Where I actually get down to mixing
First off I played this for my #1 person who I am married to, she of the good and critical ear, who pronounced it 'fantastic'. No small feat this, because if you have read this stuff you will know that Barbara never ever will tell me that something is good if its not. Painful sometimes, but I wouldn't have it any other way. The only thing she said that could be improved was a general comment about how she didn't think I was really letting go with my trumpet playing, that I was a bit too restrained.
Actually, part of this is justified. With my current set up, if I use the good large condenser mic, I have to really back way away from it or play a little softer, otherwise I run the risk of overloading the audio. Until such time as I get a better front end to record with, including a compressor, I am stuck with this. And to be honest, this song does not call for some huge blasting solos, its not that kind of song.
As I was listening to the seperate tracks prior to mixing, I noticed that some of the digital stuff from the XL7 that I recorded prior to moving the audio card around did have some little aritifacts - or pops if you will. OK, so now at least I know that there were bad things on there, even from the digital outs from before I solved the IRQ problem. They were just so low that without really listening I couldn't hear them. Fortunatley this was easy to fix, so I spent some time re-recording the bass and a couple of other parts that had some problems.
Next I played around with the horn to see if I could get a better solo on the bridge, since the rest of it is fine. For the life of me, I can't seem to get something better down; to be precise, even tho I am playing the solo correctly on the first 8 of the bridge, I am not happy with it. Conversly the second half of the solo sounds just right to me. I am toying with the idea of only having the horn on the second half - a bit weird, but actually kinda cool, since it a) eases you into the bridge section more gently and b) the horn then has more impact.
I am not certain yet, but am tending to go with this.
Onto the mix itself. With the computer resouces at my disposal, I can run up to a maximum of four aux busses, or four insert effects, whichever comes first. Typically, as I am doing here, I will only use the busses, since this gets me effects on everything that I want. I end up using a compressor, followed by delay, followed by reverb, and lastly an eq. Not standard I guess but that is my thinking now.
Before I get into the details, I won't lay out the many combinations of plugins I tried, its just too long to mention. Unlike many people, I tend to use different plugins on each project - maybe I am just fickle.
The compressor I am using (as is the eq and the reverb) is a freeware thing from kjaerhusaudio, and these are excellent tools. I tend to not need anything too fancy here, used one of the presets and just adjusted it a mite for what I need. I end up using this in varying amounts on the kick, snare, and acoustic bass.
I am using the Bionic delay from the guys at Dub Scrolls and this whole site, as I have mentioned on this site in other places, is just a great resource. As is my custom, I run some delay on most channels pre-reverb. I am using this on the vocals, snare, trumpet.
After this comes the reverb which is pretty much on everything in varying degrees except the acoustic bass and the kick drum. One thing about not having much flexibiltiy is that at least the efx match up!
The last thing in the chain, and its only used on the trumpet, is an eq since I was not totally happy with the sound I was getting. The eq helps a bunch on this, and I think it works better post-efx in this case. Hey, maybe people do that all the time, I am not sure. Sometimes its good just to be a punk, even at my age.
I listened many times over and over, and did a lot of adjusting of volumes.
Something that I don't a lot of is having levels go up and down in the mix, either for volume or for efx send. I tend to think the dynmaics should be taken care of by how you play, except of course for the typical compression tricks that I take.
I do sometimes do more extreme stuff with efx, but mostly once I get things set I just let 'em rip. I really don't want to have things sound too compressed or flat.
Tonight I will do some more mixing, and decide on the trumpet issue. Then its onto burning a stereo mix out and then thru the mastering software. Again I don't want to get too fancy on the mastering, since I am well aware that you really can't master at home as you can at a real studio. If by some chance I start making money at this, I will think about the studio route. Of course, if I do start selling my CD well when it comes out, maybe I won't actually need to use a mastering house.
Hey, I can dream can't I?