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Jesse Kirkwood
This was another exciting, hands-on mixing session with engineer, Brian Jones. I met two more apprentices, Jemelle and Daniel. Jemelle also brought in his friend, AJ. Jemelle has been in the program for awhile but does not have much hands on experience. He digs rap, RnB, and hip hop. Daniel has been a musician for about 14 years and his genre of choice is all types of Metal, but, he appreciates basically all types of music. Jemelle's friend AJ had been working on some rap tunes and decided to bring them in to see how we could improve the tracks. In this case, all we had to work with was a single stereo track. I was amazed to see all that we could do to improve on this one track. The first thing that Brian showed us, was taking out the problematic frequencies with subtractive eq. I have learned to do this a little bit already, so it was good reinforcement to be able to do some more of this hands-on. I subtracted a very pointed bell curve around 165Hz, 400Hz to get rid of the boxiness, and 2200Hz to get rid of the harsh hi-hat sound. We made sure to only subtract around 3-5dB so it would still sound natural. Then to tighten up the bass he had me do a high pass around 40hz. After that we added some compression to the track to smooth out the peaks and boost the subtle transients. The next thing Brian showed us was the eq enhancement. Its important to enhance after the compression because the compression is going to affect the sound and smooth everything out. We boosted around 5kHz to add a little more vocal pop. We also boosted the high mids a tiney bit to enhance the overall presence of the track. After doing all of this, the track was no longer drowned out by the bass and the vocals were much more in the forefront of the mix. We also added two auxilary tracks, one for delay and the other for reverb. By bussing the main track to the aux channels, we were able to write in the automation for the reverb and delay. Boosting the delay at the end of a phrase helped emphasize those words and boosting the reverb where there were no vocals really helped add some life and room to the track. Pulling the reverb down a little when there were vocals helped the lyrics pop and be more in-your-face. To wrap up our mix, we created a master channel and put a mastering compression plug-in on the channel. This was the icing on the cake. This Maserati plug-in by Waves brought all of the levels up to cd quality and added a sweet punch to the bass. It also crisped up the highs with out making it too harsh.
We only spent about 45 minutes mixing this song, but the difference was night and day. Working with Brian has really showed me that you can make a big difference in a short amount of time if you know what to look for. Also, having a few really good "go-to-plug-ins" helps a lot. This was my favorite studio session so far. I'm excited to learn more and to start making this stuff really stick. I want to get to the point where a Pro Tools session, from beginning to end, is second nature to me. I feel like once you know your way around the software and have a good understanding of your plug-ins, then you can really use those tools musically and tastfully, putting your own spin on it, and make it your piece of art.
