Hi all. I took the plunge and bought this package today. I am quite the the novice when it comes to mixing/mastering. I was wondering if anyone has this and where you would recommend starting? There is alot of "stuff" in here. Probably should have started with the eval . Too late for that now. (I am gonna read the manuals, but there are 45 of them in this Diamond bundle) Figuring out where to begin... I record all my tracks in Cubase 4 at 24/88.2.

Mostly, I play Acoustic Folk type stuff. If you were gonna mix say Dan Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band" what pluggins would you suggest using for that type of mix.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

For Fogelberg stuff, in that bundle I think the Ren stuff might work. I really like the Ren comp on vocals and even as a secondary comp after the SSL ch. It's quite good for 'softening' sounds.

L2 gets a lot of use.Other than that, Maxxbass, Supertap and TrueReverb all all I really use in there.

Cool! Thanks for your thoughts. I have been just sitting here playing with a vocal track. Geez there are a million things you can do to it.

Is it common practice in the mix/mastering world to get say a vocal track the way you want and then bounce it to another track freezing just that track mix?

I have the WAVES Diamond bundle. If you could be a little more specific I could help you out better

Thank you. I am mostly trying to select the best tools to make the acoustic mix sound like to wraps around the vocal. As if the vocal is center stage and the other instruments wrap around it. I understand that to be accomplished with panning, but I also have read that you accomplish that with EQ as well. Probably should have this thread on the mastering forum. I am fairly new to digital recording. I have a great deal of respect for mastering engineers and would love to sit and learn (or just learn on the forums). Not that i have to do everything myself, but I like to be able to. I also think the more i learn, the better I can work with a real pro to create the sound I want. Buying WAVES was just another playground set to learn with. I have just started going through all the plugins to see what they do at a high level.

quote:

Originally posted by Synetos:
Probably should have this thread on the mastering forum. I am fairly new to digital recording. I have a great deal of respect for mastering engineers and would love to sit and learn (or just learn on the forums).

I think most mastering guys will tell you that the effect you're trying to achieve needs to be established in the mixing stage, not mastering

I seem to remember a thread about EQ around here recently, in which DOT posted a link to an EQ chart you can download and print out.

Basically, you want to take your most important parts, vocal and acoustic guitar (?) and get them to happily coexist. So, solo the vocal with the guitar and clean up any EQ conflicts between the two. Now you have the basis for the mix, so you bring in the other parts, always keeping the integrity of the vocal/guitar intact. That means the other parts may have to be thinned out a bit to fit.

But each song could be different. Perhaps the key elements would be vocal and drums in one song, or vocal and keyboards in another, or whatever. Even then, you could give your project to five different mix engineers, and get back five different versions, so there is a lot of subjectivity involved.

The important thing is to find the magic and highlight it. If every single element of the mix is equal, nothing will pop out to grab the listener's attention, and the listener could end up getting bored.

The latest Al Green CD is a good example. (Out of the Dan Fogelberg field, but still relevant.) Although all songs include drums, the snare sound varies significantly from one song to the next. In one song it's a wet loaf-of-bread thud, mixed way back. In another it's a thunk with a sizzle, mixed way in your face. They may have done this to differentiate the songs, since there is a similarity between a lot of the tracks. The point is, they didn't use a formula for mixing - they treated each song individually.