New Track, New Horizons - Posted on 2014-12-12 by Oscar Galvan

On this week's lesson, John started working on another new track of mine. I spent perhaps 3 hours or so just bouncing all my inidividual tracks to audio so they could be ported to Pro Tools when I got there. As usual, it was worth the effort.

For most of this session, John was mixing the stems for this track one by one after hearing my original mix for reference. We went through a similar process as the last song, but this time John started explaining some things in greater detail since I now understand more than before. It was interesting to see how he dialed in that POW into the kick drum. That, among other things, breathed in new life into this track. It sounded pretty good from the beginning, but John was doing his "separate the men from the boys" treatment on the song. 

As with the last track, John occasionally asked me how I did certain effects since he knows I make almost all of my own sounds and SFX from scratch through software synths and sometimes a combination of samplers. My risers and whooshing sounds were of greatest interest to him. It was cool that he liked it because I spent a great deal of time working on those sound effects, as well as the lead and bass synths.

We left off with a pretty great "rough" mix, as John called it. The rough mix came out very nicely. I heard it many times back home just to enjoy hearing how he transformed my song little by little. We will finish up the track next week or the week after that.