Re-Mastering OldProjects inthe Meantime
Hi n-Trackers:
This condition is becoming serious… My ability to get beyond this condition is beginning to play on my patience-and-understanding of what may be going on with me. .
In the past year I believe I may have only recorded two tracks for a total of some 8 minutes of material… 
In the meantime I’ve been trying to keep my foot in the door by working with past projects that I’ve worked with by re-mastering past projects and learning how to improve my concept of what mastering should do to a mix…
The learning curve is quite steep at the moment but I hope it’ll start to level-off where I’ll have acquired some of the qualities of where a Mastered Mix should be heading…
This link points to a live mix that was done here at a local bar… way back in 2004…
I’m working on learning how the Har-Bal Harmonic Analizer works, along with the Kjaerhaus Pro-Limiter and a few other VST plugs might help me in the understanding of getting my mixes to a better finished product.
I hope I soon get past this Tracker’s Block, I have…
Bill…
Very good live recording, Bill. Could you give more details of how you did it, what your setup was, etc.
Paul
Hi vanclan:
Isn’t that a great recording? I think so… That feed was taken from the “House Feed”… It came from a Makie VLZ 16-Track mixer… It was recorded on a Sony Mini-Disk Recorder. (ATRAC) processor… Is that the system they use on that recorder? Anyway, the whole night was on the 1-disk-per-set for the night. There’s some pretty nice stuff on those disks… I think so… If you want to play the Bar Scene around here that’s the quality of stage you have to compete with… with that type of music… I guess it’s the same everywhere, these days…
I put 30 years into it… If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it any other way…
Bill…
Hi Bill,
For a live recording, it is excellent - and especially for a house feed. When I do live gigs, there is always a compromise between a house mix and a recording mix - and usually the house wins out. My hat is off for the sound engineer - an excellent job.
Merry Christmas, Bill, from deep sunny south Ontario, where a white Christmas is a rarity.
Paul
Hi Paul:
I didn’t spend enough time in posting things that I consider important in creating a “House Mix” from a stage… These “Mixer Guys” don’t like to talk too much about how they arrive at an acceptable mix, for fear of giving their knowledge away…
These are some of the some of the approaches to the mental attitude that makes for a good sounding stage… I know you are looking for the technical aspect of mixing a stage…
Some of the things and details that I consider when doing a house mix comes from working with the stage you mix from years of adjusting and correcting your mistakes, one-at-a-time… night-in-and-night-out… You and the guys on the stage have to have complete confidence in one-another’s attitudes… The hardest things to do are the things that make it look-and-sound like it’s easy-and-fun, to do… The hardest thing a musician can do on his stage is to do the best lines he knows only to have his audience say he wasn’t heard… The hardest thing a mixerman can do is, as good as the last job he did and not know how he got there… Well, something like that… If the mixerman is able to accurately record his work and present it to the stage members as he hears it, then, between them they are able to correct and adjust their work as time goes by…
Then, the end product can only improve… There ain’t no fun in Partying and Making it look easy every night…
Bill…
Hey Bill, you describe the mixing dilemma very well. The success of a mixer is very much dependant on experience with the musicians, a burning desire to make them sound better than they actually are, an underlying mutual trust between everyone involved, and a philosophy to enjoy what you are doing.
But there are distinct differences between a house mix and a recording mix, due to the fact that the house mix must compensate with the room accoustics, and other sounds, such as guitar amps on stage, monitor mixes (most musicians are deaf…), crowd noise, etc, etc. The recording mix is whatever you feed it.
So to have a good house mix, so that the group will sound so good that they will be invited back again, good monitor mixes so that the musicians will feel confident with what they are producing, AND to have a good recording mix is definitely a feat to behold - the “holy grail” so to speak. I have come close a couple of times. But usually there are so many other factors (and so little time to sort them out), something has to give.
