[ddots-l] Anybody wanna critique my mix and help me learn?

  • From: John Schucker <gwynn@xxxxxxx>
  • To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:44:18 -0600

OK, so a friend and I recorded something, and I'm going to explain what we did and the problems I know about already.


http://personalpages.tds.net/~gwynn/sweetheart.mp3

OK, all I did to it is: insert sends on rhythm tracks and sent them to a bus with delay, and changed the volumes on some of the tracks so it didn't clip on the master bus.

So here are the problems I can see right now, aside from some messed up rhythms and such, heh. But at this point I'm more interested in the mechanics of the mix, if that makes sense. This is my sonar learning project. The flute is too quiet. The shaker is probably too loud. Vocals need something or other done to them. That's off the top of my head, I need to listen to it more extensively.

So what I'm looking for is this. Both what you'd do, e.g. raise the volume of the flute, and how you'd do it, change track volume, EQ/compression, etc. Please don't just say, make blah louder, I'm a newbie and I'm just going to go, how do I do that? Oh I'm running sonar producer 6.2. So I don't have fun things like boost11, unfortunately. I'm hoping to upgrade soon.

I know a lot of people have way more experience than I do. I'm happy to read the documentation mind you, I'm not asking for total handholding here. But for instance, people will say things like, oh do some EQ, and I can see for instance you could do that to make the shaker less sharp for instance, but then I'm going, OK, how do I tell what frequencies I need to be playing around with, do I just slap some EQ on it and play with it until it sounds good or is there some starting point or such?

Anyway, this is mostly raw right from the microphones, except for the things I mentioned above that I did to it. Oh the drone thing in the background is a softsynth, in case that matters. Any kind of help would be really appreciated. I realize of course that a lot of this will come down to experimentation, but I also know that if I just start doing stuff to it at random I'll make it sound more horrible than it probably already does, heh. Oh and here's my info, in case anybody decides to be crazy generous and wants to chat about it. I guess in some ways it might help to be able to hear individual tracks?

msn: alashkhem@xxxxxxxxxxx
yahoo messenger: alashkhem (running under msn so can't send/receive files)
skype: khomus
email: gwynn@xxxxxxx (in case it doesn't show up in the list headers)
PLEASE READ THIS FOOTER AT LEAST ONCE!
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