A1A2, in reality, the tracking engineer makes the biggest difference. GIGO!!! If I don't have great sounding tracks to work with, I can't make them sound like this. The guy that tracked this stuff is pretty good. Great at getting guitar tones. He is hit and miss on drums, but he did okay on this one.
I DO think most should concentrate on better tracking. Period. Tracking is where it is at!!! GIGO!!! If the tones at tracking are lacking, the mix will reflect that severely. I cannot stress that enough. Sometimes it is impossible to track well when the client lacks the talent to play with tones that will work well for their music, or if they just don't have a clue what actually sounds good when they hear it. Trusting an experienced tracking engineer is a MUST.
In this case, we had a great song, some pretty damn good musicians, and a tracking engineer with something to prove.
Chris Stevens tracked this whole thing on 16 bit ADAT's. Drum's were ART and Mackie pre's. Bass was ART's, as were many of the guitar tracks. Acoustics and vocals were
a Focusrite Red 8. All mixed on a Ghost console with only 8 channels of compression available, 1 Composer, 1 AutoCom, 1 3630 (by the way, this comp was used on that Lead acoustic guitar solo and the bass!!!
), and 1 ART Dual Levelar. I only had a Lexicon LXP 5, and a Alesis quadraverb for effects. It was mixed to a 16 bit DAT. None of this gear was "all that", and most of it is scoffed at.
Oh well.
participant. This is a different singer and different band altogether.
As to how I came up with this "arrangement". Well, we started these mixing sessions out with artist playing me a lot of Sting, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Dave Matthews, and and Seal! LOL...Toad was the closest I heard to this sound, but they still sounded quite a bit different. The singer/guitar player guy was producing the CD, and he REALLY wanted his stuff to sound like the above artists.
It took doing two really bad sounding mixes before I could convince him that we should pursue a mix that works well with what is tape, rather than a "reference". Refernce material is all fine and good, but I pointed out to him that all those artists that he wanted to "sound like" sounded very different from each other too!!! Once he understood that, he was ready to start pursuing mixes that worked well for his songs. Things proceeded much faster and the output was much more pleasing. We weren't trying to make Lemondade out of raw meat!
I seriously don't know what goes through my head on stuff like this. I just get an impression of what I would like for it to sound like. This music had very "tough" sounding guitars, and I wanted to highlight the intricacies of his playing. I could hear a sort of processed drum sound behind that. I felt the bass was best left vague as the playing wasn't sync'ed all that well to the kick drum (this was more of the drummers problem than the bass players problem....). The vocals are very monotone so it wasn't all that hard to get them to sit somewhere in the mix. I just had to make sure there was a little space for his limited range. Luckily, the guitar arrangement was such that nothing competed with the vocals much.
That lead solo was tricky. The performance had a LOT of dynamics to it, and the background music was sort of static. It was certainly a surprise to find that a Alesis 3630 MADE that solo happen in the mix!!! I tried the other three compressors and none of them came close to bringing the lead upfront enough without sounding very hard. I needed soft guitar that was upfront, the 3630 made that happen. Screw off all of you that put this compressor down!!! I LIKE my 3630!!!
The delay hit on the vocals going into the solo and in the last verse almost didn't happen!!!! This guy HATED delay, and I had to practically BEG him to leave it in there!!!!
I might remix this song again one day. I didn't have editing for tracks back then, and I think I could have done a lot for the drum sounds by lining up the mics in a DAW. I also used a sampled snare with the original snare, and a used a sampled kick. Both had latency that I tried to get spot on, but just seem to sit right. A little drumagog would have done the trick!!!
There are some places too where the kick just didn't sit right for me and a slight adjustment in the time line would have made for better impacts during transitions. I think I could have brought the bass into the mix a little better with a little work on the drums. But what is done is done. I make no excuses for this mix!!!
This song didn't make the bands CD. We mixed 15 songs in 21 days (we remixed 5 songs, the earliest 5) and when it came time to choose 12 to put on the CD, this one didn't make it. I regret now my part in that decision. Oh well. This band isn't together anymore so it matters little. I might later upload some other mixes from this CD that came out pretty nice. Some who have been around this bbs for a while have heard at least 3 or 4 mixes off this CD. Maybe some of you still have them?
I did mess up the mastering a bit on this one. It was one of the first things I ever ran through a L1 and I learned from those tom hits at the end that the L1 isn't going to alone work for mastering!!!
Ed
