View Single Post
Old 11-14-2017, 05:45 PM   #6
RDBOIS
Banned
 
Join Date: Feb 2016
Location: It changes
Posts: 1,425
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by sjs94704 View Post

I am currently mixing on the really crappy ones. Good Idea?
Not a good idea.

Yes your mix must sound good on every type of speakers. But mix with the best, and, preferably always listen to music with the best you got. You have to get your ear habituated to hearing good professional songs with this device, so that when you mix your stuff you will have a reference.

You can't do better than what you got, unless you get lucky, but that will be hard to recreate unless someone with better gear tells you when your mix was good in his/her system. Does that make sense?

From one non-pro with cheap gear to another:

1) Always mix with the best thing you have, that way you can actually hear what you are doing, relatively speaking. If possible mix with the best speakers AND the best headphones (both things you normally listen music with).

2) Try using some visual tool like Voxengo Span: http://www.voxengo.com/group/free-vst-plugin-download/ What you can do is look at the frequency spectrum of your song VS other songs in the same genre, and adjust your to match. Spend a few hours just looking at different songs, just for fun and to get an eye for what pros are doing.

3) Once you have a rendered a mix, take it on a joy ride and listen to it in your car, Ipod earbuds, laptop speaker, etc. Take notes and then come back to the DAW and try modifying the mix to get it to sound better, everywhere. THIS WILL NOT BE EASY! It will taking some trial and error; it may also require actually knowing a bit about the profession/art of mastering...

4)Ask other to listen to your mix with their system. Try to find people that actually have good calibrated monitors. If they tell you that the mix has too much bass, and assuming it's not a question of sonic preference, then you need to figure out how you will approach mixing songs with your bass-bias setup.

5) Alway cover the basics, even if you can't hear them. WHat? Yep, for example, even if you can't hear the very low end, cut it out using a high pass filter. It's better to cut that out then try to randomly get a fat bottom, you know like how rap music gets with subwoofer? Just don't even try to go there; cut your losses and live with them. There shall be no astonishing fat low end in your music productions. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

6) Since we have ElCheap gear and can't get the super sonic pro sounding song, best we focus on writing a very good song. Even to this day I'll listen to a good John Lee Hooker song, which was record with very primitive gear in MONO, with one microphone and plenty of background noise, and I'm thinking: "what a great song with a great tone". I don't think a Lady Gaga song would cut it in that primitive recording and audio sound... Nowadays there are plenty of crappy songs that sound really really good, sonically speaking. It's like a 'shit pill in sugar coating'... Go back to your song on work on it, especially now that you're in a powerful DAW n-multi-track context; you may need to learn how to arrange your songs differently. For example, if you normally play and sing guitar and wrote a song that way, perhaps now is the time to change it up, and rather than add a bass guitar to what you wrote you may want to try only play the small strings on the guitar (something you would never do playing by the camp fire) and then let the bass play to low frequency root notes. See where I'm going with this?

7) Experiment. Sometime a very cheap microphone with a very cheap guitar can sound descent IF the microphone is placed at just the distance and angle (a location nowhere near what the pros are doing). This is because they don't have our cheap gear. Hmmm... Let me tell you that I really struggle with accepting to record a cheap acoustic guitar sound. For some reason I feel like I need to squeeze that lemon really hard to get the last drop of sound that I can. I'm still experimenting - I went from nasty to average -

Anyway, it takes time and effort. I wish it was easier, but getting a descent sound with cheap gear is a real challenge. I learned a while ago to become satisfied with getting an "average" sound, something that will play OK on cheap systems, but will not be so good on good speakers. I don't have good speakers, so I can't aim for anything tangible. Sometimes I luck out and I'm pleased when I listen to my mix in my friends studio.

Have fun. But don't mix with the cheap ear buds.
RDBOIS is offline   Reply With Quote