Second Stage Mixing Continues
Nov. 20th, 2013 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillA Whole Lot of second-stage mixing (for me) is making things louder, often by making parts of them softer.
This probably sounds counterintuitive. But in, for example, a track of me strumming away on the octave mando, some of the strums will be louder than others. This is partly me getting excited, or me striving for expression, and partly the sad fact that I am just not very good, and sometimes I hit the strings harder than I meant to.
And the peak for the track is the loudest point of the track, whether or not that is a strum that is 4 dB louder than necessary. If I go in and clip out that loud strum and reduce its volume to make it only a little louder than the other strums, that will often let me raise the volume of the entire strumming track.
By the same token, if I reduce the volume of the loudest sung syllables, I can raise the volume on the entire vocal track. Thus I can make the voice and the instrument both louder, without blowing out the listeners eardrums--because I can make it more consistently loud.
And while people like songs to have softer parts and louder parts, in general if you want to, for example, listen to music in the car you need the softer parts to be only a *little* softer, or the car noise covers them up and you can't hear them at all. So more consistently loud is good.
The interesting thing is just how much louder my sung high notes are than my sung low notes. I have low notes I'm boosting by 4 dB to get them audible over the instrument, and high notes I'm cutting by 2.5 dB. I end up changing the levels dozens of times in a single verse. Fortunately once I have them entered, the computer handles it automatically for every replay and rendering, or I couldn't possibly do this.
So I skipped one song today because my Ear said it was fine, and worked on three more, and am still on track to finish Friday. But I really need to get a chance to listen in the car again.
This probably sounds counterintuitive. But in, for example, a track of me strumming away on the octave mando, some of the strums will be louder than others. This is partly me getting excited, or me striving for expression, and partly the sad fact that I am just not very good, and sometimes I hit the strings harder than I meant to.
And the peak for the track is the loudest point of the track, whether or not that is a strum that is 4 dB louder than necessary. If I go in and clip out that loud strum and reduce its volume to make it only a little louder than the other strums, that will often let me raise the volume of the entire strumming track.
By the same token, if I reduce the volume of the loudest sung syllables, I can raise the volume on the entire vocal track. Thus I can make the voice and the instrument both louder, without blowing out the listeners eardrums--because I can make it more consistently loud.
And while people like songs to have softer parts and louder parts, in general if you want to, for example, listen to music in the car you need the softer parts to be only a *little* softer, or the car noise covers them up and you can't hear them at all. So more consistently loud is good.
The interesting thing is just how much louder my sung high notes are than my sung low notes. I have low notes I'm boosting by 4 dB to get them audible over the instrument, and high notes I'm cutting by 2.5 dB. I end up changing the levels dozens of times in a single verse. Fortunately once I have them entered, the computer handles it automatically for every replay and rendering, or I couldn't possibly do this.
So I skipped one song today because my Ear said it was fine, and worked on three more, and am still on track to finish Friday. But I really need to get a chance to listen in the car again.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-24 12:47 pm (UTC)(Even though software compressors, in principle, should be more clever and capable and able-to-be-fine-tuned than good old analogue technology, in practice that just seems to make them harder to set up right! "Come back (expensive) physical boxes with lots of knobs and flashing lights along the front, all is forgiven!" =:o} )
no subject
Date: 2013-11-24 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-24 01:10 pm (UTC)