MiX iT! 1e – Discuss It: Guitars + Keys

[Charles Dye]

The discussion threadz are NOT just for the mixers. Everyone is very much encouraged to participate. This event is for EVERYBODY.


MiX iT Event #1 - Discuss It: Guitars + Keys

This thread is for discussing the guitars + keys in your mix. Anything you want to say about your guitar + keyboard sounds--the EQ, comp, saturation, verb, delay, other fx, balance, panning, etc.--post it here. Or any lessons you learned from this mix about the guitars.

We know there weren't really any keys, but this is where you can talk about the wind effect.

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Discuss It Threads

There are potentially 79 different mixes for us to discuss + if we tried to do that all in one thread it would probably be very hard to follow. Our solution is to create category threads to keep the discussion somewhat organized + more focussed.

Here are the threads:

Drums + Bass (http://womb.mixerman.net/showthread.php?t=4378)

Guitars + Keys (http://womb.mixerman.net/showthread.php?t=4379)

Lead + BG Vox (http://womb.mixerman.net/showthread.php?t=4380)

The Big Picture (http://womb.mixerman.net/showthread.php?t=4381) (overall balance, stereo buss processing, automation + misc.)


Timeline

We will be discussing the mixes for approx 3 weeks, until Monday, September 24th 2007.


Discuss It Guidelines

We want to emphasize the educational value of the MiX iT #1 Event. A learning experience for all participants--whether you're a seasoned mixer doing this 24/7, or this is actually your very first mix--you're here to learn. Or even if you didn't mix the song. We're convinced that everybody can learn something from this event. These discussion threads are not for MiXiT #1 event participants only. We would like to hear from all of our forum members.

- Share thought / opinions / feelings / emotions / tips / techniques.

- Show us how you did it but also tell us what you think of the Mixes.

- Disect them, analyze them, tell us what you think is right and tell us what you think is wrong.

- Positive & constructive critisizm or opinions is, more often than not, of more value to both the mixer and the listener then negative comments.


Please share with us your thotz + let's all learn more about mixing!!

Thanx,
Chris + Charles

[IntelDoc]

Jut a bit of Neve URS EQ and compression via RComp and some fx sends.... PRetty happy with em. Oh, and all shot thru my API setup

Doc

[badboymusic]

Clean guitars: Little EQ tweaking and Waves C4. Distorted guitars: Waves GTR to add some clean punch. The lead bridge guitar is running into Enigma for a cool subtle movement and DUY Wide to spread it even more. Distorted guitars are running into Amplitube and DUY's Magic Spectrum Pro to shape the sound.

[chrisj]

All the guitars got ResEQ because I always like having narrow boosts on guitars so long as they're not on a speaker cone resonance- that's the main trick, boost where the speaker isn't honking and the articulation comes out.

On Luke's guitar I've got a bit of flanger to add to the grind. The stereo chugging tracks have low end to help them do that, and the remaining tracks do things like get obnoxiously penetrating in the upper mids, panned hard left and right.

Everybody but the one with the flanger got High Impact, the distortion plug which thins out the quiet bits so no sustain is added. This ruins pretty tones but I liked it on these guitars and it ended up ALL over this track, anywhere there's overdrive it's that. What I'm doing with it is, I push it very gently until the 'top' of the guitar part is reaching out more and being punchier, but not so much that the whole sound breaks apart, which it will if you use this too much. The stereo chug guitars illustrate this pretty well- just resonant EQs and High Impact there, and Luke and the chug guitars got a bit of automation.

I might be remembering bits of this wrong so I'll refer to what the guitars do, not the track names. The automation does this: for the solo, when the track's sort of laying back and the distorted vocal hasn't come in yet, the lead guitar comes in HOT, suddenly a guitar is really cranking. The dist vocal comes in but it's not on top of the lead guitar, then the lead guitar plays more stuff, even more searingly (no volume change for that, it's in the track) which is answered by the dist vocal, and they both get silly loud and then drop out for the whole band riffing away. At that point the lead guitar's gone back down to its usual level. The band riffs away, and then there's a little drum break that's sort of sideways, and the band busts into the chorus. It was kind of flat, then I figured out that a guitar in the middle was hitting the onset of the chorus extra hard, so I went to the automation again, and BAM, pushed that one guitar up to silly loud for just a moment, and slowly brought it back down as the vocals entered.

