A Place for Us Mixed by Dcp

[dcp10200]

Love your version DCP ,Sounds like you have had fun with great song love the drums especially the snare just the low frequencies of the snare sound a touch upfront might just be the low frequencies of the effects.

Well Done

Thanks Don! I used the sample snare which was pretty dark sounding and had tonnes of low mid energy in it, I'm working on a new revision with the acoustic snares blended in for abit more attack and a multiband compressor to smack down the 120-800 Hz range to combat the build up.

This mix was alot of fun and brings an interesting thing to light, how easy it is to make a clean and polished sounding mix when you're working with more sample and electronic instruments. Really this track sounded like a record instrumentation wise when I pulled the faders up, most of my processing was to just optimize the spacing of instruments in the mix, the rest of the time was spent on trying to get some dirt and character into the mix. When I was in my last year of audio school, my class put together an ep for the RPM Challenge and had a similar revelation.

Most of my class and I were writing rock tracks and recording them at our school's small studio with an acoustic drum kit, Vox AC15 guitar amp, and a bass direct into a Grace Designs M101 preamp. One of the other guys in the class was an electronic musician and did the majority of his tracking on his rig at home. He used sample drums, synth bass and sub bass, string pads, some guitar synths, and some percussion samples. The vocals, some solo guitar, and a bass were recorded at school but in the end it took us less time to mix that one track to a commercial level than it did to clean up and iron out some blemishes in the rock tracks with all acoustic instruments.

Most of the work on that electronic track was spend trying to dirty it up and make it more "human" sounding, however it was way more fun tracking the rock tracks and getting sounds for them, mainly because we were all working together and interacting with each other to get the best recording we could, something that gets lost being a producer in a purely digital workflow.

I'm starting to ramble now but a track like this is a great teaching tool for anyone who's used to mixing rock and more acoustic style music use different processing techniques like distortion, parallel compression, bit crushing, among others to make a more sample based track more live sounding along with adding acoustic elements to bring some human imperfections in to the mix.

Cheers,
Dcp