Diary of an Amateur mixer: Part 2

The mix is coming along nicely :). I've fixed the bass guitar level in the mix and also arranged the guitar parts in the stereo field and balanced them up somewhat. They're now sitting in the mix much better and not crowding the vocal. I've not felt the need to EQ any of the guitar parts yet as I think they sound great as they are!

On the drum side, I've fiddled with the levels a little here and there, dropping the kick drum in the mix a little and dropping the level of the rim click too as I felt it was a bit overpowering. I also took a feed from the overhead bus and fed it into another track with the SSL Listen Mic compressor on it. Running the two tracks in parallel sounds pretty damn good to my amateur ears!

Now, it may sound like I've replaced that sound that starts before the intro guitar, but it's actually just a phaser plugin and a massive reverb, all wet and no dry. It actually sounds much more like wind and to my mind suits the song better.

For part 2 of my diary I thought it would be a good idea to give a run down of my setup. It's all under the fold though so if you're not interested don't click ;). Plugin list next time...

I'm using a custom built PC (one of my many talents!) with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core CPU and 2gb RAM. This gives me plenty of headroom for plugins, which is nice :).

That outputs to an M-Audio FastTrack Pro USB interface which is connected to Mackie HR624 monitors via balanced connections. I also have a pair of Sennheiser HD280 headphones which, apart from monitoring while recording, I also use to double check the low end (no treatment in my room yet, so I can't really trust the Mackies) and headphone compatibility. My DAW of choice is Reaper.

Diary of an Amateur mixer: Part 1

So I entered the Womb forum MiLaR event and have started mixing Aces High's track, 'Simple Little Bird'.

I'm going to document my progress here. I'm using Reaper, along with the built in plugs, and I'm limiting myself to free plugins, mostly because that's all I've got, but it also means anyone can download Reaper and the plugins and get the same mix I made (I'll post a full list of the plugins used somewhere near the end of the mix).

I put a rough mix together last night, got everything organised, got the levels fairly balanced, EQ'd a couple of things (Kick drum, vocals), put some compression on the drum overheads, snare and kick, and also on some of the vocal tracks. I also set up some panning in places.

The bass guitar is a little high in the mix right now, and the guitars are a bit lost due to the fact that they're centre panned.

Anyway, you can hear what I've done so far.

1,337 Spam

1,337 Spam

NeoMPC 0.5.1

Version 0.5.1 of my web based, small screen MPD client is now available for download from the NeoMPC page.

New stuff:

  • Album cover display on the control page.

  • Track progress bar and time display. (Requires Javascript)

  • Control page has been shuffled about to make more sense.

NeoMPC 0.4

Hot on the heels of version 0.3 comes version 0.4! New things in this version include:

  • New metadata based browse mode (Artist -> Album -> Track).

  • Menu now highlights the page you are on.

  • Add and Play buttons now recurse the file tree (Be careful with this one if you've got a large library!).

Get it from the NeoMPC page.

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Pixelhum is the web playground of Dan Barber (danbee), a disgruntled Web Designer and general geek.

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