Better is all that matters. The best thing to try is to see if you can get your hands on one of their original sessions (pick a song you like) and see what you’d do with it. If you like the results, present them. You might surprise yourself.
You can’t really think of anything you do as a disappointment unless your work ends up worse than what was given to you. That’s not much of a consolation, but you’ve already elevated the material quite a bit just by improving it even if it could have gotten to a better place.
It was a music degree with audio production as emphasis. You had to do a primary and secondary instrument with piano being one of the two no matter what. I passed the piano proficiency test. You had to play all major/minor scales with arpeggios and stuff and sight-read 4 part harmony. That doesn’t make a legit piano player lmao. I suck at piano other than knowing my shit about chords, scales, etc. But, as I commented in the listening thread, remembering the Level 4 Music Theory stuff is tough for me since I’m primarily a drummer. The chord inversions, and jazz chords I can figure out but they aren’t as easy for me as those dudes in that thread.
Just EQing out all the unnecessary frequencies in the stems would set me light years above these mixes. That doesn’t mean I 'm good or want to say I mixed or mastered something haha. They blow up and then I’m the dipshit engineer who did shit horribly. I hear you though.
Is it common for people to work with stems these days? I prefer raw tracks whenever possible, but I like that in Pro Tools I can get all the reverbs/delays the artist likes to use and then I just set the stuff up properly for max flexibility.
When I did some EDM stuff, I was often tied to a lot of stuff, but the guy I was working with was just super duper on everything but EQ so it usually wasn’t hard to make his stuff bounce. I would maybe improve his mixes by 15 or 20 percent, when usually it’s at least a 100 percent improvement with most others. He didn’t really need to work with me either, and it was almost like I was working for free anyway.
Yeah, I meant tracks. Most things you can download to practice mixes are stems. My bad. My point about just EQing out unwanted frequencies from each track still stands. So easy to learn and creates so much more space in the mix.
Yeah, I think most things that are finished tracks are essentially stems. I got to download Human League’s Don’t You Want Me a few years ago. The stuff’s generally tied to reverb, but you can still screw with it a lot.
And yeah, fixing problems is like a huge part of any mixer’s job when done right. Half the things people do to create space in mixes via sidechaining, etc. are unnecessary if you just EQ stuff well to play nice with each other. If the musicians suck, then it’s another story, but in competently written stuff it’s all about getting stuff to play nicely with each other when they don’t, and the easiest way to do that is via EQ. The problem, of course, is that some artists love it messy, and don’t like that kind of cleaning.
I feel like you know more about it than me, but I hate it muddy. Each track I do has it’s own frequency range. In Ableton I have an EQ at the end of each chain cutting out every frequency I don’t intend even if the spectrometer doesn’t show it.
You’re essentially using the approach of the guy who mixed Steely Dan, which is known as some of the cleanest music done in that era. I don’t do it as much as I should, but I could have really used that strategy when I was mixing the vintage synths project. It’s not a mistake I’ll make again, but that’s generally a good strategy and puts you far ahead of most people. It probably helps that you’re a musician, as well, so you’re not accidentally carving out musical information.
I generally have a very clean sound, but I still like it a bit more raw in that cleanness than some people. I wouldn’t have arrived at either place the Nirvana stuff went with Vig/Wallace, but it might not have been appealing either…lol. Would love to get my hands on stems of that, especially if the drums were split.
