Member Dana Nielsen
MemberForum Replies Created
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INCREDIBLE, Jesse!!! It sounds amazing and is super moving, and I love the video too! Is that all your footage too? Really great man! I loved the shot looking straight up the windmill where the blades are kinda in sync with the kick drum. Really awesome editing and panning (of camera AND sounds 😉). BRAVO, my homey!!! 🙌
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Ooh, great question, @Jon_Plett ! I have not personally tried those, but I hear about them all the time. Do you use them and love them?
I went ahead and made a new discussion thread here from your original reply… Hoping others will chime in with any cool ideas or reviews related to favorite headphones for mixing! 🎧
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Sounding sick, @JLEW ! The couple things that come to my mind are:
- some of the bass notes feel louder than others, at least on my system. Like the Eb note resonates much louder than the other notes. Sometimes I do a fair amount of bass automation or note-by-note leveling (drawn automation or clip gain) to ensure that the lower/deeper notes remain as audible/loud as the bass notes in the higher register, and that the higher notes don’t get unnecessarily loud simply due to their higher pitch. Make sense? If your bass synth is an audio file (as opposed to midi triggering a virtual synth) you can often see, visually, the louder and softer notes.
- The kick feels left-of-center and – despite my recent “creative panning” post 😂 – I feel like this sort of “dance kick” deserves to be in the center.
- You might try, as an experiment, mixing a version with the guitar muted 😳. I know, I know, .. the guitar is the star of the show! But it might be cool to try the “Mute the Drums” Mix Power Tip but on the guitar, just to see what kind of creative mixing adventure that leads you on, letting go of the lead instrument and just crafting a wild dramatic ride with the supporting instruments as if there were no guitar at all. Then of course … fit the guitar back into your new instrumental to taste.
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Hahaha – you know it man! And yeah … my scented candles and paisley print walls were QUITE the vibe 😂
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That is absolutely true, man! – You can definitely produce high quality work using minimal (and inexpensive) equipment when you have a clear vision and trustworthy ears. And for me, I guess when I say the word “ears” I’m really talking mostly about my imagination, the mind’s ears. (See Mix Power Tip #5: “Don’t be Snobby”). If you know how you want something to sound in your imagination – and can hold onto that imagined sound long enough to track it like a hunter tracks its prey – you can sculpt that sound into reality, often with simple tools like stock plugins and budget-friendly microphones, speakers and preamps.
Here’s a pic I found of my wife @CMN in our old home studio (circa 2007) where I mixed that Neil Diamond album. You can see the tiny Yamaha MSP5’s I used at that time. And get a load of the intentionally gaudy wall treatments! 😱 It was a carpeted square box of a room and I covered every wall floor-to-ceiling with thin, cheap, packing material from U-Haul, and then covered that with large swatches of several of THE most hideous fabric prints I could find in the discount bin at the fabric store. It was ugly as hell! But also dry as a bone, acoustically, and worked great for many years and many records.
PS – YES! TIDAL! Tidal is my absolute fav DSP, especially since they’re the only ones who provide full album credits!
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Hahahaha, I know the feeling!
And hey, good call on the AT headphones and the HS8s – I think Yamaha make really great powered monitors these days, and I recommend them often. I mixed tonnnnns of albums on my 5″ Yamaha MSP-5’s back in the day, in my old 5’x5′ spare-bedroom studio, including this #1 Neil Diamond album. And I have mannnny pairs of those AT headphones and use them daily.
Sonarworks is pretty incredible too, esp if you get their microphone to shoot out your room (I have their measurement mic but also got great results prior to that purchase using my old inexpensive Behringer measurement mic).
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Home Before Dark - Dana Nielsen
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@Jon_Plett 😂 😂 I forgot about that!!
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Heck yeah @JLEW – laptop speakers would be perfect to use as your “smalls”!
Regarding the distance from mix position factor … there does seem to be some extra insight gained from listening from across the room, even if just a few feet, and preferably not right in front of you. I don’t want to be seduced by top-end or bottom-end or stereo image while working on my smalls; I only want to be concerned with levels and balance, the general “power” and shape of the record. Placing those speakers away from me (off to the side or behind me perhaps) keeps me better focused on my small-speakers mission: Can I hear every fundamental note the bass is playing? Are my favorite melodic moments within the rhythm section still audible and conveying the same emotion as they do on the big speakers? Stuff like that.
