guitar mixing/eq

I find that soloing the guitars can reveal what you like and don't like about the album, but I try to avoid eq'ing anything until the full mix is playing. Do both, if you must, I mean this is digital, everyone has edit>undo, keep experimenting.

I highly recommend that you import a reference track, it helps out tremendously!Last mix I did, I threw in some Arch Enemy. just listen to it, then mute it and listen to your mix and try to figure out the levels of the guitar, how bright they are, how much bass they have. You probably won't get your mix sounding as steller as the big dogs but it will give you a very good point of reference.

I always try to high-pass the guitars at around 120 Hz, then just compress using Waves RAXX, and not mess with any more EQ'ing, unless it needs it. But then again I spend a lot of time during the setup process. Last time it took me over 2 hours just to set up the guitars and get the sound that we were all happy with.
 
its def. important that the guitars sound good in all contexts. this concept is very similar to mastering a mix... referencing on different types of systems, and in mono/stereo is a must if you want the sounds to translate well
 
Chuck Norris makes stereo mixes on a single speaker...

I'm trying to figure out where panning in mono really makes a huge difference (apart from introducing volume changes), in all honesty; because wave addition is commutative, it's not like the order in which things are added together should impact the sound. What exactly are you doing, again?

Jeff
 
as someone else stated earlier, your beefy lows in the guitars will be around 150-200hz..boost a little there if you need some more meat

maybe dip the bass there a couple db's, while maybe giving a wide boost between 400-800...that's where the "growl" is most of the time on bass, and is also where guitars tend to sound sort of shitty

then sweep around and find a couple spots in the midrange where the bass pops out nicely, but the guitar really doesn't...and vice versa. don't try to boost or cram too much shit into the same frequency range, or everything will lose its clarity.
 
This is probably really obvious, but it never occurred to me until I tried it the other day, and it worked fantastically - when I wanna cut something, rather than making an extreme cut and sweeping it, I'll actually make a boost and sweep until I find the thing I hate the most, and then eradicate it; in other words, I find it much easier to recognize the effects of boosting than cutting
 
JBroll said:
I'm going to completely disagree with panning before EQing; it makes it very easy to not tell that something needs to be done, so there's just this subconscious urge to go kablooey with odd shit wondering why there's so much gunk in one region. Plus, while EQ and compression are always heard, panning doesn't mean shit fin Flash players, shitty stereos in less-than-ideal conditions, and many other situations - and don't underestimate the weight of those things, shitty as they are. If you can hear everything in mono, your stereo image will be fucking godly; it's easier to miss things in stereo.

Jeff
Click to expand...


Did anyone notice I used the word CAN in that sentence! hehe, its all good.

I guess what i was also trying to say is, sometimes we fall into the habbit of diving for the solo button and eq straight away when we start a mix, when sometimes a simple shift in the spectrum can avoid having to use eq at all, or, can help to use less eq.

Sort of the same way a stereo piano (in a synth) has its bottom keys (left side of piano) panned to the left and high keys (right side of piano) panned to the right.
If you were to run the synth in mono (i,e, every key plays at the centre of the spectrum) and play a big chord using substantial low keys and high keys it will sound fairly muddy and lack definition because all the freq's from all the keys are in exactly the same spot, even though each key has its own freq and crossover freq's from note to note of course. Does this mean to gain more definition and reduce clutter from this piano sound that we have to eq each piano note?

If we were to play that exact same chord with exact same sound in stereo, without eq'ing it, it would have more definition and not sound as muddy simply due to the placement of the piano keys in the spectrum. As a keyboard player I have experienced this many times, if im running my synths in mono I almost always have to use a little eq to clean it up, when im running stereo, no need.

At the end of the day, whatever works for you works I guess!

cheers,

madmuso
 
That's fair enough. You've still got plenty of albums left in you (I'm not assuming, I'm telling you! :p)
I think that the sound on A World Full of Grey was alot like the production on say Evergrey's In Search of Truth, or even some of Andy's earlier productions (Kreator, Nevermore) in that the small imperfections gave the sound a more unique sound, which in turn becomes your own, descriptive of that album. ie, it suited the mood of the music.
 
JBroll said:
Chuck Norris makes stereo mixes on a single speaker...

I'm trying to figure out where panning in mono really makes a huge difference (apart from introducing volume changes), in all honesty; because wave addition is commutative, it's not like the order in which things are added together should impact the sound. What exactly are you doing, again?

Jeff
Click to expand...

What am I doing? I put a mono plugin on the 2bus, send it to a single speaker and adjust pannings there.

Why do you think almost every studio has a single speaker in the middle (mostly auratones, which sound like crap) - if not for checking stereo mixes in mono on a single speaker? Guys like Jean Marie Horvath admittedly mix 70-80% of their time on that one mono speaker (including EQ etc.)

