Last night I had the wonderful sensation of actually finishing a project. It pains me to think how long this took, but life gets in the way, does it not? You can download this song by going to the songs page on this website and clicking on the link for 120 ways.
This was the third mixdown attempt on the song. The first, which I wrote about, ended up being not so hot - the drums were OK but the efx on the vocals and the horns.....not good the next day. And the bass was boomy too.
The second mix was better till I mastered it, and then I hated the drums, especially the hats, which sounded hideously tinny.
I do try and do things the traditional way, make the sounds sound right first before I do anything else - I really don't like to use EQ afterwards if I can help it. It really eats up my CPU too.
Since I had decided to drop the echo, I first rearranged the Aux sends. Compression was still in #1 but I moved the reverb up to send #2. I also changed from the Kjaerhaus Classic reverb to another freeware verb, the rgcAudio reverb. I have used this a ton of times, its simple and I just think it sounds good. Bad news is, its not available anymore on their site - really a shame.
I did try the mighty SIR reverb, but a sound just didn't come out and grab me so off it went.
With that done, the vocals were coming together pretty nicely, but the reverb I choose for the vocals was not good for the drums. I played around again with lots of reverbs, but ended up using the CakewalkFX reverb - not something I usually do but there was a nice preset in there - medium warm drum room - that did the trick.
Now I have pretty happening vocals and drums but the bass was still just to thumpy. I tried lots of things, but I finally inserted a Sonic Foundry Track EQ, and rolled off everything under 80k - boy that does work! May not be big news to all you skilled mixer folks out there, but it did wonders for me.
Now the snare, with all this other mixing, sounded OK to me but a bit flat. I decided to use the Analogic delay that I have mentioned before, and just a touch did all sorts of nice things to the snare. This was in the end of the FX chain.
One last bit of effect was to make the refrain trumpet have a bit more depth and length, and once again the Analogic Refrain, as an insert, did the job. You gotta like these freeware plugins!
I exported the whole thing as a stero wave file and it was pretty good, but there were still a few volume tweaks that I had to make, seems like its easier for me to do this when I am just listening to the stereo mix and not looking at the tracks in Sonar.
Finally I did the mastering in Ozone3. I have been using T-Racks for some time, but now I feel Ozone is really a superior product. Plus you can get other users presets off their websites, and I actually used one of them for this mix.
I know that mastering is an art and a science, and I should take more time with it - but hey, I'm just a 51 year old punk and all I know is what sounds good to me or not.
As always I would love some comments on this song, and I want to give a big shout out to all the good people that have been reading this blog and helping me as I finished this song.
In Sonar, it says this song took 36 hours, 51 minutes and 18 seconds with 464 revisions. For me, it really was like two months work.Maybe I obsess too much??????
The next step: finish the other songs for the CD. I'm sure I will find plenty to write about that too!
Great job Dana!! I wrote my compliments in the thread at ymf, as you read, but I would like to congratulate you on this whole endeavor of having a blog - it is work, isn't it?
I have greatly enjoyed it, and look forward to more as well.
BTW, dude, please keep sending me notices when you have posted something new - I always enjoy reading it.
Thanks! :)