Distancing

[AStacy2]

A lot of good mixes that I listen to will have certain insturments in certain "virtual spaces". A lot of times too, I think this aspect seperates a good mix from a great one.


An example being kick/bass upfront, snare/vocals/guitars a little farther back, toms a little farther back, cymbals farthest back. Obviously different mixes call for different things, but you get the idea.


I've had a little bit of success doing this within Waves Trueverb (by changing the distance setting) in orchestral pieces but not much success with rock/metal bands.


How do you guys go about doing this? With Reverb? What else? A good example of this is maybe KSW - TEOH album, the first song on that you can hear it really well.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Reverb and Eq help putting things upfront or further back.

 

[trym^^]

yes the more stereo spaced reverb you add the more distant things will appear.
like with the rearviewmirror. ahaha. plus boosting the frequency highlights of normal speech,
i.e. what our auditive sense is accustomed to helps to bring things up front. but that of course work only with certain instruments.
and i find the predelay time of reverbs is highly involved with this stuff.

 

[joeymusicguy]

a trick i learned to help with different reverbs working together, is to bus all of your reverbs out to altiverb, and pick a space.

it will tie together all of your reverbs and make the recording sound more together, as if it was all recorded within the space you choose. this helps when you've got a crazy reverb on the snare, and very little on everything else, it will make the snare that sorta sticks out like a sore thumb, mesh better with the mix, and still retain the large reverb you want on the snare.

 

[AStacy2]

Cool, good info about the predelay, I have been tweaking that and it helps a lot. I have lots of trouble getting the cymbals/toms on drums to be more distant while trying to keep the mix balanced. Any tips on that? If I add too much reverb they tend to get washed out instead of distanced which I don't want, just back a little further.

 

[trym^^]

mehbee try eqing the reverb as a send, filter out lows and mids,
and have the predelay separate this highendy reverb from the actual hit.

 

[Senseyete]

Cool, good info about the predelay, I have been tweaking that and it helps a lot. I have lots of trouble getting the cymbals/toms on drums to be more distant while trying to keep the mix balanced. Any tips on that? If I add too much reverb they tend to get washed out instead of distanced which I don't want, just back a little further.

Maybe you can try to adjust Volume on that instruments...volume helps a lot sometimes for spacing the instruments IMO.