One Synth Challenge #76: Mantra Evo (Syntax Project Wins!)

[Taron]

Ok, to jump on the EQ train

Lastly, don't overthink it. You will always judge your own work differently. Especially if you've worked intensively with one track. Get some perspective and time off. Generally I'd even say: Making a final mix or, especially, master of your own music will never be optimal. Listening to a track a million times seriously messes up your hearing...

Yeah, that's really the most annoying thing. ...it's tough to get distance. What I sometimes/often do is actually make another song, haha. I know, it sounds a little mad, but once I focused on another song for a few hours, listen to a few others after that and then come back to my original song, I can get at least one fairly neutral run that can help a lot.

The real beasts are those tiny compromises we make...
"Eh, that's ok, I'll just leave this little thing like that!"...
"Huh? What was that again? Eh, doesn't matter!" ...
"Yeah, it's all good, I don't think I'll touch that other thing, although, hmmm...nah!".

Those little demons, they are vicious. If one was really serious, every tiny thing that makes you even just mildly cringe is begging for attention. I can absolutely imagine that there are plenty of mixes that have no such thing left. Unfortunately none of those are mine.

[doctorbob]

Hey ho all,

EQ - the black art ... well not always. From my own experience (since the mid-60's), I have found many of the EQ issues have really been down to the instrumentation and arrangement of such. I have found this interactive page/tool very useful

http://www.independentrecording.net/irn ... isplay.htm

It can show useful things like what frequencies an overblow on a sax would create etc ... maybe not so useful if you are doing purely "electronic" music - but the principles still hold.

In the main, try to "make space in the frequency spectrum" for each "instrument" - yeah, sure they all overlap and share the freq spaces - but even doing this helps to focus the mind and ears (honestly),

I always mix without any master FX on (others will do the opposite I know). Once I have a mix which I am reasonably happy with (you never really EVER get there do you?), I switch in a fairly broad brush EQ in the master (i.e. not expecting to do any "surgical" EQ work), to fine tune the overall sound. I put an analyser on to check for phase, stereo and frequency errors (ie if there's an apparent peak somewhere in the frequency spectrum I find out what it is - maybe it needs to be there, you never know!). Then I pop in any other saturation, compression, limiting FX one by one, each time listening to changes (A/B-ing then FX in and out to be sure it's doing what I want - often subtle changes with e.g. tape saturation).

This is just how I go about it - I am not a professional, just a "hobbyist" with 65-year old ears. But, I have been around all sorts of music from pure electronica, electro-acoustic, folk, acapella, classical, jazz, blues, disco, ska, avante garde stuff, "prepared" pianos, ambisonic and full 3D sound and so on - I have recorded most at the hobby level for friends. Some tracks have made it to commercial CD's.

Best fun was doing Henry Cow - before stereo PA - so he had two stacks, and controlled the volume of each with a volume pedal under each foot to move sound around - pairs of most things - e.g. Watkins copycats, various wahwah pedals, fuzz and phaser boxes (mostly handbuilt!). Not sure how many people appreciated the small private gig - shall we say that maybe their heads were elsewhere - enough said! Me? Well, the rule for me was NO substances which could affect the mind and control - no drink or anything else - you have a responsibility to artists and audience to get it right on the day when mixing FOH or recording sessions (yeah, I know it sounds like I am a boring old fart, maybe, maybe not!).

Anyway, I hope the above strikes a chord with those struggling with EQ - man, I always struggle - critical listening and critiques from others does help to some extent - but, be wary of opinions of others, they have different ears, and also have different views on YOUR genre of music, whatever that may be. Just don't dismiss them out of hand.

The best comment I had was from a Big Band leader who was sitting in my lounge at home and I played a rough copy of a CD I was doing over the Hi-Fi (well, mid-fi NAD and Missions) - they just sat back and said "wow, is that REALLY us?". The surprise was because that CD was tracks which had been carefully EQ'd and mixed, versus the previous listenings to more raw as recorded tracks with only a little basic EQ and mixed. At one point I had to go in and volume automate JUST the low A from the baritone sax - it was just too loud - annoyed the hell out of the player because she bought that sax because it had that good loud low A - but, also agreed that it "had to be done".

From my point of view, mixing and producing in so many different genres had tuned my ears in to how sounds fit together in a mix - my electronic stuff can be quite dense at times (15-20 tracks playing), but each little element is there for a reason - take it out and the track loses something (at least to my ears).