So the automation levels went loud on the guitar solo, pulled back again for a riffing section, and then a rhythm guitar hit super loud again to try and make a wall for the onset of the chorus- I just liked the way that guitar hit, so I made it be the main thing in the wall. This is straight MiLaR stuff, you find things you're enjoying and use automation to be continually throwing new cool things at the listener when they have a functional purpose.

Using the guitar lead to cover the distorted vocal was a very functional purpose for having it too loud there, and using that guitar to make a wall coming into the chorus was also functional- the automation stings are a factor of what's happening in the song, what needs to be covered up, what might happen at a given moment. Things can't always go up and up, so you might have the bit between solo and chorus NOT really be as loud or as big as it could be- I thought I had it kind of subdued but grooving, but it's the springboard for the chorus hit, and the thing is that's not from turning anything down, it's that it's surrounded by bits where something is turned up.

Cheers :)

[Brendo]

Didn't feel the need to do much here. I prefer 'symmetrical' guitars but couldn't really do this here. Tapehead into DAD Valve set to Distorted Guitar on the Guitar buss. Slight reverb added to guitar buss. Automated up the reverb on the clean guitars at the beginning, turning it down a bit when it starts to build then down to my final level by the end of the intro/verse.

[dikledoux]

I did nothing to the guits in terms of EQ or other plugs. I mainly went after the perceived issue that the tracks were setup as stereo tracks as though to dictate the panning and width through the song and I just didn't like what had been done. I wanted to make it feel like 2 guitars that were actually playing a decent arrangement rather than panning tricks to separate parts out.

The idea was that the whole song should seem like a single performance where the 2 guitarists are just hitting stomp boxes to make changes in sound for various sections. When one part is changing while the other repeats, the first should be the focus and just use panning to keep the two guitarists separated on the sound stage. They’ll just be wide the whole time to keep the song big throughout.

Got that done by splitting some of the GatSimon01 tracks and only using one of the pair as a mono track to balance against the Gat 1 track. Did a general panning and volume setup and then automated both at specific points on some of the tracks to keep the spread consistent while still allowing for parts to have focus.

Other than that, the guitars sounded great to me. I especially took advantage of what was going on in the breakdown section. After ditching the loopy drum thing, it occured to me that the guitars were building this great soundscape through the part and that it shouldn't be secondary - it oughta be right up front with something else sneaking around in the background (the vocal/verb thing I opted for).

That's all I got without listening to other mixes and commenting.

Jeez. This is WORK. :lol:

dik

[gbacklin]

I did the same with the guitars as I did with the vocals in that I bussed the tracks to a sub mix. In the attached document, I have also included the settings I used for bass. I know there is a section Drums and Bass...I'll include the same with that document also :)

As mentioned in my vocal post, I mainly used the recently purchased URS CSPro, just to see what I could do with it.

Take Care,
Gene

[Baddo]

For the guitars I chose what I wanted to use first, bounced the sm7/sm57 tracks to one tracks and then used MixSaturator with the tape1 shape, Colortone Pro with a LA3 impulse followed by PSPMixpressor and then into UAD Neve 1081se where I tinkered to get what I want.

It's usually this or maybe Vintage Warmer instead of MixSaturator and UAD Fairchild instead of the Colortone/MixPressor combo.

I added a leslie effect but that was on an aux bus so it wasn't actuallly in the chain. Also in the aux busses for the guitars where a couple of reverbs and a delay.

