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jtbStudio mix - jtbStudio - 15-09-2019

Not a big fan of rap and hip-hop, but I think it's important to be able to mix all genres, and a lot of the techniques carry over to other styles. Flicking through the download library, this one caught my eye since it had quite a lot of stuff happening, and so I figured it could be interesting to mix. However, songs like this take time to mix simply because of the number of tracks. There are 66 audio tracks, and I ended up with over 100 tracks in my DAW, without particularly trying Sad

One thing I like to do is pick frequencies that best characterize the sound of certain elements, and those elements then "own" those frequencies. For this song, the kick was boosted at 160Hz and 260Hz, the bass at 100Hz. The bass then had a EQ cut at 160Hz and 260Hz, and the kick at 100Hz, to help each one stand out against the other. I think I learned this trick at The Recording Revolution ("complementary EQ"), but I take it one step further, by bussing the bass, synths, guitars and SFX together, and feeding the kick into a side-chained dynamic EQ. This EQ has cuts at 160Hz and 260Hz, so every time the kick sounds, a small EQ cut is applied to those frequencies, making a bit more space for the kick to be heard.

The vocals had a lot of plosives that needed fixing. Some of them I fixed by shortening the compressor attack times, but I couldn't do that too much without losing the edge on the vocals, so I had to do some fixups by manually editing the waveforms. The mic's must've been a dripping mess after this session Undecided I also had to add in a bunch of automation, since the B's and P's often hit at the same time as the kick/bass, interfering with each other.

I added a fake double for the vocal in the build-up at the end of the drop, as well as crescendos for the kick and bass. Yes indeed, you can still have dynamics in a hip-hop song that's also slamming the limiter Smile I also provided some dynamic contrast during the drop by fattening up the kick during bridge with hits copied elsewhere from the same track, so that it was only the drop that had just the acoustic kick.

I added my usual "fatness" track, to beef up the bottom end at various parts of the song. I also had to spend some time making sure the mix translated to smaller speakers and earbuds. A lot of earbuds boost the bass, so I had to make sure the bass and kick remained tight and didn't end up a woofy mess. The overall tonality isn't quite true to the genre, the overall sound should probably be a bit cleaner and sparser, but TBH, I like the slightly fuller, fatter sound. This song is also notable in that's it's probably the only mix I've ever done that doesn't have a single reverb plugin in it anywhere! Smile