First band recorded in my new "studio."

[Chris]

My new studio being my house! It's all hardwood floor and has a really open living room and kitchen, so I set up the drums in my living room, stuck the guitar and bass amp in my bedroom, setup my control room in the spare room and had some fun.

This is 100x better than recording in a practice room. Thank you hardwood floors.

So here's my first shot. Rough mix, but the drums already sound better than just about everywhere else I've recorded.

This band has no vox. It was just bass and drums and they recently found their guitarist. Their bass is through a big muff, so it's super distorted and fizzy. Hey, that's how they like it.

I did bass into the big muff into a radial j48. If I could go back I would've done bass into the di and sent that to my pre, and then put the through to the big muff into the bass cab and mic it. That way I would've gotten a clean bass low end to mix in. I read somewhere I think that the big muff takes a lot of the low end away. Blah.

Anyway, take a listen.


www.ffaudio.com/music/deepsea/flamesmix1.mp3

[nrehk]

I really don't like it, sorry :)

It all sounds so tinny and thin!

The guitars have a bee-sound...

I think you should improve your miking technique

Bye

Enrico

[Chris]

You think the drums sound tinny?

[DeeDrive]

The drums aren't so bad, but the mix is pretty out of wack. The high hats are completely buried. It just sounds like a snare drum with fuzz overdubbed. The guitar sounds really bad, but this must be how they like it...? Sometimes bands don't know what's good for them.

It sounds like you have pretty good equipment, just keep working on mic placement and mixing. The snare is so much louder than the toms, did you have the toms close mic'd? The kick is a little dead sounding too. Overall a good start, but keeping working on it.

[mopppish]

Dude, those toms sound terrible. But it sounds more like a problem with old heads/bad tuning/lackluster playing technique than with mic technique. Also, the fact that they're hard-panned L-R makes fills around the kit very distracting and unnatural sounding.
The truth is, once everything kicks in, it sounds OK (other than the tom panning). It doesn't sound PLEASANT or particularly NATURAL or OPEN, but for what it is, the trashiness kind of works.
I would say-
-bring the guitars up a bit
-tweak the kick drum (it sounds like it may be overcompressed)
-avoid trying to fix a bad original tom sound with ridiculous amounts of compression/EQ/etc. I would say just let them be what they are and fit in with the vibe of the rest of the kit rather than make them sound like a whole other entity.
-maybe bump the low end on the bass a bit
Keep working, bud!

[keithfreund]

hmm... i think if you put some kind of "big room sound" reverb on the toms/drums they might sound better. the bass is completely missing. try renaissance bass plugin, maybe? the fuzz is really cool in the beginning, but once the guitar comes in and theres no low end, it ruins the build of the sound. snare needs a good deal of something. maybe because of the player/snare/etc but id trigger a sample if possible. (unless you could rerecord).

i cant really hear the guitar well enough to tell how the recording is. pretty cool song though.

[chadly]

Originally Posted by Chris

My new studio being my house! It's all hardwood floor and has a really open living room and kitchen, so I set up the drums in my living room, stuck the guitar and bass amp in my bedroom, setup my control room in the spare room and had some fun.

This is 100x better than recording in a practice room. Thank you hardwood floors.

So here's my first shot. Rough mix, but the drums already sound better than just about everywhere else I've recorded.

This band has no vox. It was just bass and drums and they recently found their guitarist. Their bass is through a big muff, so it's super distorted and fizzy. Hey, that's how they like it.

I did bass into the big muff into a radial j48. If I could go back I would've done bass into the di and sent that to my pre, and then put the through to the big muff into the bass cab and mic it. That way I would've gotten a clean bass low end to mix in. I read somewhere I think that the big muff takes a lot of the low end away. Blah.

Anyway, take a listen.


www.ffaudio.com/music/deepsea/flamesmix1.mp3

Congrats on the new space- the hard panned toms are little out, I agree.

[RainbowStorm]

Originally Posted by Chris

My new studio being my house! It's all hardwood floor and has a really open living room and kitchen, so I set up the drums in my living room, stuck the guitar and bass amp in my bedroom, setup my control room in the spare room and had some fun.

This is 100x better than recording in a practice room. Thank you hardwood floors.

So here's my first shot. Rough mix, but the drums already sound better than just about everywhere else I've recorded.

This band has no vox. It was just bass and drums and they recently found their guitarist. Their bass is through a big muff, so it's super distorted and fizzy. Hey, that's how they like it.

