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Loud and Clear
#1
My second upload to this site. First was Heartbeats by Juliet's Rescue.

This song wasn't an easy mix, but I'll go through my process...

I used pretty much all the drum tracks to varying degrees to get the balance right. The kick drum wasn't bad; just some eq to bump up the lows and tops.

The snare drum, to me, didn't "speak" well, so I messed around with that a bit using a combination of top, bottom, gate, compression and short reverb. I prefer a ringy snare, this wasn't it.

I used all three tracks on the bass guitar, each had their own quality and mixed together sounded good to me. I bumped 260Hz to round it out a bit, then ran through some mild compression.

I used both tracks of the electric guitar, panned L/R. I wanted a little wider sound still, so I delayed one track 38ms (just an arbitrary number that sounded good to me). Then ran both channels through a 510Hz and 3kHz bump. I took it out of the verses and bridges so it didn't compete with the fiddle and horns.

The acoustic guitar has zero treatment. I just used both tracks panned L/R. It's mostly there for percussive effect - you can't really hear the actual tone very much.

The piano has just some eq where I took out the lows and low-mids just to clean up the overall sound. Then both tracks panned L/R.

The violin just has a very mild eq and a moderate amount of 'verb. The horns have zero treatment.

The vocals were... difficult. Based on the session pictures that accompany the download, I get the impression he was practically eating the microphone and the proximity effect (and some popping) were quite noticeable. It took quite some time to work out the best sound. First, Low Pass at 256Hz, then eq bump at 4500Hz, then some moderate compression. Different tracks required some different treatment; the first and second bridge were different too, so I had to automate some eq changes to get them to sound the same.

Then things got interesting - the chorus has 3 melody tracks, then one harmony track for two harmonies (we'll call them low and high). The more I played with it, it just didn't sound right - I thought it needed more harmony tracks. So: I took the low track and panned it left, then delayed it and panned the delay to the right at 58ms. The high track was panned right, then delayed at 68ms and panned left. Viola, two more background vocal tracks! What a difference.

The bridges sound a little different on purpose, so that when the chorus comes back in, it sounds fuller. The harmony on the bridges ran through a band-pass filter and heavily compressed.

Finally after all that I ran the entire mix through some mastering plug-ins to liven it up a bit. I'm not a fan of the loudness wars, but this song kinda needs the help (in my humble opinion) so, it's maxed out. Be careful if you have things loud, this mix is as loud as it gets - and it stays true to the name of the song Big Grin

This was mixed using Tracktion 6. I hope you like it.

--Dean


.mp3    Loud and Clear - Audio Technica.mp3 --  (Download: 7.12 MB)


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