Month: December 2014

When it came to starting my mix I immediately zero’d all of the faders, this was so i could start focusing on the drums individually. I rearranged the layout of my mixer faders purely out of the personal preference of starting with the kick drum and finishing with the overheads and room microphone. I managed to get a good mix of the drums, remembering to leave a fair amount of headroom, and then started to EQ them, I like being able to have a polished drum sound to base the rest of my mix on, it just makes everything else flow better. I used EQ to mainly clean up a lot of the sounds, cutting muddy signals from the mix, using a jigsaw effect to try and interweave the Bass guitar and kick drum, trying to blend any instruments with more than one recording, and giving instruments such as vocals an tweak to add qualities that i found to suit them more, such as being smoother in the vocals but crisper on the acoustics. I then went through the whole mix and applied compression to any tracks I felt that would benefit from it, such as vocals, and snare. I tried to be gentle with compression as i’m personally not a fan of over compression, but  to make sure that all transients were balanced out it was needed. I then started panning and balancing a few tracks that weren’t already panned (drum overheads, guitars). At first i tried panning the harp, but found that using the AutoPan plugin created a really cool effect that complimented the instrument and made it stand out a little more in the mix. For the Guitar solo i used a slapback delay, i’ve lined it up so that the delay almost harmonises with the next phrase being played on the guitar, this adds a lot of texture to the playing, and fills out any slightly weak signals. For this i decided to set up an aux send with the Delay attached, purely so i could retain some of the dry signal, and keep the guitar sounding as full as possible. I then decided to set up my reverb aux. I have applied reverb to almost all of my tracks, but kept it to an almost unnoticeable level for most. I decided to add a lot of reverb to the Harp and Lead Guitar purely because it added a lot more body and a nicer sound than the dry signal alone, it also takes away the sharpness and clarity of any mistakes that could have been made while playing. I am particularly impressed with the affect of using reverb on the vocals, rather than make it sound too washy it actually made the vocals just sound smoother and more full. The final thing i did was export that track as a WAV file, re-import it onto a fresh project, Duplicate the track, and use parallel compression to flatten out any transients on the whole file, this gave the feeling of the whole track being slightly stronger and more balanced. I then used a final EQ on the master fader to iron out any creases, and exported.

This week we started to arrange the project so it was ready for mixing. We started by making sure everything was ordered and named correctly, such as putting mic names in the track titles, (e.g. Guitar Condenser, Guitar DI etc.) this was so it was easier to see which guitar sound we were looking at and to make it easier to see the tracks when it comes to the actual mix. We colour coded groups of tracks so they were clear and easy to see, we could see where drums ended and bass started. We took all creative fades off, like for the end of the song, or track parts. We made sure that all of the crossfades for the preroll takes were added so we wouldn’t have to concentrate on little things like that later, and then we started to take out any dead space between tracks, such as a long space between lead guitar bits or anything like that. All of this was good practise so when it comes to the mixing stage, absolutely nothing got in the way of the creative thinking of mixing. The final thing we did before saving the project was create a very rough level for each track, just so when we opened up the project at home we could hear everything before starting our own work. then we saved the file, and each took a copy of the entire project on a memory stick to go and start our own mixes.