Mix Rescue: Ollie Wright | Audio
Audio Examples From Mix Rescue December 2009
Technique : Recording / Mixing
Here is a selection of audio files to accompany this month’s Mix Rescue of North To Alaska’s track ‘All The Same’. You can listen to these as MP3s in the media player in the main article (www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec09/articles/mixrescue_1209.htm) or can download from this page as CD-quality WAVs for more critical auditioning in your DAW.
Here are Ollie's original guitar parts, as they appear in the final remix. They were recorded via direct injection into Apple Logic and processed with the sequencer's amp emulation plug-in Guitar Amp Pro. Even with the further remix processing (in the form of cuts at 4.7kHz and 6.8kHz from Universal Audio's Neve 1081 and a 6.7kHz low-pass filter from Reaper's ReaEQ) the melodic and harmonic elements of the sound were still pretty buried under the noisiness of Ollie's overzealous overdrive settings.
Here is the first of two less overdriven extra guitar layers I added by reprocessing Ollie's DI guitar signals in order to give the overall guitar sound more edge and harmonic definition. This one uses the Fender-inspired Tweed and Tweedman models from Native Instruments' Guitar Rig 3, but with a lot of low end rolled off below about 700Hz (using Reaper's ReaEQ and Stillwell Audio's Vibe EQ) so that it was mainly adding a bit of attack definition and a harder edge to the overall tone.
The second added guitar layer came courtesy of Ob PS1, Boss DS1, and Rednef Twin, all freeware plug-ins from Simul Analog. The first of these plug-ins was a phaser which added some nice movement to the sound, but I didn't want to over-egg this so I placed this before the Boss DS1 distortion in the chain, making it more subtle. Again, I reined in the low end of this sound with cuts below 900Hz from Reaper's ReaEQ, but left enough controlled low end in there to usefully fill out the mixed tone.
This is the processed bass part used in the remix. As you can hear it's pretty heavily compressed (using Bootsy's Density and Stillwell Audio's The Rocket), and I didn't bother to smooth out the timing edits as much as I might normally do, because they're simply not audible against the other guitars in context. I shaved off a few decibels of low midrange with a shelving cut at 200Hz and a peaking cut at 330Hz (both from Universal Audio's Neve 1073 plug-in) to clear space for more low end from the guitars; low-pass filtered at 2.5kHz to scotch some excessive pick noise; and high-pass filtered at around 50Hz to avoid too much interaction with my added sub-bass synth part.
I programmed this simple sub-bass part by ear based on Ollie's bass guitar recording. The sound is coming from Reaper's simple built-in ReaSynth plug-in, low-pass filtered at around 250Hz.
