Pixelhum

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...

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.

• SSL Listen Mic Compressor
• PSP SpringVerb (PSPaudioware.com)
• NyquistEq5 (Magnus)
• X-cita (elogoxa)
• W1 Limiter (George Yohng)
• Classic Chorus (Kjaerhus Audio)
• Classic Delay (Kjaerhus Audio)
• Classic Reverb (Kjaerhus Audio)
• RubyTube (Silverspike)
• Ambience (Magnus)
• SIR (Christian Knufinke)
• SupaPhaser (Bram)
• Ferox (JB)
• Omnisone (JB)

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.

• SSL Listen Mic Compressor
• PSP SpringVerb (PSPaudioware.com)
• NyquistEq5 (Magnus)
• X-cita (elogoxa)
• W1 Limiter (George Yohng)
• Classic Chorus (Kjaerhus Audio)
• Classic Reverb (Kjaerhus Audio)
• RubyTube (Silverspike)
• Ambience (Magnus)
• SIR (Christian Knufinke)
• SupaPhaser (Bram)

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.