FOR MUSICIANS ONLY Hurricane Sessions Mixdown Part 4 -- Random Thoughts December 10, 2008 -- The steps that I went through with our sample song, are by no means the best or only way to go about it. I won't do every song like that. Sometimes I'll use a limiter to take care of the kick and snare, compress the bass. Sometimes I'll even use EQ. But that comes in the final editing. We've just allowed the individual tracks to achieve their full potential. I try not to tie myself into any one process, as it makes everything come out sounding too similar. Do we really want the kick and snare to sound exactly the same in every song? I think not. So you have to find a way to vary the things just enough to give them a different feel. The rest of the mixing process is really difficult to explain. I'm simply going to listen to each song over and over until there nothing left that I want to change. The automation will be built piece by piece, in sort of a random order. Whatever catches my ear is what will get dealt with, and then I'll listen to each track separately again to see if there's something I missed. The extra gain and limiting is going to amplify background noise, so there will be several hours spent just deleting noise (or a -96dB gain in the offending area), like we did with the toms, only not always so obvious. This is where live sound experience comes in handy. The way I judge a sound engineer is pretty simple -- If a song is playing and his (or her) arms are folded, or maybe they even wandered away from the board for no apparent reason, then they've stopped listening because there's always one more thing you can do, especially in such a fluid environment. The mixdown process lets you do every little thing on every track, every minor change and fade that you would do live, simultaneously instead of one after the other, if necessary. This is truly the fun part of the process and where the opportunity for some real creativity come in, even if some of it is subtle, just peeking out once in a while to make sure you're paying attention. It's actually a weird moment at the completion of every song where it plays through to the end and you had no desire to make anything "better". If I can listen to it three times in a row without hearing anything whatsoever that needs changed, or a noise in the background, whatever, then that version of it is ready for the band to listen to. Each song has its own sound that will naturally appear. That's what the band expects to hear when I send them I copy. As we can hear, that sort of makes itself happen with a good gain structure. Once those versions are done, I can make duplicates of sessions and change the production values, make less conservative choices, break rules, and experiment. And when I take the tracks for the band to listen to, they can have a couple of perspectives to choose from. If I don't make exactly what they're looking for, we can spend a day or two going, "What if...?" and letting them try whatever they envision. Or pull parts back from earlier versions and re-do them. Nothing is etched is stone. There are no rules in rock and roll. Only three weeks after making the recordings, the bulk of the work is done, at least for this batch of songs, which will probably show up in lo-fi (128k) versions on the music page soon. So far, I haven't mixed with any great care as to how the mp3 sounds. That's my next step, which is kind of a trial and error process: Make an mp3. Listen to it. Does it sound like your session does? Hell, no! So you put an EQ or a limiter in or something and make another mp3. Then do that over and over until you've got one that's acceptable as a a more-or-less accurate replication of how the session should sound. This brings us to the end of my lesson. I hope it is has been helpful for anyone, in any way. December 14 -- A few final notes, for those who actually found this useful. Kick Drum -- The heart of the kick drum lies in the 340-380 Hz range, but it needs some high end, too, specifically at 3k and above 5k. That will give it a cutting edge. Snare -- The ring is around 1k. Guitar -- The Behringer amp has a stereo line out which is cleaner than what we got sticking a mic in front of it. The mic was redundant and I ended up dumping its track in every song. Bass -- The tones of the bass and kick drum overlap. If you're having trouble getting the kick drum to stand out, try notching a small hole at about 340hz in the bass track. Then maybe give a little boost to the lower tones (200 Hz and below) to compensate. Destructive edits -- I use destructive edits because the non-destructive editing breaks a track up into a zillion separate files and you can't see the track for all the edits. So I make my first edit under "Create Individual Files," which gives a new version of the track. After that destructive is safe because you have a backup from before you started that you can drag back out if necessary.

Cry Raw Tracks --256k Download Phase 2 -- 128k Download Phase 3 -- 128k Download Phase 4 -- 192k Download