SoundRegion
BASSIC Productions
That is a much better mix! Next, it has a pretty dry sound. I would suggest a little reverb to put the instruments into a "physical" space (just as a suggestion, when you think you have the reverb sounding cool, lower it in the mix a little; you will like it better after hundreds of listens).
Thanks for your input. I tried it and it works. I used reverb on my audio tracks, but I don't think I've used it on the whole mix before.
What method did you use? Did you just toss a reverb on your master bus or did you use Sends and a Reverb bus?
If you did not use a reverb bus or don't know the method I'm talking about look up mixing tuts/articles about "Reverb Busses"
The premise is that instead of applying the reverb directly on the tracks (which will result in each instrument ending up in their own "space" instead of all the reverb being applied in a way that makes it sound more natural like everything was recorded in the same room) or on the master bus (which applies the SAME level of reverb on everything equally instead of allowing you to apply more/less levels of the SAME reverb/space to specific instruments) you create a "send" on all the the tracks in your project and send them to a special bus (create a new bus to do this and send all your tracks via the sends to that bus and then the bus goes to the master like everything else).
Put your reverb effect on that bus and turn the output volume of all the Sends on each track all the way down (so nothing is being sent to your reverb bus). If your reverb effect has a "Wet/Dry" knob turn it all the way to "Wet". You want the full reverb sound applied (Wet/Dry controls mix in the original signal with the effected signal which you don;t want for this).
Now start turning up the "Sends" on each of the tracks. Now main output of your tracks is still hitting your master (or any submix busses you have them routed through) and the "tap" you made with the send is going straight to the reverb bus. As you turn up the "sends" your dry signal and mix is preserved but now the reverb bus adds some "space" to the individual tracks/sounds. Since it's all the same reverb unit it sounds more like all the instruments are in the same "Space" but you can only add as much verb as each instrument needs.
So maybe you want your drums or a specific drum piece to sound less dry but adding to much verb to a guitar or keyboard muddy's up the mix. Just turn up the send output more on the drums than the other tracks.
This is particularly important for bass parts. Bass doesn't respond as well to reverb (you usually wnat it dry and tight to avoid bottom end mud which reverb can contribute to). You can just keep the bass reverb send very low or totally turned down and apply as much as you want/need to the otther tracks.
You can also turn up multiple send outputs simultaneously in Sonar by multi "Selecting" all the tracks, holding "Ctrl" on your keyboard then turning up ONE of the selected track's sends. All of them will increase together.
This is a good way to start your reverb send sound. I generally do this to set the base level of my reverb "room" sound. Like maybe everything goes up to the 9-10 o'clock position on my sends so everything is getting a touch of room.
Then I go through the individual tracks and turn things up/down as needed (sometimes creating sub selected groups like turning up the sends on all the drums at once or multiple guitar tracks at once, etc).
Anyway... you may already know all this but if not and you liked what reverb did for you then this "Reverb Bus" technique is the "proper" way to go about and has been used in this manner since almost the beginning of multitrack audio.
Cheers.