Ah, found a better link to this with a video now:

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.littlela…"]Little Labs[/]="http://www.littlela…"]Little Labs[/]

I did a mix a while back and the friken bass was a nightmare to mix.

Chris, could you elaborate a bit? Was it a frequency thing? a phase thing? A volume thing? Artifacts from a cheap instrument, or a performance parameter?

Just curious.

The bass just didn't sit right no matter what I tried. It was the wrong tone for the song and the kick. Both where fighting each other. The kick was terribly wrong as well. Using my method helped but this looks like it would have been the ticket. I've since found a filter plugin in Sequoia that I could have used but hardware like this is more appealing.

Once I got the bass sounding right I ended up replacing the kick and it ended up okay but it was a lot of screwing around.

There's just something so incredibly cool about working with tracks that were recorded great to begin with. Tracks like that seem to fit into a mix effortlessly, a seamless integration with minimal tonal sculpting or dynamic processing...

But, unfortunately, we've also all had to deal with the alternative at one time or another - in working with tracks that were inferior; bad performances, sloppy edits or punches, noisy tracks, tonal nightmares, recorded/printed with over-compression, EQ that makes you shake your head and think to yourself "WTF was this guy thinking?"

It's not that we still don't do our fair share of sculpting, that's what we are there for. But when you get into a myriad of avoidable problems, well, this is what determines the difference between an actual mix session versus a repair session.

But... it's good to know that there are new tools and processes being designed and released to help make those "damage control" sessions a little easier to work with.

fwiw
-d.