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jtbStudio mix
#1
A fun track to mix. As always with this kind of thing, with so few tracks, it's challenging to keep the mix interesting, and with the guitars completely dropping in and out during the verses, it was tricky to keep it from sounding weird, as the mix changed from a wall of sound to just the vocals.

Some of the other mixes I listened to had a woolly, muffled sound for the guitars, so that was something I was mindful of. It was straight-forward to fix, a scoop at 400hz, a boost at 2.5kHz and a shelf boost at some unknown frequency :-) I used Stillwell's vibeEQ, which is really nice for these broad changes, cleaning out mud, brightening things up and adding a bit of air.

I'm really not happy with the bass; it's there but I couldn't get it to really cut through :-( Kick and snare are OK. I tried a variant of my usual trick of bussing the key elements of the backing track together (in this case, the guitars and piano) and triggering a side-chain compressor off the kick and snare - this time I used Tokyo Dawn's variable EQ, triggering an EQ cut at 100Hz and 200Hz (for the bass) and 1.3khz (for the snare) based on what was coming in on the side-chain. This made a big difference in helping those elements cut through the guitars.

I also used another of my common techniques, bussing the kick and bass together, low-passing it at ~500Hz, compressing the snot out of it, then blending it back in at varying levels i.e. parallel compression for the kick & bass. I'll sometimes include other elements e.g. the guitars, but in this case, it just made things sound muddy. It's completely turned off during the verse, but turned on for the guitar solo, and cranked up during the chorus, which really fattens up the sound.

I don't really like the extra use of delay on the vocals, but it was in the preview track, so I thought I'd give it a go, since it's not something I would normally do myself. Not sure if I like it myself, but other people might Confusedhrug:

The times when there's just 1 guitar playing power chords, it just doesn't sound right. The preview track has it just coming out the right channel, which just sounds weird. I copied the guitar parts from other parts of the song, but the waveforms looked identical, so I suspect Jet B just recorded those bits once and copied them around. Panning the same thing left and right is obviously pointless, so I detuned the copied bits by 5 cents to give some pretence of stereo.

The piano track, I was sorely tempted to just drop completely. Regardless of whether or not you can fit it into the mix, stylistically it just sounds out of place. This was especially apparent in the intro - I tuned it down an octave, which helped, but it still sounded odd, so I just turned it down so you can barely hear it. It works best when it's accenting the same hits as the guitar power chords, and in the bridge, where it actually sounds not too bad.


.mp3    Suit You (jtbStudio).mp3 --  (Download: 8.04 MB)


Mixing and mastering at jtbStudio.com
My music at JazzTeddyBears.com


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