Original Message                 Date: 20-May-02  @  12:00 PM   -   graphic eq on final mix?

chroma

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right...so i was at this party saturday night, i played my cd and all the ladies thought i was wonderful and "very talented" but something about the mix bothered me. the bass and high end were adequate but most of the details which reside in the mid range were buried. f*ck if i knew where to find the eq controls...

anyway would i ruin anything by running it through a graphic eq (soundforge)? just to sort of nudge it to where i want, nothing drastic...

please dont say "mix it again"

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Message 31/40                 Date: 21-May-02  @  03:07 AM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

chroma

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so will the gentlemen be staying for lunch then???

i just figured that since my initial instinct was to just tweak it slightly with the stereo's graphic eq that that was the way to go...i notice though that my mixes generally sound like that, must be my lack of good monitors. the music that was playing before i popped my cd in was this indian/electronic hybrid thing with violins, flutes and a dominant pulse wave bass

i must say that parametric eqs i dont really have a handle on; i do use it on individual tracks but for the whole mix...

ok off to try parametric, in sound forge cause thats all i have...if it doesnt work out ill just mix again...thanks boys!

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Message 32/40                 Date: 21-May-02  @  03:13 AM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

influx

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but youre still basing this all on one experience with ONE system?

I dont like that very much. nope.

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Message 33/40                 Date: 21-May-02  @  09:54 AM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

bedwyr

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you tell 'im, influx.

chroma, you really do have to try it out on different speakers. lots of them. don't go tweaking just on what you hear on one set. i think the ladies' reaction says it all. most people don't give a shit what it sounds like. they like a good tune and/or a good beat.

there. now i told him to, too.

oh, and the midrange is always the hardest to get right. we're all very experienced at listening to mid range, so any fuck ups are easily larry heard.

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Message 34/40                 Date: 21-May-02  @  11:51 AM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

k

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oh one thing... my favourite speakers (which I can't use now in this apartment for fear of the building collapsing frankly), well... those speakers are old... and they have a 8" midranghe speaker in them and they emphasise midrange, meaning you tend to drop the mid a tad when mixing... well tracks mixed on THOSE tend to sound fantastic in clubs and large venues, perhaps cos you can only mix with them REAL loud. They have to be driven to a certain level like all speakers before they are properly reproducing their relative frequencies.

some people use speakers that are too big for their setup and they are always mixing at low volume where the speaker isnt being driven hard enuff.

I guess idealy you eant a dat and a 1/3 octave 31 band graphic... go to the venue, play the dat, tweak it with the graphic, checkout what you had to tweak.

but that's in an ideal world

___________________________________

I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!

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Message 35/40                 Date: 21-May-02  @  03:15 PM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

Brett

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mastering engineers ususally use apogee converters,avalon eq's ad2077 I think?($12k each) , empirical labs, manley, weiss etc etc, and go down to two inch studer tape decks that have all kinds of high end mods. Never read the kit list of a good master house and seen finalizer in it. Many mix engineers use them to get demos sounding good. I read that bands use them live and in the studio, like Marilyn Manson. I had thought of using a powercore in wavelab. I think that would yeild much better results because of the environment and rendering ability. But shit, these plug-ins do the same damn thing as a finalizer. Waves LI and RCL are sweet, and the timeworks eq is great.

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Message 36/40                 Date: 22-May-02  @  06:04 AM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

chroma

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ok ok...me go listen on a few more systems. its
just easy to think the problem is with my mix
since i'm monitoring on a consumer-level sony
system. i have tried it out on a few other systems
though, generally the mix sounds good when its
playing off a system as crap as mine

ok now i use my ears...

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Message 37/40                 Date: 23-May-02  @  12:17 AM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

Pongoid

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I'll tell you one thing right now; any of those tools, even the finalizer wit FUCK YOUR MIX UP badly if you don't know what you are doing, even if the piece has wizards in it. Less is more and you HAVE to use your ears. Don't try to pollish a turd, do it right from the start.

Ape

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Message 38/40                 Date: 23-May-02  @  04:17 PM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

k

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that's a good point - newbies pile in with a mix then 'master' it to using web tutorials which are designed as general guides - then they listen and say 'it doesnt sound pro' - well I guess if it was simply a matter of owning the gear, everyone would be a pro right! -

FIRST GET YOUR MIXES SOUNDING RIGHT FROM THE PACKET, NO MASTERING OR ANYTHING - in fact a good excercise is to do mixes with no effects at all, just eq & levels... learn your trade.

You FIRST learn eq & level mixing, adding fx will only HIDE problems... adding mastering makes it 100 times worse and you'll never identify the problem once youve hidden it in layers of fx and mastering processors.

start with the basic's... work on that.

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Message 39/40                 Date: 23-May-02  @  10:08 PM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

Brett

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true about hiding problems. I was working with this guy who mae tracks that souded cool, but I would always notice littel anomolies that made it sound off, and whn i turned the reverbs and stuff off the sound was not working at all. He would try and make soudns out of the reverb and end up with uncontrolable things. that only sounded decent when masked by tons of fx. We had to work on synth programing before I could do anything with his songs. He's gotten pretty damn good since he realized what he was doing wrong. Now he mixes dry and adds fx last. It's what I generally do.

also boosting can add unwanted phase shifts and distorion. The new waves eq is supposed to prevent phase shifiting. When I master somthing it sounds good, louder and leveled, but it looses a lot of the clarity and imiging. Using these plugs does degrade the sound quite a bit, and on a mix done with all softsynths , you can't afford to lose and thing. So for demo's I do it but would never actually try and pass my own mastering off as pro. I get a kick out of Craig Anderton doing mastering for big Labels' smaller artists. He uses Wavlab and Waves stuff. I bet he gets it nice, but I bet there is no way those masters could hold their own with anything done with higher end systems like wiess digital eq's and compressors, or the analog stuff we alreay discussed. The plug-ins add so much noise into the song and after a few processed it becomes grainy sounding like mp3. The finalizer is no diferant.

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Message 40/40                 Date: 24-May-02  @  06:31 AM   -   RE: graphic eq on final mix?

Pongoid

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It's funny that you mention that about starting dry, because I almost always do that and never really thought about it until now. Just levels, sounds that work with each other in relation to the EQ jigsaw puzzle, and movement in a groove, then comes the dashes of flavor like effects, and tricks, and even then, it's only a bit. A lot of my buddies say I have a really raw sound that they like. Maybe that's why. Huh. Thanks for the wake-up.

Ape

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