18-11-2017, 10:14 AM
This is my first time with a mix on a song I didn't create and it is very interesting. I tried to do the mix before hearing the others and after listening to a few I have some new ideas but this one is the one I did out of the gate. Here was my thought process:
This song felt like an easy going song so I wanted to keep it a bit on the soft side and I avoided pushing the levels. There were some good things and some bad things about the given tracks. I saw the notes too late. I really liked the vocals and thought they were pretty "honest" so I tried to keep the character. on the main line I boosted around 2k, did a very slight doubling and a little delay and obviously some compression but not too much. For the rap, all I did was compress and high pass filter. Dry as a bone right down the middle made it stand out. The backup vocals were pretty good except for the crackling. I turned them down and panned them to various positions and that was it. They are low enough that I can not hear any crackling in my headphones in the mix.
There were too many drum recordings fighting with each other and bleed out the wazoo. Every track got a noise gate to keep the icky drum sound out of the mix. I just started learning drum replacement so I thought I would start with the bass drum, snare and 2 toms. I kept the overhead and the upper high hat and put a high pass filter on those to get rid of the drum bleed. All the rest had to go. I lamented a bit on whether to use a fat reverberated snare or a naked one. I went with something more natural because it seemed that the topic of the song called for it. This guy is being a bit of an introvert just thinking to himself "oh God! there she goes again what am I going to do? Lets just go home before you .... great..." I didn't want an aggressive snare to send a mixed message. That's kind of what my philosophy with music is, find out what the song is saying and then try to make the music say the same thing too.
The many guitar parts were one of the good parts of this recording. Again, I turned them down and panned them. No other processing needed. They were different enough to make the sound lush and interesting in the stereo field. This song had a less is more feel.
The bass guitar was not too pleasant on its own so I sent it through the ampeg model on amplitube 3, whatever the stock setting is when you call up the model.
Then came the master channel processing. My band is a classic rock band so I usually use a tape emulator but I thought this song needed super clean. I used Nomad Factories Cosmos which is almost a magic bullet. I upped the sub bass and bass just a little, a slight amount of exciter action to make those cymbals sparkle and widened the stereo to 120%. Gave it a little limiting but not very much because I wanted this to stay mellow.
Of course everyone has their own opinion and tastes and if I am way off, let me know!
This song felt like an easy going song so I wanted to keep it a bit on the soft side and I avoided pushing the levels. There were some good things and some bad things about the given tracks. I saw the notes too late. I really liked the vocals and thought they were pretty "honest" so I tried to keep the character. on the main line I boosted around 2k, did a very slight doubling and a little delay and obviously some compression but not too much. For the rap, all I did was compress and high pass filter. Dry as a bone right down the middle made it stand out. The backup vocals were pretty good except for the crackling. I turned them down and panned them to various positions and that was it. They are low enough that I can not hear any crackling in my headphones in the mix.
There were too many drum recordings fighting with each other and bleed out the wazoo. Every track got a noise gate to keep the icky drum sound out of the mix. I just started learning drum replacement so I thought I would start with the bass drum, snare and 2 toms. I kept the overhead and the upper high hat and put a high pass filter on those to get rid of the drum bleed. All the rest had to go. I lamented a bit on whether to use a fat reverberated snare or a naked one. I went with something more natural because it seemed that the topic of the song called for it. This guy is being a bit of an introvert just thinking to himself "oh God! there she goes again what am I going to do? Lets just go home before you .... great..." I didn't want an aggressive snare to send a mixed message. That's kind of what my philosophy with music is, find out what the song is saying and then try to make the music say the same thing too.
The many guitar parts were one of the good parts of this recording. Again, I turned them down and panned them. No other processing needed. They were different enough to make the sound lush and interesting in the stereo field. This song had a less is more feel.
The bass guitar was not too pleasant on its own so I sent it through the ampeg model on amplitube 3, whatever the stock setting is when you call up the model.
Then came the master channel processing. My band is a classic rock band so I usually use a tape emulator but I thought this song needed super clean. I used Nomad Factories Cosmos which is almost a magic bullet. I upped the sub bass and bass just a little, a slight amount of exciter action to make those cymbals sparkle and widened the stereo to 120%. Gave it a little limiting but not very much because I wanted this to stay mellow.
Of course everyone has their own opinion and tastes and if I am way off, let me know!