hm.. well-- i'll give a go at pounding the bass tomorrow, and see if i can get it to smooth the whole shindig out. i think with a more consistent bass tone-- mebbe pulling the drums up'll be a little easier- i kept pulling bass down to get it all even-- and the kick'd bury the bass tone, so i'd pull it back up, and it got ratty sounding.. welp.. there be a solution to that.. much like the vocals.

it actually doesn't offend my ears as much as i thought it would, as long as it ain't huffing, but that's easy enough. alright.. tomorrow.. squash-o-rametry.

gads.. i'm not sure i could ever use the setting on any audio device labeled 'NUKE'. that's not quite how i roll usually.. .but this's actually been a blast. my head hurts... but mebbe old dogs can pick up a new trick or two now and again. ;D

i might need to swap out to a darker compressor too-- last thing i need is more of that godawful active 'clack'.. and the 1176 isn't helping. might go back to the 3127 or blockfish.

more balancing on the vocals tomorrow too.. freakin' tweaky ass balance with 4 vocal tracks-- 3 of which are not so in tune. man- i'd rather mix 4 guitarists, 2 drummers, and 3 bassists with 2 vocalists screaming their heads off than an out of tune trio- its much easier! filling space with less information is much harder than using information that EXISTS.. not gets manufactured by eq..

It's the "all buttons in" trick on the 1176. There's probably a mode for this on your 1176 plug. Re: hardware, the Distressor actually says "NUKE" on the front panel.



Filthy OTT compression; an obvious effect. Useful for crushing drum room mics a la When The Levee Breaks, smashing a rawk vocal and not really much else unless you're doing something really left-field.

http://www.mediafire.com/?js6fr7qhk9xtq2g

alright. i think it's about hit it's stride.

vox verb is vexing me a bit.. but by and large, i think it's in decent shape. i tried to buss down drums. no dice. computer blew up. i compressed the shit out of the kick and bass. much less cumbersome to deal with! now i see why people abuse these things. vocal and guit verbs changed. room got more comp. snare got more comp and slightly different room verb. eq on guitar and bass and kick changed to make holes. i think she's hangin alright at this juncture.

any thoughts.. i know it's tedious listening.. trust me.. i'm done with this song! thanks!

A trick (in Reaper) for maximising processing on minimal hardware that i have been making much more use of lately: select the tracks you want to mess with(that already have fx on them that you want to retain but add more to), right click on the tracks, select "render tracks> render tracks down to stem tracks (and mute originals)" or the "mono tracks" version of the same if the track/fx are not stereo-based.

That way the originals are not fucked with, and it is a quick easy way to take a load off the CPU/RAM, while still allowing the piling up of VSTs on the tracks when needed. It is a little less direct than having a computer that you can just chuck fx at, but i have found it pretty useful just the same.




Anyhow, this last mix sounds fine, but the vocal could probably come up more again in relation to the geetars/drums. In fact, the drums could maybe go back a little in relation to the guitars also. Not a lot, just a little. The bass does seem a little more level now.

As an aside, have you ever experimented with the Flux Bittersweet plugin that snaxo has mentioned a few times? Its business is that of an adjustable compressor of sorts, whose porpoise is to accent or lessen the transients in a percussive element. Set to the "Bitter" side, it has an interesting effect on snare ring, for instance, bringing it out a bit, without screwing with some of the other things that a straight up compressor smash might tend to. Might be something to try out on that snare there, which has a decent enough sound IMO for rock, but maybe a little bit on the dry side.

welp.. the bass OUGHTA be more level.. i crammed the bejeebus out of it ain't a rough edge anywhere-- i pert near polished that thing into a teflon bb with as much compression as i hit it with... i think 12db worth of makeup gain to get it audible again..

the levels are still up for the BAND to figure out, cause i'm just putting it straight for rough mix and their consideration-- this is by no means final by any stretch. band hasn't even put their ears to the masters in any form but the pretty untouched raw tracks with minimal eq and comping-- we'll do all that biz later... i'm just being a stickler to get it so they're happy as a starting place. i am but a microphone jock.. not a producer or at least not usually. we'll see how it all pans out!

i'll have to use the render tracks trick-- i KNOW i'm gonna need headroom, and i even threw more ram in my machine .. not knowing that xp won't give you any of it.. so i paid for 2 gigs, and i still net 2.99gb, where i had 2 1/2 before. :/ ah well.. it helped some.

i do remember the bittersweet plugin-- i even have it loaded in my fx-- i've just never tried it yet. THAT is goin on my crotch mic, for sure. i use an SSL comp to grab some bright ring-- but that freakin thing eats SO much cpu... ouch. if bittersweet'll do the same sorta thing, which it sounds like it does... i'm totally on board. i hear what you're saying about the snare.. i am NOT a big fan. the drum just has a shitey sound, and he actually requested this 'loose fizz' sound... not a fan.. but it's not my band-- and i'm trying to deliver on a request. you know how that goes... but i'm still running that turkey through bittersweet hell or high water.. mebbe we can find a happy place for both of us .

any take on the vocal sound? is the small amount of 'verb just sounding too ghetto fabulous? thanks chris!

