I use that method… I think it works well 
Infact it does.
I also found that coating anything in Jack Daniels steak sauce it great 
False dichotomy. I’m not saying you have to watch Giants at Redskins on FOX from start to finish in a straightjacket. What I’m saying is some donk yelling over the game feeds that are split to use 30% of your screen real estate isn’t how this should work. Also, let’s make sure 75% of the games start at exactly the same time to maximize the odds of missing great finishes. It’s an objectively terrible product that continues to exist in its awful form solely due to hordes of self-absorbed narcissists captivated by their meaningless fantasy teams.
Hmm I’m starting to sound like Savid Dlansky. Has anyone checked the medical literature for chronic exposure to hot take effects on brain function?
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Except Andrew Siciliano is funny.
I agree they could go to split screen less.
Still can’t blast it today so had to use phones I am familiar with. What’s obvious is how much more separation and articulation there is. I can’t hear too much difference in the bass EQs between the last two (these aren’t HD 650’s). Definitely think Butch must have been squeezed in mastering. Apparently he did a Q&A on gearslutz so maybe someone asked.
But this is all just working with what was actually recorded. I went back and watched some of their early live performances to try to tease out what I think is missing here. To me, Nirvana is “twangier” and not nearly as full frequency spectrum as they are presented on Nevermind. Twangy bands need more room sound and natural reverb and this record has very little of it; not enough chime or shimmer. It’s too much in the style of all 80’s rock / metal. No amount of mixing or mastering would fix that. Thinking about it more, Steve Albini nailed it and Andy Wallace should have never been anywhere near this band.
We need a musician/studio thread it looks like.
Steve Ablini really didn’t nail it. It just so happened that his style is more in the Nirvana style, but his style is arguably worse than what’s on Nevermind, at least for me.
I created another version where I actually did some surgery on the EQ to make it play a bit better. I think I might have it a bit too loud in this version, but it’s probably the best of the versions I’ve posted.
Here’s the V1 of a somewhat surgical attempt at EQ on SLTS:
When working on any kind of rock music, I’m heavily dependent on creating the sound of the drums through the room mics. This is a place Albini’s style did make inroads in the industry, but in a much more subtle way than he does it. It’s the easiest and best way to make drums have really natural reverb. Grohl really pounds his snare in SLTS, and I’d like to remove some of his attack, but all of the reverbs in both versions of the song are artificial as well, which heavily dates the song. I think you can get away with artificial reverbs on Nirvana’s guitars, but you have to be subtle about them (I tend to prefer plates on guitars dialed to the amount of reverb that works for the song for me). I think the use of effects on Cobain’s voice in the Vig version is really well done.
The key differences between the Vig and Wallace versions are that the drums are much more polished in Wallace’s (like when I hear these mixes I think of Deftones style as the best comparison which is kind of like an alternative metal), and Wallace used a bunch of doubled guitars that Vig didn’t use. Polished and radio friendly is the best way I’d describe it. Nothing about Vig’s is radio friendly, and it’s clearly intending to sound messy.
Again, based on how I was able to pull apart the mix the way I could, I think it’s much more likely the filtering of the song was done late and on the mix stage. There’s just no way Vig would have traveled that much bass to mastering at that time, and it’s so out of balance with the mix (quite hard to fix actually without major compromises to the rest of the sound) that I just think it happened there. I think what probably went to mastering was probably about half of what I have in the ‘DeMastered’ version, so that means the tone probably did travel across and was still wrecked in mastering.
The most important thing I was trying to capture in these versions (not quality) was the original tone of what I thought Vig was going for. You can’t have the tone in what I produced here without it being somewhat in the original master.
Here’s a Deftones song. I think the style is a cousin to what Wallace’s style was on Nirvana. It’s kind of like a cross between the styles of Nirvana’s natural state and something more metal-ish like Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name:
Have you ever listened to the HEDD type 20 monitors by chance? My next upgrade.
Currently using these. They are pretty damn good and a few people on 2p2 I recommended them to loved them also.
No, I’ve always been a Genelec guy. Up thread I said that I have Genelec 8050Bs and a 7070A subwoofer.
Do you use any room correction software? I use ARC2, and think it’s a worthy add to any mixing set up.
No I never have. I use REW when I set up my space.
That’s room correction software, so you’re using the same idea. Do you know if that goes to 5.1? That’s a deficiency in the ARC2.
When I was with my room designer when we first listened to the Genelecs prior to setting room correction, I said, ‘there’s a big hump missing between 50-80 (huge boost below that), 100’s not right, 500’s not right, and it seems slightly bright’. After correction, the graph looked almost like I described, which was comforting. I still find comfort in low bass a bit of a challenge, but for the most part I’m generally satisfied with my translations.
It seems odd that the room could color that much, but it does (only one post house I worked at did any room correction). I’ve worked in some high end places, and my studio in my house is by far the best translating/sounding room I’ve ever worked in for whatever that’s worth.
omg
just catching up on the hell i hath wrought
this is the derailiest derail i’ve ever derailed
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Not so much a hot take, but I need confirmation that somebody else knows what just blew the minds of my wife and I tonight.
