Originally Posted By: bluage
Hey, there, "Islansoul"...

Your "handle" leaves a serene, almost mystical impression. Cool! I hope you will forgive my four-day late response to your comprehensive post. frown

"Ask yourself what are the most important parts of the song? What parts really need to stand out in the mix, and what parts do you feel that the listen could get by with out really hearing up front and in the spotlight."

Wow. You do go straight for jugular, don't you? smile You were right on the money by taking note of the fact that all the instruments were "coming on loud." The only thing I'd ever read about mixing was to adjust track volumes just short of clipping...

Immediately upon reading your post, I went back to the song and did as you instructed: lowered the levels of the tracks, and then did the same thing with the master fader. Voila! It worked!

"I know panning things can make tacks sound out of place at first, but after a while, you'll start to find that not ever track need to be dead center."

Actually, I wasn't trying to push everything dead center. As I manipulated the panning controls, my intent was to "hear" my way through to determining where each instrument's track sounded best in the "stereo image" you mentioned. But as I indicated in my post, to my ears something I can only describe as a diminishment of the "fullness" of the sound, a thinning, seemed to occur in the wake my adjustments. My intuition tells me that maybe I was looking too closely at the graphic representation of the panning controls -- the way the green level light splits into two columns to display the relative increase or decrease of the signal while panning right or left -- instead of listening. What I mean is, perhaps my misdirected attention to the visual display affected the way I was hearing the sound of the instrument(s).

"Islansoul", your advice/instructions were easy to understand, and following them produced immediately pleasing results. Thank you very, very much for taking the time to listen to the song so closely and offer me the benefit of your music/audio experience.

Respectfully,

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


No problem,

I remember taking an audio mixing class called audio mixing 1 and the first week I had to mix a song using only pan knobs and volume faders. No EQ, no compression, no reverb, nothing else.

Computer: Macbook Pro, 16 inch 2021
DAWs: Pro Tools, Logic, and Maschine
plays drums, percussion, bass, steel pan, keyboard,
music producer/engineer