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David Allison
“Just A Dude” is the second released song for my band, Incredibly Average. Zach had started this song several years ago. He and Dalton came up with the hook and name of the song, and he recorded his friend Evan for the guitar. He found a great trumpet sample, and created the rest using Reason’s software drums and synthesizers. You can hear the original here:
https://soundcloud.com/incrediblyaverage/just-a-dude/s-Q6xoW
When our band revisited this song, we thought the synthesizers could use some additional work. This is where I came in. I worked with Native Instrument’s Massive software synthesizer and came up with a dozen different sounds we could work with. Then Zach and I used our MIDI keyboard and messed around with some different melodies for the different sounds. We came up with melodies on 5 of the sounds I came up with, took out some parts of the old synthesizers, and added in the elements Zach and I created. We also had Dalton rap a verse, which we added to the beginning of the song.
Once we finished recomposing the song, it was ready for me to mix and master. This song was by far my most challenging project I have been given so far. I started the session with over 30 different instrument/audio tracks before adding any aux tracks or the master fader. I frequently needed to remind myself to work the mix one step at a time to keep myself from getting overwhelmed.
My mixing process was very similar to my workflow on producing “Transition,” my band’s first release, so I won’t go into detail on things that would be redundant to my last blog. Things that I really had to focus on when mixing “Just A Dude” were organizing buses, equalization, and side-chaining. Starting with over 30 tracks, I really needed to consolidate to keep myself sane. I bussed together the kick and snare, the rest of the drums, guitars, all non-synthetic instruments (guitars and trumpet), main vocals and additional vocals, the bass, bass-heavy synthesizers, the higher-frequency synthesizers, and the riser effect noise. I also created busses within the bass-heavy synthesizers to better separate them in the mix. I also created a global bus that was used for time-based effects across the whole mix. Color-coding was definitely my friend, since I had a lot of tracks and aux busses to keep organized.
Some of the basic equalizing I did was just making sure each instrument had it’s own space in the frequency bandwidth to be heard, since there were definitely a lot of sounds that were fighting for the same frequency ranges. Luckily this track had a lot of “call-and-response” composition between the different synthesizer sounds, so some instruments were able to take turns owning the same frequency bandwidths. In areas where they overlapped, I automated the gain on specific frequency bands so that frequencies would only be cut when frequency-sharing instruments were present. This was a scenario when I really wish I had a multiband compressor that compressed specific bandwidths via an external side-chaining. I was able to side-chain busses to one another, and this helped with separating the instruments as well.
The mastering really brought out a lot of the pumping action throughout the track. By adjusting the attack and release (and turning up the kick and snare just a bit), I was really able to make the song bounce to it’s beat. My mentor really pushed me to make the track as loud as possible, and I feel like we were able to get it very loud. But, I do think some things got squashed in the process (especially the kick and snare). After releasing the song, I looked over the chapter on mastering, and realized that our RMS was a little overkill. If I were to re-master this track, I would use less compression so that it could breath a little more. Despite this, I am really happy about how the song turned out. It’s definitely the most technical project I’ve worked on, and I learned a ton over the many hours and nights I put into perfecting it.
Here’s a link to the track:
