Mixing Oceancode
Following up on my last Blog of Tracking Oceancode, I am going to talk about some of the processes I used when later mixing the tracks. Oceancode is a four-piece band with Bass, Drums, Electric Guitar, Acoustic guitar and Vocals. The mix of these two Tracks was fairly convenient as I had recorded the multi-tracks my-self. This meant that straight away I had well recorded tracks, with the sounds I was looking for and I wouldn’t have to deal with drum tracks being out of phase or other phase cancellation problems.
When communicating with the band on the sound of the mixes that we were aiming for, we decided we wanted to go for a pretty natural recording of the song and let it be more of a demonstration of what the band would sound like Live. In doing this I started doing a rough mix of levels with the whole session to get a good idea of where things were sitting. From there I focused in on mixing specific elements, starting with the Drums first. After fader pushing to get general levels where I wanted them, I then went in to do some Artistic EQ on individual drums. I EQ-d the Kick-drum; boosting 120 Hz, cutting the Mid-range around 2.5kHz and pulling-up the highs around 8k. A large part of the drum sound came from the overheads: I had used quite a lot of compression on the over-heads to bring up the exciting high-frequencies of a kit. This was a technique I had seen used by the Engineer Steve Albini.
When mixing Guitars I started with Electric and then Acoustic, I then grouped them seeing how they would sit together in the mix. Then progressively adding the separate elements together to see how the track was sitting as whole instrumental section. After I was happy with how the Track was sounding instrumentally, I then added the Vocal. The recording of the vocal I had was very good and I basically just wanted to build on how good the vocal was sounding. I used a 1176 Warm Audio Clone out-board for compression on the Vocal as well as using this as a gain stage for the vocal, driving the input. I used a standard reverb plug in on the vocal with 17% wetness and scooping the mid-frequencies on the EQ to give a very sublet Light Reverb sound.
In the Mastering stages of this Track I bounced it down to a Stereo File, putting it back into a separate Pro Tools session. I then sent the Stereo File through a Stereo Channel on the SSL using the SSL’s EQ for some Over-all mastering EQ. After I was happy with my EQs, I then sent the track through the SSLs Bus compressor, I used the compression to help glue the whole track together and also used this as a Gain-stage by driving the Make-up. The final stages of the master I used a Digital Limiter for my final gain-stage and to stop the track from clipping, as well as a POW-r Dither on the Master Fader in Pro-tools, this made sure the track was of a level that was commercially acceptable and was dithered down to the correct 16 Bit and 44.1kHz.