04-05-2024, 12:49 PM
The hardest thing about this mix was managing the long-term song dynamics. There's a lot happening with the arrangement, but it's mostly quite subtle, and for the casual listener, it's verse, chorus, break, verse, four choruses, outro, so I spent a lot time automating stuff so that the song built up over the 4 choruses.
I usually build a song up from the drums and bass, but in this case, it felt like the acoustic guitar was the foundation on which the song was built, so I started with that. The attack was really unpleasant, so I tamed that with some very fast compression (Stillwell's Rocket, ~170 usecs), and some dynamic EQ at 4.1 kHz to control a bit of tonal inconsistency. A broad boost at around 860 Hz gave it some body, and a bit of Vibe EQ at 6 kHz and high-shelf to give it some air. Polyverse's Wider gave it some stereo width, increasing slightly over the 4 choruses, as the song builds up.
Most of the work on the vocal was spent trying to control the sibilance
I bunged a de-esser on the track, but still needed to automate it quite a lot. Still not super happy with it, but life intrudes and I need to put this one to bed.
Everything else pretty much mixed itself. The band had obviously spent time preparing the tracks, and most of them sounded pretty good as they were, so it was just a matter of tweaking them slightly so that they fit into the mix.
I usually build a song up from the drums and bass, but in this case, it felt like the acoustic guitar was the foundation on which the song was built, so I started with that. The attack was really unpleasant, so I tamed that with some very fast compression (Stillwell's Rocket, ~170 usecs), and some dynamic EQ at 4.1 kHz to control a bit of tonal inconsistency. A broad boost at around 860 Hz gave it some body, and a bit of Vibe EQ at 6 kHz and high-shelf to give it some air. Polyverse's Wider gave it some stereo width, increasing slightly over the 4 choruses, as the song builds up.
Most of the work on the vocal was spent trying to control the sibilance
I bunged a de-esser on the track, but still needed to automate it quite a lot. Still not super happy with it, but life intrudes and I need to put this one to bed.Everything else pretty much mixed itself. The band had obviously spent time preparing the tracks, and most of them sounded pretty good as they were, so it was just a matter of tweaking them slightly so that they fit into the mix.