Sax is too loud.

 

Yeah, I think the instruments are well recorded and have plenty of aural space distinguishing them. Just a matter of reducing the gain on the sax a bit. Very nice.

 

was this live to 2 track? Beautiful performance. Sax could be reduced, yes, a little bit. I've done a lot of mastering and if you want to send it to me as a wave form I might be able to make some suggestions.

 

This is actually just me playing into a single mic (EV re20) over a band-in-a-box backing track (their “realtracks” sound pretty good, imo). I acknowledge the sax is high in the mix, this was mostly for me to hear the details when fiddling with the EQ

 

Sounds Perfect. Slightly loud , but you ain't got nothing to hide.

 

You sound really good, well executed - dont think you have to do to much, maybe do an eq-sweep mid freq to pick out rogue frequencies.
But yeah, damn i wish i could play like you man!

 

You sound really good, well executed - dont think you have to do to much, maybe do an eq-sweep mid freq to pick out rogue frequencies.
But yeah, damn i wish i could play like you man!

Thanks - is there a specific recommended way to do an EQ sweep (again, the mixing stuff is fairly new to me)?

 

I’m hearing in my phone. I’d like more bass tone but that might be my phone. Pull sax back in the mix. It’s too loud. Sounds like at a warehouse. K

 

And you play wel. But you already knew that. K

 

And the problem with a backing track is you are wailing and they would like they died last Tuesday.

 

Yeah it'd certainly be better to play with a band, for sure...

 

One thing I notice when I turn down the gain on the sax to more appropriate levels is some of the low and middle registers get kind of buried, if that makes sense - like the raw recording is a little muddy/less well-defined in that range

 

if you are playing to a backing track, pan if you can, the backing track to one side, your sax to the other. Than you can run it through a simple mixer and pan each side for a better balance, mixing it together more evenly. Or as I said above, send me the two track and I'll see what I can do. I've done mastering for some major labels like Rhino and Sony Legacy and for the show Fresh Air, among others.

 

Really nice playing! I don't have anything to offer on the mixing front, but I'm just amazed that it's possible to get this good of a sound and mix in a whisper room, with a backing track, of all things. Of course, the player had a little to do with it.

 

I’m by no means an expert, so take my advice with a grain of salt

 

Great playing! My thoughts: that mic shouldn’t need much EQ since it’s an RE20, but having said that the covered sound may be from the whisper room being too dead and small. Your track sounds low compared the level of the sax, which sounds a bit loud. You could lower the sax and turn up the backing track or if they’re competing too much with each other you could try using a compressor on the backing track and then sidechain the sax to the compressor. And/or you could use a compressor on everything. I use a compressor and limiter plug in on the master bus of my tracks. For EQ I would start with a high pass filter at 60-80hz. If you need more EQ a dynamic one would be best. Gently reduce some low frequencies probably around 200-400hz. You can do an EQ sweep to figure out what frequencies need to be lowered. Sometimes it’s helpful to also also lower the harmonics of that frequency as allenlowe was mentioning, although I think this would be more useful in a more live space with bad acoustics (one that rings / resonates.) You probably would need Logic or Protools to do this stuff though. I could try mixing your track too if you’d like (shoot me a pm.)

 

Based on what I noticed in some old Blue Note recordings I've been panning the bass and drums to the left and the piano to the right and centering the sax. I think it helps it seem like the guys are around you in the room.

 

This is a good idea and I should be able to do this in BIAB. I could then split the stereo file into two mono files and adjust the levels of the right- and left-sided instruments independently in garageband

 

Beautiful playing! I have the same questions re: EQ for saxophone. I wonder if the same concepts as EQ for vocals are appropriate for saxophone or flute for that matter- such as boosting at high frequencies to add "air" and cutting certain frequencies ro help with too much of a nasal sound. But I wouldn't change the saxophone sound at all on that recording if it were me! It's very warm and pretty.

 

thanks - yeah, it seems like the more I mess with it, the less I think it needs (although at the moment it sounds slightly better to my ears with a single gentle cut around 450hz)

 

Shoutout to @allenlowe, who took some of his own time and sent me a nice mix of the track. His tweaks also gave me a ideas about how I could improve it further.

What I ultimately decided to do was to re-render the backing track in BIAB with the instruments panned to create some space. I put the bass on the left at about 9 o clock and the piano to the right at about 3 o clock, with drums in the middle. This really opened it up and seemed to help considerably in terms of "uncovering" the sax; I could increase the gain on the backing track without losing the horn in the mix. I ultimately settled on no EQ for the sax and a bit of non-linear compression (using garageband's "AUDynamics Processor"). I then added the accompanying video. Youtube link below.

Autumn in New York

 

Nice job! The tone of the saxophone is wonderful, don't EQ a thing.

I mentioned this in a thread @Roundmidnite started a few weeks ago, but there's this over-arching, intimidating cloud of "what are the things I HAVE to do??" around mixing. And the fact is... you don't have to do anything except try to get the sound you like the most with what you have to work with.

Sear Sound, the world-famous NYC studio, didn't have a single EQ unit in it for a very long time. Walter Sear had a huge collection of wonderful mics, and he was dead set on getting the right sound from performance and recording technique, not EQ. That might be a bit extreme (EQ can be very useful, of course), but it's indicative of the fact that you don't have to EQ anything if a good performance is captured in the right way... and as you've demonstrated here, that doesn't require a five-figure microphone or a million-dollar studio!