Oh oh, I'm rambling on ... just my 2p's worth ...

dB

[MTLE]

@SinnerSign

As I read right you work with reaper. If you want, send me a project file. I could have a look on your EQs, make changes and send it back. Then you can compare what's different. I must say EQ is relative new to me since I joined here last year. So I'm not perfect in this. But maybe you get just a different point of view. Sometimes it can help. If your SC profile represents a bit of your natural language (D) we can use this as well. So we don't need translate to each other

EQing is not a thing of instructions, because it always depends on other things around. From this point it's more to advise someone things to do.

Send me PM for project exchange.

[SinnerSign]

@mehum

No, it is "my mixes are cold and plastic, though others tend to like its coldness and plasticness", where "cold and plastic" means "equalized everything in line and in yo face", which is pretty normal ITB, and "warm" means "equlized so intelligently, your ear can't separate one layer of the instruments of another". The truth is somewhere between, I guess.

Yeah, it's easier to just drop the difficult parts or to totally simplify the overloaded tune to make it less demanding to good eq (and to a computer hardware, btw), but if my customer brought me a tune with a 3 simultaneous basses, I can't just kick him out to remake his work. Maybe one day my tastes will change, and I will be able to choose customers and friends, but now I am searching a way to eq more fluently in a difficult situations rather than just do something easier to consume and work with.

Thank you very much for your reply. Your tune is great, good luck with it!

@MTLE You are too kind. I heartily thank you for your wish to help. I'm sure to use the offer. Good luck in this contest!

[Taron]

Frag' mich, wie viele von uns Deutsch plaudern?

However, it's not that you have to toss out the overlaying bass sounds, but you should clarify, clean them up more. Right now in your song they are literally tumbling over each other like in a brawl, but as a listener you almost feel like "Oh my god, somebody has to do something, like..call the police or so!?", hehe...you know. It's also almost like a race-riot, because they all seem to have a very different nature on top of being the same thing, if you know what I mean. I won't assign racial origins here, though.

Your stereo field actually only puts more gasoline into the fire, preventing any kind of focus for the audience. It's as if it was a sort of mumbling. Imagine you had a performer or even a band on stage, but they all would somehow doodle into themselves, having agreed only on a general key. As audience you do not witness confidence, but just a gang of loners seemingly not even really enjoying themselves.

Even a totally devil worshiping hardcore death metal band, eating unborn children whilst kicking out the teeth of the front row pit, has more or less total coordination and surprising harmony while they're doing their thing. So... minus fetus eating and dental assault...it's a good idea to envision your ensemble on a stage, playing off each other and to the crowd. They want to be seen, but they also know that the audience can only look at one place at a time, so they support, who ever is in the lead. That can change at any time, but a focus is really important to provide orientation. Like a painter, who leads the viewers eye around his picture, you want to lead your listener through your music. I think, there's almost no exception in that regard, but what do I know.

[mehum]

"cold and plastic" means "equalized everything in line and in yo face" [...] and "warm" means "equlized so intelligently, your ear can't separate one layer of the instruments of another"

I think you need to step out of the "equalized"-mindset a bit and again take a step back and ask "why? how? what?".

What really makes the layers blend together and how come you have a hard time achieving this?
I can assure you EQ is not the main reason in most cases.

I think I understand where you come from, where you want to make a lot of different parts work together in the same mix (psytrance comes to mind). That is certainly hard work, and there's always trade offs. I think the best way to approach that kind of mix is to make decisions about focus.
What element(s) should be up front and what elements may be banished to the background.
For each part you mix, Mute everything that should be background and make the best mix you can do without them. Then add background in, one or a few elements at a time. Here, of course, EQ may be used to shape things. Compressor is also good tool, both for individual instruments and groups.
Remember not to be afraid to kill you darlings in this process. Just because you made it doesn't mean you have to use it. If it's a killer part that you have a hard time to fit in, perhaps make it the focus of another part of the track or just make another track of it!

Problems may come in if you want shifting focuses. Two or more melody lines shifting in and out of focus. You will need to automate this. Sometimes even automate EQ settings, scooping out frequencies when a track goes out of focus, push it down in volume, perhaps a bit of panning, reverb to make it feel farther away and so on.
Still, when you're doing that stuff, you're really closer to arranging than mixing, even if the lines are pretty blurred. You might even want to go back to the source and change the sounds of stuff pretty dramatically or transposing a part an octave up or down to make it fit in better.

