@raino & @Reco29
Alright, back for follow up. Pardon posting length but I’m eager to learn from you and so might as well get granular. Reply at your leisure.
First, I’m including screenshots further down below of a current excerpt of the loudest part of an in-progress composition - as well as a 45 sec. video showing the Mixconsole’s behavior during it that is here:
Cubase Pro MixConsole - Current Project Excerpt - 0:45 min.
Second, a general issue I have:
My mixes just sound too mid screechy as well as muddy to my ears - I have difficulty with mixing low end and bass. I only have an entry level Samsung smartphone (earbuds) to test the exported mixes. No car or home stereo.
Something that may or may not be affecting this:
I’m turning 70 in January and I have had some hearing loss in the 4-8K range along with tinnitus. I don’t notice this as hearing impairment, but it may be slightly skewing what my ears perceive.
So the 45 seconds excerpt probably won’t sound professional to you, but that’s why I’m following up here. To hopefully improve.
On to the issues brought up:
@raino:
“What is your source material like? Is it all mono or is there stuff that isn’t stereo enough? Audio recordings, VSTi’s or a mix of both.”
===== All stereo, all VSTi. I don’t separate my drums, I use EZ Drummer 3 for doing so is a bit overwhelming, but spend a lot of time editing and tweaking in MIDI.
“I almost always set my Panners to Stereo Combined Panner instead of the default Stereo Balance Panner. These let you control each Track’s individual Panorama.”
I followed your lead and set everything to Stereo Combined Panner. Below here are still screenshots of both instruments and group tracks in Cubase 12.
Here are a couple of things written by both of you respectively on this topic of giving instruments breathing room and avoid masking:
@raino: “One thing that will make it sound ‘not wide’ is to make everything wide. It’s a bit like instruments with overlapping frequencies that mask each other. If everything is wide your Panorama becomes mush. Where if only a couple of Tracks are wide then they’ll stand out relative to the other Tracks.”
@Reco29: "However, watch out for masking as @raino pointed out. It´s still important to keep the center tight. If you want to avoid masking issues in the first place take a look at your arrangement. If you are arranging instruments/voices in a way that they don´t have to fight over their place in space and time within a song your life becomes so much easier in the mixing process!"
Instrument Tracks
Group/FX Tracks
===== So given what you can see now on my instrument and group tracks and what you hear in the 45 seconds excerpt in terms of Stereo Combined Panner, what should I do to get a clearer yet also fuller sounding mix (i.e. low end presence)?
Frankly, I don’t quite understand what the console’s Stereo Combined Panner GUI bar means (before I changed it, just went by the numeric R and L there). Most of the instrument tracks span full left to full right; the Group (actually FX) tracks all fully span left to right.
Maybe that’s the problem and where I should make spatial/frequency improvements. But don’t know how to do so for it’s easy to get info overload watching YT videos that can also offer contradictory viewpoints.
One instrument that is more or less a signature sound for many of my compositions is an NI (Gibson) Session Guitarist Sunburst Deluxe I use for lead guitar with an NI GuitarRig 6 rack as shown below. As it’s initial preset “Spacious” and use of NI Raum suggest, it’s ambient-ish.
That setup is essentially non-negotiable.
So it is other instrument tracks that need to be adjusted.
Thanks.
PS: FYI while I have a decent system - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 5950X with 64 Gb DRAM, as the photo below shows, I have a very simple setup: 5" Presonus near-field speakers through Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD I/O and I use my ancient Korg Trinity as MIDI keyboard.