songblog

120 Ways, the last roundup

It has taken some time - much too long probably - to finish my remix of my song. I have replaced the original mix over at the songs page.
Just to remind you: Cass Anawathy was kind enough to make a remix of the original material, which just blew my original mix into the dustheap, so I decided to try and match as best I could what he did, stealing every idea I could to make my mix better. This included dropping a few drum parts at the beginning of the song, doubleing some vocal parts and treating the second part with different fx from the first on the refrain, but not so striking as what Cass did, I wanted something not quite so different as the main vocals.
I also at this time got a real preamp, and since it made all the synth stuff that much better sounding, re-recorded everything in stereo, which gave me better material to start with than what Cass had. And I changed the snare drum sound to something more realistic (I hope!) and played most of the snare drum parts by hand, not just messing with the sequencer, which I hope made it sound more realistic.
One last thing was using a new plugin, the LFX-310, which I have written about, for most all the channels. Unlike my old practice, for this song I have mostly used insert effects on each channel, rather than aux sends. For the curious, here is what I did, with the fx chain left to right:
BD - LFX compressor, overdrive and eq
SD -LFX compressor, delay, reverb
HH - LFX compressor, eq, reverb
Piano - LFX chorus, delay, reverb
Thumb piano - Sonic Foundry Track EQ
Bass - Endorphin stereo compressor from digital fishphones
Synth lead and first trumpet shared the LFX chours, stereo delay and reverb
Vocals on verses - LFX eq,delay, reverb
The special effected vocals - LFX delay, tremolo, reverb and Sonic Foundry parametic EQ for the sorta telephone effect
The first refrain vocal used LFX chorus, ping pong delay and reverb
The second refrain vocal used LFX eq and gated reverb. The refrain vox channels panned a bit from the center to make them wider
The refrain trumpet had eq and gated reverb
So - this took forever but I think it was worth the time. I want to thank everyone that gave me suggestions on this, espcially Cass of course and Jay over at yourmusicforums.com.
Finally I did a quick "mastering" using the Ozone 3 plugin, using - and don't kill me for this, OK? - a preset that I liked, Rock master 4 band dynamics, all the while A/B'ing with Cass's mix.
One last thought: I now realize that instead of actually matching what Cass did - which is pretty impossible given the differences in equipment and experience, I think that what I ended up trying to do was to just make the best mix I possibly could, using the ideas that Cass had and my own mangled brain. I think I learned more from this than any other project, so thanks again to all who came along for the ride!