See, it's all interconnected. You will never be able to make "your ear can't separate one layer of the instruments of another" without first having a proper arrangement to work from.

but if my customer brought me a tune with a 3 simultaneous basses

Well, in that case it might be a good idea to still talk to the client and ask what the idea is.
Or just try and make it work. You will still need to balance the mix somehow so you need to figure out what role each bass plays in the track. Then use a combination of compressors (perhaps sidechained), EQs and volume automation to meld it all together.

But when mixing your own stuff you actually have the luxury (or double sided sword) of being able to make arrangement decisions at any time.

Although it's often good to commit to things, at least in order to ever finish something ( ) you can also think about it this way, always going back to the root of the issue:
If you have trouble mastering, there are probably problems with the mix.
Trouble mixing, it's probably the arrangement.
Trouble arranging, it can be anything Perhaps some parts do not fit together, perhaps the whole idea was flawed from the beginning. Perhaps it's just that you cannot see the whole picture because you're too involved in the individual elements.

Thank you very much for your reply. Your tune is great, good luck with it!

Thanks a lot! This time I have really no idea of the quality of my track so I'm very glad you like it!
It's the same thing here, I'm way too close to it to know. Gladly it's a pretty sparse arrangement so mixing wasn't that complicated.

I have not yet listened to your track. Going through the list, top to bottom, now. I'll try and present some more concrete advice once I've listened.

Well, enough ranting, if I keep this up Taron will have to look for a new job

[wagtunes]

As voting isn't open yet, I went to the Soundcloud page and listened to all the tracks ahead of time. I am amazed at some of the work that has been done with this synth, especially the rock tracks. Wow! The quality is right up there with all the other OSC synths.

I hope the developer is proud of what can be done with Evo, even if it is a little unwieldy at times.

Great job guys!

Can't wait to get my official votes registered.

[SinnerSign]

@Taron

Yeah, my composition is a steaming pile, I know it. That's not a kind of defense, that's true. Actually, I am going to delete it to raise your chance to win smth. There were no need to review it, because this is not a masterpiece by any mean, nor an excessive example of my work (I hope). But what the hell, I am very grateful to you for being such a communicative person. You raised my will to do music, thank you and good day!

[Taron]

Nooo, who says you should delete it, no, no, no!!! If I were you, I would definitely keep it. It's totally awesome to be able to see someone's evolution and interesting later on to recognize the "DNA" so to say, even in older, less refined works. I will most definitely keep all my old stuff up, too, no matter how clumsy I might've been, or still am.

I really don't think you should take it offline, really! Keep it up! (ok, maybe praying is a bit much?!)
But anyway...don't worry about my "chances to win", haha, I don't think my stuff is current enough or refined enough to win anything besides my happiness. That's a great price, though!
And it's one you'll get to, if you allow yourself to receive it! Things always get better, it's the nature of the universe, even if it dips occasionally.

[mehum]

Well, I just managed to have a listen before you removed it. Although I could point at some issues it's certainly not a "steaming pile".
A shame you felt you had to remove it, but that's of course your choice to make...

And regarding Tarons chances to win, I'll say they're pretty high in my book. Haven't listened through everything properly yet but yours is one of my favs this month again.

[MTLE]

Frag' mich, wie viele von uns Deutsch plaudern?

Ach. du auch

[Taron]

And regarding Tarons chances to win, I'll say they're pretty high in my book. Haven't listened through everything properly yet but yours is one of my favs this month again.

Wheeee!
Thanks, mehum!

@MTLE ...kann's auch kaum glauben!

[wagtunes]

Well, I just managed to have a listen before you removed it. Although I could point at some issues it's certainly not a "steaming pile".
A shame you felt you had to remove it, but that's of course your choice to make...

And regarding Tarons chances to win, I'll say they're pretty high in my book. Haven't listened through everything properly yet but yours is one of my favs this month again.

I agree. It's one of my favorite tracks this month and one of the more unusual OSC pieces I've heard.

[Taron]

I can almost promise that in a few months it won't have been that unusual anymore, hahaha!
...but then again, the Evo had a lot to do with it for sure!

[bjporter]

Voting! Information / links here