NEW TRICK ON GTRS SOUNDS GOOD BUT????

[MREVOL]

Last night i was mixing a metal band. I have the guitars bussed and running thru an eq. Well i wanted to a/b two different eq settings. I duplicated the buss and tweaked the second eq. Well, by accident, i unsoloed the two busses and the guitars got bigger.

Does anyone do this---run gtrs to two busses and play with the mixture of both.

Or is this bad to do in pro tools?

[MREVOL]

ok now how about a serious response

[Jonboy79]

You'll put your eye out kid. Seriously though if you like the way it sounds then why not? I'm not sure in a situation like this rules apply, just do whatever sounds right.

[max cooper]

Originally Posted by MREVOL

Or is this bad to do in pro tools?

Cubase only, as far as I know.


So, seriously, two tracks of the same thing with two different EQ settings.

If they're panned to the same place, I think what you get is a third EQ setting on the same track.

Why it sounds bigger; you've brought up the guitar on two tracks.

You've got (for example) one cup of drums, one cup of bass, one cup of vocals but TWO cups of guitars.

Some people do this when they're mixing, often with the bass. You can get it relatively louder in the mix without running the fader all the way up which can be good, gainwise.

It's a common technique. I'd say bypass the EQ's and go back and forth between one and two tracks and you'll find that the bigness stays. Of course, if the EQing was a big bump at, say, 700Hz, you'll also lose some size by bypassing the EQ, so keep that in mind.

[toolskid]

primarily 'bigger' or primarily 'louder' ?...

[MREVOL]

Im going to say louder---but not killing the mix.

I decided to play it safe and just go back to one buss.

[DECKERATOR]

Originally Posted by MREVOL

Last night i was mixing a metal band. I have the guitars bussed and running thru an eq. Well i wanted to a/b two different eq settings. I duplicated the buss and tweaked the second eq. Well, by accident, i unsoloed the two busses and the guitars got bigger.

Does anyone do this---run gtrs to two busses and play with the mixture of both.

Or is this bad to do in pro tools?

Hey MREVOL, try taking your right paned gtr and knock it back in time 20 milliseconds. pan them hard left and right and you will get a wider spread on them. kind of a neat little trick.

Just mix it!!!
billy decker

[djui5]

Originally Posted by MREVOL

I decided to play it safe and just go back to one buss.

CHICKEN!!

Stop playing it safe. If it sounds better, why would you turn it off? DO WHAT SOUNDS RIGHT.

BTW, there is nothing wrong with doing this in Pro-Tools, if you have HD. If not, you need to compensate for the delay manually. That delay might be helping you though...haha.

Billy's "trick" works nice too.

[ulysses]

What exactly are you afraid might happen using a duplicate guitar track in pro tools? The reason you got so many wise-ass comments is because it's a silly thing to worry about. You're fine, go ahead and use two tracks if you want to. Of course, all you're really doing is increasing the overall guitar volume while also messing with the EQ curve a little bit. But there's nothing wrong with that. Do what sounds good. You can't break software by cranking it up too loud.

As for the "trick" of sliding one of these tracks 20 milliseconds relative to the other - I think that's a bad idea. It will cause comb filtering that sounds funny (if you like the sound of it, then it's okay). People think that because they pan two things hard left and hard right, they don't have to worry about phase coherence. It's not true - even if you incorrectly believe you can ignore mono compatibility, you still get a lot of mixing of the L and R in the air between your speakers and your ears (or just between your ears, as the case may be). Now, sliding one track a few *samples* to compensate for whatever processing latency is on one track and not the other, that's another story.

[djui5]

Originally Posted by ulysses

As for the "trick" of sliding one of these tracks 20 milliseconds relative to the other - I think that's a bad idea.

No, it's not a bad idea at all. You've heard it done all over hit records for years. Eventide has pre-sets that do this very same thing. It's like putting a 20ms delay on a track and panning it opposite the original track. It's done on a lot of stuff, not just guitars.

[Drumsound]

Originally Posted by djui5

CHICKEN!!

Stop playing it safe. If it sounds better, why would you turn it off? DO WHAT SOUNDS RIGHT.

I wanted to say the same thing.

