I'm in the process of experimenting where I have time, but I would appreciate any constructive input around mixing the guitar and bass in a three piece (with drums the third). Lately I'm realizing my habits for recording and mixing a three piece band situation have been largely an assumption I've made of "how it's done" rather than a result based on anything empirical. I've really only ever double tracked the guitar (either twice separate from the band or once with the band and once after) and then panned each track fairly wide with bass in the middle. While this sounds "good" generally speaking, it's an extra step in the workflow that seems potentially unnecessary, as well as distracting from the sense of 3 people playing together (like a phantom fourth member in a way). I'm thinking specifically of two examples related to the EA world, "Blessed Black Wings" and "Dude, Incredible". The former seems like an example of the bass fairly central with the sources on the guitar separated in the stereo field in some fashion (Hass effect?) where any overdubs are very intentional, while the latter gives me the distinct impression of bass on one side and guitar on the other. Both sound excellent to me. What I keep running up against on my own is having a single guitar take with two sources panned to each side winds up having a less directional sense in the stereo field, despite having a reasonable sense of placement with the bass otherwise. Having the bass and guitar more decidedly left and right of one another feels mildly disorienting to me when I'm trying to mix.

That s essentially what I ve imagined doing once I have the opportunity to get a room sound on guitar, thanks for validating I might be on solid theoretical ground there. For the most part I ve done pretty dry guitar tracks due to room, space or mic/input limitations. I m curious how to attack that situation without relying on duplication of a single part.

The band I'm in is essentially a three piece. Here's the mixing approach that works for 95% of our stuff. We almost always record live, multitracked and then overdub the vocals.1. Make sure the balance in the room mic of the g/d/b sounds good by itself. As in, adjust the amp volume so that the stereo room mic could be an okay recording all by itself. Assign it to a delay unit and give it an appropriate short delay (like 20ms for starters). Kill that for the moment.2. Pan guitar about 50% one side, bass 50% the other. Bring them to a decent balance with one another. Have this peaking about 8-10db below your final headroom. Kill this for the moment.3. Put all the drums up and mix them so they sound good. Send that to a stereo submix.4. Turn the guitar/bass back on. Bring the drum submix up so that the three dry instruments are in good balance with one another. Like, if you were doing this with no room mic, as good as you can get it.5. Once that's set, bring the room mic into the mix. This should have you 95% of the way there.6. Tweak as needed.= Justin

How about using some kind of crossover (maybe just duplicating the bass track and using shelving eqs) to create hi and low tracks and have the lo in the middle and the mids / high panned?

I've gotten more comfortable over time with hearing the bass off center. We spread it out on the last Lardo album by taking both mic'd and direct feeds from both the octave guitar and bass (each one was phase compensated with rack delay). You could just pan multiple mics over the stereo field but I've never found it to widen things all that much. Whereas with a mic and direct signal, you get distinctly different textures and can pick out the different qualities across the mix better.(the bass DI probably had a low pass filter and the guitar DI was distorted with a tube pre to narrow the frequency range. Plus I've just always liked Husker Du..)I guess if we were all truly going for realism, we wouldn't pan anything past 10 or 2 'o clock..

I guess if we were all truly going for realism, we wouldn't pan anything past 10 or 2 'o clock..Some would say if we were going for realism we would record with a binaural head. I don't think many people are going for that kind of realism. For one thing I don't listen to music on headphones, I listen to it on speakers. And speakers are a second performance on a second instrument in a second room.So I don't want realism in a binaural head sense. I want something that sounds good played back on stereo speakers in a room.

the finger genius wrote:How about using some kind of crossover (maybe just duplicating the bass track and using shelving eqs) to create hi and low tracks and have the lo in the middle and the mids / high panned?I've done variations on this for widening the stereo field, but as it relates to trying to create a sense of directionality from various sound sources it seems to bring out phase problems. With a lot of care they can be worked out but the returns seem diminishing. I could also just not be very good at it.

numberthirty wrote:On it being "Disorienting"...- "While it's an approach I think could be what I settle on, it's currently throwing me off."? It's this 100%. I think the issues at hand are: 1. The sources I've worked from are very dry2. My "sense memory" is accustomed to a certain sound arrangement3. I'm relatively inexperienced with a variety of mixing and capturing techniquesObviously "Work with different sound capturing setups" is the obvious solution, obviously. Just wondering if there are some less obvious but not overly involved methods I'm not intuitively working with.

To clarify, I m not necessarily after œrealism per se, as much as streamlining workflow and economy of equipment. œRealism as a by product is fine or not, I think the source would dictate. For example I have 16 inputs, and will need to make choices between direct or mic, more drum signals at the expense of guitar or bass signals etc. Sub-mixing may or not be an option, yadda yadda you get the idea. I'm probably over-thinking this; I've been listening to the Ramones and there doesn't seem to have been a whole lot of fuss made over the stereo field in the final results. Sounds pretty straightforward with 50% guitar right and 50% bass left. I'm venturing a guess Shellac copped that aesthetic on purpose.Anywho, thanks for all the suggestions, I'm definitely going to try them where applicable.

To the point of dropping tracks to free up other possibilities, sure. I think that s the give and take of not having a fully realized studio or recording environment. I m not really looking at a specific setup as yet, but it s on my mind. I figured out a general method that works for the most part, but at some point it s not going to be appropriate, either aesthetically or practically. I m prepared to figure out most of it as I go, but any reasonable info to work from is helpful.