Click the link above and you'll hear a new song we're working on called "The Explorer". Mixing this song has been a great experience for me -- I think the lightbulb finally came on with me and mixing. In the past, my lack of understanding about how to run the software used to be a buzzkill for anything I tried, but this time, I knew enough of the basics that I could make progress. Here are a few key things I did during the mixing (I'm using Logic Pro on a Mac).
Bill's Vocal:
1. I put Platinum reverb, about 25% saturation, on the entire mix. This gave it a nice space, and made all the instruments sound nice. At first, I was trying to add reverb to each individual instrument, but this was complicated, and didn't sound good, so instead i just inserted it on the Master Left Right track, and viola, instant great reverb for the mix.
2. I put the same guitar trick to work for the vocal that Bill taught me for the guitar... I made a copy of the vocal track onto a new track. I delayed the timing of this track slightly, to give the fullness of a double track. Then, I lowered the volume of the copy track slightly to keep them from walking on each other. The only difference is that I didn't pan the vocal tracks left and right, (caused them to walk on the guitars a bit) I left them in the middle.
3. For the small vocal clip at the end of the song, I did a fun experiment. I took a clip of Bill's vocal lyric ("space between the lines"), dropped it into the song at the end on a new track. Then, I ran it through a Fender Amplitube amp... the Fender Pro Junior rig on XGear. Then, I added some compression, and delay rack effects. Kind of gave it a Peter Murphy goth sound.
There were a couple of other key moments... I panned the "Glacier" keyboard pad to the left 25%, and pulled the volume down a bit so it would sit nice with the guitar and vocal. The arpeggio at the end of the song is a synth sound on the keyboard. It is the lower octave of the higher spacey sound we use earlier in the song.
Guitar:
For the guitars, I spent more time in Amplitube XGear. I doubled the tracks like Bill suggested, moved one the of the tracks forward in time slightly, and panned them L and R 45%. On the left guitar, I ran it through a preset called "On The Edge", which is a chimey delayed U2 type sound through a Vox setup. On the right, I built a rig out of a Fender twin with a Marshall 4x12 cabinet. This gave it a nice clean rocking sound, but kicked it up with Marshall attitude. I close mic'd it on axis with a condenser 87, but added 50% room ambience. Then, I added a Tube Screamer stomp for the overdrive. To audition the correct amp and cabinet setups, I looped the guitar section where you enter with the big power chords, and swapped cabinets out for each loop... this was so cool, since you could never do this in real life without moving gear around!
Next steps is to re-take my vocal and bass in the middle of the song, and do some more drum programming. Bill says he'll be doing more takes of his guitar to fix a few things, and he's going to try singing the middle of the song in place of my vocal.
After tracking and mixing are done, I'm going to take our new mastering tools for a spin... Bill and I both have IK Multimedia TRacks installed on our Macs, which is a cool mastering setup that I haven't even used yet.
Man, these are mighty powerful studios we own now. There are no barriers to getting great sounds!
Chuck
