Mix Blog 2- Justin Myles 'Alone With You'

This blog post will be an insight into the mixing process of a multi-track session I downloaded from Cambridge mixing stems site! The site has many, many genres of music to choose from and it a great tool for a budding mixing engineer to hone their skills!! The track is a slow kind of 80's rock ballad with acoustic elements.

After importing all my tracks into the session, I began color coding, grouping my tracks together; basic housekeeping at the beginning just to create a better workflow as I move through the session. Next I created stereo auxiliary tracks for each of my grouped elements- six in total and them bussed the outputs of each element into the input of its brand new auxiliary. Drums, Bass, Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Lead Vox and Backing Vox respectively. This allows me to apply processing if I want.

I then went through each track individually and removed some extraneous noise present. There was some bleed from the overheads in a couple of the tracks. For both my kick and snare tracks, I applied a gate to remove the remaining spill. Doing so gave me so much more separation on the drums and each different strike is clearly identifiable now. I also applied some compression to the kick and snare- kick for the low end thump driving through the mix more and snare to help accentuate the impact of stick to skin.

On the stereo group auxiliary, I applied more compression as I wanted the entire drum kit to have a lot more power in the mix. This is shown in the screen shot below, it was subtle compression settings and I really feel they added some extra 'oomph' to the drums. You can feel each and every percussive element have more impact in the mix.

Now onto guitars. I think that the electric in particular really help shape the track. These needed to be impactful. With an EQ I removed some of the muddiness around the 1 kHz and 2.5 kHz, scooping out the bottom end entirely. I also gave them some gain around the 8 kHz range to add to the tonal brightness of the guitars.

With my Bass guitar, I felt it was too muddy. It took up too much of the mix and was not clearly identifiable. Now I don't know shit about guitars so I called on YouTube and someone who knows what the hell they are doing! What I found was very cool, using EQ and Compression. First I applied a channel strip plug-in and immediately rolled off the lows with a HPF. Now it was time to isolate the 'muddy' frequencies in the Bass guitar by heavily queuing and sweeping the frequency line searching for inconsistencies. I found that at around the low mid range or 380 Hz, wasn't doing me any favors, so reduced it by about -5 dB. Also around the low range I found removing -3.6 dB at about 80 Hz gave me a bit of extra clarity and separation... I could hear the string hits a little more. Next it was time to use the channel strip compressor to help accentuate the EQ that was done so I can hear more of the string hits pushing through the mix at the same volume as the others. I used a medium release and attack time, experimented with the threshold until I saw a decrease of -3db to -6dB. This is basically turning down some of the louder peaks of the bass guitar, allowing me to use make up gain to bring those plucks out.

Here's the video that helped me through this process-

It was now time to move onto the vocals. The recording was pretty decent. With and EQ, I used a HPF and rolled out some of the muddiness of the low end. Neutron was then added to smooth out the lows and highs with some moderate compression to help bring the clarity and character of the vocal to the front of the mix more. Then using Seventh Heaven Reverb (2 week demo version as I am fucking poor), I used a West Church Space reverb which really helped increase the 80's rock/pop ballad feel to the track.

There were a couple of small lines of backing vocals...the only ones in the song and they happen at around 1 minute 30 secs. I panned one hard left and the other hard right. Together with the delay and the verb, this gave the ear to ear effect. It is a an emotional little element to the track and I think it is a pleasant change up to the rest of the song.

Lastly, I bussed everything to a new stereo auxiliary track, where I used the help of Ozone advanced mastering plug-in to help bring all elements up as loud as they could go without distorting. I am still getting used to mastering and need to do more research into the art what this bad boy does. From what I see here in the picture below, it has made a serious dip with EQ in the low end at around 120 Hz, and a boost at around 4 kHz and 8 kHz. In regards to dynamics, bands 1 and 3 were significantly dropped at about 295 and 340 Hz. Inconsistencies or muddiness at around 4.8 kHz were also scooped out.

Overall, I am reasonably happy with how the mix turned out. I think there is much more space in the mix and each element is identifiable. I really like the vocals, although I think they could be crisper in areas. Maybe some parallel compression could of helped them pop more but my god I love the Seventh Heaven reverb. It is on my wish list. I have a long way to go training my ears to pick up frequencies that don't belong, especially in string instruments. I think the guitars are OK at best, maybe some more definition was needed. The bass guitar punched through into the mix a lot more than before so that was a plus!! I like my drums here. If I had to pick something... to well... pick on, I would say the kick was a little flat and could have used some extra attention. At least I am learning!!

Here is the final version of the mix :)

References-

YouTube. (2018). 3 Quick Tips For Mixing A Fatter Bass Guitar - TheRecordingRevolution.com. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2RnIRgt73g