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| title | date | categories | layout | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Return of the Amateur Mixer | 2007-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 |
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Well, another MiXiT event is upon us, and I thought it would be nice to blog my progress again.
I downloaded the multitracks on Wednesday and after a bit of a FLAC farce I knocked up the first basic mix tonight.
The song is quite an epic so I felt it needed a big sound. With this in mind I started in the usual place and set about fixing up the snare and bass. I created 2 reverb aux channels with a longish plate type reverb on the first and a convolution reverb with a church IR on the second. I EQ'd the kick drum a little, but it didn't need much as it was already sounding pretty good on it's own. The snare drum, however, required quite a bit of boost (about 10db) at around 2.6k upwards and I notched out around 6db at 520hz where there was some nasty ring. This was fed into a compressor with quite a high ratio (1:5.6) to really bring out the sustain. The snare was then sent to the first reverb to make it sound huge!
After listening to the original reference mix a few times and in a few different places I had decided that the guitars weren't really filling in the mid range as much as they should (the track sounded rather sparse on my laptop speakers in particular). I decided to adapt the bass to this role by bussing it to a new track, high passing this around 600-700hz and running though an overdrive distortion plugin. This was then EQ'd to roll off the top a little and reduce some annoying frequencies around 2.8khz before compressing it with quite a high ratio and a low threshold to keep it really even. This gave the bass a nice crunchy top end to fill in just under the guitars.
With the vocals I set the levels so the main vocal was prominent and I brought down the level of the double until I could no longer distiguish it easily. This kept the vocal nice and thick sounding. The vocal was gated, compressed with a ratio of about 1:3 and EQ'd a little to bring out the presence with a 2.2db boost at around 2.3khz and a 2db shelf boost at about 5khz. I then sent a bit of it to the first reverb and a bit to the second to give them some space. The shouty count in two thirds of the way through was moved to a seperate pair of tracks and reduced in level compared to the main vocal. This was then panned wide and sent to the second reverb to set it right back in the mix.
I've not done much with the guitars yet. Just got some rough levels and panning and sent a little of them to reverb 2 for some space.
At this point I decided to leave it for the night so I saved a new project file and printed a mix.
I've waffled on quite a bit here, so I apologise if I bored anyone!