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Kristin Staub
Continuing on with the Tales of Joy project, Edwin and I took a close look at the vocals to finish the mixing part for the two demo songs the band is going to use to promote their music. The two songs were the first that were recorded in one room and a few weeks ago the band overdubbed the rhythm and vocal parts to produce a tighter and cleaner sound. Having Edwin's years of experience working with vocals has proved vital because we could clearly hear the difference between recording all the instruments in one room, versus recording and overdubbing parts in separate rooms in Edwin's studio. This actually made it easier to go back and mix the vocals in the end because we followed the steps of choosing a condenser mic, preamp, compression, EQ and then editing with Pro Tools in the final mixing stage.
I was asking a lot of specific questions about certain keyborad shortcuts, how Edwin organizes his vocal and other instrumental tracks to come up with a clean sound. It was really fascinating to sit down with him and finish the final mix of the vocals. He even let me sit down for one of the songs and take control of editing the lead and background vocals by creating fade-ins and fade-outs to come up with a clean sound and give space to the vocals. I had seen Edwin do this multiple just by sitting in on sessions with other artists, so I felt pretty comfortable mixing the vocals and I really wanted to make sure everything sounded just right for the demo tracks. This was also a good experience for one of my upcoming projects with the band that I'm going to record and and mix.
Honestly, I'm pretty excited because I can tell Edwin is starting to trust my musical input as far as the mix is concerned. I have also been recording a couple of my own instrumental songs in order to navigate through Pro Tools and know exactly what I will be doing in the next couple weeks with other recording sessions. Edwin took a listen to one of them and his input about instrumental and rhythmic space was very helpful, so now I have a better idea of what direction I'm going in and he even likes the song. The last thing I need to do for one of my songs is fix the rhythm parts and change some of the arrangements of the instrumentals to give it some variety and interest and I'll be ready to mix it. I'm very thankful that Edwin is able to sit down with me and discuss some of my arrangements in order to help me with the actual mixing part. This is not like an actual performance where you have complete control over how you want a piece to sound. This is something that has to last for years and you almost have to be a perfectionist in order to make it comparable and as equally competitive. Overall this is an exciting process and I cannot wait to see what the final product ois going to be.
