Ummmmmmmmmm....hmmmmmmmmmmmm...well......
First off, that song never made it on the Sky Blue Mind CD!!! We regretted that choice months later...
Very good song.
I appreciate your comments on that mix. I in fact mastered it myself. The bands CD was tracked by a friend of mine, Chris "Big Sweaty" Stevens, who is a local engineer/producer who has thrown many projects my way to mix. It was gracious of him to throw the Sky Blue Mind project my way because at the time, Echo Star Studio was about 1 year old, and I only had a few projects in that studio under my belt.
I will answer in order as you asked:
1 - Rich Treece, the guitarist/singer/songwriter of the band was after a polished, sort of slick, easy sound for the CD. Most of the reference he gave me for his stuff were artists like Sting, Seal, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Hooti, etc.......After a few days of mixing the CD, I had to have a serious sit down with Rich because his expectations from his tracks were out of league with how they were recorded! He was giving me reference to artists who spent over $100,000 in production for their CD, and he spent in the neighborhood of $4000 to track!!! I didn't have an SSL, NEVE, Amek console, and tons of class A processing.
I had to explain to Rich that his songs have a sound of their own, and that we will go much farther by trying to make the best of that sound, rather than trying to "emulate" some of the artists he wanted to sound like (the one's listed above no less!!!) It took a few beers, and a lot of me saying "Your tracks sound great, they just don't sound like the references you are giving me" type of things to get him to go along with this.
Another couple of beers, and we made a pact!
We would mix the CD to make what was their sound the best we were capable of.
Things went well from here. Instead of trying to make guitar and drums sound like something they wouldn't sound like, we were mixing them to have a sound that fit together. We were finding that a few tricks with track delay were working for the drums, and we were using
an Alesis D4 on the kick, and in the case of this song, the snare.
Vocals were compressed with a Behringer Composer, with a side chain to a graphic EQ to utilize frequency dependent compression on his voice. His performances were pretty solid, but there was a sort of annoying 7KHz hiss on all his S's that needed treatment.
Anyway.....Not sure how to explain the approach. I usually just mix a song to create the right blend of power, and clarity. I will sacrifice a little of either if I think the other needs more. This is a fine line in a mix. When to sacrifice a little clarity to achieve power, and when to sacrifice power for clarity. Those decisions are made as I go along, and sometimes are not conscience decisions, but rather, the way it ends up sounding good.
2 - This stuff enjoyed a few key elements. Good tracking. Decent producing. Lot's of time to mix. Few projects I have done since have enjoyed all three things above. Also, the songs are just pretty damn good!!! A good song that is well arranged, and tracked carefully is a JOY to mix, and I tend to get VERY anal on small details.
So, didn't really do anything different per se, just had good tracks to work with, a producer that knew what he was after, and enough time to mix it right. If only everything I worked on had these things going for it, more of it would sound as good!!!
3 - We spent an average of 13 hours per song to mix a 16 song CD!!! I spent pretty much a whole month working on this project. 3 songs were remixed (the first three we mixed.....), so there was about 19 days in that month, spead out over about 25 days. Some days, we could only work for 6 hours and would just leave the mix as is until we could get back to it.
4 - My mindset is always the same. Get the MOST I can out of what I am using. I know that much of the gear I used on that mix is not regarded as "top notch", but, certainly, if used well, was quite capable of acheiving excellent results. With the kind of hours spent on this mix, I had plenty of time to experiment, burn mixes to CD, and listen on a few different playback systems. As it goes with most "whole CD" mixing, once you start finding stuff that works, things become much easier, and you can then start spending your time practicing fader moves, and rehearsing effect parameter changes and what not.
5 - I mastered what you heard with Wavelab and
QMetric, and
the Waves L1 Ultramaximizer. The songs that made it on the CD were mastered at a place that at the time was the best mastering house in Portland Oregon. The mastering they did was okay, but I was not terribly happy with how much of the top end was clouded from what they did. Also, it seemed that instead of adding low end, a lot of lower midrange was introduced from mastering. This tended to cloud up the mix a lot, and sonically change the "character" that we work very hard to get in the mix. When I mastered this song, I paid very close attention to not disturbing the clarity in the high end, while trying to beef up some of the content below 80Hz, without that making an average playback system freak out!!!
Don't know what else to say. That was mixed about 3 1/2 years ago. Was mastered about 1 1/2 years ago. It is hard to recall much of what I was thinking at the time. It was just one of those projects that worked out quite well. It was a project that I was very excited to work on.
In the next two months, you will for sure be hearing some mixes I will be doing that will compete quite favorably with that song. I am mixing three projects in the next few months were the bid for mixing was on a per song basis, with a guarantee of 10 hours minimum per song. So, I will have plenty of time to get things done right.
Thanks for the nice words about that mix. Really, it means a lot. I don't think I have ever had anyone say they used any of my work as a "reference" for theirs!
Ed
