Seeking Recording Advice

Spectator#1

Hi everyone, I'm looking for advice on the mixing down of a few home recordings. I posted this on the Recording & Mixing... forum as well but just in case some people here don't visit there I thought I'd do it here too if the mods don't mind!

Instead of bothering with the difficult task of recording drums accoustically in a home setting - which generally brings down the quality of our recordings on a whole as a result of a lack of experience and decent equipment - we used the visual method of Step Recording on a Boss BR600 digital 8-track. The drum tracks we managed to produce were more than adequate for the purpose at hand which is to create decent quality demos to bring to a studio.

Now, we then laid down the two guitars and the bass as seperate tracks on the BR600 and, having made sure that the quality was high enough as a whole for a backing track, we transferred the whole lot onto Garageband for a bit of mixing and to record the vocals from there.

The mixes previous to the vocal recording sounded great and the vocals themselves sounded very good, nice and clear when we did them as well.

Now, the problem is mixing the vocals in with the other tracks. Adding it to the mix seems to have unbalanced the whole track, the vocals are at the front, on their own and it doesn't sound as tight as we were hoping for.

In the past, we've generally discovered that putting a distortion on the vocals helps to embed it in the mix and join it to the rest of the song but we are sure that there is another way of doing it that would allow us to keep the clarity of the original vocal track while mixing it so it sounds organically conjoined to the rest of the music.

I'm not sure if that's enough information there for you or if I stated the case properly for anybody to help. In short, we're just looking for suggestions for how we might mix the vocals in with the song without having to buy new software, start again or put distortion on them! I've had a look at the manual a mod posted a link to in a thread of it's own below and I'm going to have a look through that now but any suggestion any of you might have would be more than welcome and much appreciated, thanks!

Thanks in advance!

the fnj

Put some reverb on the vocal mix, it will help it sit further back in the track

aesthetik

make sure the vocal isn't too high in the mix- sounds obvious but people often get these things way off.

did you transfer your drums bass and guitar as one stereo track or three seperate? if they're all in one track and the vocals in another it's gonna sound a bit weird no matter what.

rather than distorting the vocals you may wish to bring down some of the higher eq frequencies to pull it back a bit. alternatively push up your backing track by bringing the low end and high end up, and either leave the mids where they are or pull them back a bit aswell.

reverb will defo help.

a bit of gain and a slight delay on the vocals will help warm them up without losing clarity.

good luck

Spectator#1

Thanks for the replies fnj and aesthetik. In response to what you said fnj, we've already tried the reverb approach and it did help sit it into the track a bit better, the thing is though, that's not the sound that we're going for with that particular song.

Aesthetik, I'm fairly sure the volume levels are all ok, that's the first thing we checked. The other tracks all have their own individual tracks as well so that couldn't be it either.

We'll try the eq ideas today, thanks for that, might help! Failing that, back to plan gain!

I'll let you know how it goes!