I want to push something back in the mix. Specifically it's Embertone Walker.

Should I use the close-mics with SPAT, or the Room mic with SPAT? Dry room-mics still aren't far enough for me.

Also, is there anything better than Flux SPAT for doing this? AFAIK it's the best, and only cost is an issue with it.

 

filtered reverb on the room mics can be a posibility: not only will give you more ''punch'', you can use the close mics with less level (just a little bit). you have to filter the low frequencies up to 250 or 350 hz and the highs on 15k i guess

 

If you want to push back the vocals or some other instrument than you have to mix them with school mixing.
Modern mixing sounds like crap, either the vocals sound moronic with processing all over the place
order they put them up front with tons of auto tune, even instruments are getting this stupid treatment.

Just because you can afford a $150,000 console and tons of outboard gear does not mean you know jack about mixing. All these "Mixing Engineers" plugins they keep putting out "Hello Waves lol" sound like crap.

Vocals - Wet/ Dry mix
Instruments- We/ Dry Mix

Simply put because people are using "Profools" they forgot how audio actually gets routed in the real world.

OOPS monitoring L-R ( or more known as Out Of Phase Stereo) is your answer.

The main issue is people are not adding reverb to the track itself as the last effect anymore, because they simple don't want to spend time setting it up with the Wet/ Dry mix and using the OOPS mode to hear where that reverb is in context to the center of that Reverb.

With OOPS mode you can hear where instrument is ( how far back it is) due to it's volume based on how much reverb you give it. In a full normal LR Stereo you will never be able to hear this properly, this is why Mono listening started to be used to mix to see how much of the stereo image there is when you go to LR stereo monitoring.

OOPS is very old because the sound will be very low so you have to increase the volume a bit to compensate.

The trick is to have your mix go to 2 buses so one bus can be soloed to OOPS, while the other copy of the mix goes to the Main master bus.

In Reaper due to is Routing this is brain dead easy, in Protools and others it's a fricken nightmare setting this up as in some Daws like Studio One you even need plugins for this lol.

Basically for vocals ( if they were recorded isolated in booth dry)

**2 options**

1. "Old school wet verb"
SOLO the vocal and add a small mono reverb to the end of the track fx adjust to 15% wet/85% dry to give the vocal some space. Send this track to a Stereo reverb set to the same identical settings 15% wet/85% dry, adjust the reverb. The track does not go to the master bus, it goes fully through the stereo reverb, as we are using the Stereo Reverb as a Bus!!! using the Wet/Dry mix knob as the placement for back or front. Switch to the OOPS mode and now adjust the Stereo Reverb parameters, like 70 ms pre delay, size etc. Using OOPS You can hear where that vocal is how far in out of the reverb it is. Solo more instruments that have Reverb to hear them against the Vocal reverb to see if they are in front of back of vocal. The less reverb the more front they are( more dry)when listening in OOPS mode.
Yes it's very strange to mix this way but it also teaches you how the old school engineers mixed, listen to any track in OOPS mode and you can hear details that can't be hear in Stereo.

2. "Modern mixing using the Volume fader to set the vocal distance ( Must have phase button on the track)" . Make a send ( must be Prefader-post FX) to a vocal stereo reverb from a vocal track or instrument. Make sure both the vocal track and the Reverb track or fx channel faders are identical. Adjust the reverb wet 50% Wet/ 50% dry , we need some dry signal to phase in and out. On the Vocal track hit the Phase button, you can now use the Vocal Fader to remove the dry portion of Stereo Reverb thus controlling the placement of the Wet vocal in and out of the reverb.

Number 2 is easier to do as you are listening in normal mode so you can hear all the tracks at once and can hear the vocal going in an out of the reverb by moving the Vocal track fader either DOWN or UP past parity. To adjust the reverb you adjust it's parameters for size and pre delay as usual.

Number 2 is more modern and is for quick placements
Number 1 is more for precise placements of instruments, vocals based on the Stereo Image of each track vs the other, it also takes more time as you small track amounts at a time.

Here is a video explaining how this works( dumb guitar track but whatever..)

 

Last edited: Feb 15, 2021

the only thing you need in regards of "spat" is an air absorbtion filter, and since you are not moving the source around, you could as well use any other lowpassfilter.

dont forget that localisation mostly works in contrast to other virtual sound sources. for example you would put B in the same room reverb algorithm as A, but with other first reflection times, things like that.

 

@danfuerth
OMG this ish is crazy! Why is nobody talking about this. Thank you so much for this tool. I been studying how to create great space with reverb and delay. Would love to talk and trade ideas.
Zq

 

I do love the sounds of old recordings; that's really interesting. The reverse-polarity doesn't reverse the polarity of the send, right? However, I wouldn't be able to put an EQ before the reverb, as that'd smear the phase, right?

Ya, probably a single short delay is all I need. Price of F.Lux isn't an issue since I already have it. Is V.S.S. higher quality than FLUX? Supposing I'm a trillionaire and price doesn't matter.

 

Delay the room signal helps. Darken the dry signal also push it back. Denser church verb helps too.

 

"pre delay" is a "psycho acoustic" easy trick
And it increase mix clarity by separating early reflections from dry signal
And can be applied to ANYTHING digital/analog easily.