Mixing & Mastering Tips

[Gerk]

I do enjoy live music too ... but even in the day I have to say that there were a lot of bands that were great on records and somewhat lacking live.  Now the gap has just widened a bit.  I'm sure that people said the same thing about the electric guitar, the multitrack recorder, etc etc.  I hear what you're saying though, but thankfully most of this silliness is restricted to pop type material, which I've never been a big fan of anyway   There are still lots of good musicians out there though, but also consider that even the best musician is at the mercy of the engineer that's recording their material. 

I'm sure all the real artists said the same thing when paint-by-numbers came out   Music-by-numbers is still thriving unfortunately.  Maybe it will be a fad too ...

[BBDog]

One very important thing (at least I think it's very important).  Less can be more.  Don't push things to extremes without very good reasons to do so, on anything.  Mixing has a ton of subtlety to it.  That goes for EQ'ing, effects, overall mix levels, basically everything. 

A thing I've seen a lot of, especially people coming from the analog world into digital is to mix things very hot.  In analog land this was not too bad of a way to go, in digital land this is very bad.  You need a good amount of headroom, even on your final mixes.  Make it "loud" later, keep the headroom until then.

My problem, mixing too hot! Can't seem to escape from my brain thinking "background noise" & "tape saturation". Will have a read of all these posts!

I know that you should have plenty of headroom, but after years of using tape it's a difficult habit to break!