FWIW, I don't necessarily think that good DAW software has to look like or work like the old hardware, I think the reason so much of it does is because most of the old hardware was well-designed after so many years of use.

The thing about hardware, with all the real knobs, switches, patch cables, and so on was that most people had so much less of it, and spent so much money on it, that you really felt compelled to read the manuals and push its limits and learn how to get the most out of it. Also, the tactile experience of patch cables and switches made learning and understanding things like bussing and routing more concrete and intuitive, I think, especially since there was no computer to blame when there was no sound...

These days, it just seems so much different. It's like, if bussing something the way you want is frustrating, you can just make 12 clones of every track and have 10 insert effects on each, or if you're not happy with your reverb sound, you can just download 80 different reverbs and flip through presets instead of actually trying to find a way to work with what you have. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just seems like it would lead one to having a vastly different perspective. Especially if you come to a place where you do actually need to resolve some specific technical issue, or achieve something that they don't make a preset for, it seems like it would be really hard to know where to start (web forums, I guess).

Cheers.

ORIGINAL: Plyrman

Hey Yep....I've tried...but ...if you could explain...

Hi pass...low pass ...the "shelving".....

I'm using the Sonitus "5 band eq".....in some places of your detailed explanation ....it is generalized....are you saying "dial in +12db on all the bands...the top band the bottom band...???????..I hope you can bear with me....

Thanks in advance...

Mg

???

Yep,

I hate to be Jack's squeeky wheel but I need a solid.


When your pin pointing the one octave of bass guitar is an aggresive Q setting on the shelf

**** it ill figure it out

ORIGINAL: Plyrman

Hey Yep....I've tried...but ...if you could explain...

Hi pass...low pass ...the "shelving".....

I'm using the Sonitus "5 band eq".....in some places of your detailed explanation ....it is generalized....are you saying "dial in +12db on all the bands...the top band the bottom band...???????..I hope you can bear with me....

Thanks in advance...

Mg

Start here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul01/articles/equalisers1.asp
Or possibly here: http://www.samplecraze.com/tutorial.php?xTutorialID=4

eq is IMPORTANT to understand. Shut down Sonar. Put on some light Jazz. Bone up. When you understand it, restart Sonar, "zero the board" (set everything to it's default) and start over.

:)

David

ORIGINAL: davidchristopher

ORIGINAL: Plyrman

Hey Yep....I've tried...but ...if you could explain...

Hi pass...low pass ...the "shelving".....

I'm using the Sonitus "5 band eq".....in some places of your detailed explanation ....it is generalized....are you saying "dial in +12db on all the bands...the top band the bottom band...???????..I hope you can bear with me....

Thanks in advance...

Mg

Start here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul01/articles/equalisers1.asp
Or possibly here: http://www.samplecraze.com/tutorial.php?xTutorialID=4

eq is IMPORTANT to understand. Shut down Sonar. Put on some light Jazz. Bone up. When you understand it, restart Sonar, "zero the board" (set everything to it's default) and start over.

:)

David

Hey david....

thanks for the links....I've pretty much been mixing for a while ....as stated above ...just havin problems with the "kick" and "bass" .....never really used and "equalizer" or the hi/low pass filters in the mix before....just tweaked the frequency bands til it worked.....the addition of the equalizer into the scenario...just may make things easier.....

again...thanks....

Mike G

Add my name to the list of yep's fans. He can put complex problems into terms even a beginner such as myself can understand, and has the patience to help newbies. I'd love to see him compile a volume on technique. I'd buy it.
Mark

ORIGINAL: yep

Thanks to all for the kind words. I learn a lot on these forums too and am glad to help out when I can.

ORIGINAL: johngree
...you should write a book on mixing...

People keep telling me that, and I'm starting to consider it...

Cheers.

