Something probably stupid that I wish I could do as a blind music producer is look at the waveforms of my tracks/mixes in Reaper. like yeah your ears are the best and most reliable tool but they can be biased by headphones, how you slept, allergies like I'm experiencing today, etc. Plus there would just be something super satisfying about putting something together until it sounds good, then looking at the master's waveform and tweaking the frequencies until it fills out the entire frequency spectrum just right. I'm assuming the answer is no because I can't even begin to fathom how something like this would work, but is there an accessible tool to do this?
@TheQuinbox Gotta say having been in many so-called professional studios is that waveform looking makes certain engineers lazy as all get-out and I hate it.
'Oh let me just drag this thing here, OK looks like it's lined up with the other tracks...'
Don't even bother to play it, bounce it, test it in the car (and yes this *has* happened)
only to find out it was off by a noticeable amount.
I wish I was lying to you.
@FreakyFwoof Nods, I'm sadly unsurprised. You're always going to have those. I can see the benefits to looking at the waveforms though, make sure your mix fills out the entire frequency spectrum. But the number one rule is to trust your ears! just use the waveform to check your work. Or at least, that's how I'd use it.
@TheQuinbox Ask yourself *why* you want a mix to fill out the frequency spectrum though?
Did it sound good *before* you did that? Did it sound any better *after* you did that?
Is it possible your track *might* be used as a bed for someone to talk over, and there's just no space for voice because you phattened it up like a mix pig for slaughter with your waveform frequency-spectrum-filling?
Did you watch some video on youtube that says 'OMGOMGOMG if you don't fill this mix right out nobody will ever listen, and you're a bad, bad evil bad person if you don't do these 15 steps to waveform filling right now!'
When I say 'You' by the way, I mean the general You, not You, Quinn.
My students sometimes come to me and say
'Why don't we do this particular compression trick in every mix?'
I have to ask them
'Do you need to? Is it important that you do?'
And so on.
@FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox EDM is full of that kind of thing, although I think it's more commonly ensuring that you don't have a bunch of instruments all crowded in one band, E.G> when this happens in the lows it becomes muddy, and filling is a sort of side effect. Totally understand though. It makes sense for some genres more than others. And that's still a spectrogram, not the actual waveform. All the *waveform* is good for, IMO, is aligning transients and carefully avoiding pops and clicks from joins. And maybe micro edits to clean up a sound, remove little pops etc.
@FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox Spectrograms, though, as a side effect of their operation, have low temperal resolution! If it's going to display low frequencies it has to have a window big enough to hold at least a few periods of that frequency! And don't use it for pitch correction either, it's bands like an EQ and isn't precise to the Hz. SO yeah, if someone tried to line things up based on the spectral content without playing it back? Bad use of your tools.
@x0 @FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox I do think you can still achieve a similar mix, even at comparable loudness, without having access to tools like this. It would definitely be nice, but it is not a must. If you know the techniques and if you reference often, you can get there easily. It is a tool that won't automatically help you make your mixes sound great. You can check mono compatibility, frequency crowding, all of those things purely by sound as well using utility plugins. So I agree I'd love to have those kinds of plugins, but it's not what stops me from trying.
@x0 @FreakyFwoof @TheQuinbox For example, frequency crowding becomes very apparent if you solo an EQ band, play with the Q and then sweep. Mono compatibility becomes very obvious if you add a utility and then solo either the mids or the sides. You can also combine them.
@FreakyFwoof The largest reason is because I'm making electronic music, vaguely inspired from deep dubstep, and generally you want bass music to fill out at least most of the mix, it commonly gets played on a big system. Seeing the waveform could also be nice in case I had a bunch of clashing lowend that I can't hear on my headphones, but that you'd definitely notice on a club system. I'm probably being mostly pedantic though.
@TheQuinbox I hear you. I do. And please don't think I was having a go at you because I wasn't. I've just been burnt by idiots doing nothing but using their eyes, when music is also, you know, an actual ear thing... A sound engineer that purely uses their eyes has no right to call themselves an engineer at all.
If you do find ways of doing it, double and triple -check your work in the ways others have already specified.
@FreakyFwoof Oh absolutely, I didn't take it as you going after me at all, but rather the advice of someone who's been doing and teaching this for probably longer than I've been alive.