This month's track, 'Looking For Something', was sent to me by SOS reader David Greaves, initially just to get some advice on potential mix tweaks. Although his version of the mix was actually pretty respectable already (albeit with a few overall balance issues), it was managing to sound a bit brittle and empty, despite a fairly prominent bass line. The root of this kind of shortcoming can be really hard to trace without hearing the raw multitrack files, so I asked if he could send them over to me so that I could give him some more useful tips. It wasn't as easy as all that, though, because David's studio was a hardware-only setup, which he had based around a digital console (the Yamaha 02R96) and a Mackie HDR24/96 digital 24-track recorder.

Fortunately, Lady Luck intervened and it turned out that David's home studio was just down the road from me in Cambridge. So I suggested that I just pop over and look at the track as a kind of 'on location' Mix Rescue, in order to pass on some mixing tricks that would be directly relevant to his setup.

The song had been put together by local singer-songwriter Matt James, with the help of keyboard player Sam Ball, using a Korg Triton Pro X keyboard workstation and a Yamaha QY700 stand-alone hardware sequencer also in David's studio. Matt had then overdubbed the acoustic guitar and vocal parts with Audio-Technica AT3035 and Neumann TLM103 mics through a TL Audio Ivory 5050 preamp/compressor.

When I paid David a first visit, some of the MIDI parts were still running live through the console from the Korg and Yamaha units, and I could immediately see this causing practical problems with our plan of mixing the track in stages over a number of different visits: given that David would be using the studio for other projects between my mixing sessions, it would be unlikely that I'd be able to recall the mix in progress accurately. Fortunately, upon totting up the number of sounds actually in use in this case, it turned out that there were just enough spare tracks available on the HDR24/96 to accommodate everything, so I suggested that we bounce all the remaining live parts to audio so that we could guarantee that the mix recall would be consistent. Even where recall is not a problem, bouncing your MIDI tracks to audio before mixing can also be a good way of mentally 'switching gear' between the writing and mixing stages of a self-produced project, so I often recommend this to musicians working on their own.

Another thing I asked David to do for me before I started mixing properly was to duplicate the outputs from the multitrack machine across two sets of channels in the Yamaha console. This was so that I would have the option of trying various parallel dynamics tricks without running into processing latency problems. In most software sequencers, something like parallel compression, for example, can be achieved just by setting up a compressor as a send effect. In most digital mixers, however, the extra delay introduced by the return channel's processing will usually cause phasing problems. Setting up duplicate channels, on the other hand, avoids this pitfall by keeping the processing delays on both the processed and unprocessed signals the same. Another advantage of this approach in David's case, of course, was that it left the fixed number of channel auxiliary sends free for sending signals to other effects.

In the end, having parallel processing available really paid off in this particular mix, and I used it in a variety of different ways on different instruments. A lot of SOS readers don't really seem to appreciate the scope of this approach, so given that there were so many examples of it in this mix, I'm going to go into a bit more detail about it.

On my next visit to the studio I was able to begin work. Fortunately I had some experience of Yamaha's digital mixer approach via jobs I'd done with the original 02R desk and the AW4416 multitracker, so it was pretty straightforward to get up to speed after a few pointers from the Yamaha's user manual and, of course, from David himself.

To begin with, I headed straight for the vocal, which was clearly meant to be the star of the show. As I'd suspected from listening to David's original mix, although the mic wasn't capturing the brightest of sounds there was already too much sibilance in there,...