I did bass into the big muff into a radial j48. If I could go back I would've done bass into the di and sent that to my pre, and then put the through to the big muff into the bass cab and mic it. That way I would've gotten a clean bass low end to mix in. I read somewhere I think that the big muff takes a lot of the low end away. Blah.

Anyway, take a listen.


www.ffaudio.com/music/deepsea/flamesmix1.mp3

Chris, you might have not got the credit you hoped for with this song, but I think you're on the right track. This time you recorded a band that was not ready for recording a song. They didn't record a finished song and they didn't know the difference between good and bad sound. Your mistake: You let them into your studio and you got all the bad credit for all of it. Learn from this mistake. If you're not doing this for a living it's cool, we all need to practise on record sometimes, but if you're doing this for a living I think you should think twice before you let someone into your studio, especially if it's new, don't record whatever comes around. Think about what you want to be associated with.

Keep up the good work!

[Chris]

Well I didn't think anybody was going to reply here so I was putting an updated version on other boards but I skipped out on here. Guess I was wrong!

Here's a better version, less fizzy bass, better mix in my opinion.

The cymbals sucked. Pretty much all of the guy's were cracked. The HH sound better than the crashes, but alltogether not great.

I'm retracking bass on sunday because I told the guys that the big muff he was putting his bass through made the low end completely dissappear. We're going to DI the bass for the low end and mic the cab after the big muff for the distortion he wants.

Originally Posted by mopppish

-avoid trying to fix a bad original tom sound with ridiculous amounts of compression/EQ/etc. I would say just let them be what they are and fit in with the vibe of the rest of the kit rather than make them sound like a whole other entity.

The only thing I did with the toms is send them to a parallel compression bus and put the 1176 uad plug on them for about 3-4db of compression. Other than that there isn't any eq or anything.


The panned toms are out there and everybody everywhere has told me. Haha. The rack is panned 20% l and the floor is panned 90% r. I'll fix those the next time I get on my computer.


www.ffaudio.com/music/deepsea/flamesmix2.mp3

Originally Posted by RainbowStorm

Chris, you might have not got the credit you hoped for with this song, but I think you're on the right track. This time you recorded a band that was not ready for recording a song. They didn't record a finished song and they didn't know the difference between good and bad sound. Your mistake: You let them into your studio and you got all the bad credit for all of it. Learn from this mistake. If you're not doing this for a living it's cool, we all need to practise on record sometimes, but if you're doing this for a living I think you should think twice before you let someone into your studio, especially if it's new, don't record whatever comes around. Think about what you want to be associated with.

Keep up the good work!

I jsut wanted to reply to this and say I'm not looking for 'credit.' Haha. I don't work for anybody but myself and I just record local bands that don't have money to pay for a studio. I think it's damn better than a boom box set in their practice room.

Also I don't see how this isn't a finished song, unless you mean that there aren't vocals? Also, good and bad are subjective.

Thanks for the reply, though! :)

[RainbowStorm]

Originally Posted by Chris

Well I didn't think anybody was going to reply here so I was putting an updated version on other boards but I skipped out on here. Guess I was wrong!

Here's a better version, less fizzy bass, better mix in my opinion.

The cymbals sucked. Pretty much all of the guy's were cracked. The HH sound better than the crashes, but alltogether not great.

I'm retracking bass on sunday because I told the guys that the big muff he was putting his bass through made the low end completely dissappear. We're going to DI the bass for the low end and mic the cab after the big muff for the distortion he wants.


www.ffaudio.com/music/deepsea/flamesmix2.mp3



I jsut wanted to reply to this and say I'm not looking for 'credit.' Haha. I don't work for anybody but myself and I just record local bands that don't have money to pay for a studio. I think it's damn better than a boom box set in their practice room.

Also I don't see how this isn't a finished song, unless you mean that there aren't vocals? Also, good and bad are subjective.

Thanks for the reply, though! :)

Hmm... Cool, I'm glad if it helped at least a little I hope... What influences do you have? What reference material do you mix against? When it comes to the mix itself it seems like the mixing process was a bit "rapid".

Try distributing the signal like this: 40% drummer, 60% bass guitar and 0% electric guitar. Your role as a mixing engineer is not to take it all and push it into processing. That's what happened here. As a mixing engineer you have a picture of what YOU can do with this mix and YOU are responsible for the result of the mix, NOT the producer. In your case the producer did not notice that the electric guitar sound will create some enormous frustration out there, not to talk about the persons with Tinnitus when playing this at a local club on high volume, it would drive them crazy! So as a mixing engineer you should go:

- What element do you want to build this arrangement around?
The producer goes:
- The electric guitar, I just l-o-v-e it!

