Mixing Country - Posted on 2015-01-06 by Jesse Kirkwood

The past two times in the studio we have been looking at a country tune from nashville that I've talked about before. I learned a lot but more importantly, I got to reinforce some panning techniques that Brian showed us a few weeks back. I've mentioned how we have panned the drums before so we got to put that into practice. I learned how to beef up the kick drum a little bit by using a waves plugin called Rbass. I think we also used the SSL channel strip plugin for the kick as a limmiter/compressor/gate and an API plugin to boost some 10k and 100Hz. What we did to the kick and drums was what stood out to me the most in regards to the instrumentation. For the sake of time we used some "magic plugins"(which are producer signature series plugins by waves) for the guitars, organ, and pedal steel. 

The other thing that stood out to me was how we made the vocals pop through the mix. The lead vocals were panned dead center in the mix so that it cut through all of the instrumentation. We applied subtractive eq and deEssing to the lead vocals using the stock pro tools plugins. We used a 1176 compressor plugin for all of the vocal tracks. For the harmony tracks we cut out a lot of the lows and panned them pretty wide so that they sit nicely in the mix and would not conflict with the lead vocal track. For some of the vocals we also used an API plugin to boost some 5k to add a crisp pop. Also by adding a tiny bit of 20k it added some "air" to the track and gave it a nice full, crisp tone. 

Those are the main things I learned in the country tune sessions. I love learning about all of the things that you can do to make the important things pop through the mix and pan the other things so that they sit nicely in the mix and make it sound full bodied but not cluttered. I'm excited to keep learning and building my skill set in all genres of music.