Hi everyone.

I'm surprised that this thread has gone so far without anyone mentioning compressors.

I remember back in the 70s, mixing with the old guy who was my mentor and who taught me most of what I know about recording and who had mixed a fair few chart successes. The first thing he would do is to patch compressors into all the rhythm tracks. If you have too much dynamic range in your rhythm instruments then the tracks can combine in all sorts of horrible and unexpected ways, which will interfere with the vocal in exactly the way that CocoTex described. This technique gave rise to Malcolm's famous phrase - "When I put something in the mix, I want it to stay there". And generally it did! With the rhythm tracks tamed, mixing the backing track was a piece of cake and it left room for the vox and lead instruments to use dynamics to good effect without getting lost. Some years later, I was talking to one of the guys from the cutting room (mastering), who said that they rarely touched Malcolm's mixes - they just cut the copper master straight from the tape.

Don't get to thinking that the Realtracks don't need compressing - they are generally recorded without too much compression, in order to leave the choice up to the mixing engineer.

Finally, I'm not saying that automated envelopes aren't useful - they obviously are, but they aren't the full story.

Just trying to help with a few thoughts....

ROG.

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