your biggest mixing faults?

good bad story P! haha, hey, i think i have a good trick for you on this next time,... 
It goes like this,
Duplicate the offending track, go in and remove all of the waveform info except for the offenders! Then invert the phase on that track, and bring the fader up just enough to cancel as much of that little bastard as you see fit 8) I'm pretty sure it's the most transparent and phase congruent way to accomplish this?... i think?...

yaay! I love bisquetti! 8/

haha... Sorry, I kinda didn't say it very clearly, so i'll try to do it better now in case anyone else wants to try it?
Ok, so create a duplicate track in your daw of the Vox track with the whistling problem, then zoom into the problem areas on the waveform, and separate those parts from the rest of the waveform, then delete all the remaining parts of the waveform from the duplicated track, leaving only the problem portions of the duplicated track behind, then flip the phase on this track, that will make it 180* out of phase with the original track, then bring the fader up on the duplicated track until it cancels the whistling on the original track to the degree that is acceptable to you, it should sound very smooth and transparent, and gives you lots of room to decide the amount of attenuation to apply to the problem.

I think this is a great way to cancel just the offenders and keep the rest of the track in original phase formation without worrying about resonant bumps from using an eq.

I hope this clears it up?

T

Whoopsie, i should always refresh the browser before trying to help with things that are already solved..... LOL.

The biggest fault I hear in others mixes these days is that they are guessing about everything below 60 HZ ! Little baby speakers in bedrooms ! Don't assume it's not there just because you don't hear it !!

And actually it's pretty easy to check this outside the studio without fullrange mains or without sub.
All that may be needed is a pair of good headphones to be sure you don't mess things up there totally without having a clue....

I've made some mistakes: too compressed, too bright, wrong low end, vocal way too loud, overmixing, undermixing, it's tricky to get just right. Experience is worth so much, as well as monitoring quality, and sometimes having feedback from other people to tell you when you've got there or haven't yet. The last work I did for pay, the guy said "you're making changes so small no one will notice," and I knew he was right, and I knew it was time to stop obsessing and let the baby out into the world.

But I find my biggest mistakes are almost always artistic, or related to tracking and production. When I look back, I feel like my mixing almost always gets out of the way enough. When I've gotten to that point in a serious production, the mixing seems so dire that OCD takes over and you mix the hell out of it to the point of nausea. Of course you are inevitably going to hear one or two things you would have changed. And you are going to improve the more you do it. But usually the quality of the music will carry any halfway acceptable mix.

Most of the time the mistake is bad room acoustics, too much bleed, settling for a take that's not quite there, too many clams in a track. Not adding enough to the arrangement, not helping the singer get more comfortable, letting the drummer get away with playing some awful kit (he seems to insist), not spending enough time optimizing mic placement and choice. Accepting bad songs, accepting bad playing from musicians that really shouldn't be recording. You're either putting the hand-cuffs on yourself, or you're channeling or facilitating a higher vision. The turd polishing will only take you so far. It's better to polish stainless steel.

Even the gear used for tracking is much more important than the gear used for mixing. You could do a proper mix with nothing more than a laptop and some plugins and a decent pair of speakers, in a decent room. The instruments, microphones, and front end are doing most of the work. I think "produced by" and "written by" are more important credits than "mixed by." Obviously the goal is to go over the top in all areas, so mixing is still important. The holistic audio-human will probably be strong in every area not just one. I guess they all grow together.  Maybe the mix is the last big push in the album process, so it's nice to have some momentum on the way there.

There are so many variations on the saying, it's something like, "the production and musicians were so good the track pretty much mixed itself." I feel like that's the real challenge. At that point it's either too late, or so optimized that the mixing is just sort of trying not to ruin it, and pushing the vibe front and center. You could almost lump both mixing and mastering into that term "post-production."  Even the ideal of a "perfect mix" is different from decade to decade, genre, or person to person.

I know there are some people out there that are exclusively mix engineers, but it seems like more often we end up being a producer, mixer, artist, some combination of those things, even mastering sometimes. Especially those of us who don't get paid. Mixing is challenging, but the art and the production really is the essence. I suppose I think those areas are a lot harder to master than the art of mixing, and where most people including myself go wrong. And I suppose the sage mixer is always focused on enhancing exactly those things.