I am a firm believer on heavy reverb on pop vocals.

An example, which (in my opinion anyhow, you may disagree) has some parallels to the style of sounds that you have here to deal with, might be something like this:






That is not a mix that sounds in passing like it has as much verb on it as it does. The shit has basically just become glue in the context.



As an aside, the rest of these separate tracks on this tune make one of the finest cases i can think of for the avoidance of the excessive cutting and pasting of bits to make a rock song in the cut&paste fashion of the modern recording industry.

I am not even the biggest Stones fan that ever was, but that is a well constructed and executed rock song right there. And a lot of the individual bits, taken individually, are quite a bit, er.. loose? Filthy? Whatever. The groove is locked in a million percent, even though i don't think it is likely to be falling on the quantization grid if you know what i mean.

Also note, in that mix, where the kick has gone. Almost missing really, no punch to it, just a bit of a thwap. Most of it is bass guitar. Guitars way back too, once the main vocal starts. Snare is right up in the fucking grille though. Second only to the vocal.

That is how i look at/listen to this sort of stuff anyhow.

I would actually be curious to see how everybody else heard it.

I should add, that for my own (already admittedly suspect) tastes, the only issue i would have with reverb on vocals, would be if, i felt that the reverb didn't sound like a real space.

Thus i hate those octave-hypey ones.

Actually i hate most reverbs i have heard. Only a small few of them, and only those on a small few of their settings, have sounds that i consider "believable". Believable in this case, only meaning that for whatever reason, that my own brain reacts to the sound in the fashion that it would respond to a sound in a real space, that could by some stretch of the imagination have been a space in which the band making the sounds, could have actually played in.

I spend a lot of time cycling through reverbs sometimes, trying to find one that doesn't sound ridiculous to me.

hee.. that's why i put a negligible amount of very small room verb on the vox- i was trying to give it a little space in the mix. i ain't a fan most times, so i tried to go judicious- and didn't think it were as judicious on the cans upon a second listen- but i used room verb on the crotch of the drum in parallel with REAL room reverb in the form of an omni on the drums too to TRY to de-dryify a non-super resonant room... and a flat sounding kit.. so i figgered- what the hey.

so you haven't answered the question chris! are you hatin' on my vocal verb?. suspect tastes or not, i'm still axin'.

I was holding off before i listened with both sets of headphones.

Now that i have done so, I would probably go bigger than you did even, with the vocalverb.

Like, what you have sounds like eight foot ceilings in a 10x12 room. I might aim for a room twice as big. Like 15-20 foot ceilings and 20x30ish.

NOW. It is worth noting that the way i would do it, wouldn't work as well perhaps with the drum sound, without adjusting verb on them too. What you have now, sounds to me like a band in a small club/bar. That is a function of all of those short verbs playing together, and the dryish snare. To go bigger with the vocals, would probably mean needing to go bigger on the drums too.

You might not like the results of that. I personally like quite a bit, the big room sounds that pop up on older rock records(aforementioned Gimme Shelter, a decent point of reference for what i mean by that). But they don't necessarily sound proper natural. They are more like nature, amplified. Or something.

now THATS an answer i can wrap my head round. yeah-- like i said-- really putting a dry presentation out so the band can hear whats more-or-less goin on before getting into big verby-ness- which i'm not sure they're gonna want- but we'll see. some of the other stuff we did could definitely use that treatment, for sure. right now we're at a place of 'exile' rather than 'let it bleed' -- filthy dirty.. and nothin' to hide the track marks i know they're also looking at a billy childish sorta vibe-- despite the obvious lack of the trappings of super trashy garagey-ness. suffice to say.. lots of different ideas.. not all unified.

i DO wonder where we'll go with this thing. the songs are pretty disparate stylistically (there's 6 more.)-- and these folks need to decide WHICH direction they're heading in to really make it work as a document-- but that's alright. lotsa mix practice to be had pour moi.

This is sounding pretty good where it is. I like the kick/snare/bass where they are, and the relationship of the guitars against the bass.

I do also concur re: Chris's statement about drum/vocal 'verb; I think I'd said as much myself as a possible direction to go in. Not superoverhyped, but definitely, as Chris put it, "amplified", like the band through the PA at a club (and a big enough club to mic more than the kick).

