With everything recorded, it was time for me to mix these sounds into a song.
I started by ‘cleaning up’ the sounds. Firstly, I grouped together the instruments that were recorded on multiple tracks (such as the bass amp and bass DI). I then cropped and cut out any pieces of unnecessary noise and cross faded areas where the ‘punch in’ recordings were too noticeable. In addition to this, I made sure to fade out any tracks that ended with any grainy noise. I also did my best at syncing up some of the guitar parts that were out of beat with each other. Finally, I deleted any unused tracks.
With the sounds now organised, I began to set the levels. With this being a rock song, I aimed to make the vocals and guitars most noticeable by having them at high volumes. Once I thought I had the levels set up, I turned down the speakers, checked to see if anything stood out too much and then made some final adjustments.
Next, I added some EQ effects to the vocal track and rhythm guitar track. With the vocals, I boosted the mid and lower frequencies to help make the vocals sound richer. For the guitar, I decided to slightly boost some of the higher frequencies.
I also added other effects such as reverb. Reverb plugins were applied to the vocals and the clean chord guitar track. Both reverbs were short (around 2 seconds long). However, at 2:40 I used automation to remove the reverb on the chord guitar track as I thought the reverb effect would ruin the ‘punch’ part of the song.
Another plugin that was used was a dynamic compressor. The processor was used on the vocals to make sure that the dynamics don’t vary too much throughout the song. The vocals seemed to be a lot louder during the chorus sections of the song. The compressor made the vocals sound quitter, so I made sure to turn the track volume up a tad after I had finished with the compressor.
Next, I panned two of the guitar tracks. The rhythm guitar was panned to the left and the main melody guitar was panned to the right.
The panning and the reverb effects were used to help give the song some depth. Having no reverb and every instrument centred would sound very bland.
Once I added all the plugins, I decided to go back and check the levels of each track again. I noticed that some of the tracks with added reverb sounded too quiet and that some of sung words seemed difficult to distinguish. To fix this, I decided to turn their volume levels up and set their reverb effects down to be a bit more ‘dry’.
I asked my flatmates if they thought the levels were okay. I also asked them to point out as many instruments as they could just to make sure that they could distinguish most of them. My clean chord guitar turned out to be too quiet and so I decided to turn up its volume. Also, I made sure to listen to my mix through my earphones as well as my desk speakers just to make sure that it sounds alright both ways.