Multitrack Recording and Music Production Blog – D

I started the mix by muting every track and introducing them one by one in order of importance. Using an equaliser I rolled off the lows on the lead vocals, took off a little high and also located an unwanted frequency in the mids which I removed with a narrow notch filter. Next I found a vocal preset on a compressor and adjusted the threshold, gain and ratio to fit. I then put a very subtle DeEesser set to only affect the high frequencies. I then sent the vocal signal to an aux channel with reverb to give it more life and lastly I added delay for the section after the second chorus. I had to find the right delay time and avoid feedback overlaps as well as automate the bypass on the plugin to only be present during this section. I got the vocals to an appropriate volume and based the other parts around it.

The rhythm guitars were in four separate tracks panned hard left and right and I mixed them all in one channel. The original mix sounded very muddy so I rolled of the lows to clear room and added a BF-76 compressor but mostly for tonal colouring rather than mix placement. Lastly although the guitar was recorded with distortion I added a very small amount to add harmonic interest and beef it up more.

I rolled off lows on both snare channels (more on snare bottom) and used compression to isolate the snare as much as I could I also sent both to a very subtle reverb channel. The kick needed a lot more volume to work with the snare, I also took off some highs with EQ and isolated it using compression. After this I spent some time comparing the kick with the bass guitar to make sure they did not clash. On the bass tracks I removed a lot of high end and even slightly boosted some lows. I then compressed them for dynamic consistency.

Next I worked on the rest of the drums; there were some phase issues on the snare where the overhead and room microphones were slightly out of phase with the snare microphones and were affecting the snare tone negatively. To remedy this I zoomed in on the playlist and in slip mode aligned overheads and room to the snare parts which fixed the issue. The cymbals and hi-hat were not coming through loud enough on the overheads so I boosted the highs on them and took off a bit of low end. I also gave the room microphone more high end and gave a bit more to a mid frequency to enlarge the sound. Lastly on the drums I took high end off the toms and used an expander to remove background noise.

I decided to put the keyboard low in the mix like in the original just to add texture. I mixed the backing vocals similarly to the lead vocals but with more compression and less attenuated EQ. I also had to copy and paste the backing vocals into the final chorus and sync them up with the track. Similarly for the guitar solo I spent time going between the two takes, finding the best performance of each phrase and editing them together using cross-fades. I set the volume of the solo similar to the lead vocals as it takes its place and panned the two amp microphones left and right leaving the room microphone in the centre. I added EQ and compression to the solo to clean it up and then sent it to a phaser channel but only very subtly and with a very slow rate as well as reverb for tonal qualities and to add size. Lastly I multed the lead guitar overdub part onto two separate tracks for the two different sections, took loads of low end off the first section as it sounded very muddy, added a small amount of reverb and ran them both through a similar compresser as the rhythm guitar. Finally I automated the volume on the master track to fade out at the end and used Maxim for mastering.

I was on Pro tools for the whole session this week. We started by selecting every track and routing the outputs to 1+2 as we will be mixing “in the box” without the desk. Then we created a master fader, selected the “ALL” group and turned all of the tracks down so as to give ourselves enough headroom to work with and prevent the master fader from peeking. Before moving on we made sure that every track was named appropriately. After this we set our panning on each track (overheads hard left and right, toms left and right according to matching overhead, rhythm guitars hard left and right, backing vocals hard left and right and we slightly panned the dry solo mics against the room mic).

After this it was just a matter of listening to the piece and adjusting the volume faders to get a rough mix. The guitars and keyboard were much too loud so we made a group for them and turned them all down while also turning up the kick and snare as they are driving parts in the song. We also had to give the lead vocals more volume and adjust the backing vocals slightly quieter. Lastly we gave the bass and lead guitar a small boost. After everything was at an acceptable level we were able to turn the master fader back up to zero without it peaking instead it peeked around 10db.

Next we edited out all of the silence in longer tracks to avoid unnecessary noise in the mix. Then we found all of the tracks with punched in or edited recordings and subtly crossfaded the every adjacent take to avoid clicks or unnatural transitions while at the same time avoiding hearing both takes. Lastly we saved the project, closed pro tools and made sure that all of the project files were organised hierarchically and in the same folder.

