Song2 - Un-named album

With the first song completed and awaiting mastering the second song in the album has taken my full attention. This song is a 12 bar blues song, with a country blues tone, somewhat rockabilly also. While recording this song I had changed the lyrics because the original lyrics were too dark for this song and i wanted it to be the happier song in the album (because the other 2 are more sombre).

I really wanted to have a similar sound going through this album so the drums I have compressed

in a very similar way to the first song. On the right is the same midi drums channel i used on the first song and on the left is the live recorded drums recorded in the same session as the previous song.

The live drums are going through a light compression before a very hard limiter (seen below) this compression is just to ease it into the hard limiter, using less cpu and also reducing possible skips and pops since i'm on a laptop.

I've panned the snare to the left in this song because that's what I like to hear (snare on the left) though I'd thought about spreading the snare around but I have enough instruments in the stereo mix and I'm happy with the sound.

Below I have the acoustic guitars being played one panned left and the other panned right, these are two different guitars (same guitars as the first song in the album recorded with the same microphones. On the right below is the fender acoustic guitar (recorded on Nt5 pair) that I've boosted 2db in the neck mic for added high end and then grouped to aux 1 for a light compression and panning.

The guitar on the left was the Takamine and was recorded on an sennheiser E913 and AKG c414 which had the tone i wanted without the need for any EQ (i've taken out some bass in order to leave room for the bass and kick).

The vocals have a few things going on, firstly I've put a de-esser to take away those plosives I've also taken out everything below about 150hz because there were a few footsteps and other boomy things in the recording since I recorded in the C24 and this was the E913 microphone. I then ran the vocals through a clip distortion before sending to aux 2 for reverb, while also grouping with the C414. The C414 microphone has no eq because I chose the microphone for the tonal properties. I've run it through a low-medium ratio'd compressor and mixed it into the song, I've also sent it pre-fader to a delay which gives a very wide and slappy tone to the song.

On the right is a picture of the string section in Logic X, Most of these plugins are presets that Logic has chosen, but I have added a stereo spread plugin just to get a bit more spread.

The other thing about this midi strings section is, just like the drums they can be broken down as individual instruments so I've panned one violin part to the left and the other to the right.

I didn't record any bass for this song, so instead what I did was pitch down my acoustic guitar and mix that in with some EQ and sending the verb.

I think this has turned out nicely, although if I owned an acoustic bass I would have used that instead. This is something that modern technology can help with.

Below and to the right here is a picture of the solo guitar, which I've tried to do some things to make it stand out, like eqing and compressing, also I ran the C414 through a multi-channel compressor to add tone to the guitar. I've also given the solo it's own reverb, seperate to the other instruments to make it pop a bit more.

All in all i think this track has come along nicely, I am still yet to master this song, although I've attempted to do it in the box just for a personal mix I will be heading into the S6 for a more professional master session when all 3 songs are completed. I'm happy with the song however it still sounds too boring and cliche, but that's probably the composition more than the engineering elements.