[southboundloco]

with the guitars i just left them as they are just a bit of EQ'ng,high pass and stuff so they won't get in each other's way and so as not to clash with the bass and a bit of compression and couple of massey Tape head

[southboundloco]

oh i did put some reverb on some parts of some gats on certain parts of songs...sorry am not infront of my daw so am just tryin to remember stuff on top of my head

[MKZ]

GTRS:
I separated some of the guitar parts to new tracks based on where the sound or the dynamics changed within the original tracks. This resulted as less voices on the LE, but I guess I'm more used to having different sounds on separate tracks than automating the plugins based on changing sounds/parts. (which I should get used to.... It really isn't that hard after all....and will help a lot as far as the available voices are concerned.)

I also split some of the stereo gtr tracks to mono and threw away the other side in the beginning of the process. I guess I did this to free up voices on the LE. I'm not really sure if I shoulda done this, but that's the way I did it this time.

For compression, I used RennComp and RennAxx. EQ: mostly just hi-pass if I remember right on the Oxford EQ. I think I used no EQ on the doubled heavy gtr part (one of the stereo tracks) that kicks in after the middle section of the song.

Hmmm... what else?.... oh yeah, I added even more "tremolo" to the tremolo-gtr in the intro. [EDIT: Voce Spin]

some of them I send to the ping pong delay thingy i had goin on the vocals as well, and like wise some of them i sent through to the yamaha85 (which i used as an echo) followed by Dverb.

like everything else, the guitars were a challenge. I wished more of them woulda been doubled, but that's just my personal taste I guess.

[Evil Jack]

I thought the guitars were really well tracked, with plenty of variety in the sounds.

I started by separating out any tracks where the player hits a pedal/changes sound during the take, and splitting this off onto another track - just to give me more control.
Hardly any eq- just rolled off below 80-100hz bit of high from the Massenburg and notched out anything that pissed me off.

I muted the double tracked guitars in quite a few places - more does not equal better.

I put a stepped filter (Tremolator) effect on the solo and a large hall to make it more interesting.

Lots of automation needed though to keep the dynamics moving.

Bass was recorded lovely- just compressed it I think (RComp) and it sat there nicely.

[danbee]

Quick summary of my mix due to lack of time [+ laziness, says charles ;)], I'll elaborate later if anybody gives a shit :)

Guitars - Guitars were balanced to make sure that the chord cam through (as per mix notes) and panned to fill the stereo image. Reverb and a little chorus (sorry Brendo!) were added to the intro guitar. All the guitars were then routed to a separate track and a slight EQ cut was made to allow the vocals to fit.

Funny wind effect - I wanted to make this sound smoother and more wind like (I was assuming it was supposed to be some kind of wind!) so I used Supaphaser and fiddled with the controls until I arrived at a sound I liked, then I soaked it in reverb, all wet and no dry.

Everything was then routed to separate busses (Drums, Drum OH, Drum Loops, Guitars, Main Vox and Backing Vox) and automation was used to move elements up and down in the mix to give it some real dynamics and energy.

[st robert]

just threw some chorus on the clean gats and was done with it.

[Brendo]

robert: duck!

*throws fist in roberts direction*

:lol:

[st robert]

*takes aussie punch in the left eye, loses footing, falls down, notices the pink socks, wonders if kenny is australian, passes out giggling.*






tee hee.

:) (for effect)

no, no chorus here, just phaser in the bridge, flange in spots, the boost in the low mids, psp vw to kind of make them sit better, a bump in the 2k range during the lines before chorus 3, various volume rides to give things more power.

i have no idea if any of that was truly effective in the overall, but it felt good at the time. no way to tell without the artist actually smiling or frowning at the end of the day.

i think once everybody gets done with the "look what i did" and starts really listening to the good things about others' mixes and finding out how and why those things worked, we'll start getting somewhere.

there's a lot to get through.


rob

[Charles Dye]

*takes aussie punch in the left eye, loses footing, falls down, notices the pink socks, wonders if kenny is australian, passes out giggling.*

barbarous... fuggin brilliant!!

