Week 12 - AA1 - Mixing (2)

First up I opened the last session from last week. I ended up moving all the vocal tracks over where I could work on them easier since I was only using a small section of the song (highlighted in picture). I applied compression to the kick, snare, bass and vocals. I didn’t think it was necessary to compress everything. I found these parts to really ‘come alive’ after compressing. The three chorus vocals (the one that doesn’t say “stayed in bed” were sent through a bus and compressed together on the one aux as demonstrated in class. This helped keep the cpu strain down.

For the second mix I added some reverb. The reverb is quite subtle, but I decided to go for that as I feel it’s fairly easy to exagerate reverbs and I wanted to try and use it to blend and glue tracks together as I find that challenging. The only time it pops out as a major effect is with the delay on the phrase “I know.” Again, an aux track was created with the reverb plugin on it for the vocals and snare to be bussed to. The bus faders were used to set the levels.

A quick “mastering” was done for the last mix. I put Maxim on the master fader, set it’s output to –0.1 and lowered the threshold just enough to raise the levels without distorting. Well, it might be distorting as I don’t have the gear a real Mastering engineer would have.

Doing the mix in a step by step process definitely made these mixes much better than previous mixes I’ve done and helped a great deal in finding places for each sound in a busy mix. It’s just a matter of discipline on my part now to keep doing it this way and not go back to fiddling about with compressors before panning, etc.

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Mix with compression.

Mix with compression and effects.

Mastered version.

Fieldhouse, Steve. 2007. “Audio Arts 1 Seminar – Drums.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 29th May.
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Eskimo Joe. 2006. “New York” Black Fingernails, Red Wine (album). Mushroom Records.