I happpily burned a CD with all the tracks I mastered and brought it to work to listen to it on a truly crappy pair of headphones and multimedia speakers – and I said “Yeech!”
After doing a lot of head scratching, I realized some things.
For instance, when I was mixing all the tracks, the one I didn’t touch at all was the song called 120 Ways, which I mixed and mixed and mixed to death, as chronicled here in so much detail. When I played it here, it sounded like mud, and my vocals were way off the distance, way too much reverb……….
It took me some time to figure out why. I was using a slightly modified Ozone preset, and the damn thing has reverb as part of the setup!!!!! Why, oh why didn’t I realize this before? That’s the last thing I want on an entire mix, since I do that all on the individual tracks.
As I continued to listen to the album, things weren’t all this bad, and I started making notes to help me remember what was good and bad. I can’t stress this enough (and I am saying it here so I remember): keep detailed notes on the mixes, what you have done and what you hear. No one can keep this all straight throughout the course of an album, and that’s what I believe you really need to do: listen to the whole thing, many times, to get the feel for the whole record, including the song order. I got pretty close on the song order first time round, but not quite there.
Going back to 120 ways, last night I worked on it some more, which, trust me, after all the work I have already done on it, I was loathe to do. I am not a perfectionist, but this just needs help, and I guess that is what I get for working on mixing so much, at least hopefully, my ears and skills have improved.
One thing I did that is still not right, was reducing the levels on the tracks. I know this from examining the wav file after I dumped it from the mix. Its very strange, the level is just too hot, even though it never peaks the meters in the mix. I mean, its even hotter than a commercially made song, and so that by default means its gonna distort.
When I listened to it at work, at least part of the problem finally dawned on me, or least I think so. This song features some jacked up vibraphone like sounds, and I have applied a ton of effects on them. They sound just great by themselves, but when combined with all the other tracks, the sound gets all muddy. So the next step at home is to try and keep the tones I like but do apply some EQ to keep them from stepping on everything else. Certainly, when the vibes drop out the whole tonal spectrum gets clearer, so I really have to do something with them.
I already worked on the vocals, and changed the processing quite a bit. I have a low voice and very midrangey, so I played a lot with HF exciters and other EQ enhancements to see if I could overcome the difficulties. As I have read, the best practice is to cut rather than boost frequencies, since as we all know, louder always sounds better.
I had just enough time to look at and dump a couple of more songs. I went thru some brain spasm the other night with my track routings in Sonar – let me just say one thing: ALWAYS route the outputs of the tracks to the sound card, not to one of the busses, even if you using the busses, cause the sound, at least on my system, just goes down the drain otherwise.
Actually, I never even thought about this before last weekend, when I was looking at the stereo wav outputs of some tracks. I saw on a couple of tracks that one side would be noticeably louder than the other, I mean from looking at it. The audio difference wasn’t that much, but it bothered me. I spent some, lets say wasted some time dumping split mono tracks (bye-bye my cool panning!) and doing various other tricks to get it right, but no dice. Me gonna leave it like that, I am the only person in the world who would know if the tracks are exactly the same volume on each side.
Of the other tracks I dumped, there is at least one that is really, really close to being a good mix, so I am going to look at this one hard and see what the difference might be.
I should also mention that I am listening to the un-mastered tracks here, unlike last week when I just dumped them and started mastering. MISTAKE! The tip that I read in Computer Music is correct: listen to all the tracks un-mastered first, since you can’t fix it in the mix, eh? The things you learn……
In short, I have more work to do, but I feel I am getting closer. I am rereading the sections in the Dance Music Manual about mixing and mastering – the principles of mixing are the same for everything, so its good stuff.
Also – I must send a big shout-out to my man Jay at Lost Studios NYC for the endless tech advice and encouragement – really, HE ought to be writing this mixing stuff, since he actually knows how to do it!