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My Mix of Revelations
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This is my second mix here and the first in over a year. Practice, Practice, Practice. It looks like I am a bit late to the party on mixing this song.

I cut my mixing teeth on cassette machines from the 80's and even with dbx noise reduction, there was a lot of noise. There is a lot of noise here. The problem with tape is that it's just noisy. The more tracks you have, the more noise. The easy trick is to just turn down the tracks that aren't playing. On a small machine it's like your doing a dance with your fingers and I understand that on large mixes, they had several people with their hands on the board turning track on and off and up and down. Digitally, it's easy, just turn it down. The end of this recording has tape bleed through. Since the tape has been rolled up for 40 years, the strong parts of a recording magnetize the next layer also. You don't notice it on loud parts but at the end, it sounds like a quiet delay. Find out which tracks have that problem and cut it out!

Most of the recorded sounds on this sample are just awful. The kick drum is terrible, so is the snare and the base. The guitars have a lame sound to them. Also, on the kick and snare tracks, there is a lot of bleed through of other instruments adding unwanted tones to those instruments that got recorded accidentally. These just had to go. So, I triggered the kick drum and the snare. I also reamped the strings on amplitube 3. I also put a high pass filter on the cymbals in order to cut out the bleed on them. I added some treble to the congas to make them a little more lively and the hammond organ is ... a hammond organ. When I record, I usually use triggered drums and reamped guitar sounds. That's because most of my gear sounds awful, my recording space is awful, and since I don't have a studio full of gear, If I want a certain sound or feel, that may be the only way I have to get it. So, this is how I normally work anyway.

The overheads had to stay pretty much the way they were because that was the only source for the toms unfortunately.

The one great thing about this song sonicly is the AWSOME vocals! Sometimes you just put the right voice to the right mic and that is everything you need. His voice is kind of steppinwolfy and chicagoey and is so early 70's that it just had to stay that way. So, I barely touched it. I put just a dash of reverb there so it didn't stick out like a sore thumb.

The guitar solo is a an understatement so instead of pushing it up, sticking it in the middle, and heaping reverb on it, I just left it the was it was for the rest of the song. I think you can make everything out with how I panned the instruments.

The "mastering" is using the Kramer tape plug in. Even on the little four tracks, pushing the tape on the VU meters into the red gives the music a pleasant compression.

I hope you like it, everyone's taste is different. I only had a chance to use head phones while mixing so there are probably some tonal problems that I am unaware of.


.mp3    Revalations remix.mp3 --  (Download: 8.49 MB)


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