Yep,

I'm telling you again. YOU NEED TO PUBLISH A BOOK ON MIXING.
You already have all the knowledge and information. Just take it a step further. Compile everything you already wrote and set it aside. Draft an outline on how you want to present your knowledge. Then cut and paste all your stuff in conformance with your outline. You already have your first draft. Once that is done, just sculp what you already have and add some extra info as needed. Once you are near the final product and your work has been edited, just convert it into .pdf format and you will be ready for e-book status. A simple search online will bring you several e-book websites for this purpose. Don't worry about meeting a quoto for a certain number of pages and don't worry about covering eveything this first time around. That is what future editions are for.

Now the fun part. Figure out how much you want to charge. Don't feel guilty about charging! Remember, you have already provided a service to hundreds of composers. You are at the level where you need to be compensated for this service. It is a win-win situation for everybody. Advertise links to the webpage for easy download. A reasonable price of your book will bring prosperity - Thousands of composers would be willing to buy your e-book.

This is my message to you. Although you don't know me, I would not be wasting my time writing this unless I knew it was true.

- Steve

To start out with a big thanks to Yep for all the good info.

I am sure that is truly the way to get clear bottom end.

As a beginner I use Monitor EQing to fix the "boomy bass" I hear when I play back my mixes on CD player (I use the CD player in my car).
This is what I did: I added a sub wooffer to my monitor system and EQed my monitors so it sounded like the boomy mix I was hearing in my car stereo. Then when I remixed the song and played the CD it sounded better. After doing this a few times I got more consistant mixes.

When I play commercial CD's thru the EQed monitors it sounds bassy so this method is most likely a "no no" in the professional world. but I works for now until I can get better control of my settings and listening enviroment. With guys like yep out there that may not be long.

ORIGINAL: mcjoe

To start out with a big thanks to Yep for all the good info.

I am sure that is truly the way to get clear bottom end.

As a beginner I use Monitor EQing to fix the "boomy bass" I hear when I play back my mixes on CD player (I use the CD player in my car).
This is what I did: I added a sub wooffer to my monitor system and EQed my monitors so it sounded like the boomy mix I was hearing in my car stereo. Then when I remixed the song and played the CD it sounded better. After doing this a few times I got more consistant mixes.

When I play commercial CD's thru the EQed monitors it sounds bassy so this method is most likely a "no no" in the professional world. but I works for now until I can get better control of my settings and listening enviroment. With guys like yep out there that may not be long.

To start out a big YOU'RE WELCOME. Happy to help out when I can.

One thing that deserves mention for beginners with the talk of bass response and mixing...

Beware the "one-note" bass. Many excellent-sounding home stereos and car stereos from the likes of Bose, Sony, etc have this phenomenon where there is one tight, punchy low-end resonance built into the speaker enclosure right where it bottoms out in terms of frequency response, and that resonance dominates the low end of the playback system.

Anywhere from like 50Hz to maybe 150~200Hz, this low-end bump can be a great way to add size, power, and muscle to a small home theater subwoofer or to a bookshelf stereo system or what have you. Most people's complaints about cheap-sounding bass response are not that the freq response is uneven, but that the bass sounds overly mushy or "loose." Human pitch perception is not very good at low frequencies, so by building speaker systems that respond like a kick drum below 200Hz, manufacturers can create inexpensive punch and drama and make great-sounding, affordable playback systems.

This phenomenon is very widespread and is TERRIBLE for monitoring. There is NO WAY to tell what is going on in the low end if you have a one-note-bass (ONB) playback system. This is one way that beginners can get caught-- you might have a great stereo that everyone compliments when they hear it, so you figure it would be an okay monitor system, but if it's got ONB (and even some fairly expensive home theaters do), then you end up with mixes where the bass is either overwhelming or nonexistant depending on the playback system.

If you have ONB, you probably know it already, just from reading this post, even if it's hard to admit. It's a problem most of us have struggled with. The solution is to either invest in a pair of legit monitors, or to get used to auditioning your mixes on a whole lot of playback systems.

Cheers.

ORIGINAL: evan

Hey, yep!

Could you please explain your particular methodology for mixing voices? eq points you look for, panning doubles... You gave some tips in a rock mixing thread but I couldn't find anymore. I find your articles very useful and interesting. A compendium on Yep articles would be great and I agree, a book by you would be even greater.

