do you ever really listen to your music anymore?

Hey everyone

I just wanted to start a little "fun/non thinking" thread

Are we ever happy with our mixes? I mean REALLY happy. It seems almost an endless thing...achieving that final mix.

the hi-hats are too harsh. Damn..that bass line should have been louder. Why is that 3rd vocal harmony muffled in the mix. I could go on. Im sure you all could too.

I guess our jobs at mixing is just getting the song as close to perfect as we can..at least to the point that WE can accept it.

I find myself not even enjoying the actual song after awhile. Instead Im too busy ripping apart my own mix. where as friends or the average listener is like...."whats your problem?..that song sounds GREAT to me!"


Maybe its not worth spending countless hours just trying to get every little thing eq'd perfectly and sitting in the mix right where you want it.

I recorded in a studio down in atlanta, Ga. where the engineers told me horror stories about having to autotune the main vocals on ( i wont mention the famous bands name) every song. They actually spent weeks just going thru every little vocal line word for word to make sure it was 100% perfectly in tune! crazy? well..probably, but thats my point..Do we spend too much time tweaking things, where joe public wouldnt know the difference?

It's a shame we cant find a community web site that we could all upload one sonar bundle and have others take shots at mixing it.or something. though they are HUGE files

(yes..this is what happens when I dont get enough sleep)

sigh

trybal

I know what you mean. I've been working on some of my mixes for 10 years or more. However, I can say they are getting better.. LOL If that even matters at this point. When I finish the CD (or what ever media exists by the time it's done) I'm going to call the first one "New Old Stock" just as an inside joke. It's bad when there have been two Boston albums put out by the time you get yours done.

I enjoy the process of learning to mix and learning the new tools and methods. The tracking has been done for years on about 63 of my songs so I don't do much of that and I want to get back to recording some new songs, but for now all I have time for is to do some mixing in Sonar at night before I go to bed. I try to tell myself that if I did this as my day job I could get much better at it and trun out product a lot quicker but that may not be true.

Studio people need work too and if they can get paid to do hours of autotune and DAW work then I am happy for them. You also have to remember that music is a lasting record for the artist and some want it to pass the test of time. That may explain why they are so picky. Also more folks listen with headphones now so it has to be right.

I know exactly what you mean. It's hard for me to do the necessary context switching between being the songwriter, singer, musician, producer, and engineer. I've been doing this for many years, and I have songs that other people love - but I can't listen to them anymore. I suspect that when you wear all the hats you are less forgiving of any aspect of a song; the arrangement, the performance, the mix, and the mastering. I know I am, and it makes for a long and arduous process at times.

I dig Sonar, P5, and the multitude of plug-ins that I use, but in some respects I miss the 4 & 8 track tape days (yes I’m dating myself). Back in the day we had to record & bounce, record & bounce, record & bounce – you learned to accept what was on tape because most of the time you couldn’t go back. Having 24, 48 or more tracks to work with is both a blessing and a curse – you can sit and noodle on this stuff until fatigue, doubt, self deprecation, and hatred sets in.

I would say that if you are doing this as a hobby or if you are working on projects that have some slack time – get up and walk away from the DAW from time to time. Stay away for a day or two if you can. Many of us do this because we enjoy making music – turning it into another job or taking the fun out of it defeats the purpose. I fully understand the quest for perfection, but sometimes we need to raise our give-a-#@%! factor. Lay it down and move on! Good luck.

Dan

Hi trybal-

I find myself not even enjoying the actual song after awhile. Instead Im too busy ripping apart my own mix.

Absolutely! It's sometimes months or longer before I can listen to a song objectively again. I'm not sure how to get around that if you're the songwriter, performer, and sound engineer. I rely on the opinions I trust of people here and on cakewalk.audio re the mix, and I appreciate them, but it's still hard for me to listen to the song again, even to apply their suggestions!

-Susan

Are we ever happy with our mixes? I mean REALLY happy. It seems almost an endless thing...achieving that final mix.

It's gone beyond happy with my mixes.

What I'm finding is that I'm getting where I'm not be happy with the mixes on commercial releases. Man, why did he mix that h-hat so loud. What's up with the "esses" on the lead vocal. Where did he get such stupid lyrics.

There is a lot of music that I've listened to for many years that could have been mixed or even recorded better. However, there is no music from the past that I still listen to mainly because of the mix or the quality of the recording.