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[st robert]

and for the record the keys gave me fits. getting them to sit properly required a lot of sculpting in the lows. somewhere around 150ish there was this kinda rumble like a truck or large machinery or something. only sometimes. every 15 minutes or so i would think i had it tamed, then my ears would play tricks on me and it would be back. even after repeated breaks out in the back yard watching kids put pennies on the tracks and fondly thinking about my youth i would go back in and there it was.

fuck.

anybody else?

[MKZ]

yeah the keys were pretty tricky, but all in all I think they made a huge difference

[st robert]

yeah the keys were pretty tricky, but all in all I think they made a huge difference

:grin:

[Skwaidu]

The Keys were a bitch... I almost didn't use them at all but decided to use the Nibnob Vocollider with them synching to the shaker and speech adlibs... Very cool with a phase flip so they'll disappear in stereo!


:lol: :lol: :lol:



Oh, the guitars?

Well first of all, I wanted to do wide and mostly disregarded what the band would do live... Most of the guitars are hard panned and I just tried to balance the differential chorus guitars with EQ as well as I could.

Like I said in the big picture thread, the organization of these tracks was a little harder than usual, I would have preferred all the different sounds on their own tracks from the start.... And yes, I patched all the multi-miked guitars in to mono submasters.

Though mostly the guitars were played and tracked well, I still did do a bunch of EQ cleaning up on most of them... Cutting some lomid cabinet resonances and the woofer spike with a tight Q namely, after which I boosted hi mids with a broad Q on the chorus gtrs. I felt that this track needed no additional digital silence cleaning as all the little noises and such are what add lots of character to the song... And digital silence is kinda "passe", ainnit?

I did toy with AC1 on some dirt tracks for girth and mass and on the cleaner ones I had a hint of Massey CT4 comp and I added some ambiences to them, tried the Chandler comp too but decided that I didn't want the hype attack on these.

Most of the guit EQ was the Digi 7-band and some Massenburg.

The one track I had a little fun with was the middle eight fuzz sustain, which is panning like a madman towards the big riff and has some delay... Though I ended up burying it a little.

Also, I ended riding the guitars quite a lot, and experimented with some of the panning options available. (Like in the big riff part with the harmonies, though ended up with big LCR mono as it felt best)

...And the wind effects I just left as is, added a tad of plate to them.

[ryst]

Guitars:

I ran all guitars through a guitar bus. No compression on them at all. I did do some volume automation though. The guitar bus had Colortone to warm them up even though I cut out some lows. And I just did my best to find a good balance between all of them. They already sounded decent to me and in the spirit of keeping this mix raw as the mixing notes suggested, I decided against compression, a lot of eq, and any reverb. The only effects I used was a little bit of split harm on one track and a 1/4 not delay on parts of another. Just a little boost in the high mids on some of the guitar tracks.

That's it.

[Normie]

Guitars:

I played around with them for a while trying to get the tracks sounding different without changing things too much
As a guitrist myself I would normally have had a lot of dialog with the guy's to see what they were trying to achieve.

The brief suggested left side of linkin park I did download a couple of track for ref but without getting into re-amping and not having any direct sound
I thought its best to leave alone. also get didn't want to get trapped into over production.

I added some automation on the arpeggio Gtr's for the intro as I had cut the drummer from that also
I liked the way they sat with the vocal and wanted to sound more moody

I also played around with the panning to try and add space to the track

I added some level automation on the course's trying to keep the power in the track whilst not loosing the identity of the guitarists intern building the track as per the brief.

I didnt cut things around anywhere I would have regained some audio in parts if I had the master session possibly

It would be nice to have the full breakdown on what was used with the guitars

Again nice performances

Keys:

Not much here automated D-Verb my thinking was to add some atmosphere to this I also cut some of the intro out to get the vocal in quicker
always nice to stop DJ's talking blox all over your track :-)

Cheers
Normie

[Skwaidu]

Oh, I think I forgot to add here that I also added a tad of Massey THC to the chorus guitars... (To 1 of the 2 tracks provided in each)