[u b k]

Originally Posted by MREVOL

Last night i was mixing a metal band. I have the guitars bussed and running thru an eq. Well i wanted to a/b two different eq settings. I duplicated the buss and tweaked the second eq. Well, by accident, i unsoloed the two busses and the guitars got bigger.

as you've heard by now, it didn't get bigger, it just got louder. if it didn't eat the mix, it's because the two eq's combined did the right things.

my guess, based on years of witnessing what separates beginners from seasoned pros, is that you would do well to learn to use eq to carve away everything that is not needed, but no more, and be more aggressive with the fader than you ever thought was wise. there's a reason big consoles only have 4 bands of slightly overlapping eq... it's almost always all that's needed. when the guitars have a ton of 250, the snare needs less. the more you cut 250 from the snare, the more you can push it in the mix and not have it get in the way. listen to the difference between pushing and pulling the snare fader, and cutting and boosting aggressively with a wide q at 400. this is the difference between making something louder vs. making it bigger, moving it up and down vs. moving it forward and back.

learn to use the eq and fader in realtime as a cooperative team (it's tough ITB with a mouse, which is why i hate ITB with a mouse), learn to work with size as well as volume, and your mixes will at once get bigger but have more space. now THAT's a trick.


gregoire
del
ubk
.

[DECKERATOR]

Originally Posted by ulysses

As for the "trick" of sliding one of these tracks 20 milliseconds relative to the other - I think that's a bad idea. It will cause comb filtering that sounds funny (if you like the sound of it, then it's okay). People think that because they pan two things hard left and hard right, they don't have to worry about phase coherence. It's not true - even if you incorrectly believe you can ignore mono compatibility, you still get a lot of mixing of the L and R in the air between your speakers and your ears (or just between your ears, as the case may be). Now, sliding one track a few *samples* to compensate for whatever processing latency is on one track and not the other, that's another story.

i heard rumor that AC/DC's Back In Black, or was it Shook Me All Night Long was actually 24ms. Somebody check with Shipshape?

just mix it!!!
billy decker

[thethrillfactor]

Originally Posted by djui5

No, it's not a bad idea at all. You've heard it done all over hit records for years. Eventide has pre-sets that do this very same thing. It's like putting a 20ms delay on a track and panning it opposite the original track. It's done on a lot of stuff, not just guitars.

Its called the Haas effect or precedence effect.

The only issue is the mono compatibility.

Actually i always liked the AMS 1580 and PCM42 better for this kinda of effect due to the added latency in the converters and the roll off the converters did themselves.

[msrecprod]

Thrill, are you putting the pcm42 on an insert, or a send?

[djui5]

Originally Posted by thethrillfactor

Its called the Haas effect or precedence effect.

The only issue is the mono compatibility.

Actually i always liked the AMS 1580 and PCM42 better for this kinda of effect due to the added latency in the converters and the roll off the converters did themselves.

ssshhhhhhhhhhhhh

mono compatability is an issue for sure, but if you know what your doing...



now shush thrill

[DECKERATOR]

[QUOTE=thethrillfactor;897769]Its called the Haas effect or precedence effect.

The only issue is the mono compatibility.

Actually i always liked the AMS 1580 and PCM42 better for this kinda of effect due to the added latency in the converters and the roll off the converters did themselves.[/
QUOTE]

in all serious, is mono compatibility an issue anymore? i'm probably gonna get hazed for this but, i understand the rule of checking your mix in mono on auratones. wasn't that so mixes would be ok and in phase for am radio and single speaker mono tv's?

with as many psycho acoustic plug's and effects out there that purposely throw the signal out of phase and widen it, half of pop radio would collapse in mono. if i use enough of them my mixes do too, but they sound big as hell so.....................

just mix it!!!!!
billy decker

[not_so_new]

[QUOTE=DECKERATOR;898189]

Originally Posted by thethrillfactor

Its called the Haas effect or precedence effect.

The only issue is the mono compatibility.

Actually i always liked the AMS 1580 and PCM42 better for this kinda of effect due to the added latency in the converters and the roll off the converters did themselves.[/
QUOTE]

in all serious, is mono compatibility an issue anymore? i'm probably gonna get hazed for this but, i understand the rule of checking your mix in mono on auratones. wasn't that so mixes would be ok and in phase for am radio and single speaker mono tv's?

with as many psycho acoustic plug's and effects out there that purposely throw the signal out of phase and widen it, half of pop radio would collapse in mono. if i use enough of them my mixes do too, but they sound big as hell so.....................

just mix it!!!!!
billy decker

Hummmm... while I don't think mono matters all that much any more I do feel that phase relationships in a mix are still VERY important. I think we all agree with that.

A guitar panned hard L / R with 25 ms of delay (or any anything below the 30 ms Haas effect time really) may add some excitement to a mix but it can lead to trouble even in stereo apps. If you are not panning hard L / R you can get some phase'y-ness for sure and even when I do pan hard I tend to feel the guitar gets smeared a bit with this "trick".

Because the human ear uses delay and SPL to localize sounds I feel that this technique can mess with the perception of the tracks in a mix. I am not saying that I don't use this technique or that no one else should I am just saying that I believe there is a subconscious price to pay when the listener gets the song and that price is a little bit of focus and clarity because of the confused localization of the track.

