Songcraft: Whew...thank God! Hahaha! Thank you for the kind words brother and your condolences. My posts aren't for everyone I know...but hopefully they help those that may be into reading them. Wishing you the best as well. :)

trimph: Thanks....we do a pretty good job taking care of each other. My mom would be proud of us. :) As for your "where to post" question, if I were in need of technical advice, I would post something here...but that's just me. You won't get the same amount of views you would in the song forum, but you also won't get the same type of feedback. If you want both common listeners and technical support to chime in, I'd say song forum. If you just need tech advice, I'd say go with the tech forum.

Matt: No problem man....I know that's a lot to read. That's actually the short version. I just can't help it man...there's no way to explain this stuff any shorter while covering all the bases. I hate just giving out cut and dry info. I like to talk about cause and effect, different scenarios, a few techniques and of course talk to you like I would in person with a bit of my personality involved in the writing. :) I hope some of that stuff will be useful to you....and you're quite welcome. :)

-Danny 

The three most important elements of mixing - Compression, EQ and Reverb. Yes? 

I would have to disagree with this assumption, though i DO agree that the proper use of compression, eq and reverb is very important...
way up there on the list.


but the top 3 should read as such:




1. Capture.
2. Capture.
3. Capture.




GIGO
(garbage in, garbage out)




i can't stress enough, how important it is, to have a quality source, captured by a quality mic or some other 'dialed in' process.


this is more important than any compression, eq, or reverb, and if you do it RIGHT....


you wont even need any of that other stuff.




that said, i just read a book on todd rundgren, which stressed that in his early days, there was absolutely NO signal that went to tape, that didn't run thru some kind of compression or limiter....


so, there is something to be said for using those devices to create a 'new' sound, and there are really no rules.






just stressing, that the most important thing, is to have an really good mic...


micing a really good signal.

The most successful mixer/engineer of all time, Al Schmitt, uses very, very little compression, EQ or reverb. Sometimes he uses none at all.

This does not contradict the premise of this thread. You still have to thoroughly understand those tools, if only to know when not to use them.

I remember my very first "mix" back in 2006.  not really that long ago, actually, by all standards.  but I had no clue what I was doing (granted I'm no "expert" now, but I have learned a few things...)

I had no idea what compression was or how to use it.  I only knew I wanted to record a song of me singing to some accompaniment so that I could send a CD to my grandmother who was always my biggest fan (and she was starting to get old and has since passed on.)

using Sonar Home Studio 4, I set up accompaniment using only a mouse and Staff view of "Be Thou My Vision." I added piano, strings, bass and bagpipes using the Edirol SC and SFZ with soundfonts I found for free on the internet.   I recorded my (ahem...) vocals and I began to "mix."

without EQ, or compression (I did add some reverb, however), I mixed the song using a lot of ENVELOPES.  oh my!  I set up tracks and would alter the envelopes on each track to create the dynamics I was trying to get out of the mix.  I'd alter one tracks' envelope and then that would affect the summed audio so that other tracks needed their envelopes adjusted now.  so I'd go adjust those, then that would affect others....and the merry go round continued...

I finally got a 'mix" out of it using nothing but envelopes and some canned reverb.  I will not say that it was stellar.  especially listening now! lol!

so all that to say that I DO believe that compression is an extremely useful tool for audio engineers, as is EQ.  reverb is something that's helpful and usually necessary, but it's not in the same league as EQ and compression, IMO.

however, I also believe that the better the tracks are going in, the less you have to "mess" with them to get them to sound right summed.  I don't think that there would ever be a time I could record say 4 tracks which were so excellent I'd never have to use compression or EQ on them, but the better the tracks are going in, the less work you have to do to make the summed output sound good.

It may not bear mentioning here, but one thing I found helpful early regarding the use of reverb in a mix was to discover that what I really wanted was the sense of space, not the sound of the reverb itself.  When I discovered that the use of a little delay and/or fast decaying reverb used in a subtle fashion could give that sense of space without an obvious "echo" sound effect, it was a turning point.

