Mixing & Mastering Violin

WowBobWow

Hi,

I've been trying to deal with how to mix and master violin. I'll do my best to example the issue:

While recording, I've got a nice rode n6 condenser mic and shure mic picking up the violin very well. While recording, the violinist who is playing/ being recorded has a lush live sound, rich overtones, sounds great, and brings chills as it all sounds good.

Then, when trying to master and mix it, the issue/problem comes: the recorded violin appears to sound either flat, lacks any sense of overtones, causes ear strain/fatigue (to me) and sounds bad, which I know wasn't the live sound that was going on when I recorded the violin.

In recording, I had the mics about 3 feet away from the violinist and we used the Zoom H4 with no effects. In post work, I've tried using compression, reverb, BBE plugins, etc, but I just don't get the big wow factor I am looking for which I heard live.

Any help is greatly appreciated and many thanks in advance ~

Adelaarvaren

Are you having Phase problems perhaps (two mics equidistant)?

I'd try one close and one far, with the phase inverted on one and see if that helps.

WowBobWow

Hi,

Thanks for the help, but I think my main problem is I don't know much about mixing/recording.

I've been using Cubase and I hit a few walls by not being happy with a final mix.

I've since been using Adobe Audition which has a lot of masterings effects and I've been experimenting with shaping the sound to my liking.

For my adobe mixing, I basically went through all the effects and filters and basically used a simple process: Does this effect / filter help or hinder the mix? With that in mind, I ended up writing down what I liked and used my notes to mix down other tracks of the same day's takes as well.

Here's a clip of my final adobe audition mix (using about several effects/filters) which turned out much better than the unprocessed mix.

I'll try the phase thing if I can next time we record. Many Thanks ~