An interesting exercise

[mdlbear]

Following catsittingstill's suggestion, I threw my current collection of rough track mixes onto a CD and played it in my car going to and from work. I'd say about half of them are pretty good; the rest clearly need work. The most common problem was having the guitar part too far down in the mix -- in some cases it's practically inaudible.

And then there were the ones that were either not the most recent mix (it all depends on whether I remember to export a .wav file after I mix -- sometimes I forget), or had serious stupidities (like muting all the guitar tracks instead of just the scratch track).

As I said, interesting. In the Chinese curse sense.

Comments

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, having half of them pretty good, level-wise, is ...pretty good. ;-) Sorry about having to redo the other half, but it's better to find out now than when it's too late to fix.

My problem with listening to a mix on good earphones in a quiet place is that I can hear everything just fine--it's when there's a noise floor, like in a car, that I notice that I can't hear the tenor (or the guitar) anymore.

I think I've read that some sound systems can deliberately generate noise (is it "pink noise"?) to give the same effect, but I've always used the car. One recording magazine I glanced through at the time said "An old car where only the left back speaker works is perfect for this" or something to that effect. I never went that far myself; a properly working car stereo was fine for my stuff.

Oh--one thing I should mention (though you may have already heard about this)--be sure to try your "master" CD in as many CD players as possible. Old ones, new ones, good ones, crappy ones. We had a problem with _Under The Gripping Beast_ that we didn't find out about until we'd had all the copies made; one of the songs wouldn't play properly in a low-end CD player. We figured Callie's high-end stereo would make any problems clear, but it somehow figured out how to play the song properly, but in a cheap walkman, it had some kind of problem (noise? cut out for a while and then came back on? I don't remember anymore; it was years ago now). So play it on a cheapie before you press the copies, to catch anything like that.

[mdlbear]

Thanks! I also have to remember to try computers running all three major OSs, our DVD player (it's no longer possible to find single-disk CD decks at a reasonable price anymore) and a boom box or two.

When I'm on the freeway the guitar fades way back in the mix; it'll be interesting to see whether I can make it work properly in both noisy and quiet environments.