Originally Posted by
Andy Hamm
Here's my $0.02:
In the video you've got a small stage, looks like a small hard room with a little PA. The lead vocal sounds good for this situation BTW.
Firstly, the lowest root note on a guitar is 81Hz, setting your high pass anywhere above that and you're throwing away root notes for harmonics. I set my HPF to the lowest root note of the instrument and then set up the low EQ as a shelf. There are a lot of gutsy, mechanical and human sounds that come out of a guitar in the low range, I often find myself reaching for the fader as well as the low or low mid gain on the EQ to make it pop out without getting shrill. I agree with your instinct to grab 400Hz and give it that broad gentle boost, but maybe only during the lead breaks. I mix continually through the entire performance, I change my mix from verse to chorus - if something sounds wrong in that moment, that's the only opportunity you'll get to fix it.
Secondly, on a tight stage your biggest enemy is open mics. When you have a guitar amp and then multiple mics that are amplifying that guitar amp that are different distances away from the source you get all kinds of wishy-washy phasing crap going on. I assign my backing vocals to a VCA and I pull that fader right out of the mix when they aren't being used. You can use mute groups, whatever works for you, but try taking stuff away rather than adding something and see if the situation improves. I've mixed allot of loud guitar players over the years and I find that getting rid of the audio delay line of unevenly spaced open mics helped more than any processing I did on the strip. In fact, you can make a small PA sound much bigger than it is by goosing unused mics and riding your keys and guitars, punching things up in their key parts and setting them back a bit when they require less prominence. Also, things like guitar amps in monitor mixes on a small stage is just a bad idea in my opinion. I'd rather go with a slightly louder point source than add a few more sources of the same signal.
My last point will probably seem out there, but I've found this to be fairly consistently the case in my experience. When it comes to music, there are two types of people; those that have good pitch and those that have good frequency and dynamic comprehension. It's not an absolute, but a sliding scale where you have some people who are really good at one aspect and terrible in the other, or maybe somewhere in the middle. There are those rare and talented ones that excel in both aspects, I'm definitely not in that group. So you will find people who are great musicians, but they have no concept of how to make their instrument sound good. This is why music companies invented the word 'tone', so they could watch guitar players chase their tail their entire life looking for magic sound fairy dust sprinkled in their gear. There is a whole secondary market where they all start looking for the gear they started out with when they started playing decades after they figured out there was nothing wrong with it in the first place.
Some people won't mind a little 'guidance' with their stage sound, some will appreciate it, other's don't need it. I know I've offended people over the years and at least a few have brought it up years later and thanked me for it - there was usually alcohol involved, but still...
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