Hey team! Recently I was challenged to mix a song in exactly 1 hour and see what progress I could make. I planned to focus on cleaning it all up and make simple mixing adjustments like overall level, panning, dynamics, reverb ect. The sound I'm going for is a hifi sound that has prominent vocals, drum kit and lead guitar. The mix also contains some synth patches I plan to mix them so they are complimentary rather than overpowering. With all that in mind I got to work and here's what I ended up with!
With only 1 hour to mix this I had to prioritise certain choices over other. The start of my mixing process was making groups to edit tracks together and ultimately save time later down the track. The main plugin I used was channel strip as it contains an EQ, compressor which saves time and space when doing simple edits like this. After organisation I started where most mixes start, the drum kit.
Drums:
The overall sound I was going for with the drums in this were powerful but not overpowering. I didn't want it to sound like they were trashing around in a garage but I also wanted the drum and snare to punch through the other tracks. I achieved that by using a fair mix of compressors EQs and also a gate for the kick drums as pictured below.
This led to a punchy tight kick and snare, mixed with a small amount of reverb these sat really well in my mix. For the overheads and room mics, I cleaned them up with and EQ and had them focusing for or the high end of the drum kick and give the snare and kick some space. I also added a denoiser to the Overheads of the high hats because they had a staticy background. The only reason I mention this is that if this were a grungier, dirtier mix I probably would've left the background noise but I was going for a more polished end product. Over all My kit sounded clean punchy and more on the bright side which complimented the mix quite well.
Guitars:
The lead guitar was easy one of my biggest time killers. I was given 2 takes of the same guitar and a room recording as well. I panned these to the left (around 60) as I had a lot going on in the centre field of this mix. I sent them all into a stereo aux track and added a channel strip and reverb send. I wanted these guitars to sound nice and bright to I cut a lot of the low end and focused on the highs to help it sit up in the mix. I noticed a lot of elements to this mix were quite low apart from the vocals and lead guitar so i wanted to accentuate the difference with hard panning and EQ as shown below.
The other guitar tracks were a bit trickier to get right (especially with my time constraint). A second guitar playing chords (labeled aptly Guitar 2) was a bit meatier than the lead guitar. To make use of my space I panned it hard right to compliment the lead guitar. The EQ I used for this guitar was a bit different as I wanted to leave the high end for vocals and lead guitar so it ended up looking like this. I cut a lot of the highs and tried to focus on the lows without it being too muddy.
The last guitar parts were the guitar solos near the end of the track. These were quite easy as they already had a lot of effects already applied so my job was simple EQ, compression, panning, level adjustments and some well needed fades.
Vocals:
As with most mixes the vocals are the key element to focus on and make sure its legible. My focus was to have it stand out and have it's own space in the mix as well as have a clean amount of reverb. I EQed the vocals to cut out much of the unwanted low end except a key frequency that vocalist uses on her low notes. I boosted 4k which is the core frequency in human speech and it gave the vocals some clarity. Another key decision was moving the back up vocals a touch left and right. As you can see in my photos below they're ever so slightly out of time. This was to give them space from each other because when they were lined up perfectly it muddled the lyrics as it was hard to understand. Moving them gave them space and allowed you to focus on the lead lines rather than be caught up in the other back up vocals. I also panned the back up vocals left and right respectively to give the lead vocals space in the centre.
Extra Elements:
The other parts of this mix include three Moog synth patches and a doubled up Tack piano track. These really blended well in the song apart from a few sections of the patches. In those sections I added some fades to stop the synth from building up too much and taking over the mix and in other section I just had to attenuate the levels for the same reason. The Tack piano part came in one the last sections of the song and the only other instruments left are the drum bass and lead guitar so i panned the piano right to compliment the left sided guitar. I also added some heavy reverb to help it ring out and sound slightly softer as pictured below.
Conclusion:
So after my hour was up I was quite happy with the overall end product. I was able to clean up the parts that sounded a bit grungy like the guitars and heavy moogs and turn it into something a little brighter. I was happy with the use of plugins to save space and organise my session a little more. I learned a lot and hopefully you did as well. Thanks for reading!
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