Focusing Music in Sonar

Recording, mixing, mastering and marketing music.
 
This is a thread to discuss how other people do these things, in particular in Sonar. Please spare no words here in your replies...
 
For some people dreaming up a song is the hard part. Sometimes it is not the song or the parts that are wrong but how these parts are mixed and how they need to be processed in a standardized a way.
 
Each song is different but all songs have to fit within the same spectrum of human hearing.
 
Keeping this in mind, how does one "focus" a mix? What are your effects chains, how do you set stuff? How do you visualize the sound? Do you use color graphs to represent your waves in real-time, how do you interpret and analyse the music mix in color?
 
It looks more easy with a camera because it seems you just turn a dial and stop where it appears the best. But the problem with music is getting rid of so much mud but not that you leave it too empty.
 
I could talk on about this a lot myself, mostly questions, but how about if people leave tips here and helpful information on how you "focus songs in Sonar". A digital audio recorder focuses in on a "scene" of instruments.
 
How do you decide which instruments will play when and what forms do you incorporate into song structures and how do you automate these elements into a final product?
 
How do you pick your instruments? How do you blend them? How do you take a lot of continuous tracks and decide which one will make a peep in a moment's second in a song? There can be thousands of notes and in a song.
 
Music editing can be a nightmare. When do you say no to a song that may just be too big to make? A seventeen minute song, how do you ever finish it? Every time you hear it you just keep editing and editing and editing and it seems you will never get it done. Everyday the song sounds totally different.
 
How do you focus it?
 
It comes to hearing it somehow, to hearing what the song is trying to say midst a lot of overly loud other instruments.
 
Each moment in time the focus needs to bend in some angle and the song finds another flavor of musical progression.
 
All along everything in the mix needs to be put in tastefully complementary places and set perfectly in the virtual sound space.
 
It seems this focusing of the song is the most critical step of all.
 
Sometimes move the focus and the song blurs more, sometime it gets more clear and vibrant.
 
Please help out here and expand on this discussion.
 
It is of course the greatest thing for a song having the perfect parts simply performed so all you do is set the volumes and that is it. But not all songs are like that, some are watercolor impressions, patchworks and some very complex geometrical patterns and mathematical shapes.
 
How do you perceive song style and how does that factor into the way the mix is focused?
 
Eq, reverb, surround versus stereo. How do you set the mix what are the standards you go by? This is a discussion so all musical input on the processes of making music in Sonar is welcome here.
 
How do you focus music in Sonar? How do you polish and shine the image of the music? How do you fit the parts into their place in the mix? How do you make a final product that is ready for world distribution?
 
Please leave comments.
 
Thanks

jsg
Regarding #8, I would add: 
 
Bob Katz, the renowned mastering engineer says that mixing should take place at around 83dB SPL.  I usually have the loudest sections in my work measuring about 83dB SPL when mixing.   If you're mixing at too hot of a level you'll hear the bass and high end louder than they would be relative to the mid-range and if you mix at too low a level, you'll overcompensate the lower and upper frequencies due to the nature of how we hear sound. 

Yes, that is why I suggest testing at different levels so you can get the best "average."
 
I believe the rationale for mixing at a consistent level is so your ears can become acclimated to a standard. That way you won't come in the next day, have the level turned up, and think you mixed the lows and highs too loud.
 
Unfortunately the reality is that playback systems have never been more variable. It's still possible to do mixes that translate well over multiple systems, but that doesn't mean they will sound exactly as intended.

I would not compress after reverb in general: I think compressed reverb sounds odd.
 
That said, if you are compressing a whole mix, you can't avoid it, but I would definitely compress before reverb on instrument and vocal tracks.
 
Of course, I am prepared to be corrected by Craig and others who may know better.

Bristol_Jonesey
That all depends on room size.
 
Working on nearfileds in an an average size bedroom studios @ 83dB SPL is VERY loud, for this reason I use 78dB which is a lot more forgiving on my ears, the wife & neighbours

In Katz's document (part 2) he says he mixes pop songs at 6 db below the standard, which puts it at 77db :
 
"In 1996, we measured that monitor gain, and found it to be 6 dB less than the film-standard for most of the pop music we were mastering. To calibrate a monitor to the film-standard, play a standardized pink noise calibration signal whose amplitude is -20 dB FS RMS, on one channel (loudspeaker) at a time. Adjust the monitor gain to yield 83 dB SPL using a meter with C-weighted, slow response. Call this gain 0 dB, the reference, and you will find the pop-music "standard" monitor gain at 6 dB below this reference.
By now, we've mastered hundreds of pop CDs working at monitor gain 6 dB below the reference, with very satisfied clients."
 
