Originally Posted By: bluage
Dear "guitarhacker"...

Regarding your perception of the vocal track sounding "a bit too far back in the mix," I received that track as a separate *.wav file from the vocalist, Ms. Courtney Grace, so I'll play with that and see what happens...

You mentioned "cans." Would it be correct for me assume that you were referring to a type of speaker?

I understand (I think) what you were describing when you used the term "white noise" in reference to the tremolo strings. Is that the same thing as "artifacts?" Regardless, it could have been the result of me time-stretching that track near the end to extend the amount of time it would take to fade it out to my satisfaction.



Lets hit the easy ones first: Cans are slang for headphones.

White noise is what you hear as static on the radio. In this case, it was very low in the mix. But like I said, it was probably caused by the tremolo string section and wasn't noise at all. I've had some weird things happen in my mixes through the years. When I hear something, I reset my timeline to just before that point and go through each track, one by one to see if I hear something in any of the tracks. Sometimes I find the glitch and sometimes I find nothing. When I come up empty handed, I start adding tracks one by one until the issue reappears. More than once, I have found the interaction of events in 2 tracks combined to cause what sounded like a glitch. The solution is simple.... simply use the volume envelope to pull one of those tracks down briefly to get past that glitch point. How this applies to your mix is to listen to that tremolo track closely and see if it is causing the issue..... assuming that you can hear the issue I spoke of and think it's a problem. Quite often when I point out things in songs the originator of said track/project replies that they either don't hear it or intended to make it that way, so I defer to your preferences on this call.

I have worked with a number of tracks sent by other folks. I had no control over how they were recorded. I applied the things I needed, to those tracks to get them sounding good and then put them in the mix.

The vocal to COME AND GO (on my music page) was sent from another studio and was recorded well.
There's another song on my music page called IN A WORLD WITHOUT YOU. The lead vocal track to that song came to me as an MP3 file which was recorded in a home studio demo session. I was never able to get the wave so what you hear is the original MP3. I worked on it a bit with some of my audio tools because it had issues with noise and other things and had to go with what I had.

All that to say, you should be able to get practically any track to set well in a mix. It's a matter of getting the vocal track volume up if it was low and weak when you got it. Using some mild compression, and then normalizing the file will help in that regard if it was weak with low internal levels. When doing that, yo have to be careful because this is where noise floor comes into play. When you compress and normalize, you are raising ALL the things in the track including the noise at the very bottom. So while you get a stronger track, you might now have noise issues.... mic hiss, and other things that you don't want at audible levels. You can gate it or edit it but it's best to avoid it where possible. That's why it's always good to have solid, strong input levels from your audio sources. Signal to noise ratios matter, but with digital, you should be good under most circumstances. (that topic could be it's own thread)

Next is to get the volume in the mix set appropriately for the genre. Country, for example, tends to put vocals closer to the front as opposed to rock, where the vox may actually be quite far back and covered up to some degree by the instruments. Making the vocal fit into the mix naturally involves matching the reverb kind to the band. I often record all my tracks totally dry (exception is guitar) and applying the reverb in the master buss. That puts the same kind and level of verb on the entire mix. Nothing stands out like a band that has a wet reverb and the singer's vox is a small room dry. Levels and reverb are the largest factors in getting tracks to set properly. That doesn't mean EQ doesn't play a part, because it does, but not as critically as the first 2 do.

Hope that clarifies it a bit.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
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