Quote:
Originally Posted by jpmist
Secondly, the main trouble I have mixing is getting my guitar and vocal tracks balanced to my liking. I usually fail to notice until I've exported the track to a mp3 file to discover a vocal is way too loud and I can't hear my harmory vocal. Are there any plug-ins I can install that show a decent meter so I can compare the tracks? The 3/8" one GB shows for each channel is fairly useless.
TIA
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Speaking generally, and not as any kind of recording expert (though I record fairly often) I don't think most experts (or effective amateurs) balance and mix tracks with meters. There are meter settings, and newer meter modes, available as features on some products or plugins that you can install that attempt to measure loudness as we experience it (LUFS) but I use them more when doing the final "Mastering" stage after all the tracks are mixed already down to a stereo mix. Before that, when recording or mixing, I use meters mostly to make sure I'm not overloading any part of the recording chain.
Balancing the volumes of multiple tracks is an art that you use your ears for, and you may not get it right the first time, particularly when learning, but then the nice thing about mutltracks and DAW software like GB is that you just try again and get better with your tries as you do it more often.
It's also possible that different playback systems playing the same mix will show different problems or balances. Pros use a variety of playback systems to verify their mixes and learn to use their primary monitors to get it right more often on more systems by "learning" them. Again, a simple meter won't help with these kinds of problems.
Better recordists/mixers learn that it's not just a single setting of volume to mix tracks for best results. Where you place things in the stereo field (panning), EQ settings (two instruments can use too much the same frequency spectrum and end up masking each other), and controlling volume changes (with better mic technique, post recording volume automation curves* where you duck the loudest peaks and raise the too soft ones manually, or with compression) are part of the recipe.
For example, a too quiet harmony vocal may not be too quiet when you pan it away from the main vocal. Or it could have too much unneeded variation in volume so that you miss the quietest parts, even though when you first mixed it, it seemed "right" in general. So compression or even volume changes down to the phrase or even word level can help things at the mixing stage, or learning how to work with your voice, style of singing, and mic to reduce those variations at the time of recording.
Better, more knowledgeable people may correct or improve this answer from me, but I thought there might be some value in that I distinctly remember the problems I had to overcome when starting out, and from someone who still records with less than optimum equipment, skills, and facilities.
* Different software implements this volume automation feature differently, but usually there's some way to draw volume curves so that duck loud peaks and raise too soft parts on top of a recorded waveform. Though your ears are still the final arbitrator here, the visual aid of the waveform amplitude is useful as one draws these.