Had some downtime and practiced some mixing with this song. I do a lot of recording and production work, but only about 40% of my time is mixing.
I listened to quite a few mixes of this song after I mixed it. There are some really good ones and a few that that just need that "Nashvillle extra 5%". What I'm talking about is today's modern pop-country sound. (Americana is a genre that gets played on country radio and streams also and that is a different animal, characterized by a dryer, more acoustic, raw, and unprocessed sound). First and foremost in pop-country s the vocal. Today's country sound has an upfront, present and "in your face" lead vocal. You should be able to articulate every phrase. It's likely been tuned. Even background vocals are given some love on most country songs so they sit a little behind the lead, but still have some impact. (unless it's a duo or trio harmonizing, which is a different thing and needs a lot of mix balancing). The other aspect of the Nashville sound is all the little licks that the players throw in between the vocal phrasing. A mandolin, dobro or pedal steel may throw in a one measure arpeggiated lick for example in the turn around. That little phrase is meant to give the player "some love" and should jump out of the speaker for that moment and then lay back for the vocals to resume. In order to achieve this, volume automation is key for balance and articulation. The other aspect is energy. Most pop-country songs don't leave a lot of open space. If there's a section that has some open space for a beat or two, a lot of Nashville pop-country mixers will throw in a vocal throw echo or reverb bloom. It's all about maintaining energy throughout -- the exception being a moody, dark bridge section or breakdown. It's called "pop" country. The drums are not shy and timid. The first thing to do is understand the arrangement, tempo and key of the song. Understand what the hook is. Is it the chorus vocal or melody? Is it the post chorus gang vocal? Or is it the call and response verse interplay? These "hooks" need to be the most focused parts. They're the things that stay in the listeners heads for days.
Some good reference tracks to hear this are:
Burns Like Her - Randall King,
Dance Like No One's Watching - Gabby Barrett
Carolina Blue - Eli Winders
I know this was tracked at Telefunken and the tracks are of a relatively good quality. What I found myself doing after I achieved a good balance by throwing up the faders and listening through the song a few times, was that all of the resonant stringed instruments (mandolin, dobro, banjo) had a lot of high-mid "whistle tones". I see this a lot these days. Usually it's on tracks recorded with a modern large diaphragm condenser with a big presence lift built in. Sometimes it's the mic and sometimes it's the mic and the combination of the room reflections and/or the capsule vibrating sympathetically (not pleasant). No disrespect to Telefunken -- they make some beautiful mics, but I'm a big fan of ribbons and darker mics on these types of instruments. That said I used Brainwork's bx_dynEQ to hunt down and dynamically squash these frequencies. The "whistles' were usually between 3k and 8k and sometimes I used two instances in series to catch the fundamental and it's harmonic cousin (think 6k and an octave down at 3k). I just could not get any presence out of these instruments without this surgical correction; the mix was just a harshness party. The acoustic guitars also suffered a little bit of this, but not nearly as much.
The next thing I did was bring up the drums and acoustic bass. Acoustic string basses can be tricky, especially in a pop country mix. This one was no exception. I high-passed at about 65 hz and used some saturation on the midrange to tame some of the trebly string slap attack. The biggest issue was the unevenness of the notes being played. The song is in A Major, and about 50% of the notes being played were the tonic -- A. The A notes were very low in energy compared to the rest. As a note, a lot of country music uses the I, IV, V progression and thats a lot of what the bass player was plucking. (A, D, E) The A's were quiet and the E's were prominent. The frequency for A in the second octave is 110 hz. E2 is about 82 hz. After trying dynamic EQ and multiband compression, I settled on a combination of dynamic EQ (dipping 82 hz and boosting 110 hz) and volume automation through the song, boosting gain every time an A was played. Sometimes this is a necessary and not so fun prep job.
Mixing the drums was mostly time-aligning things for phase normalization and gating until the sonic quality of the drum shell I was gating started to suffer and then backing off. I did use samples on the kick and snare, tucked in under the live tracks.
The vocals were pretty straightforward. The lead vocal was edit-prepped by manually tuning and de-essing. It was a typical plugin treatment after that -- corrective EQ (this particular vocal has a small bit of a congestive, nasal quality to it at about 1 khz, so I corrected that just enough to not lose the nice timbre in it), compression, more light de-essing, enhancement EQ, more compression and some parallel tape saturation and compression on the vocal bus.
