alright, here's mine...
download it at
www.nowhereradio.com/nessbass/ under Discography -> Singles.
As you will hear, I messed with the tracks a lot, in a production way, rather than in a mixing way. Here's in detail what I did:
I thought that the
snare sound was quite problematic, as were the ghost notes, so I triggered it using samples out of one of my band's recordings.
I then MIDI-ized the
kick, because it was easier for me to manipulate MIDI data than to fiddle around with more than 200 snippets of wav file, what would definitely have been possible, but would have taken much more time. So I corrected the timing issues that way and changed the patterns around, leaving some kicks out and putting others in, you will have to listen to see what I mean. I then used the MIDI data to trigger samples taken out of the original wav file. This way of doing it was made possible by the fact, that the kick drum wasn't really prominent in the overheads, so that I could change the timing without having to edit all the drum tracks.
The
toms were manually gated using automation, which is very nice, cause this way you can let them have a fairly natural decay (probably longer than what my noisegates offer).
You will also notice that I changed the verse parts, because I thought that the song could use some more drive there, so I added
rimclicks on all quarter notes. The rimclicks are also sampled, because they were really not there in the snare track.
With the drums that way, I thought that it might be a good idea to leave the
bass out of the verse part right after the first chorus, to gain some space to breathe. But I had decided against redoing the bass part, so I constructed a fake note with a natural, long decay out of a looped bit of the first note of said verse (did I make myself clear here?). Other than that, I didn't do anything to the bass part. I thought about replaying it in the first place, because Josh was contantly sliding up and down the fretboard all the time, and I didn't really like that, but as you don't hear very much of that in the mix, I left it the way it was.
Another thing you will probably have noticed is the
vocal arrangement.
My first impression of the first verse was that the end (the second "at all") didn't really fit where it was, so I used it to create a harmony.
I then delayed the backing vocal leading into the choruses ("do the same" and "again"), because I thought it would be better to fill the gap there to keep the excitement, rather than having a harmony.
The last thing I did vocal-wise, was to use the backing vocals at the end (where Josh is singing the same line three times) to build a
three-voice 'choir'. I did this by copying the track to two other tracks and by chopping these around, changing the order of the lines, so that I got three different successions:
(1->2->3/2->3->1/3->1->2)
I think it sounds much nicer that way, the single background vocal just sounded too 'solitary'.
Alright, I think that's enough for now. If someone wants to know specifics as to how i mixed certain tracks, please ask.
I have a question myself here...
I know that I maybe left too many of the kicks out and that the hihats are quite buried in the mix, but what about the low end? I guess I will have to start mixing on decent monitors, because I found it very hard to get the bass frequencies under control. So here's my question: I the bass (instrument) too boomy, or is it alright, and what about the kick? Would be great to know what's going on there, so could all you guys with decent monitoring share your thoughts on that?
Thank you all, this was (and still is) great fun.
David
