Mix, Mix, Mix
Feb. 19th, 2007 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperAnd how much better all this mixing would be if I got past New Frontier, right? Unfortunately, when I went to make an assault on the next song, Shades of Gray, I realized that the mix on New Frontier couldn't possibly be right, because Shades sounded a lot louder.
So I spent some time poking around the mix. It's not done yet, but I have a better idea of what's going on.
The problem is that Sally's very nice drum line is eating a lot of the sonic space in the mix. This wouldn't be hard to work around, except that I have a lot of voices that show up on the chorus and they push the mix over the edge. As a result, everything ends up sounding frighteningly compressed and squashed.
I played around with the compression, starting at a lower threshold, which -- given the presence of makeup gain -- pushes up the parts of the mix that are at a lower volume. This helps quite a bit. I think what I want to do is duck the drums just a bit on the choruses to make more space for the vocals, which should cause them to pop forward in the mix. I may push the lead vocal up a bit on the choruses too and see how that all balances.
But that's tomorrow's problem (since I spent the rest of the evening watching TV, Monday night having about two and a half hours of stuff I want to see).
So I spent some time poking around the mix. It's not done yet, but I have a better idea of what's going on.
The problem is that Sally's very nice drum line is eating a lot of the sonic space in the mix. This wouldn't be hard to work around, except that I have a lot of voices that show up on the chorus and they push the mix over the edge. As a result, everything ends up sounding frighteningly compressed and squashed.
I played around with the compression, starting at a lower threshold, which -- given the presence of makeup gain -- pushes up the parts of the mix that are at a lower volume. This helps quite a bit. I think what I want to do is duck the drums just a bit on the choruses to make more space for the vocals, which should cause them to pop forward in the mix. I may push the lead vocal up a bit on the choruses too and see how that all balances.
But that's tomorrow's problem (since I spent the rest of the evening watching TV, Monday night having about two and a half hours of stuff I want to see).
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 10:49 am (UTC)Certainly were several songs where I made a frequency "dip" in the keyboards to allow the vocals to come forward. So this might well work for drums too.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 03:21 pm (UTC)(* Since even if Bill remembers (and my recollection is that it was at his apartment, but my memory is lousy), some people reading this are probably scratching their heads, I'll explain that an Ice Cream Horrible is a party ritual where you take a BIG mixing bowl, several containers of ice cream, and as many different ice cream toppings as you can get together, and take turns adding things to the bowl in an attempt to make it look nasty. Then everybody scoops some out into a dish and eats it (this is why you need a big party, so there are enough people to eat the whole thing). The campus science fiction club did this once. Hershey's syrup was of course one of the toppings available, and it was a popular choice early in the building, because chocolate over the top of a bunch of colorful fruit toppings produces the ideal horrible look. But we realized too late that we'd put so much chocolate in that we basically had a big bowl of chocolate ice cream; it was much less exciting to eat than we'd imagined.)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 06:05 pm (UTC)