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| title | date | categories | layout | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Return of the Amateur Mixer: II | 2007-12-30T00:00:00+00:00 |
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Well, I'm pretty confident that my mix is finished. Just need to burn it onto CD and listen to it in a few different places and then I can tweak accordingly.
I did something completely new for me with this mix and that was to mix into a compressor (from about half-way through the mixing process anyway). I used the digitalfishphones endorphin compressor as it is specfically designed for main bus compression. I set it to about 5ms attack and a shade over 100ms release, with a compression setting of 80 on the lows and 50 on the highs. I also tweaked the low/high balance slightly by dropping the highs down by 0.6db. I love the transparency of this compressor and found it made the mix pretty epic sounding without too much trouble :)
The guitars were last on the list and I wanted to try and get over my Panophobia (fear of panning stuff to extremes) so I panned Daz's guitars all the way left and panned Mike's guitars all the way right. And y'know what? I love the result! I did leave Daz 3 only about 40% panned and automated the panning on Mike 1 so the melody during the 2nd verse was actually panned to the left. This was to balance it out against Mike 2. I didn't do much EQ'ing of the guitars, just a little bit of cut here and there to clean them up. I did spend a while making sure I was happy with the levels through the song. I used a short tape delay effect on the single notes during the verses, because the notes themselves were getting lost.
I spent a bit more time EQ'ing the vocal so that I was happy with it and also automated the level throughout the song to make sure it could be heard. I also used automation on the compressed drum overhead track to bring it up during the chorus bits and drop it down again during the verses. I also sent some of the vocal to a delay aux channel, set up with a short (1 1/4 note) delay, a bandpass EQ (about 300hz - 3.5khz) and a tape saturation plugin.
I still wasn't completely happy with the bass. It needed to be filling more of the frequency range above it to compensate for the lack of low end in the guitars. So I bussed it to another track and used a pitchshifter to bring it up an octave. I mixed this quite low in the mix, you can hear it if you listen out for it but it's not obvious. It also helps to make the bass fill out the mix on smaller speakers. There is one place in the song where I automated it to make it much louder, and that was the crash about 3 minutes into the song, which I always felt was a little bit lack in power.
And with that, in goes the fork...