Category: Uncategorized

That’s right! The final step has been completed!

To be quite honest, I think if I have to listen to Superstition once more I’ll probably go crazy. So that’s probably a good indicator that my mix is complete. Or at least that’s how it feels.

It’s taking probably around 5-6 hours to do. Which, in the professional world probably isn’t that long. But I’m not a professional now, am I?

Mixing is completely new to me. It’s been difficult in some areas and quite easy in others, and I’ve kind of enjoyed it more than I expected. It’s just really tedious and time consuming, and I probably ought to be spending a little more time on it, but I’m simply unable to. Both because I practically can’t stand the track anymore, and also because from tomorrow I won’t even be here.

So let’s get onto the process.

Having had the track prepared for us, all we had to do was take the files and mix them elsewhere to our liking. The idea I had for my mix was to get it to sound as close to the way it sounded when we recorded it, but at the same time clean the track up, and tweak the sound to my liking. And personally, I think I’ve achieved that rather well. It’s not like I wanted the track to sound rough, and I don’t think it does. I just prefer that almost edgy, quickly produced quality, as if we had recorded the track in the back of my friends garage.

Firstly I needed to actually determine what tracks were which, as I had decided to keep every instrument and voice we recorded. It seemed pointless, and a little unfair to me to go and chop out somebodies work. Personally, I’m not a fan of the ukelele, but I kept it anyway, and did my best to make it work. The Pro Tools session was a bit of a mess, what with 23 tracks used, and some incorrect labels here and there. Having had all that sorted, I went about colour coding and grouping each of the instruments. This made the entire process so much easier. If the guitar section was too loud, I could turn them all down without affecting the rest of the tracks. I then set about panning the instruments and vocals. Some remained in the middle, some were only slightly panned, and then the drum overheads were panned fully left and right. This is demonstrated in the image below.

So here is my completed mix window. Each of the tracks is named, even with details as to which mic was used, they’re colour coded, and they’ve had some effects applied to them which I will discuss below.

So in terms of effects I really didn’t want to go overboard. As I mentioned, I wanted to keep it close to our original recordings. Overall I only used some EQ, compression, a smidge of reverb and and enhancer tool.

For the EQ, I used a mixture of 1 band and 7 band. The 7s were used on the guitars, overheads, toms and snares, whilst only the kick and bass guitar were treated with the 1 band. I realised that I didn’t need to go for the 7 band with the bass as I had two separate tracks which I decided to split. One dealing with the higher frequencies, and one dealing with the lower. Since I couldn’t quite achieve the sound I wanted with the EQ, I added and enhancer on top, which allowed me to boost the mids on the lower EQ, and then boost the highs on the higher EQ. In my opinion the bass sounded too flat, there wasn’t enough attack. That’s down to the original EQ when recording and my playing, so fortunately I was able to correct this afterwards. I also used some compression to bring the sound to an even level.

The kick drum only needed a high pass filter as much like the bass it sounded too flat.

I used mainly high pass again on the guitars as there was a lot of bottom end that I didn’t need, so I was able to cut it out, making the guitars sound much brighter. No compression here, just kept it nice and simple. I did the exact same for the two overheads, as there was a lot of noise from the kit, and since there are other mics to deal with each part, it seemed pointless to keep the unwanted frequencies.

I used a little compression on the clav part just to even it out, since it wasn’t sitting where I wanted it to in the overall mix. Since it’s such an important part, it needed to be constant throughout the track, and not keep dropping in and out.

Having got a basic mix completed, with the instruments sounding how I wanted, and balanced as best as I could get them, all that I had left to do was chop out the parts of the tracks that weren’t needed. For example, on the toms, they’re only used a few times in there entire track, so I decided that it’d be best to cut out the bits I needed to keep, and delete the dead bits in between. I did this for the sax and ukelele too.

For the vocals I did something similar, but decided that since I had two vocal tracks I could have them singing together at the start of the verse, and then in the chorus. Something which worked out really well, I think. Since we had used playlists, I was able to select the phrases that sounded best, and get the best possible vocal lines from the takes we had.

Finally, I used some automation on my master fader to fade the track out at the end, and then it was ready for bouncing. I tested the track through two different pairs of headphones, as well as the speakers at my flat and in the edit suite, and it sounds fine to me all round.

That’s it for my attempt mixing.

Thanks for reading,

– Anthony.

This week it was time to do any extra parts, or overdubs of existing parts. All we needed to do was record an alto saxophone part, and re record the clav part as there were some awful clicks on the track.

Much like recording the guitar, we opted for an SM57 pointed at the sax, and a 414 used to record the room sound. Originally, the plan was to only use the 414, but Jack and I recommended that we use a dynamic microphone up close for a more direct sound. The sax is a very loud instrument, or at least it can be. And it sounds completely different depending where you’re stood. If you’re behind, or away from the bell, then it’s so much less of a piercing sound than if you have your head close.

