My good friend Jack Shannon wrote a hard hitting punk rock track recently, I helped him record drums and I also mixed and mastered the track, Wew!
Check the track out here while you read!
Minimal Editing:
Punk! Need I saw more? A raw sounding genre with minimal production, and in this case: Minimal editing!
Discussing with the artist Jack, we agreed that we wanted a 'no shits given' kinda sound, that obviously started with the performance, but absolutely continues into the mixing stage.
Sibilance:
For this track I did manual sibilance and consonant control editing on the double and backing vocals, removing areas where I perceived there was too much plosive or harsh sibilance. I didn't go over the top here like I would on a pop track, I actually want to keep some of the harshness to fit in with the punk genre, this isn't supposed to be a clean and smooth vocal, I wanted the sound to reflect the lyrics and feel of this loud in your face tune.
Time Editing:
Going for a 'garage' sound, I really wanted to keep the feel live, slightly off time and imperfect with inconsistencies. I also noticed a few sections where it just felt a little too out of time, even for this genre it seemed wonky. So I synced the bass up with the tempo (140bpm) of the track, with a 15% margin for inaccuracy so that it didn't sound like MIDI, I played around with that syncing the bass line up with the kick drum somewhat. I also took advantage of my playlists and dropped in some better fills on the drums from some previous takes, polishing the drums up a bit even though they're still pretty rough, but now I think to a level that contributes to the track rather than taking the listener out out of sync band members.
Vocal Aligning:
Again to some extent I wanted to keep it rather raw, but after I experimented with some vocal aligning of the double and to a lesser extent the backing vox, I decided to go ahead and roughly line up the vocals to enhance the harmonies and doubles, I think this really payed off and doesn't lose its 'I don't care' vibe.
Mixing:
Distortion:
A pretty key part of the punk sound I went for, I added some varying distortion to the vocals, the bass and the drums using a few different plug-ins that each have their own unique sound. I used the standard 'LoFi' from ProTools, and two SoundToys distorters 'Decapitator' and 'Devil-Loc'. Below you can see these three plug-ins being applied to the vocals at different stages, my vocal bus has Lo-Fi and Decapitator in series, followed up with the Devil-Loc on a parallel bus being blended in. A little more on my distortion techniques later in this blog.
Levels and Limiting:
After my initial bounce of the track, feedback from Jack was great but with one suggestion: "pump the guitars up - break the conventions, it's punk". I tried it out and wow, I really like the sound of the guitars loud, very in your face and a good genre enhancing harshness comes into it. along with his suggestions I EQ'd the vocals a bit more to keep them more of less in front of the mix, and I also slammed the limiter in the mastering stage. This resulted in the track becoming a really loud, dense wall of sound, full of relentless energy until the song abruptly stops.
This new version really brought the mix to where Jack and I wanted it to be! We now have this banging punk track that breaks some musical and technical conventions, might sound harsh at times but really hits the spot if you're wanting some angry music.
Some Cool Tricks:
I've automated a couple of distortion plug-ins to increase their effect on the vocals as the song progresses. For me this effect adds to the intensity of the track and backs the lyrics up well, getting more 'violent' as the vocals continue. Below you can see the steady rise of the 'mix' knob on the devil-loc and also the automation on the 'distortion' knob of Lo-Fi, these increase to a certain point and get totally removed for the final line 'I never ever think I'll get over it' to emphasise the idea of giving up that's implied in the lyrics.
The guitars! I really loved how they sounded when Jack sent them through to me, so I've actually largely left them as they were apart from some minor compression, EQ and ofcourse some delay and reverb. One of the cool small tricks that I've done with them, is apply SoundToys' 'FilterFreak' separately to both guitars, I used this plug-in to modulate a high frequency notch filter based off of a level threshold that I've set. This provides the guitars with a sense of movement and even seemingly brings out the low frequencies giving them a fuller sound! I got this idea from this video where Pro Audio Files offers some inspiration from how to make guitar tracks more interesting (2:50). I've taken a much more subtle approach from him, But I very much enjoy how it sounds considering that I'm wanting to keep the guitars in the punk genre!
Overall:
I know that the snare is inconsistent, the drums totally have some timing issues, the vocals have some louder than normal sibilance, the vocals are not perfectly on pitch and even drift around at times and its just in general an imperfect unconventional sound. But that's the genre and goal of this track, aesthetically I believe I've achieved a pretty cool sound that ties in with the feel Jack was after when he wrote the track. Our process from recording to mixing and mastering has been very easy and transparent, with two-way feedback aplenty! Our communication is what really pushed this project along, which started with writing a rough timeline that would see this track to completion, and continued with our consistent feedback and guidance. And we've even beat the timeline by a week as well! =P
What do you think?
References:
1. Audio, P. (2014). How to Create a Synth Sound out of Guitar with EQ, Tremolo, FilterFreak & More. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOSh4_RJ1n4 [Accessed 28 Nov. 2018].
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