I don't know if I quite undestood this;

So now we know where the important parts are of the kick and the bass. Start to bring up your other instruments, vocals first, and get THOSE instruments to sit in the mix with the bass and drums, not the other way around. If the kick drum starts to sound too boomy, you just turn down the "note" frequency that you marked earlier.

You mean turning down the note in the vocal track, don't you? Whenever I find a good sounding kick/bass mix they stare there and I seldom change their eq.

Hm...

Thanks for the compliments evan. Those are big questions. I think maybe the vocals thread you were asking about is this one:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=830309&mpage=1&key=󊭥

As to the second question, I actually meant turning down the "note" freq of the kick drum. Sometimes I'll have a good-sounding kick, but in the mix, parts of the sound get masked and the kick comes out sounding too "boingy" or "tom-tom" like. I can usually find a notch somewhere to take some of the "note" out of the kick and leave just the thump and click of the beater head.

Cheers.

Yep,
Once again, Thank You for these very helpful posts! I have bought and read a half dozen mixing and mastering books. Some were helpful and some not-so-helpful. I have to say that your posts have been the most helpful by far. You explain things in a very concise, practical format. If you ever decide to publish a book on these techniques, I'll be your 1st customer! Thanks again!

Cheers

Thanks for sharing Yep!

How do you deal with the de-esser? De-essing for me is always a big pain because de-esser plugins are quite crappy.

Any trick to fit doubles? You know, when the singer sang twice or three times the same thing and you have to make everything work. When doubles are made by the same singer you have too much of everything.

Hey Yep, thanks again

ORIGINAL: yep

2. Way, way better to prevent than to cure. Try off-axis, different mic, mic further back, mic pointed at nose or forehead, or singing "z" instead of "s" and "v" instead of "f."

Sometimes I have problems even with well tracked voices. You listen the track and it is ok. You roll off some lows, you cut some muddiness, some nasality around 1k and you end up with a big "S".

ORIGINAL: yep

I'm not a huge fan of doubled vocals in general, but one quick and dirty way to line them up is to take the better of the performances and plug it into the side-chain of a noise gate, and use that performance to gate the lesser performance.

Yes, I knew this trick because I took it from you sometime ago in an old thread

ORIGINAL: yep

It'll at least make it less distracting. Interestingly you can also use a de-esser on the "backup" one to try and remove most of the consonant sound, to push it a little further into the background as just a "thickener." As long as you keep one louder as the main vocal, the background one doesn't have to sound all that great in terms of a lead vocal track, so feel free to chop it up like that.

I agree, I usually do the same.

ORIGINAL: kev11111111111111
...So what you're saying here is that the bass guitar should occupy its own territory between roughly 100 and 200 Hz.,and no instrument should be around this point ?...

Um... no.

What I was saying is that those are starting points where you might look for the bass range. It is really important to listen and to evaluate the subjective characteristics of each of the instruments. And this is totally erroneous:

no instrument should be around this point

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

What I was talking about was finding a certain range for each instrument and making sure that it is not being masked in that range. If the guitar for instance has a cool "chug" sound that covers the bass range then the bass range and the bass and the whole mix is likely to sound weird and/or uneven or muddy.

This does not mean that you cannot record or keep the cool "chug" in the mix, it just means that if you follow the methodology I'm talking about then the bass has to have priority in that range.

It's like this: You can carry stuff in your car, but you need to leave room for yourself to fit in the driver's seat. You can carry a cello or a tiger or a tree or whatever you want in your car as long as there's room to sit in the driver's seat.

I wish to avoid creating "recipes" or "mix by numbers" rules such as "cut acoutic guitar by 4dB at 200Hz." There are a ton of recipes like that on the web and in books and they have a certain usefulness but here I am talking about making your own recipes by understanding how the ingredients fit together and complement each other.

