So I realise I haven't mixed that much music lately and after doing heaps of research into music from the late 1800's to early 1950's I got Jazz fever. So today I'm going to have a crack at mixing a jazz big band called The Abletones and their song Corine Corine (stems curtesy of Cambridge online). So having never mixed a full jazz band I started doing some research into how to go about it. The sound I am trying to obtain is a live jazz band feel. I want have instrument to stand out in the mix and for it sound like you're sitting in front of the big band yourself. To achieve this I aim to research how professionals mix jazz bands and work on my own goals on top of that. It should be a lot of fun and I hope you learn something as well.
Looking at websites like soundonsound.com I found a really good session that followed the process of recording and most importantly mixing a jazz band from start to finish. The mix is done my Mike Senior who is a professional mixing engineer and he had a great signal flow that helped me through my mix. It all starts with the Room Mics...
Faced with any acoustic multitrack, I almost always make a bee-line for the room mics. Because these usually deliver the most natural tone for each of the instruments (albeit typically with lots of room ambience), relying heavily on these mics often helps make the ensemble more believable.
My biggest challenge for this mix is to give every instrument it's one space both spectrally and spatially. This ensures you can hear all the instruments clearly and it gives the end outcome the experience of being in front of an actual big jazz band. That's my goal for this mix, among other things that go along with mixing as well of course but the main one is space. So in this mix are three separate room mics that I have to balance so I soloed each one to figure out where about's they were set up and panned them accordingly. It would be much easier to mix if i had a stage plot of where everything was set up so I immediately knew where to pan everything, but wheres the fun in that...
So I ended up panning them something like this to spread out the instruments evenly.
It looks a little messy but it ended up spreading my instruments to where I needed them rather than throwing them all over the place with 100 panning either side. That way they would overlap and it would be a spatial nightmare. The next step was panning the instruments to fit into these room mics positions which looked like this...
With the panning out of the way I could focus on separating the instruments sonically rather than spatially, giving each of them room to breathe in the mix. I did this by adding a Channelstrip plugin to each and adding their own compression and EQ. Since this band was live tracked (Nearly impossible not to live track a jazz band), each mic in the mix has quite a lot of bleed, EQing this out helps each track pop out above the rest.
After that and a bit of simple reverb the mix was starting to come together. Overall the band was recorded really well and the instruments began so shine out through the mix. Jazz song don't typically contain that much more processing (Creatively anyway) so I listened to it over a few time and decided that was that. Have a listen and see what you think. Music isn't really my forte so any feedback would be appreciated.
Post Publish Edit
The overall goal of my mix was to make it sound big and live like you were actually there and I believe I achieved that through my use of EQing and panning to make space for each instrument. A lot of the research I investigated did help me achieve this but they also went into a lot more details that didn't really help me achieve my goals too much.
Some feedback I received recommended I add saturation to add to the old timey feel of the jazz band which would've definitely helped the overall musical aesthetic. Overall I learned a lot from this side project and I hope you did to.
References
Gabel, D. Corine Corine [Online Stems]. Retrieved from http://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm#Acoustic
Messitte, N. (2017). 9 Tips for Mixing Jazz. Retrieved from https://www.izotope.com/en/blog/mixing/9-tips-for-mixing-jazz.html
Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio (Cambridge Music Technology). Retrieved from http://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm#Acoustic
Senior, M. (2017). Session Notes: Selwyn Jazz Part 2 |. Retrieved from https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/session-notes-selwyn-jazz-part-2
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