songblog

Adventures in CD Land part 6

Not all days are difficult in mixing land, and some actually produce results.

Yesterday for example things actually went rather well. I started a mix on a new song, and again I am finding the PSP vintage warmer and Block Fish to be ultra valuable on the drums. I should be more accurate and say, on the drums when I finally get some decent drum sounds.
On this song, I have some non-standard drum sounds, some electronic percussion from the EA-1, and some regular drum sounds. I spent maybe an hour and a half trying, in vain, to make the XL7 snare, kick and hats sound decent to me. In the end, I just couldn’t do it – the snare sounded flat and the cymbals just were awful, like little hissing bits of white noise, no matter what I tried.
Finally I bit the bullet and decided once again to break out Battery. Of course, I had to clone all the midi tracks, and break them up more, so that all the instruments are on separate tracks. I thought I had already done this, but so much for me being consistent in my work habits….
Anyway, once this was done, it was fairly quick to pick a decent drum kit and rerecord all the drum parts.
Next I decided to get more organized and moved all the tracks like this: bass drum, snare, hats, hats2, rides, crashes and then bass line, all the synth lines and finally the vocals. This is what I like to do on the songs, in order to see what the heck I am doing more easily. Of course, in lots of my songs not all the drums come in at once, but I still find it easier to work this way.
By now, its pretty familiar to me: squash all the drums - although I try and use the aux sends to conserve on CPU power, I always seem to end up using different compressors on every channel. Then I add reverb and/or delay and whatever effect on them. Its amazing to me that some compression will actually seem to make the sounds more, not less distinct, especially in the case of hand drums but also snares, depending on how much I push it. Of course, if I crush it too much, the snare can start to sound like a trash can, but sometimes that can be useful too. Basically, I want to hear everything loud and clear before I move on.
I always try and give myself room to experiment too. In this song, I am running a plug-in called SupaPhaser on one of the drums – it gives a deep, somewhat boomy sound, which nicely serves to accent the fact that I am running three snares at once on this section.
Once again I find that the synth sounds from the XL7, which were recorded thru the ART TPS II are so full sounding I don’t have to touch them. Nice!
Now onto the voice. One thing I have done on the last couple of tunes: I always record the voice in mono, and then I duplicate the track and apply different treatments on each track. In this case, I had run the same compressor on each vocal track, but on one I added reverb, and the other delay. This is not what I normally used to do, where I would run delay feeding the reverb on a single track. I still like and use this technique, but in this case I found that running them on separate tracks made it sound a bit more transparent, but still “bigger”, moving my voice back but not indistinct.
This song has a flute, but that turned out to be pretty easy: another compressor, lightly, and then the Bionic delay – I just seem to use this on everything, since it just flat works. I ran some verb on top, using the Glaceverb plug-in. I don’t seem to be able to get the S.I.R. plug to work on my new machine, and don’t have a ton of time to be able to figure out why. You make it work with what ya got.
The other day I drove myself crazy trying to get a particular vocal effect. I was going to copy just the refrain from a song and make part of it sound a bit spacey I guess you would say. I totally failed at that, but I had better luck today.
I did the same process, copy the vocal onto another track and wipe out everything but the refrains. Then I keep trying one after the other effect. Finally, I thought about using Reaktor as an effect – after all, it has a ton of them in there.
After much experimentation, I found the sound I was looking for: a sort of twisted delay with lots of movement. At that point, I was able to just use the Sonar mute tool to mute out the portions of the refrain that I didn’t want effected.
In short, I got a pretty good mix in about four-five hours. I really can’t complain about that!