DA HORROR!!! Now you know that the producer doesn't know that you won't make the mix work such that it will be in both your taste and his taste at the end. He wants to build the arrangement around the electric guitar, you absolutely don't want to build the mix around the electric guitar. So without doing any decisions here you are heading straight into a big big problem. So you need to make a decision. The decision here is to take a small step towards this big decision of muting the whole electric guitar track. Do a rough mix just to make sure you really don't want to hear the result of what he is talking about. (also use some automation just to make sure it's really useless) If it works out, then the problem is solved and you didn't even have to comment on the guitar parts. You make the decision of using the guitar, a good decision. But if it didn't work, just like you expected, you make one version built around the guitar and one that is built around the bass guitar. Your version will of course sound much better because the bass and the drums got enough space to shine in the mix, simply by removing the electric guitar that was very expensive in the mix. So you ask the producer what version he likes more (you then play the versions to him). He will most certainly choose your version and if not he will most probably say something like:

- I liked the sound of the drums and bass in the other version. Can we somehow take the best of each?

Now you know it's time to bring this matter up and explain this to him:

- The reason why the drums and bass tracks sound so good in the other version is because the electric guitar is so expensive on the mix the way it has been tracked. I muted it to make you notice this because I think it's an important issue in this song. We can really take the best of each, but to make that work the electric guitar needs to be re-tracked. So we have at least two options here, either we re-track the electric guitar or we use the other version. Can you think of any other option?

The last question there is REALLY important! When you head towards a problem as big as this one and realise your reputation is suddenly at risk you just need to make sure you don't mess up this situation anymore than this, so you look for more options yourself just to make sure it will all work out in the end. He will not notice the fact that in your world this is serious stuff you really care about. By asking a question you pass the ball to the producer, you make him decide about things he should decide about. At the same time the focus will never be on whether you are competent as a mixer by not being able to make the mix like the producer wants it to sound (THAT would be HORROR due to how much it would mess up everything even more!), you make him focus on making better decisions by letting him be creative and look for new options by answering a question. All of a sudden he might come up with a really great option you didn't find yourself and now your're both ready to make the mix rock! If he still wants to use the first version (without even thinking much about it at all, the worst option: building around the electric guitar) you just need to take a break. You do that not because you are lazy or anything, you do it to make him think about all this some more, you are not going to let this guy ruin anything due to this very basic problem. That's really important when you've realised you are dealing with a very impulsive guy that probably doesn't know a shit about what it takes to make recordings that sell. If that doesn't work either, then you need to do it all YOUR WAY. At this point it's all about making it work for YOU, not for HIM. After the session you take the phone and phone for instance a friend of yours that is a professional mixing engineer himself. Now you let him comment on the mix to see what kind of reactions he has about the mix. That will give you even more options at hands and together you can discuss how to target a problem like this most efficiently. If you both agree about the guitar being much too expensive for the whole mix the discussion will be all about how to solve the situation most efficiently with the producer. When nothing else works (which is very unlikely but can happen in very rare cases) you need to tell the truth:

- Listen, I'm sure that this mix will turn out really bad if we build the mix around the guitar and leave the guitar unmuted. I've done so many mixes and I know that the lead element of a mix can't be the most expensive in the whole mix, because it literally eats up the best of it! So unfortunately I have to tell you that I won't mix this song if we don't mute it because I think it's such a basic thing when it comes to the performance of a mix and my view is that this track REALLY needs to be re-tracked. If you still want to build around this guitar I suggest you let another engineer mix this song.

If he doesn't have a bad day he will respect this and your team work will carry on as planned.

So recording and mixing is not only about doing cool stuff, sometimes you have to be very strategic in order to end up with great sound.

This might not have been exactly the kind of respond you had expected, but this is the kind of focus I think would take you in the right direction from here... Good luck and keep exploring, you're doing great!

[Faderjockey]

Originally Posted by Chris

You think the drums sound tinny?

Sorry but yes...If you like it and they do that's cool...
I just wouldn't be happy with that myself...Keep trying.

Gtr's are super small....

[mopppish]

Originally Posted by Chris

The only thing I did with the toms is send them to a parallel compression bus and put the 1176 uad plug on them for about 3-4db of compression. Other than that there isn't any eq or anything.

That's cool.
I didn't really mean to suggest that it sounded like you did a lot to them. Just that it sounds like they were not necessarily tuned very well. A lot of times, I've seen people try to tweak the hell out of a bad tom sound and end up with something that's (to my ears) even worse than what they started with.