It doesn't make a HUGE difference as in "OMG, my mix sounds better than Andy's while it sounded like shit before", but you will find places to pan things to much easier, because of the volume changes that you mention. When the sound disappears, you know it's wrong.

Regarding the wave files being commutative: I appreciate your technical knowledge, but it is very normal to experience in the audio industry the phenomenon that sound behaves completely different to logic sometimes ...
 
F0RBIDDEN said:
I don't understand how you can pan in mono? Where the hell are you panning it to? In mono something should sound exactly the same whether it's panned all the way left, all the way right, in the center, 40% left, 79.8% right, etc...
Click to expand...

in theory you're right, but it doesnt quite work that way. if you are listening to a sound dead center and looking dead ahead between your monitors you will hear that sound one way, keep staring dead ahead and pan either to the left or to the right, and although the sound IS still the same our ears hear it different. the thing is when you are listening to a sound dead center and you pan it you have a tendency to turn your head the way you've panned. (thats how doctors tell if a baby has an ear infection). i am sure you know these things already.
 
first off, thanks for all the feedback. a lot of good stuff.

i've tried a few of these things and it has made a difference. while going through them, i think i answered a few of my own questions. mainly, the presence of my sound is greatly influenced by the patch i'm using on the PODxt, as well as the cab impulse. should have been obvious, but you know how it goes somedays.. anyway, i generally gravitate toward the hack impulses and although they do add some nice, realistic "meat", "air", it doesn't come without a cost. it then requires some fine tuning on the mix to allow the bass and guitars to all sit nicely. for awhile, i did try mixing "everything" in mono - get it to a place i was happy and then switched back to stereo, but as with a lot of things - that technique got lost along the way. i'm going to return to it because i think it's a good thing and serves a lot of purposes.

in addition to all the other general challenges in mixing guitars - i found out a year or so ago i have a hearing deficiency in the 1k-3k range. it shouldn't have been such a shocker with the abuse over the years, but still - not something i wanted to hear (no pun intended). i'm sure this is adding to my woes in some fashion. this is one of the reasons for the question on where people generally, cookbook-wise, let the highs on the guitars shine through so i can just do it and trust it even though my ears might be telling my brain something else.
 
The way I think of panning in "mono" is that it's not really mono because you're panning; despite how retardedly circular that sounds, it makes sense (at least to me!) because you're basically listening to your mix summed down to mono, so the changes you make in panning occur before the summing and thus affect the end result, your mono mix.

This is how I understand it, anyway, and it makes a whole lot more sense (and is infinitely more satisfying) than the "sound behaving different than logic" explanation; it's all physics, after all, and although I'm no expert, there's enough things in this world I don't understand and have to take on faith that I don't want audio engineering, my favorite hobby, to be one of 'em!
 
Metaltastic said:
This is how I understand it, anyway, and it makes a whole lot more sense (and is infinitely more satisfying) than the "sound behaving different than logic" explanation; it's all physics, after all, and although I'm no expert, there's enough things in this world I don't understand and have to take on faith that I don't want audio engineering, my favorite hobby, to be one of 'em!
Click to expand...

HUH:OMG:
 
This is how I understand it, anyway, and it makes a whole lot more sense (and is infinitely more satisfying) than the "sound behaving different than logic" explanation; it's all physics, after all, and although I'm no expert, there's enough things in this world I don't understand and have to take on faith that I don't want audio engineering, my favorite hobby, to be one of 'em!
Click to expand...

haha!
+1 Man!! that was a wicked little thought :)
 
in addition to all the other general challenges in mixing guitars - i found out a year or so ago i have a hearing deficiency in the 1k-3k range. it shouldn't have been such a shocker with the abuse over the years, but still - not something i wanted to hear (no pun intended). i'm sure this is adding to my woes in some fashion. this is one of the reasons for the question on where people generally, cookbook-wise, let the highs on the guitars shine through so i can just do it and trust it even though my ears might be telling my brain something else.
Click to expand...

dude, mix it to how you think it sounds good! the fact that your hearing has gone slightly in that range, i'd presume that when you listen to your favourate bands mixes on itunes, that they sound perfect to you. because your ears can addapt realy quickly to fequencie changes over a certain amount of time. (hence the reason some engineers like to go outside and listen to the natural outdoors for 5 mins ever so often to refresh their ears and realy hear what they are doing to the mix.)

and i presume, you will be mixing your guitars to a simular EQ to what you are hearing on your favourate mixes, and we will hear the end result sounding fine on our end as it will still sound as close as you got it to that actual track.

i hope this makes sence.. had an evening puff with the mates lol
 
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