[LAU] [OT] Help with mixing and mastering?

James Stone jamesmstone at gmail.com
Sat May 9 17:48:29 EDT 2009


> Well, OK, I'm starting to get a picture in my mind. And not a very
> good one, but at least it's a picture and place to start, so let's
> start... :-)
> 
> In general there are two ways I approach getting a new piece of music
> on disk - record it live and then work on the pieces or start from
> scratch and build it up track by track. Assuming that I correctly
> understand that you are part of a band and you're new to this I'd
> suggest the former and building from there. However that probably
> comes a bit later.
> 

That sounds good. I have made some experiments with recording
live with rather dismal results. The problem I get in the
practice room is that the drums drown everything else out. We
managed to get a live recording from one of our gigs from the
desk, but that was pre-mixed so I guess its not possible to do
too much with that? Some of the recordings are on our myspace
page:

http://myspace.com/kittencakeband

> I'm now going to snip ALL the interesting but possibly distracting
> stuff in the middle and focus on the ONE thing I'd suggest you do.
> 
> <SNIP>
> 
> >
> > One thing I was considering, if you are amenable, is to post both
> > songs in their raw (ardour) form - the first (professional-ish) one
> > was done in protools, but I have imported individual audio tracks into
> > ardour and have got pretty much the same sequence as far as I can
> > tell. The second has all the tracking problems I mentioned - bass
> > guitar for example, which was recorded by micing the amp in the
> > low-budget version has some boom where it hits the resonant frequency
> > of one of the nearby toms! Drums (although recorded with 2 mics only
> > has one track as the mixer/PA had no pan function!) I would really
> > appreciate it if you could listen to the raw form and then say how you
> > would approach them (could repost the mixed versions if you have the
> > time?) I would find this really educational, but I realise it is
> > asking quite a lot, so I am happy either way.
> >
> > James
> >
> 
> For me anyway I don't think this would be productive, at least not
> yet. If your problems are primarily tracking, (or at least initially
> tracking) which they sound like they are right now, then why mess with
> a whole mix? Far too complicated.

Fair enough..

> 
> What I would do is, for the purpose of discussion, focus on getting
> one single good track on disk. Sorry, but I don't remember what you
> said you play. (Or if you even play! I'm old an hardly remember dinner
> last night.) None the less, let's say you played one of the guitars on
> the studio production. I'd suggest we concentrate on duplicating that
> sound as best we can. We don't need the PA at all, assuming you are
> playing through some sort of amp. If you simply listened to the studio
> mix and played your guitar along with it, recording it into Ardour,
> then we'd get an initial indication of how the room, guitar, guitar
> amp, mics, preamps, A/D and Ardour are working for you and what you're
> able to do so far. We could then work on ideas for improving it.

I play bass, and for the studio recording, the bass was DI'd
straight in, so I wouldn't think there would be too many problems
reproducing that (aside from the fact I don't own a DI box yet!).
I can certainly work on getting a good guitar sound though -
although I'm not 100% sure how I would tell if I got one.

By the way, the mix I made of the low-budget recording (no
effects, no lead guitar yet) is here:

http://drop.io/pretty_monster

So you can maybe get an idea what the tracking was like? This was
really a quick take (30 mins max) to see if this method worked at
all, and I am pretty happy, although nobody liked their
performances, and the click from ardour was not loud enough
through the laptop soundcard to be used to play the drums to..

I can post one of the individual tracks from that if you want.

> As I reread your email, I'm now confused as to whether you are using a
> mic preamp of some type or are using the PA itself as the mic preamp
> and driving Ardour from that. If that's the case I think you're going
> to have a very hard time getting the results you are looking for and
> might want to consider even an inexpensive stereo USB preamp. If you
> need to go that way then make sure you check out Linux compatibility
> carefully as so little stuff really works under Alsa. But, to be
> clear, if you are using your PA then post a single track of the guitar
> playing the same part as something in the studio mix and we'll go from
> there.

Yes, I was using the PA to mix it. I do have a mic preamp but was
not using it for the last recording.. I was just wondering what
is the best approach of the two (I could only use one mic if I go
down the mic preamp route) and whether I can safely unplug the PA
speakers when recording from the PA mixer.

> And no, you don't absolutely need to buy a hardware mixer to make good
> mixes. Ardour has more than enough capability in that area. But you
> can't make a good mix if you can't get good sound on the individual
> tracks.
> 
> If you're interested in doing this then drop a note back. I understand
> it might take a bit of time to get to it.
>

Thanks for all your help!

James



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