"guitarhacker"...

I went to your SoundClick webpage and listened (appreciatively, as always!) to "Come and Go," and "In A World Without You." You make me want to compose a "country" tune, but I'm a city bo'! Shall the 'twain ever meet? smile

I think -- I believe -- I'm pretty sure -- that I heard the proof of what you advised: "...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."

What I didn't notice upon studying your initial response to my post, was the term, "normalizing," the definition of which I read as "...the application of a constant amount of gain to an audio recording to bring the average or peak amplitude to a target level (the norm). Because the same amount of gain is applied across the given range, the signal-to-noise ratio and relative dynamics are generally unchanged."

I've seen that function listed in the main menu of my Sony Soundforge Audio Studio software, but never used it. Nonetheless, the definition of its function seemed pretty straightforward, and not too heavy to understand.

In the wake of this mighty revelation, the only question I would ask you, is at what point in the mixing stages would the effect be most usefully applied? To the separate tracks before they're rendered to a single audio file, or only to the finished file?

By the way, as I was listening to my posted song again, I discovered that all the individual instrument tracks that I thought I had panned to aurally distinct positions in the "sound field" to reasonably good effect were coming out of only the left monitor! When I opened it up in my sequencer, I realized that all the instrument tracks rendered by the same virtual instrument library only had a single audio output track. That probably accounts for at least some of the disappointment I experienced upon first listening to the song, wouldn't you say?

You lead. Me follow! smile

Thank you, "guitarhacker",

LOREN (a.k.a. "bluage")

"Music is what feelings sound like."-- borrowed from a Cakewalk Music Creator forum member, "Mamabear".