I hope that anyone with more than a few days worth of musical experience knows not to plug an electric bass into a guitar amplifier without risking damage. If you don’t, I’m here to tell you now: Don’t do it.
When mixing harmonically dense music with higher track counts (as we often do when working on rock and metal), it’s far too common to lose a decent sounding element in the mix.
Do you use busses/aux tracks when mixing? Busses are a great way to group elements of your mix before the master fader, and can make it easy to turn elements of your mix up or down after you’ve already applied processing to individual tracks.
For a lot of us, there are certain elements of a mix that we always find ourselves fixing, especially when the tracks are coming from other engineers. For some of us, one of the most common problems is an overabundance of low end in kick drums.
How many recent performances have you seen of guitarists without an amp in sight? Chances are, even the guys with a “wall of amps” in the background aren’t playing through them. Guitar tone plugins are making their way into live sound, and there are plenty of reasons why.
Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with your gate plugin – you’re just doing yourself, your mixes, and your clients a disservice by using it. Why? Because one of the most common uses for gates is the removal of cymbal bleed from your live drum tracks (specifically toms).
Amp Sims have been on the rise for the past decade, with more and more guitarists, bedroom producers & even pros jumping on board. With so much emphasis put on realistic tones and the cost of getting into recording, which one’s coming out on top in the digital age.
No matter how much off-axis rejection your mic has, you’re still going to have reverberations from every nearby sound source clawing their way into your signal.
We can blame the drummer, engineer, mixer, or whoever else might have a hand in the final drum sound on a recording, but the fact of the matter is: we beat the crap out of our drum tone. Here are some of the worst offenders...