Paul
Hi Paul:
I like that reply … There are several pieces of it that holds true… Early on, I used to think along most of those lines… Then I began to depart from that way of thinking… It was a slow process… though…
We used to stand on a stool and take photos of the mixer’s controls… They had enough detail that you could look at the photos and look at the mixer and see exactly where all the knob’s positions, were… In one aspect, this is how serious it became…
When everyone is satisfied with the mix but what you hear in the house isn’t then it’s not the knobs, on the strips that makes the mix, that’s at issue…
We discovered that it (the Sound) of the house involved some other aspect of the energy/bandwidth in the house … From Room-to-Room… We then created a way to sample the Mix of the console versus the signal that was applied to the input of the power amps (at the inputs to the cross-over units)… At that point is where we adjust for “Room Acoustics/Energy”… Multi-band Limiters/Compressors… and E.Q’s…
We, made the suggestion that a Guy’s strip shouldn’t be “Twiddled” with from Room-to-Room… just because we hear a difference in room acoustics/reflections…
Another aspect we felt deserved needed attention was the differences in stages from Room-to-Room… and… not being on the same sized stage from room-to-room… Each musician’s relative SPL is very important as to his stage /room behaviour…
The louder he plays on the stage, the farther he has to come outta the house mix… Relative SPL on the stage is very important to how he sounds, In-the-Mix…
We made up lists of our concerns and issues and approached them one-at-a-time till we all felt comfortable with one-another’s concerns, on a night-to-night basis…
Then, when we made mistakes, we all shared in one another’s screw-ups and moved on from there…
I don’t know why it is… but most times and on most stages it becomes the Drummer’s and Bass Player’s duties to fix the reasons why the stage sounds the way it does… Not in all cases, but on the stages I worked on … the piano ended up on my shoulders… 
It seemed as though the “Glory Guys” just sat around and commented as to how they think the audio should sound, like…
You know… I’m chuck’in dirt at the Pretty Boys…
Bill…
Hey Bill,
That is a really great sounding live recording!
I’m sorry to hear about your tracker’s block. I’ve seen you post a couple of times about it so I know that must be frustrating. When I get a case of that I try to listen to some stuff that is way outside of my normal/favorite listening range. Vastly different genres. Even some stuff I can’t stand - just to get me thinking in different ways. Don’t know if that helps. Maybe that’s an obvious suggesion; forgive me if so 
Just curious - have you modified that track at all or is it the original from the board? And if you modified it what have you done to re-master it? I’ve never tried to do anything like that before.
Joe
Hi Joe:
I have and use a Sony Mini-Disk recorder. It uses the ATRAC standard, I think, that’s what it’s called. I have several disks from that project. It was a bar band that plays the Bar Scene locally, here, where I live. One disk per set… It was taken from the Two-Track mix of the House Feed… The mixer was a Mackie VLZ 1604 16 - 4 - 2 model… I so happened to pick this song… I converted the extension to a .wav 16-bit/44.1 file and imported it into n-Track… There is some Kjheraus MPL-1 Pro limiting on it… I can’t think that there’s anything else on the render/mixdown… There might be a touch of Anwida Reverb on it, just before the limiter… I’d have to import the .sng file into n-Track to see what voice of verb went on it… After that I processed the Two-Track file with Har-Bal Harmonic Balancer… That’s why I re-mastered it… To practice /play around with my New Toy/Audio Processor… This Har-Bal Analyzer is one nice piece of Software… However, it shouldn’t be considered as the END-of-it-ALL…
I listened at quite a few of the songs on this project till I picked on this one… It’s a good representation of what that stage is capable of producing in the live environment…
These guys are no slouches… to the Bar-Scene Work…
I have reams of 8-Track 1/2" tape that I have worked on over the years… If I never “Track” again I have enough re-mix work to keep me busy till the end of time… If I ever get to Track again, I have definite ideas/procedures of what I think is necessary to end up with the right quality of tracks to complete the process to the End Product… I think…
That comes with working with these (less than Stellar) tracks that I’ve been re-mastering in the last while… If the right quality is not done on the track/tracking session, it’s difficult to make something outta the track in the post sessions… I’ve learned that, if anything…
I’ve tried several different things to break this “Creative Block”… Nothing seems to have worked … yet… I don’t think it’s something that can be forced… Who Knows??
Bill…