[Lowboy]

Hi,

I have figured out what is going on–why the mix does not sound good on some playback devices.

I took my friend’s stereo and mastered mix of his recording and imported it as two stereo tracks on my Tascam hard disk recorder. After recording my melodica part, I panned the original song tracks left and right during the mixdown and mastering (as you would expect). If I centered the pan of the two stereo tracks, they would cancel each other out and all I would hear is the reverb from the tracks.

After mixing and mastering the recording with my mono melodica track added, the result sounded good on discrete stereo equipment and headphones. If however, I played the track back on any audio equipment where any part of the stereo tracks were combined: mono systems, systems using surround sound decoding, Bose equipment where a single channel is often created for some frequencies, etc., the left and right tracks of the original recording would fully or partially cancel themselves out, resulting a mix with very little bass and/or unbalanced frequency response.

So for posterity, I am going to try again to mix the recording using a different technique. I think I am also going to create mix where the backing music is panned hard left and the melodica is panned hard right. This would enable you to listen to just the melodica track and hear the modulations.

Lowboy