Last night, I had a few minutes to listen again to some of the songs to make sure I am still going in the right direction with my mixes.
Some of the material is quite a bit older than others, in fact I listened to the oldest piece that is going on the CD. What I found was that with the way it was recorded, it sounded flat, dead lifeless compared with the new material.
Back then, I didn’t have the same work methods like I do now. The most pertinent example, I would just record all the drums on one stereo track and call it good. Of course, that is not conducive to making good drum mixes since you can’t mess with it after you record it, no discrete compressions on the kick, snare, all that.
I thought, OK, I have been down this road before, I can just split the tracks and rerecord them. That was the theory anyway.
I had the midi set up different when I did this song, so first I had to fix what interface was pointing where, and while that should have taken just a minute, I had some struggles and wasted some time there.
Once that was done, I spilt the Yamaha drum tracks, but they sounded funny to me, especially the hats. I discovered that for some reason I ended up with lots of hats copied, almost but not quite, on top of themselves.
Big suckathon that, since I had to painfully and slowly go to each duplicated note throughout the song and delete the doubled notes. Of course, they were so close to being right on top of the original notes I had to blow up the notes pretty large. Nasty and very time consuming.
More than an hour had gone by now, and so much for getting to bed early.
Next I tackled the ER1 drums, with the same splitting to tracks. This went much easier, but I of course am not out of the woods yet. Some of the sounds, in particular the handclaps, sounded dated and awful to me now (what was I thinking????) and will have to be dumped or replaced.
With all the splitting and moving of parts, not everything is quite where it should be, so I have to do some massaging of the tracks to get them where I need them to be (meaning whole sections needed to be moved). At least the groove didn’t die with all the shifting, that would have been awful.
At this point, it becomes obvious I have to add back in the vocal and horn parts, since I am only working with midi data, and the mix I was working from originally is just audio. Of course I have all the original parts, although with the vocals and trumpet I don’t have them all in one file each, but in takes of each part. This means more painstaking placement of parts.
I do naturally have the original mix to refer to so it shouldn’t be that bad to drop in the audio where I need to, and try and maybe even extend the song a bit.
Then I can start the real mixing, but I am going to make a bet that I will be using Battery once again to add some more drums, and make some of the drum parts more interesting. Most of the percussion on this piece is electronic, but somehow I feel the need for a real snare, and to make all the parts sound less canned. Even a drum machine can have soul, right?
This does set me back a bit, but this is a really good song and I don’t want it to be ruined by sounding poorly mixed and recorded next to all the others. I suppose this is the price I have to pay for getting better at what I do………..