution. At least this time I'm not paying thirty quid a track for someone else to fuck it up, but what would be ideal would be working out how to not fuck it up myself.
I can now get mixes that sound pretty exciting, this is cool. It's taken a lot of fiddling to work out what to do with the vocal reverb so that the vocals sit *in* the song, sound like they're part of it, but I think I've got that. The mixes I have at that stage, though, then need generally boosting in volume and a sort of finishing tweak. I was working on the idea of getting the vocals to sit in and then finally bring them back out a little more with the mastering stage. For mastering I'm messing around with a four-band compressor and a nice EQ thingy and these seem to make sense, do something useful while setting up and considering the changes they make, but no matter how minor and subtly augmenting these changes seem at the time, by the time I've got the final version exported and on my main sound system it sounds like I've killed it. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
The problem seems to me to be not least with getting the final volume up. People complain if the track is slightly quieter than the last song they listened to, but if you amplify into the realms of limiting, it sounds dead because the dynamic range has just been shot. I understand that loudness is the standard, I was complaining this time a year ago that all the money we'd paid for mixing and mastering on the SON demo had produced only a limp quiet thing, but knowing any of this still doesn't bring a solution. At least this time I'm not paying thirty quid a track for someone else to fuck it up, but what would be ideal would be working out how to not fuck it up myself.
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Date: 2005-10-03 04:07 pm (UTC)The only other thing is that you could send the output of the compressed kick and snare, plus the overhead mics, through to a separate buss and then compress that.
However, I've never actually tried any of this, merely watched other people, which is nothing like the same.
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Date: 2005-10-03 04:27 pm (UTC)Useful idea about using only the bottom bands, though, that would seem to be the only area that's benefitting from it at this point. I'll have a fidget with that, ta!
('Most studios' is what I'm trying to avoid, anyway; 'most studios' is where I've paid lots of money for someone to do all the standard things they do, and have it sound rubbish.)
(The fact that I am a stubborn bastard and demand to see *results* and *why* things are done means it really is better that I get this all out here and get to understand how to do it for myself, I think, though I'm going to be a right royal pain in the arse if I do end up in a 'most studios' kind of place again.)