30-06-2017, 02:59 PM
Hi,
So I've been gone a while. For various reasons, I didn't do any mixing in the past two handfuls of months. This one got started before that point and then set aside as, "Man, this one is tough!" Anyway, I got back into this tune over the past few days and managed to get something I feel is pretty well finished, if not polished to a mirror bright sheen. Because of the pause, I have no idea how much time I have into this but I'd bank on 35+ hours, partly because, after the break, I'm now rusty and my ears aren't tuned quite right.
The three biggest challenges I had in this mix, besides trying to find room for everything and dealing with synths stepping on each other and everything else (as expected with a synth heavy tune) was, first, the synth bass. It really needed more low end but you can't EQ what isn't there. So after compression and EQ to set things up, I ran it through Lowender and made a few adjustments to give it a bit of rumble but also to give it a bit more feel in headphones as well. This took a *lot* of work to try to get it all balanced. There was NOTHING below about 125 Hz on that synth.
Second, the drum kits. These were used a bit oddly and it was hard to get them to mesh together but there was another problem... it was rather thin. I added a MIDI track and tried to discretely add a few extra elements. This woulda been easier if I were any kind of a drummer and had a better feel for what to add where. There was also the markedly different feel between the two drum parts (verse/chorus) which didn't to me feel as though they transitioned well. Did a bit of work on the kick drums and think I managed to get that sorted acceptably.
Third, on the chorus vocal, the vocalist overdrove his recording equipment and that made it difficult to get a good sounding voice. It also made compression a bit difficult because with the dynamic range present, it was hard to keep it punchy and not have something overload after re-amplification. My choice here was to go for dirtier sounding gear and adding in a little grit by pushing it pretty hard and power noise. In this case, I used the CLA-76 black face hitting pretty hard--over on the other track, I used the blue face--and trying to set the compression levels so that the output section was up pretty high, followed by a rennaisance compressor, then the two vocal lines bussed together through the Puigchild taking only a dB or so to try to keep the two lines a little more even and add some color and warmth.
Anyway, here's my submission. Not sure I'll be back where I was before, activity-wise, but I want to try to get something else going here soon.
So I've been gone a while. For various reasons, I didn't do any mixing in the past two handfuls of months. This one got started before that point and then set aside as, "Man, this one is tough!" Anyway, I got back into this tune over the past few days and managed to get something I feel is pretty well finished, if not polished to a mirror bright sheen. Because of the pause, I have no idea how much time I have into this but I'd bank on 35+ hours, partly because, after the break, I'm now rusty and my ears aren't tuned quite right.
The three biggest challenges I had in this mix, besides trying to find room for everything and dealing with synths stepping on each other and everything else (as expected with a synth heavy tune) was, first, the synth bass. It really needed more low end but you can't EQ what isn't there. So after compression and EQ to set things up, I ran it through Lowender and made a few adjustments to give it a bit of rumble but also to give it a bit more feel in headphones as well. This took a *lot* of work to try to get it all balanced. There was NOTHING below about 125 Hz on that synth.
Second, the drum kits. These were used a bit oddly and it was hard to get them to mesh together but there was another problem... it was rather thin. I added a MIDI track and tried to discretely add a few extra elements. This woulda been easier if I were any kind of a drummer and had a better feel for what to add where. There was also the markedly different feel between the two drum parts (verse/chorus) which didn't to me feel as though they transitioned well. Did a bit of work on the kick drums and think I managed to get that sorted acceptably.
Third, on the chorus vocal, the vocalist overdrove his recording equipment and that made it difficult to get a good sounding voice. It also made compression a bit difficult because with the dynamic range present, it was hard to keep it punchy and not have something overload after re-amplification. My choice here was to go for dirtier sounding gear and adding in a little grit by pushing it pretty hard and power noise. In this case, I used the CLA-76 black face hitting pretty hard--over on the other track, I used the blue face--and trying to set the compression levels so that the output section was up pretty high, followed by a rennaisance compressor, then the two vocal lines bussed together through the Puigchild taking only a dB or so to try to keep the two lines a little more even and add some color and warmth.
Anyway, here's my submission. Not sure I'll be back where I was before, activity-wise, but I want to try to get something else going here soon.