Haven’t done much mixing lately, so I’m probably a little rusty. Going for a balance between the feel of a live performance and the presence and punch of a studio mix. Let me know what sucks (and what doesn’t!) Thanks!
3 Likes
Listening thru my macbook air speakers. Dang! This is nice. I love this. You cleaned it up nicely. I love the EQ overall. You got rid of a lot of mud.
Love the snare sound. Pops nicely on my laptop. Good balance. Guitars sound nice.
At least on my laptop the kick and bass good come thru a tad more, but I suspect on my monitors they’d be fine.
You particularly did a nice job on the vocals. How much of what you did was straight out de-essing and how much did you edit the vocals straight out? Very nice.
I got nothin’ for ya CRS. This is just a nice mix.
1 Like
OooooooH - game on!!!
This is going to be a HELL of a contest now!!! Look who’s in!
Much work awaits me Monday when I home and back in the office. Going to be tweaking, tweaking, tweaking.
1 Like
This sounds really good.
1 Like
Probably 3/4 of the time spent so far was on the vocals - edited out all the bleed and clip-gained pretty much every phrase/word/sometimes syllables to even out the dynamics prior to processing. There were big “Ss”, plosives and changing tone due to proximity effect that all had to be sorted out to get it in shape before it was really useable. I did a bit of automating of eq, and used some dynamic eq as well. De-essing was relatively straight forward after that - I just used the excellent Eiosis De-esser on its default setting, TBH.
Thanks for listening and commenting - hope it works ok on other speakers too…
Thanks -That’s a relief!
I did a fair bit of auditioning in my car to get the low end sounding ok. My first draft was way off. That scared me a bit, as I felt I used to have the measure of this system in this room. It’s been a while since I did a mix, so I think I still have to tune my ear back into my room to get things to translate better in that regard.
One thing I can rely on - the car never lies!
Coming along nicely. I think you have captured the vibe of the room well throughout the song.
1 Like
Im liking it, loads of saturation in there, cool as anything… you guys must be sampling kick and snare though, to get them that level?
1 Like
Thanks - The saturation is pretty much exclusively courtesy of the Scheps Omi Channel… I did things differently on this mix, and used it on every channel, including the master buss. It has some great saturation options that sound really good.
I’m using a sample on the snare mainly to send the plate reverb (Abbey Road). There is an ambiance only sample on the kick mixed in pretty low.
The level and punch are from the close mics. I gated them with the SOC and I used copies to created ultra saturated parallel “character” channels to mix in with the snare sound. That’s a big part of what is happening here.
The overheads are also a big part of the drum sound.
2 Likes
I tend to do that, sample ambience only for drums, its a cool trick… yeah I also shoulda got the Scheps Omni at $29 but didn’t, I liked it a lot.
Re: overheads (you got more than one?) I wish they had put up all the mic channels, I guess thats a way of staying ‘ahead of the competition’. That part put me off from finishing my mix properly.
I split my room mic and my drum overhead full left and right… assholes.
Me too! I felt like I was able to do quite a bit with the kick. I added a snare. @redworks Eric didn’t like what I did with the snare lol, I took it in a different direction than you did. I tried blending in a raunchy sounding fat dry muted snare from the Paul Maybury ‘I want that sound’ bundle. I’m gonna spending some time fighting with it tomorrow and see if I can message it in, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it to jive. In that case I’ll abandon the idea and find a sample that compliments the snare instead of trying to change the direction of the snare sound.
I’ll probably end up adding a kick sample (just a touch) of an oversized boing-y sounding ludwig kick to give the kick drum a little more sustain. Maybe even an 808 I have to. I need something to add some ringing sustain. Just pumping up the low end with a Waves R-bass or something like that makes it thuddy but it doesn’t make it ring.
For what its worth I’m REALLY glad you’re taking a shot at this contest.
2 Likes
I don’t know what this means. I “think” it means you’re triggering a sampled snare with the existing snare, then sending it to a verb. Then only the verb gets sent to the mix buss, along with the original snare (and the triggered share does not get sent directly to the mix buss). Am I close?
Thanks Eric - good to hear!
No, I only got one stereo pair of OH mics like everyone else.
FWIW, I think room mics can be over-rated. Sometimes they can be truly magical, but more often than not, I’ve found them to be pretty terrible, especially if the engineer doesn’t really know the room, and/or the band/drummer aren’t balancing themselves acoustically within the space.
What’s more, phase problems tend to increase exponentially relative to the number of mics interacting with each other, so if it’s just “throw up some room mics and hope for the best”, it’s generally a recipe for disaster, IMO.
Excuses, excuses…! 
Cool - Looking forward to hearing the changes! I did this thing that I learned from Eric Valentine, (and maybe Reid Shippen does it too) where you take the original snare top signal, gate it fairly tightly, low pass it, boost low end like crazy and distort it all to hell, then mix it in underneath as a “snare beef” channel. It worked really well here, as the original snare was a bit skinny-sounding.
More than close - that’s spot-on, mate! 
2 Likes
I’m still learning to use the Omni Channel. I’m very curious to know if you use it as your only eq on tracks and/or mix buss?
Do you use something else for eq sculpting and then the Omni more for tonal shaping? Or just the Omni channel by itself?
@Jonathan, would love also to know how you use it too, cuz I wouldn’t even have it if you hadn’t coached me into getting it. 
As I said above: I used it on the mix buss too.
For most things - just the Omni-Channel - both shaping and sculpting. Occasionally I needed some additional eq post or pre processing on the SOC, but for the most part, because it has low and high pass filters in addition the eq, as well as the twin-band “de-esser” module, which gives you a more than enough of tone-sculpting options… and then there is also the “insert” module within SOC itself…
1 Like
NOOOOOO… you really got stereo of both? I thought I had got just one of each, and panned it? wtf are they playing at? I never process stuff the same left and right… I have to go look, again now. F***s Sake WHY would you cut that corner? Pack of bastards 
… as they might say in Australia, on Crocodile Dundee in the eighties 
1 track of Stereo overheads; 1 x Stereo Room track - yes, that is what I recall mixing…
More likely “Don’t come the raw prawn with me!”
ha ha - you don’t happen to know how I can split that bullshit arrangement back up in Reaper do you?
Ive never done stereo tracks, thats alien to me, lol - I hate that crap. I only ever mix stuff I’ve recorded… one track at a time, as Johnny Cash might say.
ps. I was born in NZ, and its rugby world cup month, so I don’t mind the banter 
No, really i was drinkunf=g beers and honestly didn’t notice. Reaper showed me a single .wav file, i swear.
slight rant edit…
what I mean is… I LOVE stereo PAIRS of quality OLDE WORLDE type CONDENSER mics… I still have some ancient Neumann KM64’s laying around somewhere… on the drums / rooms or whatever, but I eq/ compress / balance them totally independently - and NEVER lock them together, like a recording graduate might think is cool, standard practice, or just easier, cos that shit changes CONSTANTLY…
1 Like
You definitely can split up stereo tracks into 2 mono tracks. I’m not near my DAW, but my guess is it would be under one of the right-click menus when you click on the track in Reaper… “item settings???”… or something like that…
ah, here it is:
My condolences! 
I jest - NZ has some truly beautiful spots.
indeed, probably at number 8 and first/second five eight and wing…
cheers mate!
1 Like