Getting serious about mixing techniques and such, resources?

[Ostinato Rubato]

First I'd like to give a HUGE thank you to CEOwl for letting me swoop through his perch at Owlsome Records yesterday evening to track my hoots for this song assignment. Having someone at the helm working the DAW and setting up your punch ins and whatnot makes a world of difference. Also, his mancave is a WWAAAAAYYY better sounding room than my bedroom for recording vocals. In 2 hours we were pretty much done... which is lightning fast considering how many evenings it would have taken me to achieve a less than equal result myself at my house. Now whether or not the song is good... is still to be determined and I'm still on the fence about a lot of it, but as far as tracking vox... that's a wrap.

So, mixing noob mike checking in here for some advice. I do ok with mixing guitars, bass, and drums but I have absolutely no idea what to do with these vocal tracks and could use some advice and some reading resources. I'm so noob you can pretty much assume I'm doing everything wrong. I mean, I just barely figured out how to send all the vocal/bass/guitar tracks to a respective mixbus and such. So anything you got for me will be appreciated. I'm gonna get to work on mixing tonight. Hoping to get my name and avatar back by the end of the weekend.

Here's what I'm using: Reaper with all the standard reaper plugin selection. Slate Virtual Mix Rack (track compressors and P. EQ's), Virtual Tape Machines (tape emulation), Virtual Console Collection (analog desk modeler... and I have no idea what it actually does ), and Virtual Buss Compressors.

So de-noob me a little. Thanks.

[nightflameauto]

This dude is pretty good for giving general mix advice that seems to apply to all DAWs regardless of what you're doing.

http://therecordingrevolution.com/

[nakedzen]

That. ^

Also another youtube series that's good for starters is Pensado's Place

[EndTime]

Yeah I guess Youtube is the way nowadays, but at least for me, besides just doing it over and over and learning what works for you, I got a decent amount of info in the http://www.KVRaudio.com forums. Prolly moreso in the plugins and shit at the time, but there was(and I assume still are) a lot of threads and info on mixing/plugins,etc. This was over 13 years ago. But I know it still exists and I cant imagine there is a better database as far as plugins. That was the first forum I ever frequented and was actually somewhat useful.

B Ut, I do want to stress while I got some ideas and pointers from forums and stuff, in all honesty, I learned everything pretty much on my own. Since for the most part I only record my self and my bands, obviously I learned a real specific way that works for myself. So, just like an amp rig, you just continuously dial it in as you keep going. I used to use all kinds of plugins and heavy EQ'ing and compression, side chain comps, all kinds of reverbs, etc.etc..to get my early mixes to sound more pro. And like the saying goes you can't shine a piece of shit. Although I think the Mythbusters actually did shine a piece of shit. But nonetheless, all my "tricks" I picked up never did the trick UNTIL I actually started recording better at the source. YOu'll probably end up changing the way you dial in your rigs initially until you lock in a sound that you can be confident in on recordings. ANd thats my best advice. Learn to be a good engineer before being a good mixer. Until you can capture good tone from the instruments themselves, no amount of mixing will ever satisfy. Compared to how I used to try to mix, I use very subtle EQ tweaks and now that I fully understand compression I can use compressors properly and without artifacts.... Everything is used with a purpose and without just applying the effect without really understanding WHY its making something sound better or worse.

[nakedzen]

I'll second that nothing beats actual experience. Those youtube tutorial series work best if you immediately try out the lesson in practise on a mix you're working on, otherwise you don't learn anything from them. Andy Sneap's forum has multitrack sessions you can download for mix practise. (As a side note, that place used to be so awesome 8-10 years ago when Andy, Colin Richardsson and James Murphy posted there regularly, now not so much).

The Reaper standard plugs are actually really good, I still use Reacomp and ReaEQ regularly. Most of the Slate plugs are sort of saturation/color plugs, even the compressors. So use moderate settings with them.

[Ostinato Rubato]

Yeah I guess Youtube is the way nowadays, but at least for me, besides just doing it over and over and learning what works for you, I got a decent amount of info in the http://www.KVRaudio.com forums. Prolly moreso in the plugins and shit at the time, but there was(and I assume still are) a lot of threads and info on mixing/plugins,etc. This was over 13 years ago. But I know it still exists and I cant imagine there is a better database as far as plugins. That was the first forum I ever frequented and was actually somewhat useful.

B Ut, I do want to stress while I got some ideas and pointers from forums and stuff, in all honesty, I learned everything pretty much on my own. Since for the most part I only record my self and my bands, obviously I learned a real specific way that works for myself. So, just like an amp rig, you just continuously dial it in as you keep going. I used to use all kinds of plugins and heavy EQ'ing and compression, side chain comps, all kinds of reverbs, etc.etc..to get my early mixes to sound more pro. And like the saying goes you can't shine a piece of shit. Although I think the Mythbusters actually did shine a piece of shit. But nonetheless, all my "tricks" I picked up never did the trick UNTIL I actually started recording better at the source. YOu'll probably end up changing the way you dial in your rigs initially until you lock in a sound that you can be confident in on recordings. ANd thats my best advice. Learn to be a good engineer before being a good mixer. Until you can capture good tone from the instruments themselves, no amount of mixing will ever satisfy. Compared to how I used to try to mix, I use very subtle EQ tweaks and now that I fully understand compression I can use compressors properly and without artifacts.... Everything is used with a purpose and without just applying the effect without really understanding WHY its making something sound better or worse.

thanks for the advice. I did spend the last year learning how to get a solid recorded guitar tone. That's kinda changed since I'm using my Laney IRT studio at home, which is great for writing things and having a killer demo/framework for a song but I'm still planning to track with my VH100R on final cuts. I'm pretty confident micing up my cab and getting my sound. I've done well with some of my guitar/bass/drums mixes. I'll try to not overthink it too much and trust my ears and trial and error experience.

[Tortuga]

+1 to recording revolution

He just did a lesson on EQing vox http://therecordingrevolution.com/2015/12/14/how-to-eq-vocals-in-3-steps/

[Cirrus]

The womb forums are really good for good discussions about the philosophy/art behind recording and mixing. The site doesn't get much traffic these days but if you go back through the archives and use the search feature there's a wealth of stuff and a reasonably high proportion of posts from professionals.

[SensoryOverload]

Hey dude I was in the same boat for a while. I put a similar thread on Reddit and found out that there's certain ways to seperate the instrument tracks by changing the lo/mid/hi freq of them, panning .etc. I posted a song there and they pretty much explained what each part should be like and what was wrong.

But some general rules:

- Guitar panned hard L and R
- Bass straight down the middle (mids/his lower so it sits at bottom)
- Vocals straight down the middle (with mids/his hi so it floats ontop)
- Compress the shit out of the drums AND vocals especially as well because the verse and chorus usually differentiate and one thing I found is certain words like ones that start with the letter P for example make this annoying "PUH" noise which spikes the volume level. Compression evens everything out nicely.

Try to add a bit of reverb everywhere except bass, and then at the end of the entire song when it's done. I only add a tiny bit because I'm not a big fan of reverb but it fills in the little gaps nicely.

Another trick is using a maximizer which basically adds volume and stereo widening to the whole track so it's got more punch when finished in the headphones/speakers