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Jesse Kirkwood
This was the 3rd mixing session with Engineer Brian Jones, and I have to say that this one was my favorite up to this point. He had two sessions sent to him from Nashville and we took a look at both of them, but I'm just going to talk about the first session since it was all individual tracks. The second session was condensed to stem tracks. The first session we looked at was a country tune. Brian had us listen to the finished product that he had mixed and it sounded phenominal. He then took off all of the plug-ins and panned everything in the center, which is the way that he got it. When he played it again it was like someone had taken all of the life and clarity out of the song. Basically, we got to start from scratch.
First things first, we grouped all of the similar instruments in groups and gave them their own aux channels. We had guitars, percussion (including cow bell, always gotta have more cow bell), bass, and vocals. After grouping, we color coated the tracks according to their respective groups. We separated the aux tracks from the rest of the tracks by puting the master track in between them. Once we got the session set up, we moved on to panning the instruments.
We started off by panning the electric guitarts 100° L and R, and we panned the stereo tracked acoustic guitar 90° L and R. This gave us a wide stereo image for the 3 guitarts that are all doing a different rhythm. By panning the acoustic guitar 90°, it gave a wide image without occupying the space of the electric guitars. The bass guitar was panned 1°L so that there could be a little bit of separation between that and the kick drum, which brings me to the next group--the drums. The kick drum was panned 1° R, the snare drum 2° L, high tom 25° L, floor tom 25° R, hi hat 45° L, cow bell 45° R, and the over heads 60° L and R. The lead vocals were panned down the middle, and I don't think we got to panning the backup vocals, but I would have given them a little bit of stereo separation so that they wouldnt occupy the same space as the lead vocals, but not too wide because the guitars are occupying the sides--maybe 50°-70° depending on the pitches of the notes and how many harmony parts there are. That about does it for the panning.
We ran out of time before we got to do any heavy mixing, but we dipped our toes in some eq and a little bit of compression. For the guitars we did a pretty heavy high pass filter so that the bass could occupy that space and we also did a decent amount of low pass as well. The acoustic guitar in particular had a lot of strum noise that we were able to take out by putting a low pass filter on it. We also took out some boxy frequencies in the upper 200Hz range for the guitars. The kick drum was the next on the list. We got the kick sounding pretty good by putting a high pass filter on it around 45Hz and a low pass filter around 10kHz. We enhanced the 8kHz range a few decibles to bring out the attack and the 100Hz range to add some beef to the kick. For the snare I think we took out everything under 100Hz and took out a some 2000Hz to soften the harshness and then enhanced some 10kHz for stick definition. We didn't get to mess with the toms much, but it was a country tune, so naturally the drummer only hit them three and a half times. For the over head mics we did a massive hi pass filter that cut off at least half of the lower frequencies so that we would mainly capture the cymbals. We did a medium Q on the subtractive bell eq around the 2kHz to take out the harsh frequencies of the crash cymbals. For almost all of the drum tracks we applied a Waves SSL plug-in for the gating, compression, and frequency enhancements. I really want that plug-in. I love that everything is in one place and it all works really well.
We didn't have time to do much to the vocals other than a low and high pass and add an LA-2A plug-in to add a nice, warm, subtle compression. That is about all that we did last time in the studio. I definitely learned a lot and I'm excited to do this kind of stuff over and over until it becomes second nature to me. Seeing Brian work is an inspiration to me because he makes such a big difference in a short amount of time. I just got Pro Tools in the mail and I'm excited to get more familiar with it so I can work quickly and efficiently within the program.
