Mute mix by Ítalo

[Mike Senior]

The hi-hat is ridiculously LOUD; the the bass drum is waaaaayyyyy over compressed and along with the snare, had to be gain-staged something massive! The lead vocal and the guitars too! Who engineered this session???

I did. I freely admit, though, that it has its problems. To give some background on it, I did these recordings one afternoon about ten years ago, using a sixth-form college's 'studio' (ie. no acoustic design/treatment and rubbish monitoring), with a band of 14/15-year-olds. I was also experimenting with a number of non-standard mic techniques on the session, as part of my general research at the time.

First things first, I agree there's too much hi-hat over everything. The drummer was thrashing the hat, and the room was so small that it reflected everywhere. The overheads aren't misrepresenting the kit balance (they were omnis either side of the drummer's head) -- that's just the way it sounded in the room! That said, listening back to the raw tracks again, I still rather like the overall tone of the kit through the overheads...

By gain-staging, I'm assuming you're referring to the low level of the signals on the drum mics? It's a bit all over the place, I admit -- the session was a bit of a free-for-all in general, to be honest! -- but even on the snare, which is 18dB down, you're still getting 21-bit audio, which still gives a noise floor miles below that of the environment/gear we used to record. Just stick a gain plug-in at the top of each channel to bring things to a decent starting level and it shouldn't be an issue.

As for overcompression -- I don't think there's actually any compression on any of the mics on this multitrack. I very rarely compress on the way in, in general. The only thing compressed here is the bass track, which was compressed within the Bass Pod XT it was DI'd through.

There's a lot of spill, but that's part of the appeal of the sound for me -- it gives a very indie/garagey vibe, and that's the whole point. If you try to fight against this inherent characteristic of the recording, it's always going to be an uphill struggle. The main challenge here is, of course, the hat balance, but there's plenty you can do about that if you ditch the tom tracks, gate/expand the overhead and room mics from the snare, and edit out the hat spill from the lead vocal (which was only about 10 feet away from the kit). And that's even before using any samples.

Taking a step back from this particular session, though, many of the productions in this multitrack library aren't perfectly recorded, but that's actually rather representative of project-studio work on the whole. If I only posted beautifully recorded tracks, no-one would really have to flex their mixing muscles, and everyone would learn a lot less.