Mixing and mastering techniques

[targuit]

I've been hoping to get some response to this topic for a while. Questions regarding mixing and mastering tracks for YouTube and other venues.

My recording setup is rather essential, as in minimal. I record in my living room with an MXL condenser ($69) into my Korg D1200, a now legacy stand-alone digital recorder with its own preamps. Lately I'm recording 6 tracks at 24-bit. I have a pair of inexpensive Roc studio monitors, but I tend to create what I call "headphone mixes", if only for the fact that when people listen to YT videos, you tend to get better fidelity if you use headphones, imo, versus listening off often relatively miserable laptop speakers.

Though my old Korg recorder does have reverbs and limiters and compressors along with delays and the like, I tend to prefer a pretty naked recording with a bit of EQ to take out some of the muddy low end. Too much processing seems to distort the timing of the music and the clarity. My question is about the soundstage determined by panning. Is it acceptable if you are recording three tracks - a lead vocal and two guitar tracks - to pan the guitars hard left and hard right with the vocal in the center? Will that create a proper audio soundstage for YT, whether the listener uses headphones or just the laptop speakers? I sometimes record this situation with the L and R channel pans at 10:00 and 2:00, but that does not always translate to a good virtual soundstage on YT videos.

How do you mix your YT videos if home recorded? And do you trust using headphones to mix or insist on using near field monitors?

Jay

[princeplanet]

Compare your recordings/mixing/mastering to your favourites. Educate your ear (yeah, like you do with Jazz). YT, like all digital encoding compression codecs for upload/download consumption is quite different to, say, CD playback where intersample peaks above theoretical zero are re-constituted before the analog conversion stage, so it's advisable to leave 0.5 bB minimum headroom to compensate for mp3/4 etc where zero really is zero...

But aside from that, treat your mixes the way you do for CD. Hard left and right panning are artistic choices, there are no rules there... well, maybe centre bass and lead vocal, but we all have plenty of jazz records with bizarre panning choices, and Spotify playback (lo-res digital codec) of the same recordings does not affect things in that regard.

I'm a long term pro in the recording game and can tell you it takes a long time to get good, despite the fact you have virtually free tools these days. How you use those tools, no matter how humble, will determine the quality of your recordings. Let me put it this way, I've known as many recording cats that get to be very good at it by "ear" as I've known Jazz players who get there by their ears alone also. A handful either way, to be sure, but it does happen, I believe, because of this parallel - you gotta educate those ears!

[GuyBoden]

Not to knock anyone's knowledge, but I prefer reading advice from dedicated recording sites:
Forum - FORUM INDEX
Recording Techniques

[princeplanet]

Not to knock anyone's knowledge, but I prefer reading advice from dedicated recording sites:
Forum - FORUM INDEX
Recording Techniques

Good for you! Knock yourself out, I'm sure you'll find all the wisdom you need right there...

... er, incase you don't detect a note of sarcasm, look, we laugh down our collective sleeve at these forums (like Gearslutz etc) since they've been overrun by over enthusiastic amateurs who either:

1/ talk WAY too much about stuff that professionals do not consider important

or

2/ talk NO WHERE NEAR ENOUGH about the real important things pertaining to the art, the craft or the profession in regard to recording.

... a bit like this place in regard to playing Jazz ! ....

[GuyBoden]

Good for you! Knock yourself out, I'm sure you'll find all the wisdom you need right there...

... er, incase you don't detect a note of sarcasm, look, we laugh down our collective sleeve at these forums (like Gearslutz etc) since they've been overrun by over enthusiastic amateurs who either:

1/ talk WAY too much about stuff that professionals do not consider important

or

2/ talk NO WHERE NEAR ENOUGH about the real important things pertaining to the art, the craft or the profession in regard to recording.

... a bit like this place in regard to playing Jazz ! ....

Nothing wrong with "enthusiastic amateurs" this Jazzguitar.be forum is a collection of "enthusiastic amateurs".

[princeplanet]

Nothing wrong with "enthusiastic amateurs" this Jazzguitar.be forum is a collection of "enthusiastic amateurs".

Oh I agree, but I did say "over" enthusiastic.... If you don't agree that that kind of enthusiasm can be counter productive, then we'll leave it alone...

Just an observation, but from my side of the glass I see far too many musicians devote a disproportionate amount of (limited) time to home recording at the expense of practicing to be musicians. Each to their own of course, but any student of Jazz can ill afford such unnecessary distractions. If you're devoting more than 20% of your spare time to home recording. I would begin to wonder what's more important to you, home recording or practicing Jazz?

[vintagelove]

Hi, guitars panned L/R with the vocal center is common. There are actually schools of mixing that think things should only be panned L/C/R.

A nice little trick is to pan the reverb to the opposite side. So take the guitar on the left, set up a reverb and return the reverb only to the right (experiment with bringing it in as well). Right guitar, reverb to the left. It is a cool sound.

Have fun!!!

