Cleaning up recordings

[Cryptic Excretions]

Ok, the scenario is I've done some demo recording as of late and I've had my first hands on experience with some new equipment, namely Adobe's Audition and a Fostex MR-8, digital 8-track recorder. The results of the process were less than satisfactory in the respect that the recording came out muddy. So here's what I've been doing.

Programmed drums and synths on my computer and recorded them into a digital 8 track recorder on one track.
Recorded three guitar tracks.
Recorded two vocal tracks.

I pulled the wav files off the recorder and loaded them into Audition and did some volume balancing and half-assed eqing and quickly came to the conlusion that I really don't know what it is that I"m looking at. The results were quite muddy. You can hear eveything the song has to listen to, just not nearly as easily as I'd prefer. I'm guessing that part of the problem is because I loaded the drums and synth on one track and lost the ability to eq properly between the two of them and that perhaps I've kept the lows up a bit much when recording the guitars. Any thoughts?

[Dr_simon]

well "mud" is normally associated with bass and bottom mids. EQing troublesome frequencies may or may not be able to help however the best thing to do is to experiment. You may also have different tracks fighting with each other and this can be tackled in two ways 1) separating them in the stereo spectrum using your pan button and 2) EQing.

so..

1) look for Mud on individual tracks. When you find it EQ that track, then have a listen to the whole mix and see if the problem has gone.

2) If not try sticking an EQ tracks you suspect may be problematic and EQ listening to the mix rather than the individual track.

[Cryptic Excretions]

Ok, thanks. I'll give it a whirl.

[Kevin Taylor]

You've got 8 tracks to work with so ya need to space out your instruments and plan things a little better.

Try putting the drums in stereo on tracks 1 and 2.
Put the Bass on track 3
Put left and right guitar on tracks 4 and 5
Put vocals on 6
Put harmonies or synths on 7 and 8.
You can add a lead solo on one of the vocal tracks if you have one.
Once you've finished, go back and redo any tracks that need improving.

Try to add a little reverb to fill things out but avoid using it on the kick drum and bass unless you're going for effect cause it'll just muddy things up.

If you've got High Bandwidth, check out the multitracking tutorials on my lessons page. I've got a few where I used old 4, 8 and 16 tracks and described the process as it's going along.
There's also some info on using loops in combination with a drum machine so the drum tracks don't sound so cheesy.