Mixing Questions.... Thoughts?

 I was working on this song recently using Music Creator 5 which is all I use now. And I should mention I really like it a lot, I think it's great. For my needs I see no need to go further.

That being said, here are a few mixing questions I thought I would ask. Also a few personal observations on my own recordings.

1 : - I kinda get the impression that when it comes to Bass and Drums, they need to be center, no exceptions? I felt on my last song post, that I should have moved the bass to 45% left. Although there were two Rhythm Guitars panned left and right. So it would have never worked. Also I must ask, is there any reason to ever record TWO bass tracks and pan them or perhaps harmonize them?

2 : - Should you always have compression in a song, at least on an instrument or the overall track? I have trouble figuring it out sometimes. At times it seems like a volume gain more so than anything else. Although I am aware that it does do things. My question actually is, does compression "Compress and shorten the sound of the track so that it fits better in the stereo field of things for the song"? I dunno.....

I only have two for now, but I am sure I will think of more later. These are probably basic questions, and most everyone knows this stuff. But I don't so I figured I would ask.

Bobby

The reasoning behind the bass/kick in the center is that the lowest frequencies require the most energy at a given volume, and so putting them in the center means both speakers are pushing them equally hard, so they get the most oomph. If it's a really low bass part it won't probably help much to pan it anyway since low bass isn't really directional. Once you start getting down low enough, the wave lengths are so much larger than your head, that your stereoscopic stereophonic hearing system can't figure out which direction they are coming from. It depends on slight variations in arrival time of the waves. But once the waves get way bigger than your head, that doesn't work very well.

Compression, as mentioned, is a huge topic. It'll take a few years probably to really start to fully get what it's all about. Same with EQ, I think. I'm going on four years into this thing come Feb, and I'm just now starting to really get these two topics. I'm not doing it full time, but I'm a very technical guy and have experimented quite a lot, and it's still taken this long for these things to really start sinking in.

And of course that's just the beginning of the beginning. There's still far more times more to learn still than I've learned so far. But, luckily I think that your rate of absorption also goes up more and more rapidly over time. The more you have figured out so far, the more puzzle pieces start coming together more rapidly.

One thing that helped me is that I would spend hours and hours just sitting there doing drum production. Drums involve usually significant amounts of production compared to most other instruments. So if you can work those out, you'll learn a lot. And, since the rock on top of which almost all pop and rock music is situation are drums, if you can get a good drum sound, you are way ahead of the game.

You don't want, in an actual mix, to get obessed too much with individual instruments' sounds, since what is important is how they fit into the mix, not how they sound on their own. But drum sound is often key to the whole thing.

Beagle

There are two camps on the way to pan them.  one camp is panning them as if you are a listener to a band.  the other camp is to pan them as if you were the drummer so that when you play air drums with the song you'll not be hitting the snare on the right and the ride on the left.

That's fine if both you and the drummer are right handed...  I'm told there are also left handed drummers though, and even if the drummer is right handed, the air-drumming listener might be left handed..
 
From my experience doing FOH, the hard/fast rule was that you matched any panning you did to what you could see on the stage.  Panning would be kept to a minimum but I would always use some to give clarity to toms and cymbols by seperating them in space between the pa stacks.

In recorded material it doesn't realy matter how you pan drum kit pieces, unless you're deliberately replicating a 'live' stage sound.  The only thing to watch for is where you have two mics pointed at a similar area they should both be panned to the same side.  eg. an overhead near the high hats and a high hat mic should both be panned to the same side.

I always compress my bass tracks because, well, I'm a guitar player, not a bass player, and my feeble attempts usually result in a wave that fluctuates all over the place.

I'll use track/clip automation as a rough leveller, then compress it to even out the remaining peaks/troughs, hopefully retaining whatever dynamics I intended to be recorded.

Karyn

Beagle

There are two camps on the way to pan them.  one camp is panning them as if you are a listener to a band.  the other camp is to pan them as if you were the drummer so that when you play air drums with the song you'll not be hitting the snare on the right and the ride on the left.

That's fine if both you and the drummer are right handed...  I'm told there are also left handed drummers though, and even if the drummer is right handed, the air-drumming listener might be left handed..
 
From my experience doing FOH, the hard/fast rule was that you matched any panning you did to what you could see on the stage.  Panning would be kept to a minimum but I would always use some to give clarity to toms and cymbols by seperating them in space between the pa stacks.

In recorded material it doesn't realy matter how you pan drum kit pieces, unless you're deliberately replicating a 'live' stage sound.  The only thing to watch for is where you have two mics pointed at a similar area they should both be panned to the same side.  eg. an overhead near the high hats and a high hat mic should both be panned to the same side.

True - but left handed air drummers are definitely in the minority!  who cares abou them???

Karyn


I had to sell my best air guitar because it was left handed and I just couldn't play it.  Even tried re-stringing it but I just couldn't get a note out of it.

I hate it when that happens!!!

Karyn


I had to sell my best air guitar because it was left handed and I just couldn't play it.  Even tried re-stringing it but I just couldn't get a note out of it.

I know how that is, finding strings for those things can be a real pain! Have you tried La La Land? They have everything you might want, and then some. It's the "And Then Some part you better watch out for though!".

Bobby