EP Project MIXING

MIXING

DRUMS - 

Drum template.

When I have finished all the tidying of my project, colouring my tracks and neatening to the regions I normally get work on setting up a drum mix that I am around 75% happy with. This gives me a good start point when I start mixing in the instruments and vocals.

I have a good template for the drum mix that I used on each of the songs on my EP.

I tweaked all of the areas of course to suit each song as I wanted a different drum sound for each of the songs although it was all recorded on the same kit.

The template I created included, EQ, compression, gates and a few variants of reverb that I could select as needed. 

Overall balancing and panning etc.

The overall balancing was done with the initial drum mix. This was where I got most of my levels for the drums. A good balance between the close microphones and the room microphones was the important element that changed the tone quite considerably. 

I decided to compress the room microphones too contain the overall tone as a sort of parallel compression but just on the overall tone. This gave it a contained and tighter feel the other drum sound without destroying the dynamics of the whole kit.

I like to pan my drums from the drummers perspective. This is something I have always done, probably from being a drummer myself it sounds more natural hearing it from being the drums. This is standard practise but panning the drums from front on is used a lot too. Its a preference thing but you also have to consider your whole mix and if panning the drums this way is going to enhance the mix and will leave space for everything else. 

Doubling with samples

This was one of the ways that I used to make the drum sound I was looking for. A commonly used technique of doubling up the drums with samples. Logic has a very good feature that allows you to scan through a drum track and it will pick up all the peaks and create a midi track underneath. For example I would select the kick drum track and hit ctrl+D this then scans through the track and depending on where you set the thresh hold it will recreate the kick track as a midi representation. I can then now select any of my drum instrument plugins for the midi to trigger. This really gives the drum sound much more of a thump. I would then repeat this for the snare and toms as well as needed. I didn’t want to completely change the drum tone and make it sound midi but just by having those samples  underneath it really fills out the tone and also gives you a little more control too.

Parallel Compression

I decided to use parallel compression on the drums for all of my tracks as this gave them a lot of punch and energy that was needed in this style of music to really drive the songs.

The way in which I did this was very simple but creates a really big difference to the sound of the drums. 

I gathered all my drum tracks, kick, snare, toms and over heads etc and then sent the out but to its own bus and levelled this 'Drums'. I then lightly compressed this bus just for gentle containment. I then send this signal as an aux send to another compressor that I then compress very heavily so that the sound is sucking and pumping. This is a really good way of doing it as I can control how much of the dry drum signal gets sent to the heavy compressor.

I now have the dry (minimally compressed) drum sound and the heavily compressed drum sound on two faders. I can now work a balance between these two to get the desired drum sound in parallel. I then send the outputs to these onto another bus that its going to the stereo output and this then becomes my overall drum fader that I can balance with the rest of the instruments. I found this was a really useful way to get the sound that I was looking for. It also opens up lots more ways to create a drums sound and you can try compressing in different ways, maybe send the signal to more than one compressor. I liked this method because it give you lots of things to try and play around with to get the desired sound.

Overall sound.

The overall sound for the drums is quite consistent across the entire EP, I wanted this as the songs are related to each other is various ways and I liked the idea of having continuity with each song to show that they are supposed to be listened from start to finish and together as one whole EP. Although there was one song that wasn't recorded in the same session as all the others or the same drum kit but I have tried my best to make this song sound similar to the others using the same techniques to achieve this.

Guitars - 

Stereo widening

As much as this is a technical decision it adds to the musical interest of the song to create a change in tone throughout out the song. I have decided to use a stereo widening plugin to create this. Again this is a very simple trick that can make a huge difference to the track. Firstly to set this up I routed all the guitars into one bus then added the widening plugin to all the guitars. I have used a widening plug in to open up the sound in the choruses to create more of a release when the song opens up, in contrast I have made the guitars sound very narrow during the verses. This technique is partly musical but done in the mixing process to add to the interest of the music. I have used automation on this track to change the width parameter in the plugin to have full control other this effect.

Guitar Stereo Widening Automation in 'You Need To Get In More'

EQ -

Another small decision I made in the mix was to take a lot of bass of man of the guitars. When balancing the levels I started to notice that I was finding it hard to get everything to sit right, especially as these tracks are extremely guitar heavy. A way that I discovered was that by shaving of a lot of bass from the guitars suddenly gave the whole room so much space to breathe and as a result of this the vocals shot out of the mix and were massively too loud. Although I wanted to have the guitars very bass heavy they stick out in the mix after I've rolled off some of the bass because everything just sits much better with each other. Everything has more room.

Main guitar EQ for 'Call Me Old Fashioned'

Flex Time -  

Im not one for using this very much but in this case it was very useful tool.

The flex tool. I used this in 'Call Me Old Fashioned' as I had a sample that I had taken from a very early rehearsal recording of this with feedback that we couldn't recreate in the studio. This was slightly out of time with the recording of the track so used this tool to nudge a few notes to help it stay in time. This was really helpful because it allowed me to use another recording that sounded much better and still keep it in time. This isn't so much a mix technique but it did enable me to add something that did enhance the mix and the track as well. 

'Call Me Old Fashioned' Rhythm Flex

Tone correction through guitar amps plugins -

Guitar Amp Plugin 'Call Me Old Fashioned'

I decided to try out a few of the guitar amp plug ins for compression and tone adjustments as a sort of experiment. I used Guitar Rig 5 for this. This was just used for a few tonal changes. its nice to hear the guitar sound through different amps and with different microphones. Also because you have complete control over this it allowed me to find the tone I was looking for very easily. 

BASS - 

I really liked the sound that we recorded for the bass guitar. We had a DI sound and a microphone picking up the bass amp. These combined gave a really full bass tone and the DI picked up the attack of the strings to capture the licks and fill on the bass guitar. I didn't want to take away from this too much. I found a nice balance of the two tracks then added a small amount of compression just to make it a little punchier as well as a few EQ changes. Rolling off some of the high end of the amp sound welded the two sounds together much better. I think its important when mixing to know when your raw recording sound good already and sometimes doing very little is the best way to make it sound how you want.

'Call Me Old Fashioned' Vocals Reverb EQ

VOX -

Reverb (EQing Reverb)

I found that I was having a lot of trouble getting my vocals to sit how I wanted as well as being clear and prominent. They were consistently sounding too muffled. It came to my attention that the reverb that I was sending the vocals too was massively boosting the bass of the vocal making it sound muffled and unclear. I went into the seven and rolled off quite a lot of bass and this was the missing piece I was looking for. Suddenly the vocals came to life and were suddenly much clearer and defined and more upfront. after a few balancing adjustments the vocals were sitting more or less perfectly. 

Compression - 

I was having a lot of trouble compressing the vocals to keep them contained as well as keep them dynamic and realistic. I was trying many compressors with different EQ plugins and analogue compression too. I found that overall I was adding way to much compression and this was just destroying the mix. I found that when I took off all the plug-ins that I could really hear what was needed and just a small amount of compression was needed. I decided to compress a minimal amount and then bounce the vocal with the compression and then compress again. This was a little experiment but it seemed to work the way I wanted. It was good to have time to try different things out and very rewarding when you get where you want.

Harmonic Maximiser -

 This was little bit of a gimmick that I used while mixing to give it a crisper finish to it. This is a harmonic maximiser. You set your low and high 'tunes' and then you can boost harmonic in those areas to give the track a glisten. Its a little trick to make it sound more finished that it already is but I think that was useful to make the track sound bigger and fuller before sending it off to the mastering engineer.