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Originally Posted by RockNashville Greg you freakin rock. I was beginning to think that this site was completely dominated by retailers and gear makers rather than hands on music makers. |
Nope. Actually, the retailers here are some of the best participants.
Jim Williams is right -- also, on a related note, less is more.
Approach adding compression with a sense of purpose. Is a background percussive piano or marcato (or maybe pizz?) string line "poking" out too much, but is it getting distant too quickly if you just turn it down?
Well, here are some approaches:
* Fast compression will control those attacks & smooth it out.
* Taking out certain frequency ranges will "sit" it behind whatever it's poking out OVER. Are the mids too crowded? Is that 750-1.5k where the vocal needs to be prominent? Pull that band down. One cut is worth a thousand boosts.
On a related note, EQ'ing lows AND highs out gives the illusion of distance -- this is grounded in real-world experience: if a sound is distant, the mids are pronounced (or, actually, the lows and highs become less and less prominent with 'distance'). So, if you really wanna sit it >BEHIND< the rest of the mix, try an HPF at, I dunno, 200-400 (?) and pull that LPF down to 2k-7k (or more). Ren EQ 2-band will work for this, as will adding two 1-BEQ's (Digirack). I like the Sony Oxford EQ's filters.
* Reverb will also sit it "back;" Dave Pensado was referring to reverb as "pan-front-to-back" -- I tend to agree. Again, this is an illusion grounded in our real-world perception.
* Pan it off to the side a bit.
***combine any and all of these.
A lot of the other stuff you're talking about is, well, let's say, tonal color. You could seriously get a decent (not great) mix hypothetically ONLY using the Digirack comps & EQ's (and reverbs & delays) if your fundamentals are on target -- the whole "LA2A on the vocal" thing is, like, the last 10%, and the formulas don't really work all the time, anyway. Threshold, Ratio, Attack, Release. Threshold, ratio, attack, release.