What do you sound like on Nu-ILX?

MIXING IS SO F-ING HARD!!!

trying to mix my "little dog" track for the ilx covers loutallica project

it's like, on one hand, stuff like protools has made it super easy to just get stuff down to the point where ppl are like "yes that is a song" but it's that extra level of knowledge about compressors and EQ and stuff that really makes a good mix a good mix is what's missing! really irritating because i can hear in my head how it *should* be but i can't make it like that

in my darkest moments i'm honestly considering mixing this stupid joke metallica song at a professional studio haha

lol

i'm a lot more confident in my mixing than i was a year ago, but still not totally happy with any of my solo in-the-box mixes. doing a thing now where i'm sending stems (mostly groups of synths and vocals) to an engineer for him to bounce down to tape, then i combine those with my original bass & drum stems for a final mix. it has a nice analog summing effect and i still get to obsess over the final balance of everything.

seems like you already know what to do, m@tt. you don't want to blow this by not taking it to a pro studio.
i give so little thought to mixing. i have no idea what i'm doing.

actually i'm not going to stress that much about the mix because i know howie weinberg at masterdisk is gonna fix a lot of this in mastering

sending mine to bob clearmountain. he owes me a favor, you know.

really irritating because i can hear in my head how it *should* be but i can't make it like that

Yes, this is the worst feeling. I was explaining to the mixing engineer just the other day how I hate it when I know a section of a song needs to sound "exciting," I know that it doesn't sound "exciting" yet, but I don't know how to get it there.

But it's always interesting how when you do get it there it was often via a totally different route than you had first thought -- e.g., sometimes you make the vocal sound more powerful by turning something *else* up.

I really feel like DJing is making me better at mixing. When I mix my tracks with similar music, I can pretty quickly tell when there's a problem that needs to be addressed and I have a good idea of what needs fixing, way more intuitively than if I just compare it to a guide track.

this girl I'm producing got song of the day on popjustice yesterday.

pretty unmixed track we stuck up to gain a bit of interest.

http://www.popjustice.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5712&Itemid=243

Mixing is pretty much voodoo. You raise something up other things start to vanish. Pretty much I just go with notch EQing dropping something out trying to bring something in on the track you want to come out some.

The hardest thing to get for me is getting a good drum sound. I can make the guitars sound good and bass etc, but the drums are always kind of limited by where (an untreated garage), the speed (pretty much line 'em up and go) and how we have recorded (pretty much live in the same room quite loud).

Towards the end of October we are going to do a second batch of recordings and I'm going to try some different things. I got a headphone distribution amp and I am going to setup the guitar and bass direct for the base track and cut the drums in the room without a ton of bleed from everything else. Then we are going to go back and overdub on top. The scratch guitar and bass could still be usable, as I have been able to get some decent sounds with a bass preamp and running a line off an attenuator.

Oh yeah and I still need to get my drummer to get a new front bass drum head with a mic port. That solid drum works probably good for jazz in Rudy's living room to get the real sound of the kick, but it about impossible to get the beater sound just with a microphone on the front of the kick drum (especially with a bass amp and a loud tube amp in the same room not minding the PA with the live vocals).

I tried putting a mic on the inside of the kick where the beater was located but that thing was picking up so much from the snare and seemingly everything else, it was a worthless track to use in the mix.

Only posted a few times on IMM, used to spend lots of time I Love Vinyl, but here is the stuff I make.

http://soundcloud.com/markusmidnight

Mixing is pretty much voodoo. You raise something up other things start to vanish. Pretty much I just go with notch EQing dropping something out trying to bring something in on the track you want to come out some.

ime if i find myself in this situation it generally means a problem with the arrangement. what instruments are you having a problem with? how essential can the parts be if they are easily masked by another part?

curious as to what kick drum mic you are using. is the kick being played particularly softly? i don't think i've ever gotten snare bleed in my kick mic...