I don't know which frequencies are most important to the bass in your song or in your aesthetic judgment. I don't know whether you also have too much kick drum or vocal chestiness in those frequencies. Maybe you have a tuba or viola or a synth pad or a James Brown sample that is more relevant. I can't tell you how you should want those to sound or fit together, but I can tell you what I would look for and listen for andd where I think you might have to make difficult decisions.

One I think I was confused about the post was this,you say the 'dull thump' of the kick is around 60 to 120Hz.If you mention later that if the track needs more thump this frequency is the magic dial !But how would this work with the bass,if the bass is to have ownership of the free range 100 to 200Hz.Does this mean its not possible to have a hard thumping kick,and a hard thumping bass ?

You can have "hard thumping" everything if you want.

If you felt like it you could dial in an eq boost at 150Hz on every single instrument and then put it all through an expander/gate and just have an entire track of "hard thump" at that frequency or any other. But I doubt that you would be happy with the results. It's up to you to decide what kind of sound profile you want for each instrument and for the whole mix. But there are a few things I would encourage you to keep in mind when it comes to the low bass frequencies:

- A little goes a very long way. This range is more perceived than heard and it turns to mud or dull noise fast. It also tends to get compressed and flattened on most playback systems. The more bass you pack into your mix, the more the low end will tend to turn mushy and fuzzy and the quieter your overall mix will have to be since those powerful low-frequencies will be sucking up all of your dynamic range.

-Reducing the amount or number of instruments with low-frequency content can actually convey the a tighter, more solid and powerful low end. A "hard thumping" bass plus a "hard thumping" kick drum is usually going to result in a softer, mushier low end than a "hard thumping" kick drum alone with a full-bodied bass sound that is not trying to make more thumpy. In other words, let the kick be the kick and the bass be the bass. Don't try to play bass on the drums and don't try to play drums with the bass. Or do, if you want to, but be aware that a bass is almost never going to do "thump" as well as the kick, and trying to have a "thump duet" with both instruments is often going to produce less thump and more mush than a thumping kick drum alone.

And regarding the overlapping frequency ranges: sorry, but this is inevitable. Almost every instrument will produce some sound at almost every frequency. Your job as the mix engineer is to decide how to fit them all together in the best and most flattering way. This does NOT mean that you need to go through every frequency one at a time and decide on one and only one instrument that can occupy that bandwidth, it just means that sometimes you will have two instruments fighting each other and deciding to push one back a little might help both. Sometimes those decisions will be obvious and sometimes less so. It gets harder in the bass frequencies because they are harder to hear and because they are also very dramatic, so there is a tendency to want to turn them up on everything.

Cheers.

Hi there,

Reading this thread just brought to mind a technique that Classical Guitarists use. What they sometimes do when playing a passage that uses open strings is to damp the notes according to the exact value of the note on the sheet music. If for example they play an open `D` for 2 beats, they damp it at the point they hit the next note eg `G` on a different string. Theory being that if the note D is left to ring out, it will sound for say 4 beats instead of the correct 2 bts according to the music, meantime the `G` note has been played over the top of it for say 1 but again if not damped could ring for another 4 bts

In other words overlapping frequencies. I have used the same technique sometimes when recording Bass and have rearranged passages with this theory at the back of my mind. I have thought that some of the bass parts have actually had more clarity by doing this.

Even though the range of notes played may be upto one and a half octaves for example, the freqs can perhaps range upto 4/5 k and above, etc. Don't know about anyone else but using the sweep / sweet spot method, I've found that 4 band para EQ ain't actually enough at times. I can easily use 4 bands towards the lower end to try and achieve clarity, definition and still maintain enough body. More often now, I am using 5/6 bands, whether my ears are deceiving me in my old age, I don't know, I'm either being too anal about bass EQ or I'm finding too many spots that need addressing in which case, could mean back to the drawing board, input stage again.
The other result of using 5/6 spots is that they will be narrower bands otherwise there could be 2 spots within a small freq range for example doing or not doing! as the case may be, the same job.

Anyway an excellent thread and thx to Yep for his input, extremely helpful.

Cheers
pkev