rock mix

[zildjohn01]

i finally decided to stop asking how to do stuff, and just do it. this is my first attempt since my crappy laptop, $5 radio shack mic days.

it's hard rock, or at least it's supposed to be. i only have the first verse and chorus done, i want to see if there's anything i can change before i go ahead and do the whole song.

drums
- two nady sp5's x-y off a little to the ride side, centered through the snare and kick, about 6-7 feet up (low ceiling)
- sm57 on snare
- atm25 on kick
- no processing

guitar
- fender frontman 25r, wide stereo mic'd w/ two sm57's
- no processing

bass
- same setup as guitar (yes, you heard me right)
- again, no processing

voice
- sm57 w/ cheap pop screen
- light reverb

it's called Why. ok, bash away...

[brandondrury]

They cymbals are a little fizzy. It may be the room, but more likely it's the placement of the overheads. I think the whole "overhead" thing works great in big rooms, but is not nearly as effective in smaller rooms.

I've had a small room for years and I work around the loud cymbals issue by moving the overheads so that they are are about 3 feet off the ground. Basically, I often place the overheads so that it's sort of micing the floor tom, but I may pull it up a foot and back a foot or two from the drummer's perspective. This helps keep the cymbal levels manageable. I can always compress these to bring up the cymbals if I need to.

The snare sounds a little boxy to me. A lot of that is due to the drummer not smacking the drums hard enough. (Listen to the kick drum during the verse. It falls out). So smack the drums harder, but don't hit the cymbals nearly as hard (if possible). Listen to the tone of the snare during rolls. It's much better because the drummer is actually hitting the damn thing a little bit.

The guitars seam to be fizzy. They have more of a "jih" tone instead of a "jah". It's probably the amp causing this, but maybe you can work around it. I'm not big on stereo micing on guitars. I'd rather just double the guitar with a single mic and hard pan them. It sounds MUCH better to my ears. Give it a try and see what you like.

I'm not big on micing up bass these days either because it's easy to fall into this excessive 400 Hz trap. Your bass seams to have fallen into that as well.

There are a lot of groove problems that I would definitely fix on the real track. Your drummer plays very passively and there is no room for that on a recording.

Brandon

[zildjohn01]

i didn't have time to rerecord anything but i remixed a bit. here

i lowered the drum oh's volume a few db and it sounds a little better. i compressed the heck out of the kick track to even it out (it sounds maybe too loud now, though). i couldn't mess with the snare, there's too much already in the oh's. i'll try the new placement along with rerecording sometime. the problem with that is, the drums are in a corner of a large (10x35?) room, angled 45 degrees, hi hat toward the corner and ride toward the center. seems like mics facing right into the corner would cause a problem compared to mics facing toward the open space. does that matter much?

i didn't change the bass at all, but in one last comparison the raw DI sounds a lot better than the raw mic'd. next mix i might switch it over. or maybe try eq'ing the mic'd track to fix it (starting with a nice cut at 400hz apparently)

i was never happy with the guitar tone, it was always crap. the weird "grunge" sound comes from something in the mids, i'm guessing. eq never helped the problem, only masked it. my amp is a fender frontman 25r, more of a little practice amp than a decent recording amp. i use the orange Boss MD-2 and play that clean through the amp. anything out of that amp is better than a DI sound though.

you didn't mention voice, but the more i listen, it sounds ridiculous. (yes, i'm the singer) i was going for a Hinder type of vocal, which i can get sounding decent live on a good day, but mic'd it just gets ugly. i'll rerecord those vocals too.