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Post by bradd on Apr 5, 2021 10:03:04 GMT -6
Maybe some of you have experienced my current frustration. We always talk about trying to get things to sound "big", "huge" and "full" sounding. Lately when I've been comparing mixes I'm working on to pro releases, I'm amazed as to how small some of the professional recordings sound. For example, yesterday when mixing a piano focused pop track, I brought up some Billy Joel (Piano Man and New York State of Mind), and Counting Crows (Sullivan Street) off of August and Everything After. Those recordings sound great, but all the instruments and vocals sound so much more thinned out than my mix.
After doing more filtering, I got closer, but then thought, "Is this really what the recording needs or the sound I'm after?" Has anyone experience this? How to you folks balance this?
I know this is song and genre dependent, but I just wanted to make sure that I'm not alone in the wilderness. Thanks.
Brad
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Post by Guitar on Apr 5, 2021 10:06:28 GMT -6
Maybe once in a while I have to dial things back, compression, limiting, saturation mainly. To get things more behaved and normal sounding. Not sure if that's what you're talking about.
If the mix is too dense, yeah, that can be a problem. I am surprised at many old famous mixes, too.
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Post by ragan on Apr 5, 2021 10:12:40 GMT -6
I deal with this constantly. Getting Metric AB has been a godsend to me for staying in perspective as I'm mixing. Otherwise, everything I do ends up sounding bloated.
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Post by bradd on Apr 5, 2021 10:16:42 GMT -6
Thanks, folks. I just picked up Metric AB during the last PA sale. I need to learn it and put it to use.
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Post by Mister Chase on Apr 5, 2021 10:17:05 GMT -6
I've experienced this exact thing. It makes me think though how much of this happened due to working in the days of vinyl and keeping low end leaner. I'm amazed listening back to theme songs etc where the electric bass is played mostly up an octave from where it is usually for a very mid-rangey sound. I guess they knew it was going to go through a TV set and if you wanted to hear the bass, well better play it up.
It's a mixture, though, right? I mean, listen to Beck's "Sea Change" album. Enormous sound. Great stuff. One of my favorites all around. Modern record, though. We are blessed with the luxury of 20 hz if we want it. But then we're back to the cell phone listening argument so it's sort of the same.
Anyway. I know what you mean. I think we tend to mix the way we want to intrinsically unless given direction, which of course we are given from time to time. Ever get really uncomfortable with client requests about overall sound stage? Out of the comfort zone. But it's good to try from time to time. I mean, the magic is in the mids, right? Try referencing Piano Man when you do another similar production and see how you like the result. No big airy sounds, super lows etc. Could be fun.
Of course, if you listen to Lou Reed's Transformer, there's more low end than you usually hear in that era. Like on Hangin' Round.
I'm rambling but this is a fun topic for me.
There is something really nice about just enough bass to hear it, and enough hi hat highs to get some top and the rest being a nice mid range. Very pleasant listening experience. I'm always going for clarity and feeling in the lows so it's hard to resist the temptation...
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Post by Chad on Apr 5, 2021 10:20:03 GMT -6
Also – Take a listen to Natalie Merchant's 'Tigerlily' (specifically, the song 'I May Know the Word' comes to mind), or U2's 'Achtung Baby'. I recall both of those being much larger in sound than 'August & Everything After' by the Counting Crows.
There's definitely a spectrum of fat to thin sounding mixes.
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Post by ragan on Apr 5, 2021 10:29:26 GMT -6
Even with something like a modern Beck record (some of which have enormous low end, like "Morning Phase"), it's still a very controlled soundstage. Left to my own devices, I'll have that much low end, but then also a bunch of crap in the low mids making everything sound bloated and eating up the headroom of the mastering limiting. I think that's the "size" problem for me, the low mids (which I'm calling like 200-600Hz). bradd definitely fire up Metric AB. Even without the analysis tools, it's amazing. Just drag and drop several audio files into the slots and use the big button. Instantaneous AB'ing within your DAW is amazing. And then once you start wanting to match sonics of something, you can look at the spectrum and dynamics tools. It's intuitively laid out, easy to understand. As is probably obvious, it's like my favorite thing lately.
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Post by EmRR on Apr 5, 2021 10:49:58 GMT -6
For example, yesterday when mixing a piano focused pop track, I brought up some Billy Joel (Piano Man and New York State of Mind), and Counting Crows (Sullivan Street) off of August and Everything After. Those recordings sound great, but all the instruments and vocals sound so much more thinned out than my mix. After doing more filtering, I got closer, but then thought, "Is this really what the recording needs or the sound I'm after?" Has anyone experience this? How to you folks balance this? I know this is song and genre dependent, but I just wanted to make sure that I'm not alone in the wilderness. Thanks. Brad Well you’re referencing a different era, everything was thinner. Somewhat to do with vinyl, somewhat to do with trends in power amps and speakers, car radio, etc. We push so much more power to speakers now, and the majority of power is eaten by bass. Then there’s what things should sound like on an iphone sitting on a table.....
