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What is your latest mixing tip?


garybrun

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37 minutes ago, Bapu said:

Disclaimer: I mostly mix "metal/hard rock". So...

Make everything louder than everything else.

Then go back and try it again, only louder.

? 

 

 

Me thinks you have to do that old man because you can't hear   ?   but also isn't louder better ;)

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1 hour ago, garybrun said:

What is the latest mixing or mastering tip you have recently learnt?
 

Sing your main vocal...  the do it again but whisper it.. then blend in.

Sounds like that new Apple commercial with the mom going down the basement stairs :)

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17 hours ago, garybrun said:

What is the latest mixing or mastering tip you have recently learnt?
 

Sing your main vocal...  then do it again but whisper it.. then blend in.

I do that, sometimes a lower octave version too or even a somehow heavily mangled copy of the track. Basically anything to make it not sound so much like me.

The main thing I've learnt about mixing is........I should have paid more attention years ago when I thought that our mixing guy was just a nerd with no actual musical ideas that just sat twiddling knobs for no apparent reason. I always figured that we mostly just kept him because he had a van and didn't mind being the driver. If I'd given his craft more credit, I might have been halfway good at it by now.

Then again, he did seem to spend an awful lot of time twiddling knobs that made no apparent difference to anything.

 

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The concept that helped me the most for mixing was to think about everything in 3D (no, not using hallucinogens though those did help! ?).

From the perspective of looking at the "players" directly in front of you; you have panning left to right, frequency up and down, and volume front to back.  Making sure that you keep things in their own areas with a good balance kept the mix clean and interesting.

I was right in the middle of getting oscilloscope software calibrated to my gear and learning how to take a mono input source (like a guitar) and make multiple copies for panning when I lost my studio.  I really wanted to make that "wall of guitar" sound!  Oh well... ?

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20 hours ago, garybrun said:

Sing your main vocal...  then do it again but whisper it.. then blend in.

The Stones do that in Angie. There's actually two very different vocal tracks going at the same time in that song. With your headphones turned way up you can hear the different vocal tracks throughout the song. It almost sounds like bleed through on the acoustic track on the left then they redid the vocals and couldn't fix the bleed? I don't know. But there's clearly 2 vocal tracks going through the entire song and whispering during some of it after the 3:40 mark.

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