I’m at the point of being able to work with ardour AND to understand what I do.
This list always helped me, when there was something where I needed help.
Thakn you !
Now, being able to work with ardour isn’t everything , obviously
The subject of this (hopefully beginning) thread is, something like asking for best practice of mixing.
Let me shortly describe what kind of recordings I’m trying to mix,
it is a simpe 4-track recording, 2 vocals, two guitars.
What I experience is, I’m never satisfied with what I’ve mixed. I tried several things, but I think I need
help/hints/ideas/discussions about “what’s best practice” when it comes to the mix.
For example, my aim is a mix/sound where the vocals seem to dominate and the guitars are some kind of “in the background”. What I hear after is vocals in the middle of the mix, but it’s - let’s say - flat …
I tried several plugins and use them in the order equalizer, compression, reverb (here: on vocals), but I always have the feeling the plugins subtract something instead of adding it.
So far so good, what I’m hoping is a discussion of people who tell about their best practice …
As linked above there are a lot of great resources about how to mix that deal with everyday common sense issues like overlapping EQ’s and using too much Reverb or over-compressing things etc… In my opinion you should have an idea what you want things to sound like in the finished product before you even start to mix. There are many recipes to get that ‘polished modern sound’ but is that you’re looking for? The whole premise of Computer Recording is a paradox right off the hop, we have these machines capable of reproducing sound frequencies most of us can’t hear by the time we’re old enough to start recording and once greeted with these incredible pristine sound reproductions of the Digital realm we scramble quickly to find an Analog emulating Plugin of some kind to make it ‘shittier’…? For a large part our ears and perceptions are made uncomfortable by the perfectly replicated full frequency distortion free signals presented by our hardware which is a very weird inconsistency.
If on the other hand you are after such sonic perfection then you will probably want to learn how to mix in a very methodical and physics engineering kind of way. If you are a more intuitive and ‘feel’ driven kind of person who enjoys the jagged edges of sonic ‘mistakes’ then you will probably want to learn to trust your intuitive instincts and how you perceive the music emotionally to mix.
Both disciplines take years to hone and in the end the best productions are usually some balance of both. There is no short cut to that but there are hours of great fun in trial and error!
I’ve been attending these free Fix-The-Mix challenges, and find them quite eye-opening. If they schedule another one in January, I suggest you register. The December one is already started, but you may be able to register still.
what I want is definitely not a polished “modern” mix
I’ll have a look to the linked resources. My problem is more a “what plugin is useful”
and “what are the default values which are recommended for a start”.
Sure I have to play with the values to find those which give me what I want.
Hopefully the linked resources will give an idea, how to start without losing myself
in the jungle of plugins. I need a kind of restart, cause all the mixes I did in the last
two years can’t satisfy me and I’m a little tired of that try-and-error-mode I’m in.
