Mixing and mastering tips

[Aero]

Hi all ! Im making a demo for my band, I will record everything with my pod xt live, exept the drums, wich i've recorded in some studio.

The drum has a mic for every hihat, snare, kick and tom, 2 overheads for crashes, 1 floor mic and 1 ambience mic for natural reverb.

I already did nice pan to the drum mics, put some compression and eq to the kick drum, and it sounds preety cool.

What i dont know, is what steps to follow (in a generic way) to get a decent mix and a final mixdown. I already have the final drums and bass tracks, ssome guitar tracks but just for reference.

If someone knows about this I could upload some clips so you can listen what kind of music do i make and give me some tips !


peace 

[greendog]

send me a link to some clips and il see what i can suggest.

my main piece of advice however will be to just follow your ears. (as stupid as that sounds) but people tend to follow what people say far too much which can lead to a crap mix simply because you end up forgetting to actually listen.

[IzzyDutch]

^ Yeah just use your ears

Just do:

- EQ on all tracks; kick / overhead / snare / toms / guitars / bass / lead vocals / backing vocals (not overall)
- Compression on those same tracks, with a vocal compressor on the vocals.
- Add a little reverb on the vocals or where ever else you think is necisarry.

I asked the engineer of Izzy's Like A Dog album how he mixed and mastered it and he did the same deal basically... close - miced the guitars, then used the EQ on each instrument, but on the mixer instead of the software (which was Pro-Tools) and immediately pressed to tape. Then compression on everything and a little reverb. On Izzy's Miami album no reverb at all was used for example except on 'Everything's Alright'. The rest is all natural reverb from the big studio space.

Anyways, here are some very handy tips & tricks as far as EQ-ing goes:

http://www.recordingwebsite.com/articles/eqprimer.php

And for mastering I use a mastering program called T-Racks24 (there are others like Hal-Bar, Ozone and some others) which is nice cause you can really make it more slick and professional sounding. I just use one of the pre-sets there 'vintage masterings suite 1' and it works out great for me.

I also suggest www.homerecordingconnection.com (forum part). It's got lot's of great info/articles and the people are very friendly and helpfull.

[Aero]

i really appreciate man ! thanx !