If I had to break it down tho, I’d say simply having a set of small speakers to work with is 80-90% of the “smalls” equation for me. Getting them situated in mono and away from the listening position adds another 10-20% helpful information mojo magic. 🪄💫
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Excellent ideas (and English), @Nikolaj ! Your suggestion to guide the singer to “perform the dynamics” is a classic producer move and falls right in line with the tried and true ethos to “fix it at the source.” It’s that same ethos that inspires me as an engineer to adjust the mic or mic placement before reaching for an EQ; or as an editor to fine-tune the comp before mucking with Melodyne; or as a mixer to adjust the fader or pan position before picking additional processing, and to wring the most out of the room mics before reaching for reverb….
Our caring, playful, attention to each moment during the process of making music (or mountain climbing or anything else for that matter) distills and reinforces our creative vision along the way, making for easier decisions and more natural solutions to the challenges that lie ahead. That’s how I feel anyway, haha.
That said, I do also love a good compartmentalized mixing obstacle/dilemma, i.e. “the singer has flown back home, re-singing is not an option — how can I achieve the glorious ‘final mix’ I hear in my imagination using only the tracks and performances available to me right now?” Working with what you’ve got and solving those riddles is, in large part, The Joy (and Frustration 😂) of Mixing.
☝️ … good title for my autobiography some day right there, hahahaha 🤦🏻♂️
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Right? Yeah, I’m stoked to try it out! I’ll prob hold off upgrading my PT software till I’m finished mixing a few current projects, but after that it is ON! I love the non-linear creative/writing/experimenting/arranging flow that Ableton does so well, and I do already have a solid Ableton->Pro Tools workflow (using Dante and Ableton Link), but I’ll be very curious to see if Sketch cracks open a new simpler path for me, bridging the gap between early “sketches” and finished productions.
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Hahahahahahahaha – bane of my (room) existence! I even have a custom “De-147Hz” clip fx button for it programmed on my soundflow streamdeck! 😂
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Wudup, @smoothygroove ! Yeah love Sound ID and the Sonarworks peeps! They actually came to my studio and did an interview a year or so ago. I’ve been a fan of theirs for years. Sorry to hear of your hearing woes. So glad you’ve found a good workaround! 💜. Thanks so much for sharing this!
Here’s that interview if anyone’s interested 🤘. Maybe I’ll add it to the blog page soon…
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Heck yeah, homey! So glad to help and LOVE hearing your amazing progress!!
PS – I added a few more ideas to the original post, as I wasn’t done writing when I accidentally hit “post” haha -
Yeah man! The phone will sum that wide mix to mono for the most part, which is fine. I’m constantly referencing the tiny side-speakers in my studio, pushed together in mono, as I mentioned in this thread from a few weeks ago – check that one out, u might dig!
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Finding clarity in chaos - Mixing - MIX PROTÉGÉ
Finding clarity in chaos - Mixing - MIX PROTÉGÉ
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Jesse!!!!! I can’t wait to listen to this properly in my studio in the morning! Was a busy day here w sessions. And @Jon_Plett thanks so much for weighing in with those great suggestions!
@JLEW …. take that panning guidance you received in the past and throw it IMMEDIATELY in the garbage! 🗑️ And then light it on 🔥 just to be sure it’s gone for good! hahaha. For real tho – panning is such an amazing source of expression in mixing. I haven’t even listened to your piece yet, but can safely advise you to roam freely about the stereo field with your creative choices. There is definitely a time and place to keep focal elements centered (lead vocal, bass instruments, kick, snare, etc.), but even those rules were meant to be broken when it feels right.
Legend has it, the fully-sweepable pan knobs we know today weren’t even a THING when stereo mixing first hit the music scene in the late 1950s. Mixing consoles of the day had buttons on each channel – one to send the signal to the Left speaker, one to send it to the Right; and by engaging both buttons you could send the signal to both speakers, i.e. Center. So, in essence, you had three choices: hard left, hard right, or right up the middle! I think back to some of my favorite stereo records of the 50s and 60s and how wild (and courageous!) it seems that the drums are all on the right speaker 😲 and the bass and piano are completely isolated on the left speaker 😮🧐 … what once seemed to me like “odd” or “brave” panning choices were really just engineers of that time having fun experimenting with the “brave new world” of stereo mixing, playfully utilizing these TWO brand new buttons on their consoles! Crazy, right?!
So… don’t be afraid to be brave. Be odd, too, if ya like. And above all else … have FUN!
P.S. – This Wikipedia article is pretty fascinating.
