So I FINALLY have a full song tracked. Now what?

Sorry... I was just being silly because I'm excited to get down to mixing. This is gonna be fun.

And transpose to Am? ;-)

Now destroy all what you hardly  did well .. ......

@zo... lol. Not a chance. Gonna A/B the whole time. ;-)

Now you've made me curious how many cowbells I have installed. *shakes head* Must... stay... FOCUSED!

Well, you've made it through half the battle... now is the fun part, sort of. I've been mixing and re-mixing songs some for over 10 years. They're just for me so it doesn't matter. Every time a new version of Sonar or a new tool comes out, I go back and re-do those songs. I guess that's the fun of it. 

After fighting the mix for weeks you will come to the conclusion you should have tracked things better. Always happens to me.

lulzylulz... These are actually pretty hacky takes compared to what I'd normally strive for but I just wanted get something to work with. Now I have a massive clean up of the project to do but I enjoy that kind of thing (strangely enough). I'll tell ya this though... I can't wait to get the take lanes in X2. At first I loved the take layer idea but now seeing them and action and having to deal with the aftermath... not likin' them so much. Still fun though.

I love it all but gluing it all together... yeah, there something special about that. I'm glad I have the opportunity to stick my fingers back into this pie again. It's been a while.

I only worked how to export at New Year's past,and now I'm convinced that Exporting while listening,is better quality[instead of "fast bounce"]...yeah?

Anyway,Iv'e found the Mastering part to be the real Head%^& as a tune I have with a very average guitar sound,just keeps getting re-mastered,and re-mastered,all the while thinking-"but if I just do it AGAIN it'll be BETTER.....you know what? the second try was by far the best,and now its lost amongst 55 different projects,all done around the same time!

The one that has worked the best,is one I did once only[mastered]as it always had good separation,and a good real amp tone,instead of a sim,and this has been a learning experience for sure,the one with good sounds[with little EQ]are always going to be better,well that's MO ATM.

Cheeriot
Bob

For me there are really 3 stages after tracking. I try to keep these segmented so I can move cleanly from one to the next and keep focus and momentum going.

1. Sweetening- This is all about how individual elements sound, general flow of the song, etc. If I'm going to do any of the following I do it at this stage- after tracking and before mixing: 

• Removing hum/noise/clicks pops/plosives
• Editing for rhythm
• Comping takes
• Pitch correction
• Sample replacement
• Tone shaping with plugins- clean vs. warm vs. dark vs...
• High/low filters- try selecting all your tracks, holding CTRL, and enabling the ProChannel EQ's low rolloff on a channel, then rolling it up to 200 Hz. Do the same while holding CTRL for the high rolloff at 5kHz. Then slowly add back in the things you know are missing (shimmer in the cymbals, thump in the kick, etc.) Starting with the lows and highs killed completely will mean that you consciously choose what to let back into your mix, and may result in a cleaner product with a lot less work.

2. Mixing- This is less about how things sound and more about how everything feels, gels together, etc. Here I tend to focus on energy and movement. For instance-

• Am I getting too much low end energy from my guitars, where they are fighting with the kick, bass, etc? (Low roll-offs and shelves are great for this.)
• Am I getting too much high end energy from my guitars, where they are just making my cymbals sound like fuzz? (High roll-offs and shelves are great for this.)
• Is the energy of my guitars/synths complementing or conflicting with my vocal?
• Are the movement of the high hat and tambourine complementary? Conflicting? (Usually in this case I pan them opposite each other, sometimes the tambourine needs to be muted.)

The reason I like to think of movement and energy here is that it does a couple of things to my thought process:

• It stops me from focusing too much on how an individual instrument sounds
• It makes me think more proactively about the relationships between instruments. I know, for instance, that if my vocal is too loud and I turn it down I will want to check the snare level afterward since they are generally panned in the center and the energy of each interacts closely with the energy of the other
• It stops me from always thinking I need to turn something up or down. Sometimes I am getting "too much energy" from the high hat because it is very dry compared to everything else. Sometimes I need to filter out a frequency that is bugging the snot out of me (in high hats this varies, but usually focuses around 3k or 8k.) Turning it down might be an improvement, but adding more reverb/room tone, or EQing slighly might be the better fit

3. Mastering- this is all about making everything feel like a cohesive record. The key to doing this well is focusing on the big picture:

•  Color (EQ balance)
• Movement (esp. with pop/rock/dance where you may be slightly pumping the master buss compressor for a particular sound)
• Loudness and sound stage (consistent levels overall and consistent amounts of reverb/room tone)
• Low end tightening (this can be hard to do when mixing on headphones or bookshelf speakers, but do your best to keep the low end from being too boomy. This is almost always due to bass, and multi-band compression can help control this a bit)

Of course, now that you have everything tracked, have fun!!!


Peace,

Tunes

Awesome. I'm about to get back to it but I had to take advantage of the sun for a while. I've been trapped in this dark room all summer figuring stuff out and realized I'd better load up on vitamin D while I still can. I think I'm drunk on sunshine... and beer. ;-)

It's all going to depend on how you mix and master also. The stages of editing are a part of mixing and mastering. More mixing than mastering but, your technique for a final stereo track will be based on what equipment you throw at the mix. Whether you're doing it all internally or sending it out to a burner through hardware. The format of your end result will dictate how you mix and master also.

All internal for now. This track will mostly be for the forum and my own experimentation. Actually it started out as an example for my BFD eco thread but I got bogged down with some meatworld stuff so it's taken me far longer than expected. The playing is a little sloppy too but I just want to play with all the X1 toys. After this I'll get more serious.

I'm actually doing a massive clean up of all my takes and tossing all the crap so I can just see/use what I want. Then I'll start patching it all together and do some volume edits. I really kept a lot of garbage. lol