We were talking about random stuff, when the subject of our crazy cat came up. I had made her jump making some kind of noise, and I proclaimed that she was skittery. This led into a convo about whether skittery was a real word. During it my wife said “Skittamarinkydinkydoo” and I finished with “I love you.”
She was shocked that I knew that, and I was shocked that she knew it, but neither of us knew what the hell it was from. I figured it was from a Disney movie or something and she looked it up, leading to this.
Doing some research, this is from some obscure, Canadian, preschool show that evidently made its way to Nickelodeon at some point during my childhood, which must be where I learned it from.
So… who else knows this? And if yes, what age range are you? If the dates are to be believed, only 33-38 year olds or their parents should even have a clue.
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I don’t know and neither I, nor my kids, are in that age range. But, maybe some parents with kids around my kids’ ages would know it. We had various crappy kids video tapes and DVDs that were old from dollar bins or whatever.
We watched this a million times - it was from 1990.
Never seen it. Conversations like that were so much better before the internet.
omg I have heard it before! obviously I didn’t click the video before your post
Yeah, I’ve heard it before. Probably from Play School, which is incredibly widely watched here. From the Wiki:
Play School is an Australian educational television show for children produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It is the longest running children’s show in Australia, and the second longest running children’s show worldwide, after Blue Peter.
An estimated 80% of pre-school children under six watch the programme at least once a week.
See above; wasn’t ignoring your posts.
The Vig mixes were released as part of a super duper deluxe box set in 2011. From what I gathered, they weren’t even actually finished. Which I was somewhat aware of already, but in looking for details came across this article,
which contains this hilarity:
…derided the early mix as “a disaster.” This assessment was propped up by Vig,who remembered: “I’d be balancing the drums and the guitars … and Kurt would come and say, ‘Turn all the treble off. I want it to sound more like Black Sabbath.’ It was kind of a pain in the ass.”
Also,
http://www.feelnumb.com/2012/02/15/nirvana-nevermind-the-devonshire-mixes-location/
Krist Novoselic –
“Butch wanted to take a week or two off, to rest his ears. But the recording went on too long, and we just immediately moved on to the mixing.”
Butch Vig –
“We only had seven or eight days booked, but around the third or fourth mix I realised it wasn’t sounding optimal. Part of it was that the band were hanging out with me. Kurt would keep coming up to the board: “Turn the trebel off all the tracks.” And I’m like: “I don’t think that’s going to sound very good.” So I’d turn all the cymbals down and it made it all sound like Black Sabbath. We went around and around. When we played stuff for the label they felt it could sound bigger and bolder – and I think it was smart to get Andy Wallace to come in with a fresh perspective.”
So that all lines up with the story I always understood, that Vig never actually finished. At that point Vig had recorded and mixed the demo, helped with the arrangements and recorded the album. Almost a member of the band.
It explains the overwarmnth and muddiness we’re hearing, as these mixes weren’t intended to be finished releases. I honestly think they sound solid and just putting a high shelf on it would do the trick (I have a friend who’d joke that all he actually does when he masters is put on a high shelf). My first thought was also that the ‘correct’ mix is ‘in between’ the Vig and Wallace.
The loudness-war vid I linked compared the original mastering from the 1991 release to the 2011 remastering from that same box set:
It’s just literally brickwalled.
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Check out that ‘DeMastered’ version I made. I think it’s probably pretty close to what Vig did tonally minus it having way too much bass. The mixes being unfinished lends a lot more credence to a late stage ugly roll off at the mix stage. As you know, boosting bass a ton tends to lower the feel of the treble, so that might have been what Vig was doing in the ‘screener’ sessions with Cobain to try to trick him (the 60 bump is probably 14 or 16dB too hot in the DeMaster). He was probably just making ‘mixes’ to satisfy Cobain while still trying to preserve something.
Cobain probably asked him to play something similar to the DeMaster for the label, and after a sleepless night Vig probably said ‘what the eff do I do, because I can’t even make a cassette of this mix?’. So he just threw a bass roll off on it and took it to the label without playing it again for Cobain. The label hated it, and they went a different direction probably to Vig’s relief. He probably couldn’t imagine spending the rest of the time with Cobain giving him idiotic notes that would never get past the label.
With Wallace being chosen, there was probably no ‘connection’ and the label had already put its foot down (all this stuff is softened in the history I’ve been reading, but I’m pretty sure it was a label move and not Vig). I think that was probably the moment Cobain ‘lost’ the album, and the fights probably became much less while Cobain hated it much more.
Hearing that Cobain loved it when it was mixed and then hated it later is so typical. I’m sure Grohl and Krist did love it and were stoked with how it turned out, which probably helped with getting it finished. I’m pretty impressed that they mixed that album in less than 2 weeks. That means it probably only cost about $8k to $10k to mix that album as there’s no way Devonshire studios was a $1200 a day lockout at that time (doesn’t say that’s where it was ultimately mixed, but your article suggests it was). That’s pretty nuts for a first release that had a lot of high hopes.
Are there any ‘finished’ Vig mixes of anything that would be representative of his mix style (that were commercially released)? I’m suspect that he’s a good mixer, but do think he’s a good producer. He had a similar thing that happened with Siamese Dream, and I can’t seem to find any examples in his discography where he was the mixer on a finished ‘hit’ track in the early to mid-90s.
was just getting to those 
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