At last I have something to write again! I have another song finished aswell, have to consult the archives before I can release and write about it though. It's been finished for some time now, so I need and try to remember how I mixed that one. But that's not this song, so let's get to the point here.
This was originally just a test of a plugin type I hadn't used before; a gate.
I had experimented with it in 2 other songs-in-the-works, but this one was the first to be complete.
At first I had the gate on drums as well as on bass. On drums it was so tight it killed all sustain and at first I was happy, since it was going to be a fast song right from the start. But then I noticed that the bassdrum had some kickback because of the gate. It wasn't audible in the fast parts and barely in the slow ones, but it still bothered me a lot. So I opened up the gate somewhat so it left some sustain to the drums and also returned some of the original sound of the samples. And I saw it was good.
The gate on bass made it distorted in a very sweet way (for my ears), sounding like a bit crusher. I liked the way it sounded and was very happy... For a while. It turned out that the gate didn't work in the long run; the sound became really odd after some time into the song. So ultimately I had to think something else for the bass.
I had an idea for the guitar after reqular EQ proved not to work as I wanted in this situation. I got the Grease Tube VST plugin and tweaked the guitar sound with that. And it made wonders for it, making the guitar track extremely dirty.
So the next idea was to put the same plugin on the bass track. And it proved to give a really decent result. I have to admit I'm still sad that the gate didn't work because with the guitar track it would've propably been a killer sound. But all-in-all this was a really good alternative since the plugin gave some nice distortion to the bass.
After I got all done in MPT I exported the tracks to Podium for the final mix. And that proved to be a pain in the ass... A big one too.
I had already done some mixes with the gated bass, so at this point it was just tweaking the levels, but that turned out to be quite a job to do. All-in-all I had to mix this shit almost 20 times before it was finished. The mixing was a bigger job than the composing or coming up with the sounds. :P
In Podium I added EQ on the bassdrum, snare and cymbals, but this time I boosted only ranges from around 1kHz to 4.5kHz. As follows:
Bassdrum: 6dB boost at 2kHz.
Snare: 3dB boost at 1,25kHz.
Cymbals: 4.5dB boost at 3kHz and 3dB boost at 4.5kHz.
So in that matter too this was a different way for me to do things. I wanted to make a clear dirty mix, so that's why I didn't make the drums so snappy and crispy. It wouldn't have fit for the atmosphere of the song.
I had really hard time with the drums on this one, they were being buried all the time. So after like 15th or 16th mix it was clear to me that I need to bring the guitar and bass down. So I made a 3dB reduction to them and got the drums' levels up a bit in the process. Now it sounded really neat on my AKG K-44 headphones and I was so happy.
But then I listened it through my KRK Rockit 5's and it became clear that the snare is barely audible at times. :/
Some listens more and I realized that I can't do too much to it or it becomes too dominant on the other parts, so I left it as it was.
This time I used compression on the master track along with the usual limiter. That's how I mixed all the mixes before the last one. I noticed that the compression cut some of the low end, so I exported 3 files from Podium: drums, bass and guitar. Drums I exported the way I had mixed the song: with compression and limiter. Bass and guitar got out without compression, although they both are extremely compressed already because of the Grease Tube.
After that I imported those three tracks back to Podium, applied the limiter to master track and made some reduction in levels and that was it. Finally.
So there's little problems with the snare, but I'm still very happy the way this turned out to sound. And composing-wise I'm also satisfied, I think there's some nice things going on, especially with the drums. Also something bit different at times.
Enjoy this little piece of heaven. ;)
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