Mix Rescue: Synth-Pop

This month David Lowdon's synth-pop song gets the SOS makeover treatment.

When David Lowdon contacted SOS for help, he was working on a song called 'Whispers', written by him and his colleague Michael Muir. The only audio tracks were a couple of acoustic guitar parts, three electric guitar parts, and five separate vocal lines sung by Michael's daughter Blue Jean. Everything else was provided by synths and samplers. Although David's original mix was fairly well balanced, the prominent and slightly out-of-tune acoustic guitar part didn't seem to gel with the more highly produced sounds, and David felt the mix could be made to sound more commercial overall.

Preparation & Setup

I loaded all the WAV files from David's mix into a new Logic project, named the different parts, and created some mix groups using Logic 's busses, including groups for vocals, backing vocals, bass, drums, synths, and guitars. This not only allowed me to work on the mix in broad strokes, but it also opened up the possibility of overall group processing.

I quickly concluded that the original out-of-tune guitar wasn't worth keeping, so I played the same thing in again on a Fender Strat through Waves GTR, automating the channel pan control to recreate the original alternating stereo effect. Once this part was in place, I decided to mute another original electric guitar part which largely mirrored the acoustic part I'd replaced. I also created a couple of intro and outro parts by copying and pasting what David had already done — for example, the accelerating snare roll at the start was made from a single beat of the main snare track, with some flanging added.

Kick, Synths, & Guitars

As far as the synths were concerned, I felt that some of the sounds were just a bit too dated, so I decided to try varying degrees of processing to rescue these. I also left off a legato sampled-sax part that sounded rather like a Stylophone once in the mix. David had originally chosen a mainly 'two to the bar' kick-drum pattern that I felt didn't gave the song the impetus it needed, so I added a second kick-drum part beneath what was originally programmed, giving the track more of a 'four on the floor' feel. When I found a suitable kick drum in Spectrasonics' original Stylus instrument it all locked in nicely, with David's existing kick beats working as accents so that the drum part didn't end up being too uniform.

Here you can see the processing chain that Paul used to transform the rather weak original bass line into something much more powerful and upfront.David had also used a general rhythm guitar part that sat reasonably well under the track, but it was again very slightly out of tune, and sounded rather dry and 'stuck on' next to the rest of the instrumentation. A little early-reflection ambience reverb plus a touch of Logic 's Exciter plug-in to bring out the top end gave it a far more lively sound to which Logic 's Ensemble plug-in was added to produce something like a 12-string/chorus effect. A track of TB303-style bass-note runs that pop up throughout the song was left alone, except to balance the level, but the main resonant synth-bass part suffered from being very bass light, and it also seemed too clean and harmless to work properly in a modern track, even one tipping its hat to the sounds of the '80s.

To bring the bass more up to date, I added some sub-octave using Logic 's SubBass plug-in, then dirtied up the sound a little using Logic 's Phase Distortion plug-in, which gives sounds a kind of rough-edged frequency-modulation character. Other distortion devices could also have been used here. A Waves L1 limiter was placed at the end of the plug-in chain to catch any level spikes. The final result wasn't quite Leftfield, but at least we'd left the '80s behind!

To stop the mix getting cluttered, particularly towards the end, where David had brought in several synth parts, I brightened up and/or thinned down the synths using EQ and other tricks. The part called Echo Stabs was simply treated with a low-cut plug-in, while Pad 1 was subjected to both low cut and the Waves Metaflanger to add movement and interest to what was otherwise a fairly stodgy pad part. A panning bass synth part that comes in around halfway through the song was processed using Noveltech's Character plug-in (running on the TC Electronic Powercore) to give it more definition, while a very bland synth horn part was turned from a pad into something that reinforced both the rhythm and the stereo image by using two instances of Logic 's Tremolo. The first tremolo plug-in was set up as a square-wave chopper sync'ed to 16th notes, while the second panned at four sweeps to the bar. A string pad part was processed via the Universal Audio UAD1's Roland Dimension D plug-in to add an ensemble effect with width, while a further resonant synth line that added bleepy percussion sounds with echo was also chopped into 16th notes and then brightened up using Logic 's Exciter to help it reinforce the rhythm more strongly.

Logic's EVOC20 and Tremolo plug-ins were applied to some of the more static synth sounds, increasing the sense of movement and interest, and also bringing them more up to date.Treating David's original drum parts was mostly down to balancing the various hi-hat, snare, and kick parts, though I used the Exciter plug-in again on the hi-hats to give them some edge. I also played around with the kick, which I felt was rather insipid, adding some deep low end with Logic 's SubBass, and then using Character to give the whole thing some bite. At the end of the chain, I used another L1 limiter to guard against excessive peaks.

