2010 October 10
Friday saw the commencement of the Tweaking Frequencies mix project. We began by exporting Pat’s project’s individual tracks and importing them into a fresh Cubase project. All 30 tracks were then colour coded, placed into logical folders, grouped routed to the mix bus and then out to the monitor bus (either Events are Avantones) as is now my standard practice. Rough song levelling performed, then individual track adjustments. The production was already in very good shape, so only minor tone shaping required (prinipally low mids and mids). Subtle shaping on snare for more crack and punch, beefed meat (not to be confused with boom) on the kick and various other eq subtleties. No edits needed. No enhancers or harmonic distorters added at the track level. First master using minimal eq., fairly mediocre compression and wide band limiting.
Mix/master sent yesterday in the early hours. Received mix mod request and mastering for more brightness. To aid this task, installed the living room amp and speaker into my monitoring environment, with a single B&W monitoring the mono mix, positioned at a recessed 2m from the mix position (as opposed to 1m for the near fields). This now provides an alternative window into the mixes and one that was valuable during the revised louder and brighter master for Pat’s track today. Awaiting his second round of comments. The track is to be entered into a competition tonight/tomorrow.
Other major activity was the Hey Big Aki mix session. Great day and night had by all greatly improving our previous efforts. Most of the band were present and this yielded a jovial and hard working environment. The session was roughly 2 pm till 10 pm with appropriate breaks. Mixes monitored in car stereos as well. Minor mods requested (on bass, vox and snare) and will be performed this evening. This should now be close to final. A great experience and the most challenging (the most acoustic tracks) project to date. Also the group buy in (5 members) largest to date, and was thus was a good learning experience in compromise.
Now travelling to see my niece for the first time!