I listened to quite a few mixes of this song after I mixed it. There are some really good ones and a few that that just need that "Nashvillle extra 5%". What I'm talking about is today's modern pop-country sound. (Americana is a genre that gets played on country radio and streams also and that is a different animal, characterized by a dryer, more acoustic, raw, and unprocessed sound). First and foremost in pop-country s the vocal. Today's country sound has an upfront, present and "in your face" lead vocal. You should be able to articulate every phrase. It's likely been tuned. Even background vocals are given some love on most country songs so they sit a little behind the lead, but still have some impact. (unless it's a duo or trio harmonizing, which is a different thing and needs a lot of mix balancing). The other aspect of the Nashville sound is all the little licks that the players throw in between the vocal phrasing. A mandolin, dobro or pedal steel may throw in a one measure arpeggiated lick for example in the turn around. That little phrase is meant to give the player "some love" and should jump out of the speaker for that moment and then lay back for the vocals to resume. In order to achieve this, volume automation is key for balance and articulation. The other aspect is energy. Most pop-country songs don't leave a lot of open space. If there's a section that has some open space for a beat or two, a lot of Nashville pop-country mixers will throw in a vocal throw echo or reverb bloom. It's all about maintaining energy throughout -- the exception being a moody, dark bridge section or breakdown. It's called "pop" country. The drums are not shy and timid. The first thing to do is understand the arrangement, tempo and key of the song. Understand what the hook is. Is it the chorus vocal or melody? Is it the post chorus gang vocal? Or is it the call and response verse interplay? These "hooks" need to be the most focused parts. They're the things that stay in the listeners heads for days.
Some good reference tracks to hear this are:
Burns Like Her - Randall King,
Dance Like No One's Watching - Gabby Barrett
Carolina Blue - Eli Winders
I know this was tracked at Telefunken and the tracks are of a relatively good quality. What I found myself doing after I achieved a good balance by throwing up the faders and listening through the song a few times, was that all of the resonant stringed instruments (mandolin, dobro, banjo) had a lot of high-mid "whistle tones". I see this a lot these days. Usually it's on tracks recorded with a modern large diaphragm condenser with a big presence lift built in. Sometimes it's the mic and sometimes it's the mic and the combination of the room reflections and/or the capsule vibrating sympathetically (not pleasant). No disrespect to Telefunken -- they make some beautiful mics, but I'm a big fan of ribbons and darker mics on these types of instruments. That said I used Brainwork's bx_dynEQ to hunt down and dynamically squash these frequencies. The "whistles' were usually between 3k and 8k and sometimes I used two instances in series to catch the fundamental and it's harmonic cousin (think 6k and an octave down at 3k). I just could not get any presence out of these instruments without this surgical correction; the mix was just a harshness party. The acoustic guitars also suffered a little bit of this, but not nearly as much.
The next thing I did was bring up the drums and acoustic bass. Acoustic string basses can be tricky, especially in a pop country mix. This one was no exception. I high-passed at about 65 hz and used some saturation on the midrange to tame some of the trebly string slap attack. The biggest issue was the unevenness of the notes being played. The song is in A Major, and about 50% of the notes being played were the tonic -- A. The A notes were very low in energy compared to the rest. As a note, a lot of country music uses the I, IV, V progression and thats a lot of what the bass player was plucking. (A, D, E) The A's were quiet and the E's were prominent. The frequency for A in the second octave is 110 hz. E2 is about 82 hz. After trying dynamic EQ and multiband compression, I settled on a combination of dynamic EQ (dipping 82 hz and boosting 110 hz) and volume automation through the song, boosting gain every time an A was played. Sometimes this is a necessary and not so fun prep job.
Mixing the drums was mostly time-aligning things for phase normalization and gating until the sonic quality of the drum shell I was gating started to suffer and then backing off. I did use samples on the kick and snare, tucked in under the live tracks.
The vocals were pretty straightforward. The lead vocal was edit-prepped by manually tuning and de-essing. It was a typical plugin treatment after that -- corrective EQ (this particular vocal has a small bit of a congestive, nasal quality to it at about 1 khz, so I corrected that just enough to not lose the nice timbre in it), compression, more light de-essing, enhancement EQ, more compression and some parallel tape saturation and compression on the vocal bus.
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Marty
Mixer/Engineer/Producer
Austin, Texas, USA
Marty
Mixer/Engineer/Producer
Austin, Texas, USA