After having DP7 since early 2010 I have just really got myself into my first real mix. Wife and Father in Law doing some tunes I had bought from different MIDI houses and will be used to give to family. He is an old hand (84 yrs. old) who has sang on radio, stages and about every club of notoriety in the 50's & 60's. My wife's been singing on stages since she was 13.Armageddon wrote:That's why I usually try to make sure the audio files themselves are recorded (and bear in mind, in my case, I currently just do it all inside the machine through VIs routing directly into DP) as close to 0 dB as possible, then normalized. Obviously, most of you swear by the Trim plug, but I'd rather just have a printed audio file that tops out at 0 dB. For a bona fide plug-in junkie, nine times out of ten, I prefer to just get away with some low cutting (80 Hz for everything that doesn't need any low end) via a two-band ParaEQ, then, see if I can get something to mix right just by getting the volume where I want it. If it's still buried, or if it's not standing out where I think it should be, I'll resort to a compressor. My old method of mixing was just to slap plug-ins on everything, which meant that everything was always either compressed or EQ'd before it even hit the mastering stage. Obviously, that's not solving problems, especially mixing problems.Dan Worley wrote:One thing to consider not limiting your choices about is which device(s) or plug-in(s) to use to push the mix's levels up, before the final comp and limiter. (This is assuming there's some room to push anything.)
It doesn't have to be the gain of a perfectly clean Trim plug, or the limiter's threshold or the mastering comp's make-up gain. It can be whatever you like the sound of when you run the signal through it and increase the gain. Something with color and character that might be lacking in the mix, for whatever reason. Or something that adds to the overall tonal aesthetic of the entire album that the mix engineers just couldn't wrap their minds around when doing the individual mixes. Just something that sounds better or different or, you know... good. It can be 12 different things, as far as that goes. Okay, I'm exaggerating to make the point.
In mastering, going from level-A of a mix to level-B before the final comp and limiter can be quite an adventure in sound.
I have some really great takes to work with and decent VI's through NI & Kontakt. After really depressing that I just couldn't get what I was hearing, it hit me and I went in and stripped every plug-in off and started with just getting good levels in a mix. My lesson I learned was that things that may sound exciting through decent monitors don't always translate to a good mix. I wasn't that my monitors lied to me, more that my car speakers made me listen with an open mind.
