A fair few submissions for Mix Rescue suffer much more from tracking problems than mixing problems, and normally we reply to such submissions with a few recommendations for tracking tweaks. The bottom line is that there comes a point when there's more to be gained by addressing problems at source than by trying to fix them in the mix.

So when Scott Martinez and his band Alice Sweet Alice sent in the multitrack files for the song 'Broken Heart On A Winter Night', it was clear to me that a remix was very unlikely to give him the sound he was after. The main problem was that he had recorded almost everything with effects, which makes it very difficult to gain a useful degree of control over the sound while mixing. For a start, if there's too much effect you can't take it off, but it's also a problem in other ways. For example, if you compress a sound that has been recorded with reverb, you'll bring up the level of the reverb as well as evening out the dynamics. In short, recording tracks with effects on them can make mixing practically impossible.

Taking my comments on board, Scott endeavoured to record another song, 'With You, With Me', trying to minimise his printing of effects, and sent that over to me in due course when he was unable to get the kind of big, ambient sound he was looking for. Again, I felt that tracking issues were going to limit the extent to which mixing would be able to deliver what Scott was after, but it also seemed to me that he wasn't clear why this was the case, or indeed how he might best improve matters in his simple recording setup (based around a Soundcraft Compact 4 mixer and Cakewalk Pro Audio 9).

Back in SOS August 1997, top mix engineer Jon Gass said "I don't think you even know how to track music until you've done quite a bit of mixing", and with that in mind I decided that I'd try remixing the tracks as they were, in the hope that I would be able to illustrate some of the difficulties and limitations involved, as well as suggesting a few simple ways in which he could improve his raw recordings in the studio.

The first main problem with this new song (as with the previous one), was that the drums were already mixed to a single stereo file from Acoustica's Beatcraft drum machine. Although Scott had removed the effects from the mix, the samples he'd loaded into the drum machine still had a lot of fairly grainy-sounding reverb on them, which couldn't be removed.

These two factors limited my options in a number of ways. One thought I had, for example, was that a little less stereo width in the drum parts would help make them cohere a bit better, but I was only able to reduce the pan settings a little before the prominent reverb tail became very narrow and constricted.

A more important concern was that I felt that the kick and snare sounds needed a lot more weight and definition, but the nature of the mixed drum track rendered all the more straightforward tools I'd use to achieve this pretty ineffective. For example, EQ'ing the drums track to improve the snare sound affected all the other sounds in undesirable ways, as well as adding odd colorations to the reverb tail. On the other hand, simple dynamics processing such as compression or gating started heaving the reverb tails up and down in unnatural ways before any useful adjustments were achieved.

I tried using Digital Fishphones' Dominion to increase the snap of the kick and snare transients, but the hi-hat began tearing my ears off before that made a useful difference. Multi-band compression? That did nasty things to the reverb. Dynamic EQ? Couldn't get it to trigger reliably enough on such a complex mixed signal. Celestial Systems...