Mixing issue

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 5:48 pm

hello

i'd like to know how you can bring something up in a mix without making it louder.

i have some rock/metal tracks with some electronic sounds in them. when i make them louder they're too prominent in the mix, when i pull them down, they seem to almost disappear.

i know some recordings where they have electronic or other sound really differentiated in the mix without being too loud. i guess it's a frequency thing, but when i play with the frequencies the sounds change too much.

is there any other way to do this?
does anybody remember the "q sound" on, for example, stings "the soul cages". how does that work?

thanks for your replies!

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 7:15 pm

without hearing what you are talking about, the first thing that comes to mind is compression. That shuold help it come through. Reverb is another possibility to let this "sound" smear itself out a little bit. Maybe both, but like I said, without hearing it just a stab in the dark

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 7:41 pm

I'd bet that putting some reverb on it might not do what you want, as you will percieve it as being farther back. If you have any other instruments that are competing with the electronic sound's frequencies, try cutting the other instruments a bit in that frequency and see if it makes a difference. It may be that the electronic bit's are just getting lost with other stuff. Obviously, without hearing it, I'm just throwing ideas around. Good luck.

Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 8:51 pm

Try a little boost arount the 1-4kHz to add some presence to a part... or like my man said cut some of that range out of the offending part. Also try panning it out a touch to give the sound it's own "spot".

Also don't worry how your EQing sounds when the track is solo'd - it only matters in context. So I don't think you should worry too much that you are "changing the sound", you are mixing the song so hopefully that is what they are expecting you to do. But as many wiser and much more experienced engineers than myself have said, your responsibility is to "serve the song", and in that sense I agree that you should be somewhat conservative.

Good luck, have fun, and most importantly - don't monitor loud for too long!

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 10:58 am

panning? pan the offending sounds apart? ooh or even pan dynamically, that'd catch the ear.

I don't suppose you are limiting / compressing your mix too much are you? that'll smear everything together.

If you think it sounds like an eq thing then it might be that, its just tough when you have a lot of sounds in the same register

If the electronic sound is changing volume a bit and you are loosing it on the quiet passages, you need to reduce the dynamic range with compression

A lot of times in engineering it helps to do a lot of small things the right way (eg- good mic, good pre, good singer, good coompression good eq, good de-ess, good verb good level, good fader rides..... = great vocals) maybe you need to do a little of each?

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