After wrapping up the editing of our final recording session, we decided to get into the beautiful Custom 75 Neve studio and do a mostly analogue mix with it's channel strips, warm summing sound, in-built compressors (2254s) and a bunch of awesome outboard hardware. Lets get into it!
Click here to read a bit about this analogue desk and those compressors mentioned above.
I'm gonna take you through the main mix we did here on the console, note that we did do some in-box ProTools mixing before this session to add some effects and plug-ins that unfortunately we don't have hardware for in this studio!
Here's the final track for reference and enjoyment while reading!
Our mixing process:
We began by routing our edited track through the desk, quickly filling up every single channel available, we had to level and group a couple of things in ProTools like backing vocal tracks to make everything fit! - Leaving a few planned channel strips empty to be used for hardware parallel compression later. This routing requires you to know how the desk works in regards to receiving inputs from the DAW, and then sending that channel to be summed with everything else at the main mix. These controls for this desk are available at the top of each channel and in the centre of the console as seen below.
Label stuff!
we made sure to label every track correctly, this really helps save a lot of time during mixing. Nothing is worse than having to constantly double check what track is on what channel.
Levels:
Initial volume and panning. As the track was lightly mixed already in our DAW, only minor adjustments were required when we played the track through the Genelec studio monitors. We did pan everything where we wanted on the console. We also continued to make minor adjustments throughout the session to the levels and panning.
Mixing tip: Listen and mix mostly at low levels to preserve your ears and hear the track dynamics accurately.
Effects (In Box):
With our recording of the new clicks and routing the effects to the desk, we realised that the reverb, delay and all the effects from the original scratch tracks no longer worked well. So back to the box to redo some effects!
Little Plate is a great verb that we used, you can hear it applied to the clicks we recorded with a one second decay and lows cut from it at around 600-800Hz to remove any 'boomyness'. Ofcourse the plug-in is set to 100% wet so we could use sends on each channel in PT (ProTools) to set the verb separately for each instrument.
A really cool delay trick we used for the main vocals, is to place an in tempo delay (we used an eighth note) with a small pitch shift followed by some feedback so the delay loops through the plug-in and is heard a few times.
This technique is sounds great because each delay that is fed back also has the slight pitch shift applied to it again, resulting in each successive delay playing at a higher pitch than the last one. Have a listen to the track again and focus on the main vocals, see if you can hear this effect!
Another simple yet effective tool we used was a saturator! It proved great for getting a vintage and dirty sound on the keys solo that you hear during the bridge starting at 1:17. Here we used SSL's Native X-saturator which is well known for it's excellent quality.
Before moving on, I really want to share how we got our sick bass sound!
What you can see here is our bass processing. We've implemented a chain that provides a more snappy thick sound, and also makes it sound like our bass player is really good. We started by duplicating the bass track (naming one 'Bass Lo' and the other 'Bass Hi'), placing a non-linear crossover over each channel (check out the freqs above) and on 'Bass Hi' we put a 'Lo-Fi' saturator to introduce some distortion on the high end. This is followed by a sidechian expander, set so that this saturated/phased/hi end signal only comes in initially on the attack of the bass. In essence, we now have control over a cool plucked sound that we can now blend in with the 'Bass Lo' track!
We also hit he bass with a compressor thats got a relatively fast release (125ms), allowing the tail of each bass note to come back up in volume. With these two tricks paired together I think we have achieved an awesome sound.
EQing and Filtering on the Neve:
This Neve is equipped with it's signature '1081' 4 band EQs, which are hailed as some of the best ever produced by Neve. They use switched EQ settings with 5 sets of separate circuitry, one for each frequency option. The high pass and low pass filters also have 5 switched frequencies each at 18dB per octave. The use of these channel strips is the main reason why we chose to do an analogue mix with this console!
So we went through and used these beautiful EQ's quite a bit, almost on every channel, although some channels didn't need much as we were happy with our recording. The left photo is of our EQ for the kick, and the right we have our bridge keys 'rhodes', our outro keys 'e-grand' and the backing vox. We made sure to do plenty of bypassing the EQ's to make sure we were heading along the right path! Lastly, we also hit our parallel compression tracks with some bass and treble EQ boosts. more on that below!
Compression:
Here's why we saved a few channels earlier in the session, so we can use parallel compression on some key track groups! We used ProTools to send tracks to the spare channels, and from there we used the patch bay and some bantam cables to route signal through the hardware compressors and back to the channel as an insert. (This short video explains why we use patch cables and bantam leads)
Following the parallel compression guidelines set out by Justin Colletti from 'SonicScoop' in this video (which also explains what this technique is if you're unsure), we set the compressors characteristics. After the compression was applied to the duplicate channel we blended them into the mix to taste!
We used the Distressor from Empirical Labs in 'opto' mode for the vocal bus (look at the manual for more on the Distressor)
We hit the band (everything but the vox) with a stereo compressor - the PRO VLA II - with the settings you see below, at 6 - 10dB of gain reduction.
And finally, we used the stereo compressor that's inbuilt for the master output. This is the 2254 that can be applied to the mix by simple hitting a button on the desk.
Using Reference Tracks:
After doing some minor final touches to our mix, we made sure to check out a bunch of reference tracks through the studio monitors. This is to make sure that our track isn't overly heavy or light in any particular frequency range and also to re-align the track with what we love about these other references. (Check out this article for an in depth read on why reference tracks help during mixing). We references tracks like Erykah Badu's Apple Tree, and D'Angelos Brown Sugar. Listening to these and several others, we found our track to be quite heavy in bass, so using the Neve's 1081 EQs again, we lowered our levels to reproduce those in Apple Tree. We also changed the panning of our hats a bit and re-leveled the vocals.
This process also highlighted to me the room acoustics of the studio. There seemed to be huge bass traps in the room corners and the low frequency response varied hugely throughout the room. Noticing this I was very pleased that we thought to use the reference tracks to help us with the final mix.
That pretty much wraps up my blogs for this project. Thanks for following along :) and feel free to check out my other projects I've got on here!
- Andy Leeder
Bibliography:
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