I wouldn't say masked, but become less present. This is more in fine tuning a mix going for say an instrument texture rather than something being heard at all. Say you boost a snare track a half to one db to try to get to cut just a little bit better, but when that total track is boosted, you loose a bit of texture out of say the attack on a bass guitar or kick drum. It's not a total mask like something moves out of phase, more on a micro level in the whole mix when you have gotten to the point that just raising or lowering your faders or trim on the mixer channels won't get you 'there' and at that point really it is the limitation of the original sound in that particular track. EQ, compression, etc. can work some but at some point, but with each of those choices it is a compromise and ultimately goes back to the inherent weakness in the original sound.

Our drummer has a trad style front kick drumhead that doesn't have the built in port for putting a microphone into the kick, so it is hard to get that more high end thwack of the beater on the inside head. Early on in practices, I tried some tricks to isolate the kick a bit and it really made it worse by putting a blanket over the kick with the mic underneath (which worked pretty good to cut down some high end bleed when micing through the kick port) but with the full face kick drum head, it added this weird low end rumble to the proceedings. It was better to just let it bleed.

What I tried to have another option on getting that beater on the kick sound was putting a second microphone and track on the other head, where the beater is located - but that track turned out to be pretty much worthless to try and mix, as it would get the beater and a crap load of the under snare sound (rattle rattle) on each hit. Yeah you would get the beater better, but the rattle from under the snare was annoying and really couldn't be EQ'ed out with any good results. I ended up not using it at all and quit recording it. I've tried double micing a snare with one on top and one below and it has never panned into anything usable.

yeah the kick thing does sound pretty challenging. i'm assuming removing the front head entirely is not possible?

(best kick sound i ever got was from one with no front head)

surprised about the snare thing - i love top/bottom snare micing, wouldn't do it any other way now. though there was that time i finished a mix and wondered why my snare sound was so thin, not realising til later that i hadn't flipped the phase on one of the channels..

Hiya ILX, long time no speak. I've recently come out from the depths of wherever it is that I hide and brought out some new music stuff.

http://lynskey.bandcamp.com/album/idea-prime

If you're a last.fm person it's on there as well

http://www.last.fm/music/Lynskey/Idea+Prime

― Lynskey, Saturday, July 23, 2011 5:43 AM Bookmark

Oh man, I missed this and I was a fan of Lynskey's old electronic stuff. I still listen to one of his track's not infrequently. Lynskey, if you don't mind a brutally honest comment, your production is fucking awesome and the vocals on this do not really stand up to it.

wow idea prime is amazing. Production is amazing. Don't mind the vocals. It has a kind of ash channeled through albini kind of thing going on

Thanks! I've alway got tremendous problems doing vocals, it was ok back when I was doing the electronic stuff as I could drown it all in effects, I couldn't really hide with these ones. I'm a complete wimp in that I'll only record vocals if the house is empty, there's no-one in next door and no-one stood at the bus stop over the road. So things tend to be a bit rushed. Plus these needed to be belted out / screamed in a lot of places and I feel like an idiot doing that sort of thing in an empty house.

^^^ I have this same problem - I can manage ranty style vocals, and more-or-less spoken singing, but anything more and I can only do it if there isn't anyone around for half a mile.

perhaps not a genre of interest around here, but here's a hip hop recording we're giving away now- http://poem-cees.bandcamp.com/album/everything-youve-always-wanted

http://soundcloud.com/reverenddollars/you-dont-come-home-128

It's on, motherfuckers.

perhaps not a genre of interest around here, but here's a hip hop recording we're giving away now- http://poem-cees.bandcamp.com/album/everything-youve-always-wanted

nice. beats are fire.

It's on, motherfuckers.

nice. beats are fire

two songs i recorded with my former bandmates. kind of minimal midtempo garage rock?
http://scarequotes.bandcamp.com/album/place-and-time-mind

wanted to do a remix of a Lana Del Rey track but I couldn't find an acapella so I knocked out a cover today. Pretty pointless. http://www.mediafire.com/?gg6zrxego1sko7u

I got a second mix of my current band's epic 'Wings of Madness' up. Kind of sounds like a stoner rock pere ubu I think.

