Tricks

realgearonline.com/thread/3003/mixing-tips-secrets 

for bands with two guitars, i like to track with a very short, very small amount of reverb and pan them hard L and R to create more separation, if that suits your fancy.

Similar to jdc's comment, I run all of my wide guitars through some sort of mono ambience. Whether it's a room mic panned center, a reverb panned center, or a "doubler" sort of delay panned center and mix that in pretty low.

It helps make the wide ass guitars not feel so starkly off to the side. Careful about collapsing to mono, though, it has the possibility of getting kind of weird.

Also, in a rock setting I compress my drums for two things and do so on two parallel signals. If the main sound I need is punchy, I'll use slow attack/tempo-appropriate release times and . It allows huge transients to come through. All my shells then get routed (pre-fader) to a parallel channel to do the opposite: smash the crap out of the transient and emphasize the sustain with fast attack/fast release. Then I basically have the two important drum tone components on different faders. The individual drums get routed to the drum bus and the parallel gets blended.

Need less transient: bring the individual channels down. Need less sustain: bring the parallel down. It's not so much a trick as it's a mindset that I had to stumble upon much like I would a "mixing trick." I had always heard "use parallel compression" but I wasn't 100% sure I knew what I was getting out of it. I figured it out and, in rock music, anyway, I've got my process and workflow set up to accommodate what I'm typically looking for.

sounds interesting, never heard of this, looking forward to trying it, thanx for the tip 8)

Solid tip, especially for mixes with wide vocals where they'll drop in level in mono - nice to have other midrange instruments drop a little more.

For the same reasons I apply additional M/S widening to my stereo reverb returns, usually just carving about 3dB off the centre to keep the ambiance levels similar. I use a lot of mono reverb too. If I'm also sending a few different instruments to the same reverb bus, I'll probably have a few busses feeding into the reverb with 100% wet delays adjusting the pre-delay per instrument and maybe some EQ too.  But by now you guys know I could talk all day about reverb.

Anyway, my tip: If you're wet/drying effects but finding it hard to decide between too much and too little, my advice is to use a double track for the effect. You still have a dry version, but the differences in the DT pull it away from the original performance. Delays and inserting effects in feedback loops of delays can work great if you don't have a double track.


Modulation effects in particular love the feedback loops of delays - give it a try.

This isn't a recording or mixing trick, but rather a simple recording principle:

Always track as finished a sound as possible. Tone, not effects embedded. Don't be afraid of minor EQ corrections (like carving out 350z from kick drums and toms, HPF on guitars and snares, multi-mic'ing guitars so that they can be EQ'ed with varying their level later) and hit those compressors whilst tracking!

You can't "fix it in the mix" you can only "mask it in the mix". Garbage in, garbage out.

I'll do this, especially on background vocals.  I'll copy, nudge the new track 10ms or so, then send both tracks through a stereo delay/chorus, adjusting as needed for the song, but usually just barely audible.  Just this small addition can make things sound even bigger/wider.