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On 7/22/64 11:59 AM, mark francombe wrote:
The next process (that I am terrible at... always use to use an engineer for) is mixing.. I really want to make all the music sit well together, I expect that the Film Director will drop the music VERY low in the mix ofr my tastes, and often what tends to happen with my mixes, is that one hears ONE instrument stick out above the films mix. Do I REALLY want to slap a big old compressor on the end..It is extremely difficult to answer a lot of these questions without hearing the music. The answers will necessarily vary quite a bit depending not only on the content but also on what you've done so far in the mix.
In general, if you have your track normalized and you have good separation of your mixing frequencies (to avoid timbral masking and a general sense of 'muddiness') then it is not necessary to use compression.
However, once you have the mix where you like it, try out some compression on the entire track and make it be very, very subtly applied. Sometimes a nice rule of thumb for applying effects of any kind (especially compression, reverb or e.q.) is to bring the effect up into the entire mix and the instant you can hear the effect, bring it down just a tiny bit until it sounds inaudible again. This is a psycho-acoustic trick that we play on ourselves. Print the results (always as a numbered mix attempt), wait a couple of days then listen to your mix A-Bed with
and without the effect. Your ears will tell you which ones to use.
It ruins the mix for me! And the music sounds good loud.. how can I avoid this instrument seperation... I feel its This problem, that (if im not careful, I dont think Im in this ball park yet ) can make a good piece of music start sounding all er.. "General Midi- ish"
Again, hard to say without hearing what you've laid down so far, but since it sounds like a lot of what you are doing is orchestral, consider how an orchestra is laid out in a concert hall and place your instruments accordingly. Cross talk to your ears in a concert hall is very strong, so you want to avoid any really radical hard panning of anything. You want to go for a general feeling of 'space' in your stereo placement and avoid a 'stereo' mix if you know what I mean.
Reverb?? I usually like to use as few different reverbs as possible, just one short one, for increasing the size of instruments, and one Hall reverb to emulate that all the instruments are in the same room. Is this the right approach?
Errrrr, here's one place where I"m a bit dubious about your approach. Think about any natural acoustic space:You don't have instruments in an orchestra inside tiny boxes (creating their own reverberant space) and then all of them inside of the reverberation of the concert hall, so if you want a naturalistic sound, why would you put a reverb through a reverb? Do you see what I'm saying? Electronica artists and artists who use backing tracks make this mistake constantly....using tracks with reverbs and then performing in a hall that has it's own natural reverberation.........adding a reverb to a reverb is one of the first ways of adding muddiness to your mix, imo.
Personally, in such a case, I find that using a convolution reverb instead of a typical digital reverb is a great way to go for naturalistic 'space' creation. I have an amazing impulse file which uses Row 8, dead center in Foellinger Auditorium at the University of Illinois.........it's just a beautiful sounding convolution reverb sound. I'd be happy to send you my entire collection of impulse files (and a freeware Convolution reverb as far as that goes)
if that would help.
Any other tips of tricks.. ( feel like theres a professionals trick Im missing here) Like someone with say " Well Mark, you HAVE cut the whole mix at 1k havent you? and boosted the Sub?
Its very hard to guage, the film dialog mix is terrible at the moment, all different levels (even jumps from left to right haa ha.. with lots of background noise (wind in trees mostly)Here is where compression might save you guys a lot of heart ache............some clean up tools might help too. If the movie is going to be effective it is imperative that this be fixed right away, even down to going into a controlled
space and re-dubbing your dialogue.This is one of the first signs of an amateur film and I can't more highly stress that you should get a handle on it
in order to make the film effective.A quick trick with your left to right jumping dialogue........condense your stereo track to a mono track and duplicate it and then remix to naturlistic taste. If the dialogue is really heavily lopsided in stereo then put the two tracks out of phase with each other........this will radically reduce your noise but still retain the dialogue. This one is tricky and doesn't always work but it might be worth a shot to save you a lot of re-dubbing time.
Okay, that's it for now. Good luck and congratulations on your first film score!
rick walker