Chris is spot on re: Gimme Shelter. Looks broke/don't fix/not the point/would kill it. Not all rawk needs to be tight or shiny. Some works as such, some doesn't.

One thing that might just be my overanalyzing here is that the shinier drums and lead vocal make the bass and guitars sound loose/nastier, but in an appealing way. Call it contrast? They're sorta skronking and lurching along, and can do pretty much whatever as long as the drums and lead vocal aren't totally out to lunch in a way that diminishes the song.

On a tangent:

My question is this: If you had just recorded Gimme Shelter, and you had those tracks to work with, would you make the choices that they did?

I don't know if i would. I would like to learn to(and am certainly trying!) but i don't know if i would leave stuff like that shouted "YEAH!" from the cheering section when the female vocal starts to get really out there and breaking up in the middle.

And i don't know if i would be able to bury the kick like that. Or leave that harmonica(?) that fucking loud all up in the mix.

I mean, in retrospect, it is obvious that the correct choices were made. But, without retrospect to lean on, pretending that you had never heard this song a zillion times on the radio, would you mix it that way?

It is very interesting to me.

It's an odd beast. It's not an expander or gate, and it doesn't act like a slow-attack compressor. It's sorta its own thing. I use it on drums quite a bit; where it goes usually depends on what I'm doing to the tracks, but on the master drum bus as an insert before the send to the parallel compressor is as good a guess as any. Also good for software electrodrums (the attack is never right on these) and pulsing synths against dirty guitars. A little goes a long way; I usually have it on the Bitter and Center settings, with the dial at about 20%. It's also not very CPU-heavy, either.

What are you using for the SSL compressor model? I've found myself liking Cytomic's The Glue, which isn't quite a straight-up model as an idealized SSL 4k-series master bus compressor, with handy sidechain and parallel functions that I think help clean/clear it up a bit, at the expense of authenticity.

If I did it, it would probably come out sounding like Dark Side Of The Moon (or a cheap attempt at it as I am emphatically not Alan Fucking Parsons) and I think the world would be a worse place for it. I'd probably try and balance/even it out more than it needs to be. More Charlie Watts, less Bill Wyman.

And I fucking goddamn love that song. And no one would mix a record that sounds like that anymore and bury the kit like that. Those tom fills would be up with the snare in yo' grille.

I put it on to make sure I'm talking sense, and I probably might have kept that backup vocal like that. And pushed Mick more forward. I probably would have done it "right", I admit.

A point Chris brought up where I think the modern aesthetic fails: no need to line it up because the groove is already there. It's fine and you will ruin it. If you tried to make this record now, someone of their stature, some poor studio intern would wind up spending a month chopping up Charlie/Bill/Keef and tuning Mick before it got sent to, I don't know, Chris Lord-Alge or someone who will never hear the original tracks anyhow. Decidedly not idiomatically appropriate. And the world would be a worse place for it.

hm.. it IS an interesting question. i think what we're probably missing from here in regards to answering it is probably a listening history of jammin' to old R&B of the 40's and 50's! THAT stuff was mixed in ways ( if mixed AT ALL!) we'd probably never get. and kick drums were probably a luxury, and snares just CUT through single ribbons in a room-type of recordings!

not to say i know... but i KNOW that i make crazy different decisions based on how my wierd ears've heard music i like-- so i'm sure it was probably more of the same. not to diminish the absolute genius of something like gimme shelter.. but bob ross happy accident? mebbe at least partially, huh? at least one made of a musical history we can't really even get our minds around from here is TOTALLY possible.

fuck, i love this recording crap. it's social theory wrapped around musical decisionmaking in a way.. WE fucking decide what is important and how to filter history!

oh-- meanwhile, eric-- it's the listen mic compressor. apparently, it was the one in SSL's talkback mics which made all those phil collins drum sounds. hugh padgham... it's free! http://www.solid-state-logic.com/music/LMC-1/ i know you have a manlier computer than my laptop.. so run that thing. i LOVE it on snare/crotch mic 'cause it's a killer on toms and drum resonance. not dissimilar from an 1176 entirely-- but quirky and ringier. try it out! it sounds kinda like the idea of bittersweet on bitter.

I used to use it a bunch, but the Mac version isn't supported anymore. Won't run on an Intel Mac. Granted, I suppose I could try and make it work... or try and get around it with a VST wrapper. I wonder how it would sound as a guitar distortion?

good question! i don't think i've ever turned it up high enough to get cracklin'... usually that sound comes from an old intel single core arcing in my particular case... but i dunno how well it'd translate 'to tape'..

it sounds like bittersweet might do something similar anyhow- i'll give it a go tomorrow night on snare and report back. mebbe i'll dime the fucker and see what happens.. i DO have an extra half gig of ram now...