The crash-cymbal track sounded too much like, well, samples of crash cymbals, and it was also quite busy, so I passed it through Logic 's EVOC20 filter bank to give it a tempo-related filtering treatment. This produced a metallic pulsing effect that again added interest without getting in the way of the more important elements of the mix as a whole.

Vocal Processing

The vocals comprised three main parts, with two further backing-vocal tracks singing 'whoa' and 'uh-uh-oh' phrases. A gentle touch of Logic 's Pitch Correction plug-in fixed a couple of minor vocal pitching problems on the vocal parts, and then three sends were set up, one feeding a bright ambience reverb (TC Electronic Classicverb), one a longer plate (the UAD1's Plate 140), and one a tape-style delay from Logic 's own repertoire.

A harmony part sat alongside the two main vocal parts, which I panned slightly left and right of centre to get a kind of 'call and response' feel. With the harmony sitting close to centre, this gave a nicely balanced effect, and I used a combination of ambience reverb and the UAD1's Plate 140 plug-in to add life to the sound, but without making it sound washed out with reverb. I didn't want to use a convolution reverb in this case, as I felt something more traditional sounding would work better. After trying several different options, I settled on the Plate 140 as adding the right feel.

My idea was to process the two backing-vocal parts using some 'telephone' EQ to give them a distant quality, then to add a little reverb and some tempo-sync'ed repeat echo. I used Logic 's Channel EQ to cut below 1kHz at 12dB/octave and above 4.5kHz at 18dB/octave, and then put the tracks through a Waves L1 limiter to apply a bit of assertive gain reduction on the peaks. A UAD1 LA2A compressor on the buss squashed them some more — I wasn't after realism here! — and the result worked really well once I'd added some reverb and echo.

Mix Balancing

Paul's complete final remix setup within Logic's Environment window — you can see which tracks he processed, the order in which he put the plug-ins, how he panned everything, and also which tracks benefited from the sequencer's automation facilities. The eight channels at the bottom left of the window are the group channels which he set up at the start of the mixing process, allowing him to make quick 'broad brush' changes to the mix levels. To the right of these are three effects return channels, catering for two reverbs (TC Electronic Classicverb and Universal Audio Plate 140) and a tempo-sync'ed delay. The Out 1-2 channel is the mix buss, which has PSP Vintage Warmer and TC Electronic Brickwall Limiter plug-ins inserted in it.

I felt that the drums and the main bass line formed the backbone of the song, so I balanced these first and then brought up the vocals. By getting these key parts to sit together, the other elements could be slid into place without too much problem. The track starts with a flanged 'noise' sound which reappears throughout the track, so I simply built in some panning each time this occurred and then treated it to a generous dose of plate reverb. David had constructed the track so that the various elements joined in as the track progressed, which worked pretty well with very few modifications. I killed a few prominent synth phrases earlier in the song when I felt that they got in the way, but otherwise left the arrangement much as it was. Thinning and brightening those synth parts really paid off, as they now sat nicely in the mix without getting in the way, yet they were clearly audible and added a lot of interest, especially when listening on headphones. I stuck to the tried-and-tested approach of keeping the vocals, drums, and bass close to the centre of the mix, while panning synth parts that occupied similar parts of the audio spectrum to the left and right.

David had added a distorted rhythm guitar part in the choruses of the second half of the song, and this sounded to me as if it was covering too wide an area of the spectrum once everything else was running, so I used a strong EQ peak at 2.9kHz to give it some focus, and also used a 24dB/octave filter to cut everything below around 180Hz. This meant I could turn it up just loud enough for it to be audible without it getting in the way as it had before. Had I been playing this part, I would probably have used a more staccato style to leave more space, as wall-to-wall guitar chords and legato synth pads soon eat up space.

Once I had what I felt was a good balance, I fine-tuned it using Logic 's mix automation, paying particular attention to the vocal balance. I also cut and pasted a few of the backing-vocal parts just after the middle of the song, running them beneath the first words of the following main vocal and giving them a long, decaying echo feel. The final touch was to use the PSP Vintage Warmer for gentle mix compression plus mild high and low EQ, adding weight and 'air'. This was followed by a limiter to catch the transients, allowing me to get the mix sounding loud without killing all the dynamics, though the limiter was used very lightly.

I decided not to do any heavy mastering treatment, as that should really only be done when you have the other tracks on the album there too. Part of the mastering engineer's job is to make the various tracks sound as though they belong together, and you can't do that in isolation. It would also be possible to 'pump up' the rhythm more at the mastering stage if that were the artistic direction the client wished to go in.