Mixing: Darling

The song in question:

I love this work. More than just about anything I've had the opportunity to try. It was an incredibly fun project for a friend of mine and I'm excited to do more. So let's dive straight in to the process.

Tracking was all done remotely via a basic, bargain tier audio interface. As evidenced by the track titles, it may have taken more takes than we would like...

After getting all these takes, comping, comparing, picking which sounds we liked and didn't, I was able to dive into my process.

My general starting method was to use a surgical EQ to target unwanted frequencies, then focus on overall volume. Following that, I got straight into coloring. The Maag EQ plugins were my best friend - simple, broad strokes to change the tonality into what I pictured. Typically I used these on bus channels to equally apply across all tracks grouped together.

Guitars:

Vocals:

I wanted the vocals to have more body - this song especially had some intricacies in the female vocals that needed some depth to help fill the space. The guitars were good as is, but taking the final, cabinet sim tone and giving it some more mids and highs made it feel complete and connected in the broader context.

I took a jump ahead and worked on getting the reverb tone I wanted for each section next. The Atlantis Dual Reverb was my go-to, but I used a few others as well.

This plugin focuses on simulating a real room (or two if you're feeling experimental) and worked beautifully. The biggest problem with amp/cab simulators is all the mics are close. They don't capture the "awe" factor of a larger space. This nicely fills those gaps with a low dry/wet mix for guitars, and for vocals it can create a more typical effect of being in a cathedral or well designed hall. Having options for mutiple microphones is a big plus as well.

I could spend hours talking about reverb and the tweaks, but you always end up with a semi-static product. Automating the reverb and volume for swells and space was the real sweetness.

During the song, the "Darling" tagline is repeated in the outro. These are perfect times to give Baykah's vocals extra volume and reverb to really accentuate those moments. I automated three things for vocals: volume, wet/dry mix, and decay. All of these increased for the important swells, and all except decay quickly returned to normal values.

My penultimate "broad strokes" adjustment is in compression. After the bones of the song have taken shape, the sound has been colored to my (and my client's) taste, it's time to add what I consider the texture.

Compression, at its core, is simple. Reduce peak levels, increase the quieter parts. Compress the signal into a lower dynamic range.

But it isn't that simple. Compressors behave differently depending on attack time (time before effect is applied), release time (time after effect is applied that it no longer applies), and some various combination of input/output gain and threshold.

One of my favorites for normal usage is the MC77 1176 simulation by Purple Audio. Excellent product, wide range of applications, and it's in stereo. For double-tracked guitars, it's great. Bus the tracks together, pan individually, and compress either the same or adjust to taste/need. Each compressor has its own character that it imparts to the sound. The 1176 has an incredibly fast attack and release, meaning the transients, or the loudest part of the note, do not typically escape unscathed. An LA-2A or Vari-Mu has a much slower attack time and lets larger parts of those transients through.

Since it applies the effect on a L/R (or M/S) basis, each channel is effected independently. There is no recipe for compression. As a mixer, do your job, trust your ear, and when in doubt, take a break. After about 15 minutes of fanangling with the compressor on guitars I took a break. Eventually, I got the desired effect, made the guitars more omnipresent in the mix without making them too focal and removing the listener focus on Baykah's vocals. I think my biggest mistake was spending too much time on solo'd instruments, and in the future I will be putting more time into the contextual adjustments.

Finally, I reach for my mix bus controls. This will be the last broad strokes adjustment I make on the song. I have had it set up for a basic set of adjustments based on how the song sounded originally the entire time, occasionally turning on/off the collection of inserts to make sure I wasn't missing anything major.

I like ending my signal chain out of the bus with a limiter to ensure that I'm not hitting my main output with peaks over 0dBFS.

At this point I'm running into a Variable Mu compressor and a graphical EQ. I have a loudness meter to let me know about where my LUFS are (THEY DO NOT MATTER) and what my loudness range, LRA is. The compressor is there to "glue" the song together. Binding each individual track by limiting the overall dynamic range. Typically I'm going for a very small, between 0 and 2 VU gain reduction. I just don't want the vocals to blow out of the track, or the bass to be ridiculously loud comparatively. Human ears perceive different frequencies differently, as a drummer, mine are lightly fried already. It also lets me boost the output volume by pushing the compressor with the input gain, limited by it's reactivity and pushing the peak level down, but the average level up.

My last EQ is a graphical to kind of show me what I've been hearing. Where is my loudness concentrated. A still shot won't do any good here, I watch where the peaks and valleys for, adjust, repeat. I like to try and do my adjustments with my eyes closed, not looking at the size of the band. The visual element is just there as a guide to help understand what the frequency spectrum map of the song looks like and this EQ in particular makes a very tone-neutral adjustment to it.

This isn't an all-inclusive list of effects and actions I took to adjust the song and tracks to taste, just a few of what I consider the most important. Outside of these I've used vacuum limiters, distortion, tape emulation, chorus effects, etc.

I adore these minute adjustments. The finicky nature of audio as a whole means that each change prior to the final main out can have a butterfly effect on each following piece of equipment. Being able to foresee and anticipate those is a challenge, but a fun one!

Some adjustments I made for different requests:

Guitars are too loud -> now suddenly everything is too loud, so instead of lowering level, reduce attack time and reduce output gain slightly on the MC77

Vocals need more body -> I actually covered this one earlier, but I added those glorious low-mids via the Maag EQ2

Synth too quiet -> yeah this one I actually just raised the levels.

After however many revisions (I lost count at 12) between myself and the client my friend, we each consider the mix completed and I move on to mastering. A subject of which I am absolutely not a master.

This is a constantly evolving and learning process, so after I engineered these three songs I changed how I approach a projects like this. I will be detailing more of my workflow and my struggles with different plugins and songs in the future.

Check out the full EP on all streaming services under the band name Autumn Historic. I look forward to working on more of these tracks in the future.

Till next.