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David Allison
“Summer Livin’” is the third released song for my band, Incredibly Average. This one has been a lot of fun because it has such a huge popularity factor and potential to get our band noticed. It’s our summer anthem for the Twin Cities, and it definitely sounds like a song you would hear on the radio.
It’s a hip-hop funk track that we composed relatively quickly. It started with a rhythm guitar part that was composed a long time ago by a previous bandmate from Zach and Dalton’s old band. Zach composed the drums, bass, and lead guitar, I composed the acoustic guitar, and Dalton composed the lyrics in practically ten minutes. We used DAW plugins to compose the drums and bass, recorded the guitars and vocals on the spot, and the mixing was a breeze since we wanted to preserve the natural vibe. To our surprise, our track likely to be our biggest hit was composed practically overnight.
In the mix, I definitely spent the most time and energy on the vocals. Dalton has a great voice, and I know that his sound can compete with the big names out there. Also, if this is going to be a “radio” track, the majority of our listeners will be paying attention to the words more than the instrumentals. I started my cutting out the empty spaces and minimizing/muting his breaths. DeEssing his voice was very tricky since in the chorus he repeats, “summer livin’” and I didn’t want to give him a lisp saying, “thumma livin’” after inserting the DeEsser. Waves’ Renaissance DeEsser did the trick at 5.2kHz with moderate range and threshold settings. For equalizing the vocal, I had a high-pass filter at 125Hz; slight boosts at 223Hz, 1.3kHz, and 10kHz; and attenuations around 1kHz.
The guitars were also tricky to mix. Zach was able to get an amazing sound for his guitar part, and I didn’t want to ruin that sound. Both guitars had a screechy frequency that needed work. Dipping 2.3kHz helped, but more still had to be done. I used Waves’ C4 multiband compressor to compress and attenuate the troublesome frequencies between 800Hz and 2.3kHz.
Mastering is where I spent the majority of my time for this track (I ended up bouncing over a dozen versions of the mastered song so that I could listen in my car and on headphones, and probably would have done more if my band didn’t have a release date for the song). In my mastering chain, first I had Waves’ Linear Phase EQ to get rid of all the unwanted frequencies below 35Hz. Next I used Waves’ C4 to compress 200Hz-11kHz down by 3dB then boost with makeup gain by 3dB to make the track sound like songs one would hear on the radio. The rest of the compression was processed through 4 compressors: Pro Tools’ Channel Strip to grab the peaks with a 20:1 ratio and high threshold, then Waves’ H-Comp and 2 V-Comps to color the sound and apply different compression ratios at different thresholds. Waves’ PuigTec equalizers were the MVP’s (Most Valuable Plugins) of my mastering chain. I used the MEQ-5 to dip 1.5kHz, and the EQP-1A to color the mix by boosting and attenuating same frequencies (I boosted and attenuated 30Hz, boosted 3kHz, and attenuated 20kHz). Using these equalizers and the analog settings on my Waves compressors gave a surprising amount of desirable warmth to the summer track. Last but not least, I used Waves’ L3 UltraMaximizer as my limiter to bring up the volume!
Here’s a link to the track:
