Sleep by the Fire, Bloom in Water - Friggy MixV1

[Friggy]

Wanted to come back to this song and see how it would sound with a new mix. Interesting to hear the different approaches to everything.

Old mix might as well just be drums, and pretty scooped. Low end is pretty messy and unmanaged. Funny how it sounds decent on the same old computer speakers, but doesn't hold up at all to any pro mix on my monitors.

New mix keeps a lot more midrange energy, drums and low end stay consistent. I think everything is better balanced, guitars are actually part of the song now.

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Hey guys, first time posting here. Just found this site about a week or two ago and its awesome to see all the songs available to mix.

This song is really catchy and was fun to work on. Majority of the mix was done last night so I was just using my tiny desktop computer speakers. Always fun to see how much groundwork can be laid out with those.

Need to check on actual monitors either tonight or tomorrow and hear everything that needs to be fixed. But for now i'll throw this first "cheapo speaker" mix up here. :blush:

[Friggy]

Here's mix 2. Cleaned up a few things once I went over to the monitors. Mainly realized I could go brighter once I referenced with another track. Also pushed the volume a little more in this one.

[Merkytcio]

Very nice, bright mix! May be you can pan guitar little more to side and do little quiet vocal in verse? In general I like it.

[Friggy]

Ill check it out. The guitars are panned hard L and R, but I don't think I did anything else with them, like using Shredspread to really make them sit outside of the speakers.

I'm still new to vocals. About 80% of my mix experience has been with instrumental groups. Haha, ill have to mess with them more and get creative with them.

Thanks for listening.

[wurstdrummer]

This is actually a really solid and nice, bright mix. Your kick may be a little too loud, but it sounds WOW.
You could work on getting your snare to snap a little more and maybe give it a little more sustain. Nothing else to complain. Nice mix!

[Friggy]

Thanks, it's really cool to get your input on this song. I agree with what you said as well. Even when looking at my limiter settings I could see the kick hitting 2-4 db louder than the snare. Should of listened with my eyes on that one and lowered it a bit.

Think im gonna mess with sending a snare sample to get its own parallel compression and bump up the snare reverb to see what happens.

[Friggy]

Mmk, 3rd and most likely final mix of the song. Turned down the kick a bit, added some brightness to the snare. Also side-chained the snare to one of the room mics so when the snare is hit, the room mic signal expands a few dbs. Also checked the gate on my snare group and I had the release set to 100ms. Surprised I had it so quick, so I opened it to 250ish ms. Snare sounds more natural to me with the longer sustain.

That's all I did and funnily enough the whole track feels like its been shifted around for the better.

[ulynch]

Would love to know what you did to get that kick sound. Very nice.

[wurstdrummer]

Very nice, good job!
I'd call it a finished mix. That kick is so awesome!

[Friggy]

Would love to know what you did to get that kick sound. Very nice.

I used all 4 of the kick tracks. Kick in and Sample kick were set to the same volume as each other. The kick room sample was used very quietly and then the Kick Out was the loudest channel by just a few dbs. I also used LF Max Punch on the kick out track. Added in some subs and saturation with that plugin to really pull out the resonance of the kick drum. When I was happy with the balance of the 4 tracks they were all sent to my KICK bus.

Started with EQ, and I like to get the high and low end of the kick to be even with each other. Sometimes it takes a 20 db boost to get it there, but when there is minimal bleed, it sounds great.


Then I had a really basic gate after that. Fastest attack, and 150ish ms release time. I set the gate to only close by 15 or so db. You still hear some bleed but that sounds more natural than the gate fully closing.

Follow that up with a compressor. I don't think I was ever doing much more than 2db of gain reduction. Fast attack and release. I play around until I hear a "thhip" sound from the kick. It's a hard thing to explain lol, but when sweeping around the attack settings you hear how it affects the transient of the kick.


Last plugin was TB Reelbus. I just used the default "Welcome to Reelbus" preset that it loads when you fire up the plugin. Except I turned down the hiss option all the way. Brings out more of the 100hz area and softens the click a little.

And that's the kick.

There's some mix bus plugins too. Another eq boosting high end and the low end. SSL compression, fastest attack and release and HP sidechain set to 100hz so it was only reacting to the snare, hardly the kick. And another Reelbus, but set to be very transparent.