We had a lot to record for the overdub week. We started by recording the guitar solo as without it there would be a large, boring instrumental break. I was playing guitar and after setting up the amp (high gain, high mids and lows, slightly less treble to avoid string noise) I ran through the part on loop as it was particularly difficult. We used two close microphones on the amplifier at the same distance (SM57 and an Electro-Voice RE20) and an AKG 414 as a room mic placed opposite the amp (set to omni-directional for room sound).I had to use a punch in for the last part as it overlapped and we recorded two takes in order to pick between the best executions of each lick.

We also re-recorded the lead guitar part as we were not happy with the one from week 3. For this I used the same amp settings as the solo.

Next we recorded keyboard; here I was able to get behind the desk and work Pro tools with Panashe. First we found the right sound on the electric piano and then ran it through the DI into the patch bay and then into the desk. I set the gain levels, pressed the “line” button and turned up the short faders into pro tools at the right level and then listened back with the long fader. We recorded in stereo using two jack leads, one for each output. We encountered a problem with a buzz coming into pro tools; we realised that the sound was coming from the keyboard itself and found that adjusting the volume made no difference to the buzz so to remedy this we simply set the keyboards volume to max and then reduced the gain on the desk. Increasing the signal to noise ratio like this got rid of the buzz.

Lastly we recorded backing vocals; for this me, George and Panashe all went into the dead room to record around one microphone. We encountered a problem where our headphones did not reach well enough but we simply moved closer to the headphone output. We used an AKG 414 with a pop shield set to omni-directional to capture all of our voices equally. After looping the chorus and practising a few runs we recorded together.

This was the first week were I was not performing so I was working the desk. Before the session began I printed off the lyrics just in case. We recorded vocals in the dead room to avoid unwanted room noise. We tested three microphones (Shure SM57, Electro-Voice RE20 and an AKG C414) to see which best suited our singer (Panashe). The SM57 gave a surprising amount of low end for its polar pattern while the 414 seemed the most clear and intelligible. After the initial test we did another one but over this time over the track; now the RE20 and the 414 stood out the most in the mix. After a final vote we decided on the 414 as we felt it had the most detail and got the most out of Panashe’s voice. We set the polar pattern to cardioid as we were after a direct sound but we avoided hyper cardioid as we also wanted to get the subtle resonances from his body. Then we enabled the bass cut off filter to 160Hz and under to avoid unnecessary low end noise which could cause EQ problems at mixing. Lastly we made sure that Panashe did not stand or sing to too close to the microphone as he might overload it.

The first thing I had to do on the desk was zero the faders from the previous session. From here I set the gain levels for each microphone (enabling phantom power ((48v)) on the 414’s channel. Before we tested the vocals over the track I only had to press the “mix” button and set the input level with the short faders and output with the long faders (once we were recording into Pro tools I turned the “mix” button off). When setting the short faders into Pro tools I tried to make sure that the loudest parts that he would sing were peaking between 20 and 5db. We recording more than one take to allow for variation and multing during mix down. It was also important to keep regular communication with Panashe to make sure he was comfortable and delivering the best performance.

After the session I also made sure that the desk was zeroed.

We were tracking electric guitar this week. Our track “Beat It” is guitar heavy so we had a lot to record. First we recorded the basic rhythm part which we double tracked (recorded twice) for a heavier sound. For this we used two Shure SM57’s at the same distance from the amplifier. To get both a bright and dark recording we pointed one of the microphones in the middle of the amp (for treble) and the other to the side of the speaker (for bass). When we tested the sound there was too much low end so on the desk we cut the frequencies below 50Hz using EQ this gave us a less bass like sound (we also panned these to hard left and right). We played the guitar through a Vox modelling amp so we were able to dial our desired tone in. We avoided adding affects like reverb as these can be added easily during mixing. I was playing the guitar this week so I made sure that the tone fitted the song. We set the amp to “High Gain” and turned the gain nob all the way up for a heavy metal tone.

Before recording we made sure that the mix has alright in my headphones. While recording the rhythm part I missed a note at the end which we remedied in Pro Tools by copying the note from the same part that I had played earlier and pasting it were the note should be.

We also recorded the lead guitar part which is more aggressive. We put less distortion and gain on the amplifier for this part as it was too overpowering. We also added a room microphone to get the more reverberant room tone that suited the lead part. For this we placed an sE 2200 on the other side of the live room from where I was playing and set the polar pattern to Omni-directional in order pick up all of the reflections of the room.