Mix Rescue: Punkdisco : July 2009
Mix Rescue: PunkdiscoArticle Preview :: Sparse ArrangementsPublished in SOS July 2009 Technique : Recording/Mixing We didn’t have to fight through competing walls of sound in this month’s Mix Rescue, but a sparse arrangement offers challenges of its own...
A track like Punkdisco’s ‘Oral Hygiene’ doesn’t come along every day, so when the band sent it to Mix Rescue asking for mix advice, I jumped at the opportunity. Many Mix Rescue submissions have so many tracks that you have to fight to make things audible, but here I was faced with the less common situation of a smaller-scale arrangement where the tracks weren’t really filling out the mix, both in terms of frequency spectrum and stereo image. In addition, the drums and vocals, both of which were really important to the tune’s impact, didn’t seem to grab you by the throat in the way that I’d have hoped for. So in this month’s article I’m going to look at how I addressed these two main concerns while remixing the track. Kick Tricks The kick drum was pivotal to driving the rhythm in this mix, so I was sure to give it some careful attention. The attack phase of the raw sample was already fairly good, but I wanted to give it a bit of edge, so I experimented to see if I could sharpen it a little more with some compression. I have been recently getting to know Stillwell Audio’s Major Tom compressor, and have found it quite good for envelope-shaping percussive sounds, so I thought I’d give it a go here. If I were trying to enhance the drum transient with most compressors, I’d look to set a fairly long attack time, but Major Tom doesn’t have time-constant settings, so instead I set a high 9:1 compression ratio, slapped on a pile of gain reduction by turning down the Threshold control, and then flicked through the compressor’s other settings in search of a sound I liked. A lot of the time when you’re compressing, you’re just trying to remedy general dynamic range problems, but in cases like this, where you’re trying to bring about a change in the actual character of the processed sound, there’s no sense in being shy with the gain-reduction to start with. Many of the timbral effects of compression can be quite subtle, but if the compressor’s really working hard they become easier to hear. Once you’ve worked out which settings are giving you the kind of changes you want, you can always rein in the gain-reduction to more appropriate levels. In this case, I selected Major Tom’s soft-knee and peak-detection modes and used the feed-forward algorithm, but it wasn’t any kind of reasoned decision — I just listened to what the compressor was doing to the attack and stopped tweaking when it sounded harder and cut through the mix better. Later on in the mix process, the kick also benefited from a 6dB EQ boost at 10kHz, using the Waves API 550A plug-in, so that it could compete with the large number of clangorous synth sounds, but in many other mixes this probably wouldn’t have been necessary. ...
Published in SOS July 2009 
| Sunday 8th November 2009 November 2009
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Classic Tracks
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