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Re: [microsound] Help for the beginner and Hello's




If you want to avoid the wall-of-mud sound you should first take care of the voicing of the sounds going into the mix.You can try to use different software when creating sounds to avoid everything having the same sonic character. If you use 24-bit (or more) recording keep peak levels on individual channels below -16dB. Enable all dithering you can find on your DAW.


When you get to the mix use the best EQ you own (lesser ones tend to impart their ow character over every sound) to (at least as a start) gently tweak the sounds. Use nothing else on the mix until you get it right. Use the mixer, ride the levels. Be very careful with reverb.

I have found no magic technology to help in this - just learn to listen and use good quality equipment.

Finally avoid any mastering plug-ins or multi-band compressors. They will mash any mix into a mud-pool. I prefer to just use gentle single- band compression followed by a limiter. Never normalize the mix to 0dB, stop at -6DB to avoid distorting the majority of D/A:s on the market.

Sorry if all this is obvious ;=) It usually is worth it to get a good mix - it helps the listener stay focused.




5 mar 2006 kl. 02.30 skrev thewade:

Oh, I feel an A/D discussion coming on...

I know how sampling rates and Nyquist's theorem affect the frequencies and how noise adds warmpth and that certain "feel", but I guess I was interested more in retaining detail amongst many signals.

I know one can notch-filter sounds into seperate frequency ranges and that works to some degree but there has to be a technique I am missing - not pan, frequency, reverb, compression... What am I missing? I will just have to play around some more I guess.


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