Given the choice between one track with 20 or so ms of delay and two separate tracks from two separate takes I would choose the latter… not that you always get that choice…. Or I would choose to record in stereo ala Bruce S. and let the natural Haas effect of the stereo track work in the mix… again not that you always get that choice when mixing someone else's tracks.

To the original poster…. MREVOL. Rule #1, discounting all I said above, if it sounds good then do it.



One more thing. When you are working with delay effects below the Haas cutoff then in essence you are messing with EQ. You start to separate men from boys when you start using phase relationships for your tone shaping as well as for the effect. I have a hunch that is what you stumbled into above. When combining the two tracks you were eq'ing them because the phase relationships were canceling out the right frequencies for the mix you had going at the time. You hit on a pretty nice little tool to add to your bag of tricks… now you can see why people say experience counts huh?

[thethrillfactor]

[QUOTE=DECKERATOR;898189]

Originally Posted by thethrillfactor

Its called the Haas effect or precedence effect.

The only issue is the mono compatibility.

Actually i always liked the AMS 1580 and PCM42 better for this kinda of effect due to the added latency in the converters and the roll off the converters did themselves.[/
QUOTE]

in all serious, is mono compatibility an issue anymore? i'm probably gonna get hazed for this but, i understand the rule of checking your mix in mono on auratones. wasn't that so mixes would be ok and in phase for am radio and single speaker mono tv's?

with as many psycho acoustic plug's and effects out there that purposely throw the signal out of phase and widen it, half of pop radio would collapse in mono. if i use enough of them my mixes do too, but they sound big as hell so.....................

just mix it!!!!!
billy decker

When was the last time you were in a club Billy?

Its mostly mono stacks everywhere.

Anything pseudo just collapses and disappears miserably.

[thethrillfactor]

Originally Posted by msrecprod

Thrill, are you putting the pcm42 on an insert, or a send?

On a send so you can balance the return.

Also you have to pan the return for the wide stereo effect correct?

[DECKERATOR]

[QUOTE=thethrillfactor;898307]

Originally Posted by DECKERATOR

When was the last time you were in a club Billy?

Its mostly mono stacks everywhere.

Anything pseudo just collapses and disappears miserably.

back in my 20's chasing tail and drinkin' like a fish...wow i am getting old.....

just mix it!!!
billy decker

[dbbubba]

ALWAYS THINK ABOUT MONO COMPATABILTY

If a piece of music has a long life span it is going to hopefully be used in many situations and you don't want it to not work in mono. There are lots of delivery mediums that ARE exclusively mono. If a piece just works on a CD then great, but FM has a much more collapsed stereo field than a CD. There is a hell of a lot of music played on AM still.
Maybe someone wants to use it in a TV or radio spot where mono compatabilty IS an issue. Maybe the cut is so popular that they might want to use it at a sports venue. If it is popular it will be played in clubs which as the other guy stated are usually mono or improperly implemented stereo. Distributed music systems in shopping malls, casinos and evrywhere else are not stereo.

I'd venture to say that MOST of the places that a cut will be played (if it is a popular piece of music) WILL NOT be stereo. If it is piped out in stereo then the chance that the average listener will be in a spot to hear both channels properly is rather small.

So... why would you want to mix a cut where the mix is proper ONLY in one medium? The revenue a cut can potentiallly generate would probebly be greatest in the long run from playback on these mono systems.

I'll tell you this... of the money I have seen made in audio production the material created for mono playback or broadcast has been FAR greater.

Hey, if you are going to delay one side, then pitch shift it down a tiny bit as well.
A teenie tiny bit... only a few cents. Listen to what that does.
You have heard this many times.... cool effect on heavey GTRs.
One of the kings of heavy GTR did this since he was fifteen.

Danny Brown

[ulysses]

Originally Posted by DECKERATOR

in all serious, is mono compatibility an issue anymore? i'm probably gonna get hazed for this but, i understand the rule of checking your mix in mono on auratones. wasn't that so mixes would be ok and in phase for am radio and single speaker mono tv's?
with as many psycho acoustic plug's and effects out there that purposely throw the signal out of phase and widen it, half of pop radio would collapse in mono. if i use enough of them my mixes do too, but they sound big as hell so...

The lack of concern for mono compatibility by new engineers in the last few years has everything to do with why mixes sound so lousy today. Firstly, every mix that sees any kind of widespread playback is going to be heard in LOTS of cases on a single-speaker system, whether it be on a TV, a computer, or a clock radio. Not to mention many "stereo" systems such as boomboxes and computers where the two speakers are so close together that you effectively are hearing monophonic sound by the time it reaches your ears across the room. But even on a wide stereo pair, you still get substantial in-air mixing of the left and right signals. What you hear as "huge width" in the stereo spectrum in the controlled environment of your control room quickly translates into "phasey and thin" in the real world. Personally, even on headphones I don't like to hear hugely out-of-phase information dominating a mix. It makes your head feel funny.