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Post by Tbone81 on Apr 5, 2021 10:53:59 GMT -6
I’m totally guilty of that. I made a conscious decision a while back though, that I’d err on the side of things being too big, rather than to thin. At least that way the mix would still have some excitement and power even it’s equally as “bad” as being anemic and thin.
A lot of it is context though. The trick IME is to make things sound big, without them actually being big. Recording and mixing is all an illusion. We’re not actually capturing the music in a literally way, we’re capturing the emotion. Nothing we do, short of using a binaural mannequin head mic straight to 2 track, is “natural”.
I once had a friend tell me how big and huge the drums were on a Slipknot album...I replied that the drums are actually paper thin and very small sounding...but the music tricks you into feeling like the drums are huge because the end product is huge, visceral and so emotive. I could see the “holy crap you’re right” look on his face.
One area I think we probably all struggle with is with samples and VI’s. It seems to me that they’re Almost always too big. They take up huge amounts of space in a mix and are almost always stereo when they don’t need to be. I can pull up a Rhodes VI and it takes up way more space (left to right) than my actual Rhodes when recorded. The VI fills the entire soundstage. The real thing is often smaller, as in it takes up less space left to right, but weightier or more sense, and seems to have more dimension front to back. It’s like comparing a beach ball to lead shot. One is “big” and takes up lots of space, the other is smaller but has more mass.
I’m rambling, but yes I feel your pain!
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Post by svart on Apr 5, 2021 10:54:56 GMT -6
Yep. All the time. I'm amazed at how my natural inclination is to mix extremely bottom heavy. I overcompensate the bottom end by boosting the subwoofer. I'd say that there's a lot of pro records where I don't hear much difference between if I have the sub turned on or not. Most of their bottom end information is above 100hz it seems.
However, when I listen to my mixes I tend to have a huge difference between the sub being on or off.
I've noticed a lot that my mix will sound wildly exciting to me in the studio and it'll just be "too much" anywhere else. Yet if I listen to a pro mix anywhere it sounds great no matter what.
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Post by stormymondays on Apr 5, 2021 11:19:24 GMT -6
Very interesting topic. And I love "Sullivan Street" and that album.
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Post by bradd on Apr 5, 2021 11:24:18 GMT -6
For example, yesterday when mixing a piano focused pop track, I brought up some Billy Joel (Piano Man and New York State of Mind), and Counting Crows (Sullivan Street) off of August and Everything After. Those recordings sound great, but all the instruments and vocals sound so much more thinned out than my mix. After doing more filtering, I got closer, but then thought, "Is this really what the recording needs or the sound I'm after?" Has anyone experience this? How to you folks balance this? I know this is song and genre dependent, but I just wanted to make sure that I'm not alone in the wilderness. Thanks. Brad Well you’re referencing a different era, everything was thinner. Somewhat to do with vinyl, somewhat to do with trends in power amps and speakers, car radio, etc. We push so much more power to speakers now, and the majority of power is eaten by bass. Then there’s what things should sound like on an iphone sitting on a table..... You're right, my tastes tend to lean from late 60s to early 80s. I need to pull up some modern references to compare.
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Post by Guitar on Apr 5, 2021 11:25:25 GMT -6
One fun thing is the "bypass all plugins" button in Cubase. Your huge mix will go from blasting the roof off, to tinkling out of the speakers quietly. It seems to me that's a lot of what I'm trying to do in a mix, get things big. You really see that with the processing bypass.
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Post by bradd on Apr 5, 2021 11:30:03 GMT -6
Thanks for all the great replies. Great suggestions and glad to hear I'm not alone.
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Post by indiehouse on Apr 5, 2021 11:53:01 GMT -6
This is something I've been struggling with in a recent mix. I wanted everything to be big. Big acoustics. Big vocals. Big strings. But was having a hell of a time trying to get separation between instruments, giving each their own space in the mix. So, if everything is "big", is then that counterproductive? Do you run out of space in the mix for each instrument if they are all big?
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Post by Mister Chase on Apr 5, 2021 11:56:29 GMT -6
For example, yesterday when mixing a piano focused pop track, I brought up some Billy Joel (Piano Man and New York State of Mind), and Counting Crows (Sullivan Street) off of August and Everything After. Those recordings sound great, but all the instruments and vocals sound so much more thinned out than my mix. After doing more filtering, I got closer, but then thought, "Is this really what the recording needs or the sound I'm after?" Has anyone experience this? How to you folks balance this? I know this is song and genre dependent, but I just wanted to make sure that I'm not alone in the wilderness. Thanks. Brad Well you’re referencing a different era, everything was thinner. Somewhat to do with vinyl, somewhat to do with trends in power amps and speakers, car radio, etc. We push so much more power to speakers now, and the majority of power is eaten by bass. Then there’s what things should sound like on an iphone sitting on a table..... Didn't even think about the speakers. So I guess even in studios it was an issue? Would they get intermodulation distortion and all that jazz more quickly with low end?
