forums : Producing

"real" mixdown = hella work

First off thanks to Kingpin for being the mastermind (pun intended) behind this weekends project. The two of us spent the majority of this weekend in the studio mixing down 1 track. Yes, 1 track! But that s**t was done proper and I could not be happier with the final product. I had NO CLUE what was involved in final stage mixdown till this weekend. I guess what I am saying is DAMN that is some f**king work! Respect to all those who actually do take their tunes through a mixing console track by track. I think I figured out why the UK tunes usually have the nicer phatness and warmness to them.

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well, I think part of the problem was that I was still sorta fumbling w/ everything (hmmm, I wanna do this, where's that button) hehe

but yeah, gimmie a few months n we should be able to bang stuff out much quicker

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yes. why do you think im so hesitant to get s**t out? its trouble enough with just rendering the song down track by track.

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well it may have takin a little while to complete, but the result was absolutly smashin!~

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Share some info on the process that you guys went through.. I still have a very small idea on what the full mixdown process consist of!

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yea mixdowns are a bitch but looking at the waveform of the track / loop helps...

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i remember when i had a track in reason and i exported all the channels as their own wav and imported all of them in cubase and tried to do the mixdown in that and that was too much for me... it was too easy to get way off on your signals...

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We started by tearing the song down to seperate tracks and exporting them as wav's into Brian's Mac using Cubase as the main platform. Cubase was also hooked up to a Mackie Mixing Console for the full effect. So each track was workable through the console. We added compression to the bassline, we added a de-esser to the high hats, we added some reverb and compression to the drums, and eq'd every track as best as we could. Then we mixed all of that down to just two channels, one panning hard left and one panning hard right. This was the final product. To burn it to a format we combined those two tracks into one and ended up with our final stereo product.

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to be more specific, I have an 8 out sound card that plugs into a mackie mixing desk. Each track dave gave me had it's own pair of outputs, left and right.

output bus 1 = drums
bus 2 = bassline
bus 3 = synths
bus 4 high hats and samples


We then used the desk to set levels and eq's of the 4 busses, then also used the desk as sorta fatten the whole mix.

To do that, we routed every bus we had to the sub output bus the mackie desk has (it's a 16 channel, 8 bus mixer, so we weren't really using much of it at all). On this, we rode the gain to over saturate it, giving it a warmth and fatness. We then routed that bus to the main outs, back into the computer.

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^^ and thats why HE was the "mastermind".......

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Thanks man, that helps.

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word. thanks for the info guys.

post up the track why don'cha?

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Good tip when eq'ing, instead of boosting the freq's you wana hear more of, use eq's to cut the really resonant freqs. to find these, boost your eq to max and sweep through all the spectrum. by cutting instead of boosting, you are creating a lot more headroom im the mix. thats one of the best tips on mixin g my teacher gave me.

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^thanks for the tip!^

*the track will be posted soon enough with a couple others, a little birdie told me something about April 1st.....*

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April 1st? What a joke! har har




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According to dj.com ...

^thanks for the tip!^

*the track will be posted soon enough with a couple others, a little birdie told me something about April 1st.....*
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Good job pieman. alot of people dont realize that. i work in the "industry" . actually the mainstream industry, building , custom fabricating and designing recording equipment. on the average a major label release takes about a year to produce. give or take a few months. and more than half of that time is doin the mixing and mastering. i have seen people take alot longer than that to do a final mixdown. one of the biggest things in gettin a good sounding project is outboard gear.
yes cubase, or in my case nuendo can do alot. but in the real world outboard is king. sure a compressor works and sounds ok in vst land. but it will never compare to the sound of a La-2a or a 1176 or even a fairchild mastering mixer ( but we wont go into the cost of one of those but lets say its much more than your average car) bottom line try to accumulate as much outboar gear as you can. get the best mixer u can as well , makie are decent mixers they are on the lower end of professional audio gear but they do the job and who can afford $500,000 to buy a hardcore mixing board. Compressors are what make the world go round. they are your best friend. hoarde those as much as u can as well. the more tha better. most people dont realize how much compression goes into a track . every drum , every bassline , every vocal, and alot more go through compressors. so start there. the dbx-160 & 165 are very decently priced for the quality they give you. u can ge them anywhere from $150 and up if you look in any majro recording studio u are gonna see at least of those.

if anyone has any questions or comments for me hit me up.
anyone needs and custom cabeling done . anyone needs any gear fixed let me know
djvandal1@hotmail.com

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something i learned the hardway over years...
get your mixdown to sound as close as physically possible to how you want it before youd o all that stuff, and dont pull the ol' "ILL GET TO THAT IN THE MIXDOWN" or youll just go nuts. and die

ps drink baby pepsi

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i agree with MOST of the points raised... i just spent some time in the UK working with my old partner and a band called the foofs.... we recorded everything thru focusrite avalon & joe meek mic pre amps.... motu 192 HD, nuendo - UAD-1 card with some PRIMO plugins.... the digital mix sounds as analog and warm as you'd like.... in fact the record label concerned thought it had been done in a studio costing 5 x as much.... admittedly there was a little more to it all than described here... (like the neve channel strips and some other hardware trickery) but in the main the whole project was digital.

oh imho mackies suck. the eq is harsh and un natural. anyone using cubase/nuendo needs to buy a UAD-1 and get the cambridge eq.... and the compression plugins for it sound so..... creamy.... yummm i think i might wet my pants....


and yeah cut EQ instead of boosting... when u can... just like your man the vandal there a lot of ppl dont realise im not just a crappy MC..... im whats known as a TonMeister and am qualified to teach audio engineering and advanced production to university level, as well as being a bit of a steinberg afficionado... and errrr mix pop/rock/crap (DON'T TELL ANYONE!!) and movies...... so i do actually know wtf i am on about.... got any questions re: production hit me up..... or hit vandal up....


[ mcme - 5 Mar 2004 11:35 ]
[ mcme - 5 Mar 2004 11:29 ]

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thanks for the tips!

I do have a question about Mic pre amps. Everyone always says "oh this n this has the best mic pre's".

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's not a whole lotta mic'ing going on in electronic music, so, does that mean that every one's just using the mic pre's to sorta color the sound?

Being a pre amp, won't that make a line level input too high?

I know the point of an analog desk is to over saturate, does the mic pre make that easier?

Thanks for your help!

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bnj makes a great deal of sense there....whether hard or soft, synths, samplers and the filters/effects on them can do some crazy things with sound. Getting these initial sounds in the right spot is key.....

After lots of frustration I came to the conclusion that sometimes you gotta just chill out and not fawk with sounds too much until you record them to audio.....

man we need more of these threads, does wonders for everyones production I think...

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Cool, when I get more tunes ready I'll have to pay yous guys a visit. I like the panning hard right and left, real studio bizzness, huh?

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The Relentless Audio Studios are open for biznuss =)

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