Once we had the mics plugged in, we needed to reassign there inputs and outputs in Pro Tools, as we used the live room, which was already used to record the guitar part previously. By now, our Pro Tools session was a complete organised mess, and we only had a few tracks left. In fact, in the end I think we’ve used 23 out of the available 24. Which I reckon is quite impressive.

We recorded one take of the sax, and then had to do a quick drop in to correct a mistake that was made in one of the choruses. After that, we decided to record a second take on two new tracks, to beef up this part of the song, as more than one sax part would really change the way the entire recording felt. Having done that, we had a listen through, and the same chorus effect created by the vocals and the guitar was created.

After we were done with the sax, we recorded the clav part again, in its entirety, just to make sure that we erased any mistakes or clicks on the track. This was done using the DI method, just like before. However we turned down the volume of the electric piano to avoid getting any nasty clicks.

And, that’s it for the recording. Only the mix to go, I can’t wait!

– Anthony.

So now it’s time for the vocals!

Luke kindly offered to step in and perform for us this week. How noble. But, credit where it’s due, he did a great job, and when it comes to mixing, I’m sure it won’t sound half as bad as he expects.

So for recording vocals, we were fortunate enough to be able to use the Neumann U87 condenser, in terms of microphone quality, it doesn’t get much better than this for vocals. Consider it the holy grail of microphones, if you will.

We chose to record the vocals in the dead room so that we got a nice, clear and crisp vocal track. Recording the vocals was relatively straight forward, once we’d got the levels set, (and won the battle with the headphone levels) we were ready to go. We did one take, and then decided to do another, again multitracking like we did the guitar. This created a really cool effect, almost like a chorus which sounds really nice on the vocals, almost as if there are two singers at once, each singing a slightly different line from the other.

And really, that’s it for vocals. No messing around with playlists this time. Nice and straightforward, just as it should be. Just don’t break the £2,000 mic!

– Anthony.

So it’s a little late, but it’s time for me to update this blog. Starting with the guitar tracking!

It was Robin’s turn to perform this week, and a mighty good/complicating job he did of it too!

To record the guitar we used three microphones, using inputs 1-3, one Shure SM57 which was pointing directly at the speaker cone on the guitar amp, one which was placed at the edge of the amp, and then one AKG 414 which was used to collect the room sound. When soloing each of the microphones, there wasn’t much of a noticeable difference between the two SM57s, nor were there any phase cancellation issues, but there was a huge difference between the Sm57s and the 414, which was the intended result. We also made sure to place Robin behind a board so that the room mic didn’t pick up so much fret/strumming/string noise.

 

 

Now, superstition is a bit of a funny one when it comes to guitar. What with there being multiple lines at least, but this was actually quite beneficial for us as it allowed us to do some multitracking. To do multitracking, we could simply move the XLR cables into different inputs in the mic box, however it’s much easier to change the inputs in pro tools instead. We find out later on that this starts to make a bit of a mess of the session, but it’s not that big of a deal. So, after we changed the inputs and outputs in pro tools, all we had to do was turn up the volume of mix B on the new channels (4-6) on the desk.

Apart from a few mistakes here and there warranting a couple of drop ins, the recording went rather well indeed.

This allowed us to record the clav part in the same session, we did this in a similar way to the bass by just directly inputting the electric piano into the desk. Alice performed her part well, and just a couple more takes were needed. This was great, and it allowed us to use the playlists feature in Pro Tools. Playlists are useful for recording more than one take on the same track, as you just hide each recording, and then keep the one you want when it comes to mixing. Pretty useful really!

But, that’s it for guitar. Vocals next!

– Anthony.

 

This week it was my turn to perform. That’s right. It’s bass time!

Having recorded the drums last week, we needed to add an actual bass track, rather than the guide track which already existed. I had brought in my own amplifier to do the recording, which we hooked up to a speaker cabinet that was already in the dead room. After getting everything wired up correctly, making sure that we had some sound, we needed to mic up the cab. We did this using both an AKG D112 and a Beyerdynamic M201. We also used a DI Box (Direct Input) which would record the raw sound straight from my bass, rather than the sound which had been processed through my amplifier.

After we get the levels set correctly for all three inputs, we just needed to get a good mix of mic and DI. In the end we decided to not use the D112, as the majority of the group preferred the sound. After getting a good balance between the inputs, we decided to run the bass through a compressor which is used to make the dynamic range of the sound more even. Raising the volume softer sounds, and lowering the volume of the more aggressive sounds. Much like last week, having two inputs on one sound source gave the potential to produce some phase issues, however there weren’t any at all. We flipped the phase anyway to see what effect would be generated, and most of the low frequencies disappeared, unlike last week when flipping the phase generated more low frequencies.

Once we were all set up, we managed to record the bass in one take. However, as there were some mistakes in just a few bars, there was no point recording the entire track again so we just recorded over those specific bars by dropping in and dropping out.

Next week it’s guitar time, which should hopefully be just as simple to record!

– Anthony