[GuyBoden]

I see far too many musicians devote a disproportionate amount of (limited) time to home recording at the expense of practicing to be musicians.

That's a very insightful observation and very true.

[targuit]

Thanks for the comments so far. I do generally record the signal with some soft compression and as a final effect use a 'studio limiter' setting. But because my living room 'studio' has nice sound overall, I do not usually add any canned reverb or delay because it tends to muddy the recording, imo. Or at least not add usually to the quality.

I need to get a computer DAW, but for the time being the main drawback is lack of decent editing capability. I was wondering if you all do any special treatment for vocals to help them sound ok on a YT platform? Do you like to use delays with vocals? I generally trim the low EQ frequencies a bit for clarity.

I am a bit puzzled by the comments regarding recording yourself for demo or other purposes.

Jay

[vintagelove]

Thanks for the comments so far. I do generally record the signal with some soft compression and as a final effect use a 'studio limiter' setting. But because my living room 'studio' has nice sound overall, I do not usually add any canned reverb or delay because it tends to muddy the recording, imo. Or at least not add usually to the quality.

I need to get a computer DAW, but for the time being the main drawback is lack of decent editing capability. I was wondering if you all do any special treatment for vocals to help them sound ok on a YT platform? Do you like to use delays with vocals? I generally trim the low EQ frequencies a bit for clarity.

I am a bit puzzled by the comments regarding recording yourself for demo or other purposes.

Jay

There are probably a lot more effects than you realize on much of what you hear. The thing is, with really great reverbs (especially real plates) you can get away with a lot more of it and it still sounds natural. A lousy reverb will sound fake. I would try to add just a little bit of reverb, just enough so that if you were to hit a staccato note, it would decay like it would in the room.

Vocals usually have a good amount of reverb, as well as a hint of delay. Sometimes I will only mix the delay in 1%.

Think of effects like make up on a woman.

Bad looking girl + makeup = still bad looking (in other words, reverb is not going to help if it sucks)
Good looking girl + makeup = WOW
Good looking girl + too much makeup = what happened

There is a fine line between the right amount, and too much. FWIW, I played classical music for years, and like you tend to prefer a more natural sound. Unfortunately, if your comparing it to commercial releases, you will hear they are using much more fx. Style dependent of coarse.

Have fun!!!

[AlainJazz]

A while back I started recording a CD. Good thing I decided to mix it song by song rather than record everything and mix later. Why? Because I realised quickly, that mixing is incredibly difficult and takes a loooooooooong time. I don't have the patience or time. I stopped after 2 songs. At some point I'll take it up again and pay someone to mix it for me. If you're serious about a good mix, I think this is the best way to go.

[fep]

Check out my favorite read on this subject:

Why do your recordings sound like ass? - Cockos Confederated Forums

[grahambop]

Interesting topic!

For youtube videos or soundcloud tracks, most of my recording is done on a simple Korg SOS recorder, which is good enough for 2 or 3 overdubs. (I don't use my desktop computer for recording because it has too much latency). Either I use a line-in from my Roland cube amp, or for acoustic guitar I use the built-in mic. on the Korg as it's not bad. Then I transfer the WAV files to Audacity for the rest of the process. I use Audacity cos it's free and it works!

If there's a backing track I'll put it more or less centre, then put guitars about one-third left and right (I don't like things panned full left or right).

For reverb, I clone each guitar track to a new track, add 100% reverb to the new track (or use reverb 'send' option if the Audacity plug-in has it), then I can mix in just the right amount of reverb I want for each track, and pan it where I want.

I try not to use any EQ, preferring to get the best tone I can at source. Maybe I'll use a bit of EQ to scoop out some bass if it's a bit muddy.

For the mixing I use a combination of headphones and my computer speakers (they are not that great though). But it's going to get compressed anyway on the web, and people are going to listen to it on crappy earphones and laptop speakers, so I don't worry about it much.

That's about it.

I think there's a lot of benefit in recording yourself, if only to hear where all your weak points are! Often you don't hear these things while you're practising.

You can hear a couple of my audio examples here (click on the link underneath, rather than the waveform thingy - I can't work out how to remove that!):

[markf]

Fep...

great link, thanks. I've read lots of articles on this, that one looks very good so far as I've gotten.

[rictroll]

I've found it helpful to include a stem of a similar, commercial recording as a reference track when I mix. I can then toggle back and forth and try to dial it in. I generally find I need to smooth things out. I was was told to try EQing by reduction rather than addition. LOL

With my aging ears and limited engineering chops I consider my mixes examples only, and turn both mixing and mastering to a pro if it will be released beyond a website clip.

[dingusmingus]

Just an observation, but from my side of the glass I see far too many musicians devote a disproportionate amount of (limited) time to home recording at the expense of practicing to be musicians.

Boy, that sure rings true for me! Mostly in my rock days, I had spent lots of time and money learning about mics, building preamps, trying to mix demos, etc.

About two years ago, I decided to spend all my time just practicing and playing with people. My enjoyment of music has increased considerably.