Mixing Madness

[lesmac]

(Are you talking about using the pre delay to let the attack smack cleanly or not using reverb at all on the drums themselves or not letting the reverb ring from the other instruments?)

Hi

I was alluding to basically getting a good drum reverb/space sound. It's a concept along the lines of walking into a room and clapping your hands to hear the reverb time of the room and the idea that it is transients that help define the space.

I don't mean to not use different reverbs/delays on instruments. I'm a guitar player, I love delay and reverb

Spending some time to get a good room sound for the drums is the thing. CLA has a video where he talks about the panorama where he uses, I dunno, six or more different time based effects.

It's common for mix engineers to put a click through their delays and revers to set the tails, how they ring out.

I guess I was throwing in something to think about in general.

[OwenGrech]

(Are you talking about using the pre delay to let the attack smack cleanly or not using reverb at all on the drums themselves or not letting the reverb ring from the other instruments?)

Hi

I was alluding to basically getting a good drum reverb/space sound. It's a concept along the lines of walking into a room and clapping your hands to hear the reverb time of the room and the idea that it is transients that help define the space.

I don't mean to not use different reverbs/delays on instruments. I'm a guitar player, I love delay and reverb

Spending some time to get a good room sound for the drums is the thing. CLA has a video where he talks about the panorama where he uses, I dunno, six or more different time based effects.

It's common for mix engineers to put a click through their delays and revers to set the tails, how they ring out.

I guess I was throwing in something to think about in general.

Haha I got your same guitar player disease along with GAS!!

I think this is all great advice man as I never got into this kind of detail with the space thing. As you said we guitar players love reverbs and delays so in the beginning I found myself just drowning everything and of course it sounded really bad:) so then I went the opposite direction and got scared of using them at all. Lately I have been slowly trying to learn how to control them more and hence why this post got my attention

Will look out for that CLA video for sure.

Thanks again man and take care
Owen

[Paulie]

Lots of great advice in this thread. The "car test" is legendary, many of the greats use this technique to check their work. Have you performed some critical listening in your car, as in taking notes of every detail you hear that you need to change? while in the car, take notes of what needs to be brought up or down in the mix. Listen to the tone of your patches, whether or not you can hear any reverb or delay you've added, etc. Then go back and adjust the track in your studio and then go back to the car. Do this several times... (it's a pain in the butt for me because my studio is upstairs so I end up getting a good aerobic workout when I do this.)

Once you start getting better mixes in the car, you should be able to start understanding what you are doing wrong. If you recently changed monitors it's a whole new studio basically.

And I cannot emphasize enough doing A/B comparisons. Constantly go back and forth from your track to a similar track running in iTunes or Spotify, etc. Listen to the clarity, the space, the eq, etc. You've basically got to teach yourself what to listen for in your studio now.

Good luck!