I’ve been asked to mix 6 tracks from local Hip-Hop / rap artist Jimmy Yox!
After hearing his previous work and the stems of the beats I was asked to work with, I happily agreed as I saw this project and it’s potential.
Process:
I began by editing and mixing a single track 'All My Life' - this was to check on if Jimmy liked my creative input on his tracks.
After he gave me feedback and approved of the mix on this one track I'm now going to begin the process on all of the other tracks. My plan is to edit them all consecutively, followed by any sound design and the mixing. Then I’ll Master them all together. I’m choosing to do it this way as my creative process works much better when I can focus fully on mixing, rather than jumping from track to track editing then mixing. I’ll be able to improve my workflow efficiency by having a few big editing sessions to get it all done!
I'll send Jimmy the tracks as they are mixed and be able to make changes to them as his feedback comes in. I won't be waiting around however for his feedback, I'm going to jump straight into mixing the next track - Time is key, and judging from the time I've spent on this first track, editing is going to take around 50% of my time, mixing 40% and mastering 10%.
Mistakes were made!
The first rough mix I submitted to the artist - I was quite happy with it and knew that what I had was already coming close to industry standard, I also knew that it needed some more work but I wanted to hear some real feedback from the artist before I continued down the aesthetic path I chose.
Lucky I did.
I was extremely surprised when the feedback I got was entirely negative - he said things like ‘why is my lead distorted, pitched down and sounding like a slowed down record‘....
needless to say I was confused. I asked for more specific feedback and got just about the same response.
Slightly discouraged I looked into the issue, nothing from my session was slowing down the vocal, even with everything bypassed. I went back to the original session Mitch Stan recorded and BAM the entire track was faster. This is probably the biggest 'facepalm' moment during my mixing career so far.
After some investigating, I realised I had imported all of the stems from his track at the wrong sample rate. Starting my session at 44.1kHz instead of the original 48kHz, this resulted in all of the files getting converted and therefore slowed and pitched down. Not only had I delivered this incorrect sample rate version as a rough mix to the artist, but I’d also edited and mixed the track at this slower playback speed without even noticing something was up. Wow.
So after realising this, I corrected it by creating a new session at the original sample rate, and importing all of the session data and tracks from the old session.
I re-mixed things accordingly as it was now pitched back to the original recording, and delivered this new rough mix to the artist with a sincere and explanatory apology.
I’m sure I’ll never do that again!
Feedback on first track mix of ‘All My Life’
After the sample rate debacle, I’d given him my mix of the non slowed down version - his feedback was along the lines of ‘Much better dude! I feel however that I would love the vocals to sit back in the mix a bit more, and the 808s and drums to bang out more. The overall compression seems a bit off too, aside from that sounding good. Can you please copy and paste the hook directly after that last verse? then after that 4 bars of the melody and bass by Itself then a fade out on the next 4 bars other melody and bass. That would be dope.’
This feedback gave me plenty to work with!
I went through and played with the levels of the drums and vocals, the buss compression I have on the sub mix and also added some multi band compression to all of the vocals, this reduced the harshness in some parts and I believe addressed what he talked about when he mentioned an issue with the ‘overall compression’.
I also re-arranged the song using grid mode to the arrangement he suggested and sent him back the new version of the track that night!
Resources:
As detailed in my case study blog about the reference artist for these tracks (Kevin Gates), I'll be using a lot of information from blogs to videos about processing vocals and mixing this genre. These are all listed in that blog. As well, I've found that Slate Digital's Masterclass series on Mixing Hip-Hop with Cameron Cartee has been extremely helpful for mixing this first track and I'm going to be referring to it throughout the mixing on all of these tracks. This series is actually of particular interest to this project because Cameron Cartee is mixing a new Kevin Gates track - absolutely perfect for Jimmy Yox!
Conclusion:
Apart from my crazy fuck up, I really like my planning here. Getting this single track to him before the rest really gave me a chance to hone in on his aesthetic preferences and will provide me an awesome guide to how to mix the rest of his tracks. I'm on track with my timeline so far and aim to have these tracks mixed for mastering within the next 3 weeks
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