The most common mistake I hear with young bands in the studio is to use too much distortion (which you can't fix in the mix). I think it comes from the insecurity of their live performances not sounding nearly as big as the recorded bands they hear on CD.

Agreed Billy. The reality is that you can't actually squeeze what you hear from a bandstand worth of equipment through two little speakers of the playback environment. A great mix engineer can work magic in implying the same energy of the original performance.

feedback50


I've had a similar experience (cutting instead of boosting). For me it's a build up in the upper mids (where distorted guitars, high end of vocals, acoustic guitar transients, and cymbals live). It's not just the content (choice of tones and playing techniques) but the cumulative impact of inexpensive pre's and mic's all of which are trying to add "sheen" to make them appear more hi-fi. The same applies to many synth patches, particularly the ones they like to demo in the stores. Everything Can't be that big! Un-hyping these tracks individually through eq cuts can add up to a much more pleasing product. You can save this part of the spectrum for things that really count.

Another difficult lesson is to know the difference between fideltity and real content. Subwoofers can be addictive ear-candy that will mess with your expectations of what a normal mix should sound like. They can be used sparingly to compensate for inefficiencies in your monitors, but beware of thier addictive nature. The same goes for mixing to compensate for fidelity (highs or lows). I try to make sure there is some content throughout the spectrum so mastering can push something besides noise if it needs to be eq'd to match other songs in a collection. But I don't try to make my monitors or stereo sound better than it actually is. The mix will never translate well. Bouncing back to a reference cd helps but the mastering on pro CDs is tough to comensate for.

bitflipper


There is one really good piece of wisdom in Charles Dye's "Mix it Like a Record" DVD, which is that learning to mix is an evolutionary process. You don't just one day learn some secret technique that makes it all come together. Such a technique doesn't exist. A good mix is the sum of many, many small decisions.

One example is bass management. A common complaint from mastering engineers is they often get mixes with way too much bass in them, and occasionally, way too little. Bob Ludwig has said that the vast majority of what mastering engineers do is compensate for errors in mix engineers' playback systems.

Subwoofers aren't the answer, and for most of us, building a proper room (large, with the right dimensions, and lots of trapping) isn't an option. So what's a serious amateur to do? Well, we can use visual aids, for one thing. SPAN, Har-Bal and EQs with spectral overlays can be your friends.

But there is a Catch-22: if we don't know how much bass we should be hearing, how will we ever know how much bass we should be seeing? What does a nice, round bottom look like? No, I don't mean Angelina Jolie in spandex. I mean the display in SPAN.

If you load up a good commercial mix into SONAR, you can then apply the exact same visual aids to it that you use for your own mixes. Make notes, take pictures. Eventually, you'll get to the point where you immediately know if there's too much at 50Hz, even if your speakers don't accurately reproduce it. And then you'll have added just one more technique to your toolkit, one more step toward the day when, as Charles Dye says, you listen to your mix and think "wow, that sounds like a RECORD!".

Also how to create "the donut" as he calls it, for letting the vocal come through a mix.

montezuma


I got to be honest and say I got suckered in to at least the Owsinski book and sure it's good...but really a let down compared to the massive amounts of information freely available on the net. People talk about these books like the holy grail...