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Post by Mister Chase on Apr 5, 2021 11:58:52 GMT -6
This is something I've been struggling with in a recent mix. I wanted everything to be big. Big acoustics. Big vocals. Big strings. But was having a hell of a time trying to get separation between instruments, giving each their own space in the mix. So, if everything is "big", is then that counterproductive? Do you run out of space in the mix for each instrument if they are all big? Exactly. In order for there to be Summer there must be Winter etc.
It's like when a client wants "the guitar to be louder, ok now the vocals need to come up, ok now the drums need to come up, ok now the bass" and after an hour you could have just turned the monitor controller up and been in the same place.
I had a friend ask me "How did they get everything so big sounding" on Adele's "Hello". Well, there's very few mix elements going at once. Less is more when you are reducing everything down to two speakers.
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Post by Tbone81 on Apr 5, 2021 12:11:30 GMT -6
So much of this is about arraignment. Speaking from my own experience, I think a lot of us understand arrangements in terms of harmony, melody and rhythm. But I’m coming to see that as an AE it’s possibly more important to understand arraignment in terms of timbre, ambience, transient response, and spectral balance.
I just finished an album that had deep sub kicks, punchier tight kicks, 808’s, and a live bass player. The low end was a mess. I never want to juggle those elements again. The client wanted everything bigger, “more sub kick”, “why can’t I hear the bass as loud now”, “the 808 doesn’t hit like it used to”, “make the drums bigger”, “the vocals aren’t as up front anymore” etc etc. When honestly it was the arraignment that was off.
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Post by indiehouse on Apr 5, 2021 12:14:23 GMT -6
Follow-up. How do YOU define making things big? Low end is definitely part of it. I tend to think a short plate type reverb pushed up just enough tends to make things sound bigger. Would you agree?
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Post by indiehouse on Apr 5, 2021 12:15:16 GMT -6
Also, what role does compression play in making things bigger? Doesn't compression make things smaller?
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 14,942
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Post by ericn on Apr 5, 2021 12:17:00 GMT -6
A lot of this can be solved by mixing as you go, if you find your tracking things to big to fit well in a mix or help spot to much LF build up.
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Post by the other mark williams on Apr 5, 2021 12:24:51 GMT -6
For example, yesterday when mixing a piano focused pop track, I brought up some Billy Joel (Piano Man and New York State of Mind), and Counting Crows (Sullivan Street) off of August and Everything After. Those recordings sound great, but all the instruments and vocals sound so much more thinned out than my mix. After doing more filtering, I got closer, but then thought, "Is this really what the recording needs or the sound I'm after?" Has anyone experience this? How to you folks balance this? I know this is song and genre dependent, but I just wanted to make sure that I'm not alone in the wilderness. Thanks. Brad Well you’re referencing a different era, everything was thinner. Somewhat to do with vinyl, somewhat to do with trends in power amps and speakers, car radio, etc. We push so much more power to speakers now, and the majority of power is eaten by bass. Then there’s what things should sound like on an iphone sitting on a table..... Yes yes - bradd, I’m a big Counting Crows fan, so I know exactly what you’re talking about with “Sullivan Street.” But compare Sullivan Street to A Long December off the next album (Recovering the Satellites) or Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby (off of This Desert Life), and I think you’ll see that T-Bone was especially going for a lean, sparser, smaller sound on “August.” I believe it’s one of the reasons the band didn’t work with him again. While commercially successful, it wasn’t entirely representative of the full band.
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Post by Tbone81 on Apr 5, 2021 12:47:06 GMT -6
Also, what role does compression play in making things bigger? Doesn't compression make things smaller? man that’s a great question. I think compression does both. Generally I think it makes individual elements smaller, when they’re considered in isolation. However, if the compression allows you control the sound stage better, and place other elements in the mix in a more symbiotic fashion than I think the net result is a “bigger” sound from the mix as a whole. I think a good song/mix truly is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Post by Guitar on Apr 5, 2021 12:48:09 GMT -6
Also, what role does compression play in making things bigger? Doesn't compression make things smaller? Compressor trades peak level for RMS level, which sounds louder, and also adds harmonics, which sound louder. Louder is usually bigger.
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Post by EmRR on Apr 5, 2021 12:49:53 GMT -6
Also, what role does compression play in making things bigger? Doesn't compression make things smaller? Depends on the envelope of the compression. Slow attack makes bigger transients. Is that smaller? Is that bigger? What's the context?
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