Since you've already heard the isolated tracks from that one, this might be more interesting. I can't believe how good the wall of guitar parts sound on this.

In general, isolated tracks are a musical obsession of mine. That's part of why I enjoyed the McCartney series. Just two musical legends geeking out at a mixing desk.

Relatedly, I never realized how cool Mike Mills' bass line on "Driver 8" was until I heard the isolated track last week; it kind of gets buried under the lead guitar riff.

I really dig Mills' bass lines. I feel like he really was the standout in that band.

Oh man, the whole Murmur record is full of cool bass lines. I like the indie rock punchiness of Chronic Town/Murmur, even though Mills has a ton of pretty bass work and organ and background vocals on their 90s albums too.

Murmur and Reckoning are my favorite REM albums, although I did get to see the Life's Rich Pageant tour and that was a solid album.

I like the early REM records best. Not a huge fan of them overall, but those early records have a sound I like more. I love that "indie rock punchiness" you're talking about. The bass cuts through so well. it reminds me of the mixes of some other bands around that time, specifically The Cure and The Police. Sparsely arranged with jangly guitars and busy, midrange-y bass.

How is it that R.E.M had such good production on their first album? Husker Du is another band from the same time period with similar indie rock prestige, and yet I find their albums unlistenably shitty sounding.

Speaking of bassists from the '80s that I love, Andy Rourke is another big influence on me. This might be my ideal bass tone.

ETA: the video works. Not sure why there is no thumbnail.

Rourke was amazing. I burned holes in my Smiths CDs in the 80s.

rome8180 said:

How is it that R.E.M had such good production on their first album? Husker Du is another band from the same time period with similar indie rock prestige, and yet I find their albums unlistenably shitty sounding.

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That may have been a rhetorical question, and anyone can make up a ton of answers, but I always imagined that the fact that Mitch Easter and Don Dixon both were not-very-old frontmen/guitarists in their own own right at the time they produced the record helped them take a lot more care with the guitar sound and the mix.

Dixon's band, Arrogance, were a bit cheesy 70's rock band from Chapel Hill; Easter, out of Winston-Salem, played in a couple of bands in the 70s and formed Let's Active in the early 80s, with more a jangle pop sound not crazily dissimilar from what Peter Buck was doing. Let's Active became labelmates and a frequent opening act for R.E.M. in the 80's.

Incidentally, I.R.S. records originally had the band set up shop with a different producer for Murmur, a guy named Stephen Hague. The band really didn't like the results, and put their foot down to work with Easter again (he'd produced their EP), and the label eventually gave in.

What if the band hadn't held out for Mitch Easter? I think Murmur would not be in any pantheon of great albums. Check out the versions of "Catapult" below.

December 1982 demo with Stephen Hague:



Actual Murmur version, Jan-Feb 1983 with Mitch Easter/Don Dixon:


This book is basically 120 pages all about the recording and producing of Murmur, and much like Uncle Cliff Paul dropping in for an unexpected visit, it's surprisingly great.

rhfarmer said:

@rome8180 do you have any interest in the debut album by Boston? The story behind it is pretty epic. The guitarist and song writer, Tom Scholz was an MIT nerd who built all of his own pedals and did all of his own engineering in his basement.

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Scholz also invented the Rockman, which was basically just a headphone guitar amp with only a handful of settings, but it was used for probably 98 percent of the guitar parts on Def Leppard's "Hysteria" album, because Mutt Lange wanted the guitars to sit in a very specific place in the mix.

@TS9 since you record your own stuff, you might find this interesting or helpful. What I've been doing is finding isolated tracks I love the sound of, or I think match my vision for a project, and dragging them into a Logic session. I then open up an EQ with a frequency analyzer and see what the isolated track looks like. I compare this to my own rhythm guitar or whatever. I boost and cut in the appropriate places until I get it close. After that, I listen to my track in my full mix and make the appropriate tweaks by ear.

I'm breaking a couple rules doing this: 1) mix with your ears, not your eyes; 2) never mix a track in isolation. But the thing is it's working. And it's training my ears what to listen for. I've seen dozens of videos that talk about using a "reference mix," but never reference tracks. It's rare for me to find a full mix that matches a project I'm doing. And even then, you're trying to identify exactly what's going on with the bass behind a wall of other instruments. Often, it sounds completely different in isolation.

Partial screenshot of the Logic file. As you can see, I was especially focused on getting the drums right.

I'm very tempted to play these all at once. I don't even like Disturbed, btw, but I stumbled across this isolated track and thought the bass tone was killer for the kind of heavy song I was doing.

@rome8180 I have not tried this with individual instrument tracks, but I might give it a shot. It took me a very long time – and I probably still haven't fully gotten there – to grasp the concept of "it doesn't matter what an instrument sounds like on its own, just how it sounds in a mix." As I'm sure you've found, there are a whole bunch of professionally recorded instrument tracks that sound like garbage in isolation, but in the mix they sound great. I still get too married to a specific tone I really like, and I try to move mountains in order to make it work in a mix, even when it's clear that it won't.

I did try the reference mix thing a few times, using the Match EQ plugin in Logic. I saw too many people swearing by this approach, but I never figured out how to use the method effectively. I was probably doing something wrong, but as you said, it's hard to find reference mixes that seem super close to what I'm doing.

For me, bass tone in general has been incredibly hard to figure out in recording/mixing, so I might dive into your reference track thing to get a better handle on it. Often seems like so much can go into a single great bass tone on a record – blending amps/models with DIs, different types of compression, EQing to balance with the kick, etc. It gets exhausting.

@TS9 yeah, I'm remixing a project I was disappointed with from the ground up. I spent 3-4 days getting the bass and drums to work together. Once I had that, the rest of the mix started falling into place. With bass, I suggest using way more saturation than you think. Also, way more high end. Logic has plugins that will give you the kind of distortion you need, but there are also a couple great free ones I use all the time. Kit Burier Plugin and Softtube Saturation knob are both great. They're also very useful on vocals.

If you can get the kick drum, snare drum, bass, and vocals right, the rest of it should fall into place.

Another thread ruined

This is great, what are you talking about?

Well, usually this kind of geek recording talk has been confined to the Hobbies thread.

@TS9, sorry to keep tagging you, but another thing I wanted to say just occurred to me. It's important when mixing to realize that not everything has to be heard equally. You need to make decisions about what is most important in any given section. Sometimes this might mean burying a particularly cool guitar riff in the mix because otherwise it detracts from the vocals or the drum groove. This can be challenging if you're particularly proud of the riff and want people to hear it. I've started doing a lot of volume automation to bring things in and out of focus as the song progresses.