I think everyone is in agreement.

 

The other thing I would mention is that you mix based on the audience and what you want the listener to experience. Let me give you some examples of what I am talking about.
 
I listen to and play mostly bluegrass music. Here the individual performance is up front. When the singer is singing, they are in the forefront. When the mandolin is doing a solo, it gets pushed to the front. A lot of this comes from the old days when they had but a single mic on stage. The band would gather in a semi-circle around the mic. Then as a part would become the focus they move up to the mic. When they were background they would move away from the mic. Doyle Lawson and Quick Silver still do this a lot in their performances (here is a youtube clip - here they use 2 mics but I think it'll give you an idea - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYsd4vm3kC0). Further, bluegrass tends to be more 'honest' in that what you hear on a CD is nearly the same thing you will hear from the group on stage or sitting around a porch playing. Not a lot of effects, and those that are used are subtle.
 
I also do the recording for our church services on Sunday. We have a praise band that includes acoustic guitar, electric guitar, electric bass, electronic drums and keyboard, lead vocalist and three backup singers. When I first started doing the recordings I tried to do it like the music I had been listening to, and needless to say it wasn't working. Nobody was happy with the sound, especially me. I started talking to the leader of the praise band, and we sat together for a number of days talking about what we could and could not do while recording the service. He also lent me some CDs of the groups that had recorded the original songs they were doing. Folks like Chris Tomlin and Casting Crowns. Here is a YouTube video of the Cast Crowns song "Courageous" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM-gDcmJeM).
 
If you compare these two styles of music, you can easily see how different they are, in presentation, in instrumentation and in the mixing. After listening to a bunch of these CDs, we were able to significantly improve our mixing of the praise group. We still talk about how things can get better, from both sides of the mic.
 
Lastly, how you record/mix has a big influence on your final product. When I record at home, I can take my time, do multiple takes and select the best ones. I can also try different effects, different mics, move panning around, and do all different sorts of tricks. Not so when doing a 'live' mix. Every Sunday we record to a CD. One take. Two effects (chorus and reverb) and no second chances. Plus we also want the CD (which is also the signal used for our live streaming) to bring across the feel of the live environment. So we include adding in the congregational singing, the hand clapping, etc. Totally different mix from the 'sterile' studio environment.
 
As was said earlier, lots of different things to think about when trying to 'focus' your music. Hope this has offered some ideas to think about.

24/48 is fine.  24 bits is as high as the hardware can capture and process out.  32 bit floating is a bit depth storage. So record at 24 bits and you can save the file as a 32 bit format.  24 bit storage is fine, too, as in the words of Bob Dylan, "You will not die, its not poison."  It is just storing the sound at a bit higher resolution than the working resolution.
 
The 64-bit engine is confusing, esp. as Cakewalk implemented it about the time that 64 bit processors were introduced, but the engine doesn't have anything to do w/ that.  It processes your sound at 64 bit,  a higher resolution.  So when your computer is doing the calculations the truncations (or rounding off errors) are at an even lower level.  Think of Pi (the number).  It goes to infinity the last I heard.  Same w/ sound calculations w/in SONAR, but if you want the computer to get finished doing them you need to stop it somewhere.  The 64-bit engine does that at a higher number so the sound more accurately reflects non-discrete analog.  A lot of older effects "sounded" better since they "upsampled" (to 32 or 64 bit processing) the sound internally.  SONAR can do this for every calculation.  I've never heard any major difference but w/ modern computers so fast it makes no practical difference so why not?  Same as storing your bounced files as 32 bit.  Hard drive space is cheap compared to 5 to 10 years ago.
 
Record at 24 bit (the highest hardware allows), store processed files as 32 bit and process your song w/ the 64 bit engine.  Easy enough to remember.
 
@

Is a song better naked than too embellished?

Thanks Guitarhacker and MandolinPicker for you very informative responses. I found out I was compressing too much of the transient on my various tracks, it was making my music flat and less transparent. I let the transients through the compression's attack on my tracks and suddenly there was more room in the mix :)
 
Interesting about complexity in music. It makes one think about originality a lot. I think discouragement is the worst detriment to creativity. There are lots of undiscovered variations and themes in music, at least that is the idea. Every voice is unique and the idea is to find your own sound and style that identifies you and separates you from the crowd in a good way. Quality not quantity...