When working with sampled sounds, synths, etc. rather than directly mic'd sounds, they didn't all sound like they were in the same room at first.  Minimal use of delays and/or fast decaying reverbs on specific tracks could disguise this and create the illusion of a band in a particular soundscape.  In many cases, I ended up using delays, but no reverb.  It depended heavily on the specific tracks and the desired sound for that band/song.

I'm sure that's obvious to the veterens here, but it's not always apparent to those just getting started.  Sometimes, dialing up a reverb effect on a bus and applying it to the mix as a whole can work.  In my experience, it usually does not.

Obviously, others may have a different approach and may disagree with mine.  YMMV.

Agree with Bat: I think if you get great capture you will have a much easier and less involved time mixing.

However, most of the folks on the boards don't have the time, equipment, expertise or talent to track it down great (Lord knows I most certainly do not). Or the dodgy samples you are using aren't all that great. Or the tracks someone sent you to mix aren't super clean and punchy. Then the OP's question is 100% valid.

In today's modern pop music, it feels that compression is king more than anything else.  Eq to taste then space it out with reverb (though on a lot of tunes reverb is done with a more minimalistic approach).

I would agree that what happens before the mix is the most important of all, but he was asking about what's important in a mix.

Tracking is a tiny part of what I do, in those circumstances getting an accurate track is only important for acoustic singer/songrwriter of rock-band based music.

Stuff I use that needs tracking, is normally done is tracked by someone else in a different location, the rest of it is conjured out of the ether.

I saw this as a mixing question, in much modern music you'll find many completely different mixes of the same song that can be dramatically different yet all are using the same source material at the heart.  I don't even care who Al Schmitt, George Martin or Geoff Emerick are, no more than I care to listen to music by the Tremeloes, The Beatles or the Beach Boys these days.  So how did a question on mixing become a diatribe on 'purist' acoustic tracking?

Yes on fewer and fewer occassions theses day the originally recorded source is still as important, but more and more the 'mixer' has become even the origin of the sound source.  Again nothing to do with no or dimiinished talent, dodgy samples or a lack of anything.

So yeah we can all get delightfully anal about the purity of the input signal but it seems to me there's more and more to be done and learned at the mixing stage unless you are just planning to be the next Leonard Cohen or Dire Straits.

So good tracking may certainly be part of good mixing, but who here would have worked out that a green bullet mic through a guitar combo would be the best bet for recording a blues harp?   If it hadn't been done before I venture most here would be recommending a $4000 mic and boutique pre to match with the mic carefully measured to be 32" away in an overly treated room.

I'm currently 18 lanes into a percussion track for a Dance re-mix, I've probably got another 8 to go down before I'm finished, there's plenty of frequencies been removed to far and everything is sitting where I want it as far as width and depth of field goes no compressors yet and certainly no 'verb, but it's groovin' and I haven't needed to track anything yet either. 

I can see where a couple of the lanes will need some compression already because the attack phase is too quick but I don't really find that out until I've Eq'd it all first.  Likewise I thought I'd have to gate a couple of lanes but having isolated the required frequency component I found didn't need to spend the 20 minutes to get both those gates working sweetly, hooray no gating required even.  That's a couple of reasons why I always Eq first that have shown up already.

good sounds are good sounds.

crappy sounds, are crappy sounds.

the more you have to tweak a track, the more you realize that you are dealing with crappy sounds.
 
the goal, especially for beginners, should always be to work with the very best source tracks available, which means you are tracking them yourself, and have no one but yourself to blame if they sound less than stellar.

once you've gotten to a point where obviously jonbouy has gotten, you've already learned these lessons, and are now equipped to do specific sonic surgery as part of the job.

but i can tell you that working with well recorded tracks is always easier and faster work.

but i can tell you that working with well recorded tracks is always easier and faster work.

Always the best idea, I don't think anyone will argue that point, but this was a mixing question, no?

So say all the tracks are in, they can't be done again.

Where do we go from there?  That's how I saw the question.