The Brakes!

From the moment I imported the song into logic I knew this was going to be a fun mix. Even the raw files sounded awesome.

First thing I did was cut the excess off, top and tailed the song so I would just be looking at what I needed.

After listening to the song through I realised the biggest problem would be the stereo image. Because the band was just 2 people I knew I had to make the band seem bigger. So I started with the drums, got a nice stereo spread with panning. Then the question became how to get spread on the guitars, I tried a few things like adding a spread plugin, but I found the thing I liked the most was actually having the bass panned centre and the mid cab left and the top cab right. This along side the spill in the vocal mic (panned centre) blended the whole image together.

This came back to bite me in the backside a little later when it came time to mix in the vocals, I did a little parallel compression and added a little reverb. The spill coming through the vocal track had made the guitars a bit too reverb-y, which I didn’t want to put any on the guitars. The solution I found was to put a gate on the vocals but only with a 7dB drop when the gate was closed. The reason I did this was because the spill was so loud, the threshold between cutting off the spill and not cutting the vocals was very small. The 7dB drop would mean that the reverb in the spill would be reduced to an acceptable level while the vocals had the reverb that I wanted.

I also made some subtle eq changes, like giving the bass guitar amp a little notch around 200hz to get the kick to shine through, and boosting 1k in the mid cab and 4k in the top cab, just to brighten up the tone of the guitars.

I did very little eq to the drum kit, as I was happy with the majority of it, just a little boost of 1k on the compressed snare top, and some frequency isolation to get rid of a little bit of cymbal bleed which was a bit too harsh.

In reflection, and overall I liked how the mix turned out. I have a few things that I could have done better. The vocal take that I received wasn't the greatest, and even the use of the gate didn't give me the sound I wanted. Ideally I would have re-recorded the vocals separately from the rest of the instruments, giving a cleaner vocal track however given the tracks I was given I think this was as good as I could get them. I was a little unhappy with the tone of the guitar as well, I felt like the song needed a bit more high-end, something that would have been better to fix during the recording stage than to come back later and add. Or if there were other guitar parts like a lead guitar dubbed over the top. I really love how the stereo image of the guitars turned out, the panning of the cabs gives a huge space for the guitars, since each of the cabs were slightly different it keep the image sounding unique as opposed to just being a duplicate track panned left and right.