Mixing for the good of all

[Billy's Little Trip]

I figure I'll start this thread instead of going straight to the studio guru's here, so it can help other members too. I'm sure there are other similar "old" threads, so a fresh one might be nice.

I'd like to use one of my past two entries, because they are my only digital home studio recordings, Pink Ribbon and Convalescence, as a tool to point out how the recording and mixing could have been improved to get a "real" professional sound. As I've said, I'm determined to learn this stuff as many SF'ers are, so what better place to discuss it than here.
By the way, it doesn't have to be my songs that are used to pick apart, any song that we can listen to and have issue pointed out will do.

I've gotten some great advice from Ken and Desh, to get me to the point I am now. I know there are other good engineers here too, so let's make this an educational thread.

Here is my Convalescence song to get the ball rolling. Please be as brutal as needed.
By the way, this is a recording, mixing and mastering tutorial, so use any genre of music here as a subject.

I'd like to re mix my Convalescence after advice is given to have a "before and after" version to show what proper mixing and mastering can achieve.

[Billy's Little Trip]

The first mistake I hear now on my Convalescence entry is the over all reverb and delay make the song lose it's tightness and the vox seem hard to understand. It sounds ok on head phones, but horrible played in a big room with natural acoustics mixing in with the added reverb and delay.
Where is the in between point to sound good in any situation?

[jb]

Let's ask some easier questions:

How do you make the perfect martini?
Is there a God?
Who'd win in a fight, Buffy or Xena?

[ken]

That mix sounds pretty good in headphones. I think you could add a little fuzz to the bass to give it some grit and weight. Honestly, it seems like you are on the right track.

Ken

[Billy's Little Trip]

Let's ask some easier questions:

How do you make the perfect martini?
Is there a God?
Who'd win in a fight, Buffy or Xena?

Really, it's that vast? A martini sounds good about now, oy.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Ken, I do feel I'm moving in the right direction, but I seem to have hit a road block. From what JB said, I guess there really isn't a black or white answer.
But I figure since you have held classes in recording and mixing, you can offer some educational starting points.

[pegor]

A while back Hostess Mostess put his individual tracks up and let people remix a song with comments. It was very cool to watch, and kind of takes the "Martini" aspect out of it since each is mixed to taste

http://www.songfight.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1633

uhmm, oh Zena 'cause she had that hot little sidekick to cover her back

mmmmmm back

[Billy's Little Trip]

Perfect Pegor, this is what I'm talking about, good call on that thread to bring this thread forward. Too bad Blue's remix is no longer available, but in all fairness to Blue, it was over a year ago. I wonder if he still has it laying around? It would be very helpful to add to the discussion.

[Lunkhead]

I think the consensus on reverb is that it should generally be "felt" more than "heard", unless you're using it more of as an effect than a general part of your mixing process.

Anyway, another way to get info about mixing is to post your raw tracks and/or project file for your song. Some industrious and knowledgeable folks around here might actually make a new mix for you, and provide info on what they did. (Of course, you may get a remix that goes beyond what you're expecting and heads more towards http://www.remixfight.org territory, but that's part of the fun.) Hostess Mostess did this with his "Pieces of Eight", and Blue, Future Boy, and Bell Green all did new mixes of the song:

http://songfight.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1633

EDIT: Oops! Pegor beat me to the punch with that one. I'm bummed to hear blue's track is 404, too, that sucks.

Also check these threads for more cool info:

http://www.songfight.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=286
http://www.songfight.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3385

[pegor]

EDIT : never mind

[Billy's Little Trip]

True Lunk, also for Pegor's question. What I'm trying to achieve with this tutorial thread is to see if professional advice given to a novice like myself and other beginners here, can be implemented. Not to give a pro my tracks and have them mix them.
Now with that said, one of the pros here might want to put up a link to one of his songs and tell us everything he did. Maybe broken into categories, like Vox, rhythm guitar, solo guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, etc etc.

[starfinger]

give us your tracks! i'd like to give that a shot.

-craig

[Spud]

We did this once, and I learned a lot:

http://www.mightyoctothorpe.com/remix.htm

SPUD

crap. I see that all the entries have gone missing. I shall have to dig them up.

[Lunkhead]

I guess the lesson is, if other folks remix your tune, save a backup copy.

[Billy's Little Trip]

give us your tracks! i'd like to give that a shot.

-craig

Well, if you're willing, it would be interesting to see a different mix. How would I go about giving you the tracks? Email mp3's one at a time? There are something like 10 tracks just for the drums alone. I'm using Cubase, is that an issue? How would you line up the tracks? Sorry, I'm still new to this kind of thing.

[Billy's Little Trip]

We did this once, and I learned a lot:

http://www.workshop3d.com/octo/remix.htm

SPUD

crap. I see that all the entries have gone missing. I shall have to dig them up.

Cool project, I'd like to hear the results.

[jb]

Original: http://www.songfight.org/music/too_goth ... torock.mp3

JB Remix: http://johnorama.com/misc/octotoogoth.mp3

[Spud]

found them. will correct my page to point to them.

[Märk]

The biggest problem I've found in my tenure here is that everyone has different ears, and while there are certainly ways to badly mix a song, usually you're going to hear someone say they don't like the mix regardless of how well you did.

These people are usually listening on 5 dollar headphones, or 3000 dollar studio monitors. The trick I've found is to make something that sounds good in the car.

If you ask someone like blue, he'll tell you that louder is better. This is acheived by using T-Racks, or Izotope Ozone, or any of several other multiband compression/mastering apps/plugins. I personally think these things squash the hell out of the dynamics, but I use them myself, so there you go.

Mix down the source tracks (after EQ-ing, etc) so that everything sounds balanced, and the highest peak on the mixdown is ~ -5db. That leaves headroom for the mastering app to work with.

Read this.
That's all I got.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Hey jb, your pretty good, who'duh thunk?
The original is more centered and has a tunnel reverb to the over all mix.
The jb re-mix is much wider and very stereo. This mix actually increased the vocal interest to me. Over all volume was higher too. Nice mix.

[Billy's Little Trip]

The biggest problem I've found in my tenure here is that everyone has different ears, and while there are certainly ways to badly mix a song, usually you're going to hear someone say they don't like the mix regardless of how well you did.

These people are usually listening on 5 dollar headphones, or 3000 dollar studio monitors. The trick I've found is to make something that sounds good in the car.

If you ask someone like blue, he'll tell you that louder is better. This is acheived by using T-Racks, or Izotope Ozone, or any of several other multiband compression/mastering apps/plugins. I personally think these things squash the hell out of the dynamics, but I use them myself, so there you go.

Mix down the source tracks (after EQ-ing, etc) so that everything sounds balanced, and the highest peak on the mixdown is ~ -5db. That leaves headroom for the mastering app to work with.

Read this.
That's all I got.

This is an "after coffee in the morning" read. Looks good, thanks Sven.
I've been trying to figure out how to increase volume after the final mix and I've tried a couple ways so far. My Convalescence entry, I took my final mix to my editing program, (Goldwave) cleaned up my beginning 1 second of silence, and the fade out. then I reduced the peaks and pumped up the volume as high as I could without peaking the meter. I'm not sure if this is recommended, but it kind of helped me get to where I was trying to go with it.

[Spud]

Here we go. Moved it to the current domain:

http://www.mightyoctothorpe.com/remix.htm

SPUD