Same thing applies to one's own music. The stuff I still like was the better composed or more open-ended (where one can still discover some "unintended" creativity). The glossy stuff was fun to do but does not need to be revisited, IMO.[sm=rolleyes.gif]

Richard

Hi all,

We're a bit late to this discussion, ladies and gents, SONAR users.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (a.k.a. Mark Twain) cut to the chase on this topic 150 years ago.

His "Two Views of the Mississippi" is still delicious reading, having grown not the least bit stale over the years.

In case you don't have a copy of it handy on your bookshelf, you can read it here:

http://www.mtwain.com/Life_On_The_Mississippi/9.html

If you're pressed for time, scroll down to the paragraph that begins "Now when I had mastered the language of this water..." and read one of the most quoted passages he ever wrote. If you're in the mood for a literary break, read the whole chapter. Enjoy.

--thndrsn

Or A masterpiece is never finished, only abandoned.

John Lennon once said "there isn't a beatles song he wouldnt like to re-do" He hated Strawberry fields -- it was acually recorded in two differnt keys -- they took the later key and slowed it down to match the first key -- and pasted the two takes togther--- You can even tell the tape was slowed down when listening to it, but most Beatles fans let it slide and say its great -- I am not sure if he was talking about the mixing or the acually performances of all Beatle songs or both (performance and mix) --

But I know where you are coming from -- you make a good point -- I am the same way -- my friends say it sounds great and I am busy listen hard to the mix.

I find it always better to walk away from a mix becuase your ears get burned out-- there are a million different ways to approach it and you want to hear them all before you decide and that takes tons of time and work.

I guess this doesnt really answer your question -- but I guess in short -- yeah!! -- I think most people think it could always be better... John Lennon did too --- your not in bad company......................

ORIGINAL: mildew

i find the best time to listen to your mixes without analysing them is when you are drunk.



m

Exactly. I love doing that. All the playing, arranging, tweaking - maybe one initial mix, is done sober (just so I'm in the 'region' of what I want...) then I sit back, fire up the Lava-Lamp, do some serious damage to a 12-pack of Carly Export - and indulge my ears! Break off every hour-or-so for a Family Guy (your DAW plays DVD's, right..? )

I save each mix (crazy as they may be) - then the next day I play each mix, one of them takes me to where I wanna be. I'm always surprised at the 'freshness' of my ideas.

Anyway, Joe Listener won't be analysing your mix! He'll be dancing to it, drinking to it, making lurve to it.... Skating to it...... Y'know.

BTW, if I ever meet Joe Listener - I need to ask him which EQ settings are a good starting point to separate 2 Les Pauls without hard panning.......

Ryan

The last project I completed was a couple of days ago, for a compilation at Another Forum. The deadline had already been pushed back a month, and there was talk of pushing it back again another month and a half to the beginning of July.

And I knew that given another month and a half to tweak, I would use it just like I had used the extra month already given, thereby climbing just a little further up my own colonic channel.

So I literally had to listen once more to everything I had done and tell the empty room, "This... is... done." I backed the files up to DVD-R and erased them from my hard drive to make it just that much more difficult to want to tweak, then sent a CD off before I had a chance to reconsider.

Even putting that figurative exclamation point on the process-- decaring it finished-- wasn't enough to really make it final in my own head. I had to rush through the backup and the mailing in order to be comfortable with the mix as it was-- because now that I've done all that, I have no choice in the matter. This is how it is, and the case is truly closed. I'm done torturing myself, at least as far as that project is concerned anyway.

Time for the next one.

I dig Sonar, P5, and the multitude of plug-ins that I use, but in some respects I miss the 4 & 8 track tape days (yes I’m dating myself). Back in the day we had to record & bounce, record & bounce, record & bounce – you learned to accept what was on tape because most of the time you couldn’t go back.

This is exactly why I convert to audio at the earliest possible moment, and then delete the synth... and I rarely save presets. Commiting it to audio is like bouncing in the old days: you're forced to work with what you've got and it prevents endless, endless tweaking (which I am definitely prone to).

when i am working on someone else's music, well they pay me to mix it. however, when i am working on my own music that i really want to enjoy, i have someone else to mix it so i can still listen to it and enjoy the music, and not even think about the mix.

diamondjim,
Aww, shucks. Twernt nuthin.
-thndrsn