Now, in actuality a 20mS delay on a guitar track is going to be innocuous because it's a long enough delay that you won't hear it as comb filtering (the null would be at 25Hz, where the guitar isn't doing much musically and has probably been hi-pass filtered anyway). But I don't like to hear generalizations about how you can slap a particular delay or EQ setting or anything else onto a mix with good results. When mixing stops being context-sensitive, that's when you get cookie-cutter mixes that are unlistenable. For an example, turn on the radio.

[DECKERATOR]

Originally Posted by ulysses

Now, in actuality a 20mS delay on a guitar track is going to be innocuous because it's a long enough delay that you won't hear it as comb filtering (the null would be at 25Hz, where the guitar isn't doing much musically and has probably been hi-pass filtered anyway).

point well taken, gentlemen. duping and knocking back a mon elec is all i was talking about with the mono issue. your right ulysses, i should not have generalized my statement.

just mix it!!!
billy decker

[not_so_new]

You guys make a good case for mono compatibility for sure.

I still stand by the claim that mono is not as important anymore to the general public. As Thrill said you can find mono stacks in clubs but I also see plenty of stereo rigs in clubs now as well. Yeah maybe TV but I can't remember the last TV that I saw which did not come with a stereo speaker set up (but as Justin said, many of these are too close together to really count as "stereo" in the first place). Most people I know seem to listen in exaggerated stereo environments now days, in the car or with a set of phones.

Justin's point about in-air mixing is the most compelling argument in my eyes.

I also stand behind my point that mono or stereo you can still get in trouble if you are not paying close attention to your phase relationships and tricks like delaying guitar tracks under 30ms should be approached with caution. The guy or gal who uses these tricks should be aware of the consequences. Screwing with phase inside a mix can be a cool trick but often it makes my head hurt and just sounds wrong. I will play these tricks subtly with a lead vocal track but I don't like to do that and do the same thing with guitars and then bass and then…. the mix starts to get all out of focus.

[dbbubba]

It is a way to put a mono elec GTR into stereo for sure.
Back in the early '80s I would slap an Eventide H910 onto my GTR channel and apply the setting where the readout flashed between "0" and "-1" and pan them hard L/R.
This was a common H910 trick.
I now hear all of those tracks and wish I could remove it!
I also got addicted to running my leads into a Yamaha SPX90 set to a stereo chorus/flange thing. It seperated the lead from the track texturally, but although it was somewhat subtle it sounds kinda' goofy now. Too waterey.
I even recall a lot of Frank Zappa's re-mixes of his old releases had a DDL thing going on with the bass. It was spread pretty far L/R and although I hold Frank's music in EXTREMELY high regard... that sounded bad.
He was also guilty of using extremely dry sampled kicks to relace the originals.
I think he had to re-record these tracks due to tape edge damage (it was 12 track and the kick and bass were probebly on outer tracks.)

The comment about needing something to make a lead vocal sit in a track is so true.
I always would kinda' like it to be "bone dry" yet I always have something added.
I used to use the Harmonizer up and down, pan thing and it ain't bad... I still use it live on one C&W artist I mix.
I usually like a VERY short verb of a short 120 to 170 msec. slap on rock stuff.
I make it be a stereo slap (two slghtly different amounts of delay) and it almost is like an ambient setting.
It is never loud enough to be heard until after the words.
If I have longer DDL I'll use a gate with light ducking.

Danny Brown

[mtstudios@charter]

A better idea is to split the guitar into different amps while recording. Eqing each differently for this effect. Or using different Mics on one speaker.

www.bluethumbproductions.com

[toolskid]

[QUOTE=thethrillfactor;898307]

Originally Posted by DECKERATOR

When was the last time you were in a club Billy?

Its mostly mono stacks everywhere.

Anything pseudo just collapses and disappears miserably.

yeah I think mono compatible mixes wil pena trate better in a club !

[ulysses]

Originally Posted by mtstudi@pacbell

A better idea is to split the guitar into different amps while recording. Eqing each differently for this effect. Or using different Mics on one speaker.

Even better is two separate performances of the same guitar part.

[initialsBB]

Originally Posted by not_so_new

Yeah maybe TV but I can't remember the last TV that I saw which did not come with a stereo speaker set up

I think another point is not so much the end listener's setup but what happens in between with various production stages that you don't have any control over. For example in my day job I'm often given 4 channel audio splits of movie trailers -- that's 4 mono tracks, music, dialog, fx, & v/o. You never know if a song might end up in a movie or commercial which in turn gets put online or on a dvd, travelling through all sorts of hands along the way. There was a thread here a while back where someone linked to the Talledega Nights trailer online which had been posted without any sfx!