Hello, all.
I'm currently a student at a recording tech school, and last night as I was waiting to get into a lab, I overheard a lab instructor talking about a mixing technique he's been experimenting with. He was explaining how he will flip the tape so that the song plays in reverse, which pshychoacoustically makes his brain focus on the envelope of the sounds, rather than the transients. Then, he said, once he's got the mix sounding great in reverse, he'll flip the tape again, leaving him with a nice punchy mix.
Obviously, this technique could be very dangerous and I'm sure it's not an easy thing to listen to for hours, but I was just curious if anyone else here has ever tried this technique and if so, what are your thoughts on it.
Comments
It isn't mixing, but a well-respected restoration and mastering
It isn't mixing, but a well-respected restoration and mastering enginer uses reverse processing for his [major-label] releases...
What it comes down to for him is this- in restoration, it is very easy for you to loose your transients if you hit audio too hard with denoising/declipping, etc... This is easy to do when you are trying to clean up the tails of sound where noise will be more noticable...
His solution to get around this is reversing the audio, doing your processing with quick attacks and releases to clean the tails, but preserving the transients which are now at the end of the note. When the processing is done, he turns it around again and he's got a great finished product. It is a bit difficult to do, but once you get the hang of it, you can get some pretty amazing results.
Personally, when it comes to mixing, I don't think I could ever mix in reverse...
--Ben
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