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jtbStudio mix
#1
The bass is critical for carrying the groove, so I was ruthless when lopping off the low end from the guitars and keyboards, to make room for it. The low end of the bass itself made the mix very muddy, so I high-passed it at ~40Hz. There was also a nasty resonance at 120Hz, which was very apparent during the chorus riff, so I fixed that with a bit of dynamic EQ. I also add a fair bit of distortion and higher EQ boosts, to help it cut through on smaller speakers, and side-chained an EQ cut at 120Hz from the kick.

I blended in some samples for the snare, to give it a bit more snap, and kick, to give it some more body.

Mixing the vocals was also tricky, not because of any particular problems but because their voices were so distinctive, and I didn't want to mess up their sound. Mike has a wonderful dark, gravelly, Dr. John-esque sound, and I added some dynamic EQ at 2.7 kHz to even that out, and a bit of my usual "hype" to help it cut through (I high-passed it at ~5kHz, boosted everything above 7kHz, compress it *hard* and blend a tiny bit of this back in i.e. parallel compression for the top end - it really makes a difference). Erica has a completely different sound, so the challenge was to bring that sound out, but still get it to blend with Mike, especially during the call-and-response bits.

This genre requires a trio of hot chicks in tight black outfits for the backing vocals in the chorus (it's the law), so in an effort to sonically simulate this, I created a fake double vocal, panned one copy 10 cents down to the left, one copy 10 cents up to the right, and then blended a tiny bit of them in. I also shaved off a lot of the top end of these doubled tracks, since I wanted them to fatten up Erica's main vocal track, but not be particularly noticeable in themselves.

Quite a few people said that the song got a bit monotonous towards the end, and I'd certainly agree with that. It'd be a great track to hear live, grooving on the dance floor, but for playback, it does drag on a bit. I cut it down by almost a minute, and at 5:08 it's still a bit long, but better. This mix gave me a lot of trouble, for some reason, and took a bit longer to do, so after listening to the same groove over and over again, I was getting a bit bored, so decided to have a bit of fun for the stop... :-)


.mp3    Kane Guru (jtbStudio).mp3 --  (Download: 11.77 MB)


Mixing and mastering at jtbStudio.com
My music at JazzTeddyBears.com


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