Hi Tom,
thanks for your nice words; I worked very hard on those mixes because I needed to learn everything by myself with the help of these excelent forums.
Here's a procedure I tend to follow.
About space in a mix; it's all about creating the illusion of space realy.
The way I work on any style of music is I visualise the space I'm working in. With a Hall reverb I create stereo depth (far corners left and right), an Ambiance reverb gives me stereo width (left right) and a mono reflection from the RS-1 gives me mono depth (the farest point straight ahead).
I often leave some room on the left and right to be filled in by reverbs and stereo delays, so I don't often pan hard left and right: 80% is mostly my max. All reverbs are on a send.
For eq settings: we hear close sounds more detailed = more top high (>12khz) and with detailed bass. Far away sounds have less body and less high end. Next to that it's very important to hear on what specific frequencies an instrument sounds good. Mostly thats a low mid and a high mid freq. Combine that with high end and bottom for closeness and the instrument gets a position. There are guidelines for eq: kick is roughly 50hz bottom- 320hz body- 2.5khz attack, bass is 75 - 450 - 3khz,
snare 120 - 900 - 3.5 khz, git 180 - 1khz - 5khz etc...( I do this by heart and its late, so just look at the idea and not at the exact numbers) Use a not too broad band and sweep it to find that exact spot where the instrument sounds good and nothing sounds overdone. Then add that frequenty to your taste. Do the exact opposite with disturbing frequencies.
Pan your eq'ed instr. in the stereo field and don't pan anything on top of it unless its in the middle. Choose carefully what goes left and what goes right, leave the key instruments (vocal, snare, kick, bass) in the middle, Narrow the stereo spread of drum overheads and stereo keyboards (80% max)
Compres things so that the soft notes are hearable and the hard notes are not disturbing. Compress before you eq because the compression alters the sound, and each compressor alters it differently.
Use a little overdrive on anything that sounds too weak. You can use overdrive as eq or as compression.
So, here's how you can start:
-take a guitar part. Compres it so it sounds compact. Add a little hall, ambiance and mono rs-1 so you can hear the surrounding space. Find a nice eq spot around 150, one around 1k and one around 5k and add a bit of them so you hear the guitar more defined. Pan it a bit left or right (30%) Play with the rs-1 send to move the guitar back and forth. Add a little overdrive to see what it does. Use very little drive and start with no high cut.
Break all the rules, but only if you _hear_ you need to do that. Experiment!
I hope this helps you. If I'm unclear about something please let me know; I'm not native english as you can see so I'm not too sure about my choice of words.
Have fun and show us the results 8)
