Pixelhum

And this is why I use headphones to judge low end.

There’s a lovely 12dB peak at about 128hz and about 24dB difference between that and 90hz! Time to order the bass traps…

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!

This will be the last entry in the diary, as the mix is now done and submitted to the event.

The mix was pretty much done, but there were a few things I wasn’t really happy with. The snare drum sounded a little bit weedy, so I put Ferox on it and whacked the saturation all the way up to 80%. This gave it some grit and snap that it was lacking before and I was happy with the result. I also brought the wind sound up in the mix slightly, and also automated the second lot of wind up in the mix even more so you could just about hear it throughout the middle eight. I also added a stereo widener (Omnisone) to the drum buss and set it to about 150%.

I placed a delay plugin on the distorted vocal that went through the middle eight to take it back in the mix a little as I felt it was a bit prominent.

The automation was tweaked in places. I also added a very small amount of compression to the bass track to help it sit better with the automation.

There was absolutely no 2-buss compression. Only thing on there was Ferox, set to about 20% saturation, just to give the mix a little bit of grit.

Updated plugin list under the fold.

This mix is now starting to sound like a record to my ears! Tonight I concentrated on tying everything together better and using automation to add some dynamics to the mix.

Somebody in the Mix thread pointed out that the top snare drum track was clipped. I hadn’t actually noticed, but I did think it sounded a bit rough, so my first task was to fix that using my favourite audio editor. This produced a much better sounding snare track and I used PSP Springverb (a Computer Music freebie) to give it some life. While I was on drums I also muted the toms where they weren’t being played. This cleaned up the drum track nicely.

I created a set of buss tracks so I could group together instuments for automation (drums, drum overheads, guitars, bass, vocals and backing vocals).

Then I listened to the track and added in the automation where I felt it was needed, using it to bring up the guitars during the choruses, and drop them out a little during the quieter parts of the track. I used it on the vocals to stop them getting lost with the guitars, and also to help parts of words from getting lost in the mix too. I brought the backing vocals up for the outro to really bring the track to a big close.

You might also notice that this mix is quieter. I was running it quite hot before with the W1 limiter on the main buss, but I’ve dropped the level back so it’s not hitting the ceiling anymore. I think it sounds better that way.

And finally… under the fold you’ll find a list of all the plugins I’ve used so far, not including any of Reapers built in ones.

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…