Song Mixing

Reverend Bow

Reverend Bow

Active member
Is anyone into mixing?

I recorded a thing, I really dig it (it most likely isn't to a lot of people's taste), but the mix is muddy. I tried rerecording it, but I can't catch the feel/vibe of the first version.



Anyone have any suggestions on how to clear it up? EQ tricks perhaps? I used to much reverb, in stereo, while tracking, which I believe is causing the mud...

It is a bit of an audio clusterfook...

If anyone can provide any ideas, I'm all ears.

And I fully expect to get slayed for the 💩 playing, but I pretty much expect it 😂
 
Eq can help separate tracks by giving each their own space and reducing how much they interfere with each other. Eq can't get rid of reverb though. That's why I always take a DI track. It actually saved me this week.

When I got my new pedal, the Beez Nutz, I was quick to have my bassist try it out. He's more of a death and doom guy, so he didn't really bond with the funky pedal. He did, however, find a part in one of our songs where it fit. I insisted he record with it, because I'm determined to get my nuts on his board. The intro/first verse of a song and the outro he plays a whole note melody over my quarter note riff, and the wah made a neat effect. We recorded it and I mixed it.

The band was listening back Thursday and the effect was challenged. It was different from how it's been played for years. Ultimately we agreed that it doesn't sound right in the beginning, but works for the outro. So, I fed the DI track to the bass rig and recorded his performance through his amp clean. By reamping, I still had the feel of his original performance, but with different tone. It can save your ass and is good to do every time you record.
 
Drums need more beef to start, low end needs tightening with drums and bass, and is that one guitar track with tons of reverb on it? I’d go double tracking hard panned 100L and 100 R. If you want to make any part like a true lead you could go in the center with the lead and rhythm guitars underneath.
 
Brandonrz said:
Drums need more beef to start, low end needs tightening with drums and bass, and is that one guitar track with tons of reverb on it? I’d go double tracking hard panned 100L and 100 R. If you want to make any part like a true lead you could go in the center with the lead and rhythm guitars underneath.
Click to expand...

^Do all this first, but there is also too much verb and delay and space in it also.

If there's mud in a mix, adding echo will exponentially mudify it up even more. Which is, why I expect you noticed it in the first place
 
Cool tune, but yeah that's a bit too much on the verb.
First of all, if you are running any mix bus compression or mastering limiting, it will drastically bring up all the low level audio like verb in a mix.
If that's the case, process the rest of the mix on another sub group and leave the guitar tracks with the verb untouched.

you could also try something like this:
https://www.zynaptiq.com/unveil/

You might be able to download a trial version and fix your song without having to buy the full plug-in.

Good luck!
 
DanTravis62 said:
^Do all this first, but there is also too much verb and delay and space in it also.

If there's mud in a mix, adding echo will exponentially mudify it up even more. Which is, why I expect you noticed it in the first place
Click to expand...
I did get distracted mid response kiddos running around, thought I wrote about the verb lol. Yeah it’s absolute over kill.
 
Brandonrz said:
I did get distracted mid response kiddos running around, thought I wrote about the verb lol. Yeah it’s absolute over kill.
Click to expand...

Generally speaking, the more verb and echo you want to add into a mix, the more midrange (especially 800 hz to 3k) you have to scoop out - OP should listen to dark side of the moon or any Def leppard for an example of how to accomplish this

The guitars and the mess of echo are sucking up all the oxygen for the space the drums should be occupying

He needs to

1. Take all the verb, echo, and fx off
2. Start from scratch with the drum sound
3. cut a gargantuan amount of midrange from all the guitars bass keys etc cumulatively,
4. making surgical cuts in just about everything, and then re-jigger the echo now that he has space
 
i would start with the kick, it sounds a bit buried which i think is making the overall mix lack punch more than it is muddy. the guitars do have too much reverb, id probably do like brandon said with a cleaner L/R track and add reverb and delay after. i think everything could use a little bit of compression to glue it together more. overall its a solid start though
 
Like some others have said. A bigger & punchier drum sound would help tremendously.

If you don’t have that, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle all day. To prevent them from getting buried, everything else has to be dialed back to compensate.
 
DanTravis62 said:
Generally speaking, the more verb and echo you want to add into a mix, the more midrange (especially 800 hz to 3k) you have to scoop out - OP should listen to dark side of the moon or any Def leppard for an example of how to accomplish this

The guitars and the mess of echo are sucking up all the oxygen for the space the drums should be occupying

He needs to

1. Take all the verb, echo, and fx off
2. Start from scratch with the drum sound
3. cut a gargantuan amount of midrange from all the guitars bass keys etc cumulatively,
4. making surgical cuts in just about everything, and then re-jigger the echo now that he has space
Click to expand...
So here in lies the problem....

