Some Guy contest entry
Howdy folks, I’m new here on this site but I come from the PureMix site. Here are my “thoughts, techniques and impressions” as required by the rules. If I get time to figure out a way to share my mix on this thread, I will, but otherwise you can hear it if/when the PureMix site opens up a way to hear others’ submissions.
I did it all ITB with Logic Pro 9. Stock Apple plug-ins only. Mostly with headphones, plus some car and living room checking. My poor iMac hard drive couldn’t keep up with all the tracks and I was too lazy to trim all the silence out of the timeline, but I do have 16 GB of RAM, so I made a 3.5 GB RAM drive and put the wavfiles in there. Problem solved.
Used very little automation. Almost everything sits untouched the whole way through. I definitely could have automated some tweaks in places, but I try first to get everything to fit together as-is, which ended up good enough for me to not want to bother.
My snare sucks!! I absolutely could not figure out how to get tight punchy snare. It seemed like the “beat” track was just flat-out lousy. Super-tight gating plus reverb was the best I could come up with, but I’m not happy with it. I would have totally just drum-replaced the whole thing, but I don’t have any tools for doing that. Wish I could’ve just muted the damn thing and used only the other snares, but it was far too essential for the song.
Kicks got some gating and then most processing was done on a bus of kicks. I was able to almost completely eliminate the disagreeable roomy-boomy kick from the “beat” track with the previously-mentioned gating, plus a little bit of ducking on it by kick3.
I made the piano pretty wet in reverb. Seemed appropriate alongside the “vibe guitar” and all my vocal delays.
Nothing too special on the guitars. I don’t think I quite got “verse guitar” to sit how I wanted. The “chorus guitar” I put an amp sim on to make it more synth-like. I thought it fit better that way.
The main bass got some much-needed highpass, then distortion, comp, and ducking by kick1. The bridge bass got an electric guitar amp sim.
I made separate vox busses for each section (prechorus, chorus, oohs, etc.) and did almost all processing on the busses rather than the individual tracks. My idea was that this would help differentiate the sections from each other and also fuse the individual voices together within each section. Once I had the general sound for a bus, I did spend about five seconds EQing each vocal individually just to gently dip a unique mostly-arbitrary frequency on each. Then I picked one vocal from each section to be the lead vocal, and reassigned it to a bus belonging to a different section so that it would stand out from the backing vox.
I’ve got four delays running on the vocals. They feed each other a litte bit. Lots of ducking going on on the delay returns. One of them ended up with four comps on it, all sidechained from varying things. I thought it ended up kinda cool when the ducking on a return ends up noticeable in the send to one of the other delays. Yes, a duck can echo after all.
Nothing special on the SFX. I included the crash FX in my parallel drum comping. I omitted “Dog FX,” because f**k that.
Some EQ and parallel comp on the whole show, et voila! Had a blast. Thanks Ben and everybody else who played a part putting this together. Looking forward to Ben’s PureMix video so I can learn how to fix my crappy snare!
) and I composes, plays and records my own music.