notesdontmatter

Audio Arts – Week 8 – “Mixing Pt 1”

After some serious splicing, fading, stretching and other general audio manipulation tasks, I think I have manufactured a semi-reasonable vocal line from the atonally corrupted stream that we were given to work with (meaning the guitar in the vocal track, not the voice).

The main issue was the onset of heavily strummed guitar chords, which were out of tune and sounded clunky against other instruments in the mix. The only bandaid type solution I could muster for this was to apply fades to the beginning of affected regions in a vain attempt to remove the problem. While this worked to some extent it has the unfortunate side effect of making the onset and transition between some vocal regions sound artificial. If one can ignore these quirks however, it works in the context of the rhythm section and harmony lines.

I started the instrumental mix by tweaking the kick and snare with a little redundant frequency cutting to tighten things up a bit. The same was performed for the Cymbals. I then called upon my session management skills and routed the drums to an auxiliary track for some global reverb and volume control for the percussion.


The bass was rolled back with a simple 1 band EQ at around 1Khz to lose some of those muddy mids. I found that I liked the same EQ setting applied to the acoustic guitars as well so maybe I have an adversity to midrange frequencies. The acoustics received a generous amount of Bomb Factory compression as well.

For the electrics I played around with a couple of different Amplitube settings for the varying rhythm and melody lines available. In the end I used a global Amplitube plug in for the electric guitars auxiliary bus and only had one electric guitar track using an alternative as it tended to highlight its bright melody line. A little reverb and compression were then applied to the group globally.

There was no need for routing with the vocals as there is only one line but EQ, Reverb, Compression, and De-essing were utilised to tweak my final arrangement and make one last attempt at masking that pesky background guitar.

Below is an MP3 of the final result and the EMU Drop box will contain my full Pro-Tools session.

Click here to link to online folder containing MP3's of the final mixes (variations are in the inclusion / exclusion of electric or acoustic guitars and different levels of pan settings).


Reference:

David Grice. “Audio Arts – Wk 8 – Mixing Pt 1.” Tutorial presented at Studio 1, Level 5, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 1st May, 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 1:40 PM