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Rubblebucket - Carousel Ride
#1
This is the second song I've mixed here and the first time I've dealt with mic bleed from everyone playing together. I found getting the right vocal tone to be really difficult (but this is only the fourth time I've mixed vocals, so...). There's probably too much reverb and I wonder if the trombone is too restrained. Otherwise I'm mostly happy with how this turned out.

I leave a mess of a comment below about everything I did, but it's more for my own sake than anything else.

Edit: I made a few changes and updated.


.mp3    Rubblebucket - Carousel Ride (wunderbier).mp3 --  (Download: 6.03 MB)


.mp3    Rubblebucket - Carousel Ride (wunderbier 2).mp3 --  (Download: 6.02 MB)


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#2
I tried two new things on this track. The first was using iZotope Neutron Elements everywhere, since I just got that for free. I'm not a fan of the presets, of the assistant, of the workflow or of the visuals. So that was an uphill battle. I ended up doing everything manually anyway. The second was multiple reverb aux sends. I've done a general reverb aux for quite a while, but this time I had separately near, far and solo reverbs. The solo reverb is only used on the lead vox and trumpet at times. I think I probably ended up with too much reverb despite summing everything into one reverb bus.

The first thing I did was to time align all of the tracks. I matched everything with the room mic. I wasn't sure whether I should have left that track locked in or nudged it back as an additional reverb. It's way down in the mix, at any rate. I cleaned up everything by hand making use of clip gain automation and de-essed the vocals the same way.

The drums were pretty easy. EQ'd the shaker down, parallel compression, saturation, used a spectral pan to push the shaker off to the side, added a short reverb. I side chained the drums into a dynamic EQ on the instrument bus, but I only turned that on for the final chorus.

Vocals were next. I'm still learning a lot about this. I did a lot with clip gain automation, but then moved on to a vocal rider, de-esser, compression, an ugly spaghetti mess of EQ, and saturation. I also had a multiband compressor in parallel and a stereo delay. Both the delay and lead vox went into some of the reverb auxes. I also had a mono-compatible widener on the lead vox bus. I left it quite low for the verses and bridge, but turned it up during the choruses. I tried and tried to get the lead vox a little brighter, but also smoother, and I just could quite get there. Oh well. The shaker bleed into the vocal mic was really frustrating.

The backing vocals received a striped down treatment similar to the lead vox. I scooped the mids significantly. I also split the tracks when the BV were clapping and handled those separately with limiters in the clip fx.

The trombone was kinda difficult. I like it being so bLaRtY but I wanted to rein it in somewhat. I think I should have done less to it in hindsight. Just EQ/comp/saturation. The trumpet was a bit easier as the mute leaves the sound more open to interpretation. Same deal, EQ/comp/sat. I spent more time with the guitar. I had left it rather untouched outside of EQ/comp, but then I heard someone else's version where it *sparkled* and I had to try for that. So I used a transient shaper to bring out the decay and hold back some of the attack. I went back and forth between the two, but eventually chose to use Roth-Air (MB comp/sat) over OTT (MB comp) to really bring out the high end. There's a little light EQ/comp on the instrument bus and I lightly ducked them against the vocals.

Mix bus has a slow compressor, BW limiter and Ozone Imager. The compressor takes off maybe 2 dB at the most and the limiter is basically untouched. I panned instruments manually throughout the song (wider during the choruses), but used Ozone Imager to give it that little extra; the settings were very mild. I did some light volume automation and that was pretty much it.
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