I tracked it in stereo.... With delay and reverb ..

So I might be pregnant....

I run Reaper and except for the voice/radio calls, which the reverb/delay was added in software, everything else was committed during recording...

So yup, might be screwed

The Drums and bass were done with a DigiTech Trio pedal. Those output the drums and bass into 1 mono track. I used the count in feature and recorded just the drums, then just the bass and lines it up for proper timing.

Thank you for all the input. I will try to see if I can salvage it, but it isn't looking great.
 


Found an SPL De-Verb Plugin... installed on the guitars... it seems to have killed some reverb, but the delay is still there... but it is intended, bumped the drums and worked the faders on everything else to try to keep it off the red...

I'm starting to thing 30 years of working on and around military aircraft didn't do my hearing much good
 
Reverend Bow said:


Found an SPL De-Verb Plugin... installed on the guitars... it seems to have killed some reverb, but the delay is still there... but it is intended, bumped the drums and worked the faders on everything else to try to keep it off the red...

I'm starting to thing 30 years of working on and around military aircraft didn't do my hearing much good
Click to expand...



It's not that the verb and delay is terrible sounding or anything, it's that it's attached to so much midrange and there's only so much room in there with all the echoes - I get the intended effect and it does sound good in a vacuum. It's just the difference between an "in the room" tone and an "in the mix" tone

Sounds better with the drums beefier anyhow, they might be a hair too much now but that's much better than before

I don't think your hearing is fried, it's just a difficult style of musical idea to record and make sound good
 
Reverend Bow said:
So here in lies the problem....

I tracked it in stereo.... With delay and reverb ..

So I might be pregnant....

I run Reaper and except for the voice/radio calls, which the reverb/delay was added in software, everything else was committed during recording...

So yup, might be screwed

The Drums and bass were done with a DigiTech Trio pedal. Those output the drums and bass into 1 mono track. I used the count in feature and recorded just the drums, then just the bass and lines it up for proper timing.

Thank you for all the input. I will try to see if I can salvage it, but it isn't looking great.
Click to expand...
Retracking isn’t the end of the world. I’m tracking my buddy’s guitars right now for him and had him redo them because I knew he could do better. Just how it goes sometimes.

The world of recording gets everyone, look at this lol

 
When you do get to adding wet effects in Reaper, playing with the eq and pre-delay will help with clarity. You can make a separate reverb only bus and eq with lp / hp filters to start with. Valhalla vintage verb is good if you don't have it.
 
Often subconsciously, people get their cues on clarity and quality from what the drums sound like. You can have crazily ambient guitars if the drums sound anchored. There’s a reason for the old joke: “There’s three parts to a song: The kick drum. The snare drum. And the rest of the song.
 
Brandonrz said:
Retracking isn’t the end of the world. I’m tracking my buddy’s guitars right now for him and had him redo them because I knew he could do better. Just how it goes sometimes.

The world of recording gets everyone, look at this lol

Click to expand...

Dude, I suck..... There is no way I can pull off what I played in that one take... I have no idea what I played 😂
 
DanTravis62 said:
It's not that the verb and delay is terrible sounding or anything, it's that it's attached to so much midrange and there's only so much room in there with all the echoes - I get the intended effect and it does sound good in a vacuum. It's just the difference between an "in the room" tone and an "in the mix" tone

Sounds better with the drums beefier anyhow, they might be a hair too much now but that's much better than before

I don't think your hearing is fried, it's just a difficult style of musical idea to record and make sound good
Click to expand...
Thanks, I will attack the guitars and try to weed out the mid range a bit.

Yes, I was going to spacey, ambient weirdness, now I guess I have to learn how to mix it...

This whole thing spawned out of my playing with backing takes and decided if I am going to be playing away for hours, I should have something to show for it. This was the first track I did, so also my first adventure into mixing an audio clusterfook. Hindsight being what it is, I should have did the delay/reverb in the daw and not with the pedals while tracking.

I appreciate all you gents inputs, hope to learn something
 
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Reverend Bow said:
Thanks, I will attack the guitars and try to weed out the mid range a bit.

Yes, I was going to spacey, ambient weirdness, now I guess I have to learn how to mix it...

This whole thing spawned out of my playing with backing takes and decided if I am going to be playing away for hours, I should have something to show for it. This was the first track I did, so also my first adventure into mixing an audio clusterfook. Hindsight being what it is, I should have did the delay/reverb in the daw and not with the pedals while tracking.

I appreciate all you gents inputs, hope to learn something
Click to expand...

Yeah if you're recording it, you always do the time based effects afterwards so you have control over them, but no changing that now obviously.

Everything is a learning experience with recording, but it could be a lot worse as far as ambient style recordings
 
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