some new tips for all you guys... pos...

ok....ive been recording and mixing the same project for about 5 months now...i am almost done mixing...and here are some things i learned...some of these things you guys may be already doing, but ill try to explain anyways...

-before mixing, after youve finished up tracking...take a seperate day to run through all the songs and do a "clean-up". basically just run through and mute (cut out) any string noise, click counts, any breathing before vocal takes...etc..etc...to take this further...ive tried something new instead of using a gate on my drum tracks for more seperation and that leads me to my next tip...

-instead of relying on the parameters in your Gate plug-in for your drum tracks, go through and MANUALLY cut out the spaces in between drum hits, this works particularly well for snare and toms...how i do this in Nuendo is simply take my "scissor" tool and cut right before the initial hit and then cut again right after the waveform starts to fade down and then mute the parts that are in between after the snare/tom hits, after a while youll start to know just by looking at the waveform where you can cut it off after the transient (initial hit)...now to put this over the top for the snare track...Compress and Gate it! after manually cutting out those "spaces" in your track you can afford to go a little bit easier on the Gate settings but ive found that i still needed it on my snare track just to make sure nothing is missed. just make sure you run the Gate first in the signal chain, then run your compressor after it...this seems to work the best for me...

-SUB-MIXES!!!! this is probably one of the things ive learned that has the MOST profound effect on my latest mixes and recordings...its simple...after youve done some of your basic EQing on your tracks, and have them all panned appropriately, put them all into appropriate Sub-Groups...this is how i do it in Nuendo...i go to ADD TRACK, and choose GROUP CHANNEL and call this group channel "DRUMS", next i send all my individual drum tracks to the DRUMS sub-group, i do this step again and then i call the next one "GUITARS", and then i send all my guitar tracks to this sub-group, and repeat the process again and call the next one "VOCALS", and send all my vocal tracks to this sub-group...and if you use more than one track for your bass then repeat the process again call it "BASS", im sure you get it now...you should now have sub-groups called DRUMS, GUITARS, VOCALS...etc...

now SOLO your DRUMS sub-group...get all your levels right so that your drums sound natural, as if you were in the room with them...all balanced...etc...etc..., do the same with your GUITAR sub-groups, solo it and make sure all your guitar tracks are intelligible and balanced with one another...(you should have already EQ'd and panned all of your tracks before even starting your sub-groups)...after all your instruments are EQ'd, panned, assigned to their sub-groups and balanced within their sub-groups...its time for the fun to begin...

bring the fader up on your DRUMS sub-group, but make sure you dont bring it up too high, i dont even bring mine to unity gain, i make sure to leave some headroom to boost my tracks a bit more...and by this time my drums sound slammin'! next bring up your bass track (or bass sub-group if needed)...and by now you should be hearing some musical magic...then bring up your guitars, then vocals...etc...etc...now when you are playing back your tracks and you need your guitars to be a little louder, you have one fader for all your guitar tracks...so you can raise them all equally...but you also have to the ability to boost only one of the tracks...i mean some of you may not understand why this is makes that much of a difference, but trust me it DOES!!!! i wouldnt waste my time doing all of this work if it didnt make a HUGE difference...

give some of these a shot and let me know what you think :-)