Hang On - The Febs

Hang on is a gentle rock/country song by the Febs. Initially when I imported the files into logic I had to pick through over 50 audio files to find the ones I wanted to keep. I started by muting everything except the drum tracks, and found the drums I preferred. I then started to eq the drums, starting with kick and snare, blending a portion of the top and bottom snare and eq-ing a small boost around 1k by about 1.5 dB. I found the hi hat had LOADS of spill so I had to cut from about 130Hz and below just to reduce the muddy kick sound and some of the snare resonance. The kick I just couldn't get to sound right, I cut everything from about 300Hz up and below 20Hz. I thought it might've been the spill that was giving it the muddy colour so I went through all the layers of drums trying to isolate it but couldn't. The cymbals I cut everything below 250Hz and boosted a little around 5k with a wide Q value on the overheads and on the hi hat I cut below 200Hz but because of the spill I kept the highs unaltered. Finally I made a stereo image from the direction of the drummer. The bass DI had a good tone to it already so all I did was add some reverb to spread it a little wider. The electric guitar had a really awful hum that poked through during the quiet section, so I added a noise gate so it would be silent. I mixed the sm57 and the AKG414 together favouring the 414's high end and panned them about 15' out left and right. The acoustic guitar sounded great so I didn't do any EQ-ing, and being recorded in an xy configuration I panned the 2 tracks hard left and right giving a really nice stereo spread. As for the vocals, it was hard to pin point the vocal tracks that sounded the best since there were so many takes. I found a good intro middle and final lead vocal track and added them in using the vox guide track as a guide for placement. I didn't use any of the room mic because it didn't create a good reverb sound. I compressed the vocals on the channel very slightly at a 1.4:1 ratio before sending to a parallel compression compressing 30:1 and also sending to a second aux with a chorus and reverb insert, to brighten up the reverb. I found that the song was a bit too long, so I cut about 8 bars out of the pre-outtro which made the song under 4 minutes and also create a less drawn out version.

In reflection I can see that I probably made the song worse than it originally came in. This is one of those occasions that taking a break during the mixing process would have helped me immensely. Too many things distracted me from the bigger picture and it made the mix suffer in the end. The vocals sounded good after turning down the reverb, having just a slight reduction in reverb really was all it needed. and maybe having a break and coming back to it with fresh ears I would have caught this. The drums sounded pretty dull in my opinion, looking back I could have done more possibly like adding distortion to make them stand out, but since there was so much spill I wasn't sure how it would sound. The acoustic guitars sounded great and I'm very happy with how they turned out, the recording process of the xy paired akg 414's made them sound amazing and it has a great stereo imagery.