Mixing Tips

Deijavoo

Well, I'm now properly broke as joke due to various repairs needed to my house to the tune of 6 or 7 thousand quid and today my bass player/engineer quit my band, which while it was expected has thrown the last 3 months of tracking in the air.

I'm gonna get the tracks off him and try to mix it myself in my newly found time of probably not being able to leave the house for the fear of costs for the immediate future. So maybe I'll learn something new, plus I get my bass guitar back. Not all doom and gloom!

Any tips guys? 

I guess the sort of sound I'm looking for is in this ballpark (not that we sound anything like these bands)

The last time I tried to mix and then master something myself it came out as the most compressed and bassy load of arse juice known to mankind, so I figured my issue was that I was trying to get a mastered sound while just mixing.

I can't afford any new plug ins, the stock Logic X ones will have to do for now and well, yeah that's about it. Any help and advice would be amazing.

Thanks.

Deijavoo

By the way I should say I'm not planning on mastering myself. 

I do have some people I know that could help out in that area and if not we'll just have to fork out a wee bit.

spark240

I think EQ is your main goal....and it's not easy. Check out you tube David Glenn ( pro audio files ) recording and Johnny Geib, both excellent short tutorials on all aspects of mixing.

Deijavoo

Cheers mate.

Deijavoo

I'm bad for using too much compression, must rein it in a bit. I'm also very new to live drums, always used software in the past.

Any magic hints? Everyone talks about gating them, but I never heard such massive benefit truth be told, but that'll be my heathen ears I suppose.

indiansummer1

whether you need to gate or not depends on the sound you're after, and also if for example you need to really boost the levels of one drum without boosting the rest. i've not got any 'magic' tips for drums as i'm probably as inexperienced as you, but i think careful eq of each drum mic is as good a magic tip as you'll get. then i will pretty much always use light compression on the drum bus, sometimes in parallel, to glue the whole kit together (as well as eq on the bus, usually cutting out some lower mids depending on how boxy the recording/room sounds).

it really depends how inconsistent the performance is, but often i avoid compression on the individual drum mics save for bass and snare, and even then sometimes i use a transient designer instead (logic has one built in i believe). again, all depends on the style you're going for though.

indiansummer1

whoops i should have listened to the videos at the bottom of your post!

Danny1969

When it comes down to drums it's all about how good the tracking was, and that depends on how well the drums were played, how well tuned the kit was and how nice the room it was in sounded. If all those things were great then it's easy

Start just by listening to just your overheads, the better they are the easier your job will be. Are the kick and snare both in phase and in the centre ? Is there enough snare in the overheads or is a wash of  hats and cymbals ?

Was there a room mic ? it can help a lot if there was

Every case is different but in general I tend to use compression and a lot of EQ on the  kick and snare close mics but I try to get as much from the overheads and room mics as I can cos that's what sounds real. I do very little to the overheads, just a high pass filter around 90hz and that's it generally 

Slate Trigger is a great tool for drum sample replacement, either to thicken the existing kick and snare or replace them completely. But it depends on what was played, if there's a lot of ghost strokes and snare rolls then even the best drum replacement  software won't sound natural.  

Rather than using compression on everything to keep things level try a lot of automation, the more under control things are with automation the easier it is to master quite hot without sounding a compressed mess

spark240

Deijavoo said:

I'm bad for using too much compression, must rein it in a bit. I'm also very new to live drums, always used software in the past.

Any magic hints? Everyone talks about gating them, but I never heard such massive benefit truth be told, but that'll be my heathen ears I suppose.

I would normally gate the Bass drum and probably snare, possibly HH, but seriously check that David Glenn guy...he knows his stuff !

guitarfishbay

One way of gating is to look at it as isolating sounds for you.  So if you gate the toms in theory you'll hear the tom, but when it isn't playing you'll have reduced or not level coming from the tom close mic depending on what settings you choose.  

Gating in that respect helps you EQ close mics a little more aggressively without making for crazy spill sounds - but it depends on what is played and when (you'll still get cymbal spill if cymbals are sounding at the same time as toms, no getting around that).  

If the mics are always on and you say increase some high end, then the spill from cymbals will also have boosted high end, which you might not want.

Again, gating before compression can help, because in theory you're only compressing what you want to, rather than everything.

IMO it is as much about arrangement as it is about the technical side of things, but since your drums are already recorded you've got to work with what you have got.

Logic X has everything you need to get a good result so I wouldn't worry about your situation meaning you can't buy anything new.  It even has a drum replacement tool if you're totally stuck - it isn't as quick to use as trigger, but if you take your time you can get good results.

Deijavoo

Thanks guys, all great advice.

We were quite happy with the tracked sound to be fair and one thing we all said right from the start is that it "didn't need much doing to it". So I'm hopeful that the hard part is out of the way.

In terms of panning the toms and cymbals is there any rules? I've always just messed about until I get a someway pleasing spread.

What is best practice to get a mastering engineer the best template to work with?

spark240

Deijavoo said:

Thanks guys, all great advice.

We were quite happy with the tracked sound to be fair and one thing we all said right from the start is that it "didn't need much doing to it". So I'm hopeful that the hard part is out of the way.

In terms of panning the toms and cymbals is there any rules? I've always just messed about until I get a someway pleasing spread.

What is best practice to get a mastering engineer the best template to work with?

Drum panning...totally up to you I would say.

A Mastering engineer would prefer as many tracks as possible, recorded as well as possible.

I would take all the drums parts, pan them as I wish, then route to a drum bus, and add any global FX there.

Same with guitar parts, vocal parts, keys etc etc.

I would then route all of these buses to a Sub Master, there I can apply any additional global FX to the mix.

Route the Sub Master to the Main out.

Thats my template, I will post a screen shot of it later.

randomhandclaps

Again, you should be in London.  You could have popped over and we would have sorted you out.

I haven't got the time right now to write a load of long winded tips but will certainly help with any things as they arise.

How were the drums recorded? How many mics?

Deijavoo

Eee....precisely fuckloads.

It seemed that figure at least.  I'll know when I get the tracks off him so I guess I'm no use without detail until then. 

I have some photos of the session I think where I might be able to tell.

Deijavoo

Deijavoo

I suppose this is the best I can offer right now.

indiansummer1

Another thing I forgot to mention earlier that I find quite useful is that if you have an inconsistent top snare mic which requires more compression than is perhaps ideal (or even if you don't), it can sound nice to bring an uncompressed bottom snare mic up quite high to preserve the snappiness of the snare.

Deijavoo

Cheers mate.

steamabacus

I think the two biggest obstacles to mixing are firstly, the quality of (and your familiarity with) your monitoring environment and secondly, your ability to accurately analyse what it is you're hearing and what needs to be done to make it sound like you want it to sound.

With regards to the second of those points, I found this online critical listening course very useful (and pretty challenging - and I've always thought I've got fairly 'good ears'). I'm not sure when they'll run it again but I recommend it highly.

sweepy

I go through phases of using too many plugins,,,,these days I try and record with no plugins apart from a little reverb to give the singer a little confidence and start from a clean slate really asking yourself if you are using the EQ just because its there, rather than getting the sound right in the first place etc etc 

Deijavoo

Ah, I tried that Phillips one which took a bit of time but certainly helped a wee bit in recognising sound but that looks ideal!

Also, that David Glen site is an absolute hive of knowledge. Thanks.