I went ahead and posted a couple of songwriting demos up for two songs I wrote recently 'The Plan' & 'Gravelbed'.

http://soundcloud.com/earlnash

Ha, just found out that this is still online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgkjYF-4arw&feature=related

Deconstruction of A-Ha by a sort of ambient/post-rock/improv group I played with in Windsor

Guess it's not all that nu.

http://bloodletters.tumblr.com/post/11443793967/song-the-best-cuts-salut-to-art-brut-proving

drum-machine + silly faux-british accent = ???

Guys - here's a promo mix for my upcoming record. Lots of North African stuff, etc. Enjoy!http://soundcloud.com/professorjorge/hassan-promo-mix

http://soundcloud.com/doglatin/asphyxiated-dub
http://soundcloud.com/doglatin/drowning-dub
http://soundcloud.com/doglatin/pukestep

I like 'Asphyxiated Dub' - ambient, but without the usual ambient problem of being too slow.

That's because it's just a sped up version of Drowning Dub. Lots of sub-sub-sub bass sounds I couldn't hear properly on my speakers, so I pitched the whole thing up and got a new track. Thanks mate.

http://bloodletters.tumblr.com/post/11626859187/cover-the-soft-boys-tonight-bloodletters <— for some reason Robyn Hitchcock songs always bring out the best in me?

So I made this on this setup (i.e. keyboard only; the laptop was only used for recording, looping, editing, and mixing).

cheeky Justin Timberlake deep house ish remix done in the depths of flu fever yesterday

http://www.mediafire.com/?0tslnn0msd59ozf

Here's a more complete version of a Reason track I posted earlier : http://soundcloud.com/doglatin/hertford-loop
And here's the first half-listenable thing so far from my new band (just a bit of a jam so far, working out the parts: http://soundcloud.com/doglatin/disco-zhivago-zinc-globular

playing some beats in a room that's embarassingly well-lit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeUJ1J1lYkU

got some new software and made this thing. it's not really done but my productivity has been at negative 50 for the last month or so i doubt anything will ever get done. at this point successfully brushing teeth and ironing pants in the same night is like a legendary achievement for me.

oh, maybe it's this link instead? i never use soundcloud and oh mylanta

nm, deleted it, fucking terrible

I released an EP last month while ILX was down:
http://songs.stevegoldbergmusic.com/album/the-flood

More recently I downloaded a bunch of soft synths and made this song:
http://stevegoldbergmusic.com/media/FirstWorldProblems2.mp3

Flakey Genes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED35go-0U1E

I've been using a bit more of my old analog gear, jamming tracks, and dirtying up by recording to tape recently.

Made this track just before Christmas which sounds a little bit Drexciyan, mixed with a riff that after finishing the track I realised sounds like Mamma Mia :D

http://soundcloud.com/glocknspiel/matty-balaam-booziya

Wrote and recorded a song on ukelele through my laptop speaker in an afternoon. It's very silly, but I kind of like it.

http://soundcloud.com/doglatin/let-me-play-ukelele

we covered The Gift and replaced the story with a tale of kids in yorkshire with bananas.

http://housevshomerecords.bandcamp.com/track/the-gift

http://soundcloud.com/doglatin/jukeska

Trying to make crazy footwork music out of vintage ska samples. Not sure I've got the hang of it yet.

started doing a bit of djing at parties again and making these long lindstromy transition tracks with only analog synth samples and live desk/controller automation. Would love to invest in better gear so I could do full sets of it but currently having to go through 5 or 6 times to get it right.

http://www.mediafire.com/?9m7j6b5v6o6wr13

I've spent a year writing techno and house music with my boy, and this is our first finished song. It samples DJ Screw.

Plum in the Golden Vase

owen- i like your space track. have you made other stuff?

that track is great!
Yeah I've got loads more. When I finish off a few other projects I might stick them up as a packaged download somewhere.