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5 Min To A Better Mix is BAAACCCKK!!!


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I check for new recording revolution videos pretty regularly but today I nearly deafened my coworkers once I saw that 5 MIN TO A BETTER MIX III just going!!!!!!!!!!!! On the negative side now everyone knows I surf on my phone at work. :( Oh well screw 'em!

http://www.youtube.com/user/recordingrevolution

A great piece of mixing wisdom everyday for the rest of the month!

Edited by Garpocalypse
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As much as I love Graham I gotta say that today's video couldn't have come at a worse time for me. Just this week, after over a year of doing things my way, I just identified how poorly i've been using my stereo tracks in my mixes and today his tip reinforces what i wish I knew all this time.

Thanks graham but if it came a year earlier I would have been posted by now!! :)

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Noob question: Does this mixing in Mono talk have anything to do with the "Width" control that (at least) Reaper has next to the Panning?

Sort of but not really.

I've never used reaper so I can only guess that it's used to get your supporting instruments out of the center. You can do the same thing recording a stereo track and splitting to mono which is how i am doing it.

Forcing everything to the center let's you see how everything stacks and makes it much easier to find something that's clashing or disappearing completely. Some issues you might not be finding in stereo become much more apparent in mono. Plus a quick and easily reversible change in your DAW can be used to combat mix fatigue and give you a better perspective.

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I started watching the first 5 episodes or so, and yeah, there are some really excellent tips and tricks to be learned from this guy. Ya just gotta listen to his shitty music :P It was Christian rock a la Taylor Swift if I remember correctly.

lol yea I wish he would do some different things once in awhile. One of his recent videos has him using his own mix as fodder and he says those god awful Linkin Park esque guitar licks he did were a strength of the mix. I'm not crazy about the amount of nasal singing that are on his videos either but the information is good and that's what matters to me.

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But it's "okay" if I lower the width knob to manage the space that my tracks use, right? Or is that "wrong"?

It's not wrong, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's better to start off with a mono source (like DI Electric Guitar recordings) and stereo enhance it from there if you wish. If you're starting with a stereo source and you want to make room for other instruments using stereo mods, sure, it's fine to narrow the stereo source a little bit, but try not to do that so much that it becomes a habit, because narrowing the sound sometimes merges specifically oriented sound waves that might worsen the sound quality overall. It's like when you try that trick to isolate vocal tracks and the result worsens the background instrumentation but leaves slight traces of the vocal track (which might be the wet signal obtained from effects like chorus and flanger, I believe); I discovered that Fruity Stereo Enhancer can do almost the same thing and it works pretty well, so I'd imagine that stereo reduction has the possibility of worsening the sound quality excessively. I find it better to just arrange things by stereo enhancing them to different extents to "position them around me" at "different angles".

Edited by timaeus222
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Sure, if a sound is too wide. Mixing in mono is a different thing, though. I hope we're on the same page here. Mixing in mono doesn't mean you render the track in mono.

I understand. I ask because I have this orchestral mix where I really wanted the position of each instrument to be clear, so I reduced the width of them (not dramatically enough to actually reduce their quality as timaeus' says).

I think I'll rewatch some of the videos to better get timaeus' tips :-P

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I understand. I ask because I have this orchestral mix where I really wanted the position of each instrument to be clear, so I reduced the width of them (not dramatically enough to actually reduce their quality as timaeus' says).

I think I'll rewatch some of the videos to better get timaeus' tips :-P

Yeah man, if reducing the width sounds better go right ahead.

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