Mix Rescue: Javier Barrios & Lindy

Javier and Lindy, whose improvisation was the starting point for this month’s track.

Sometimes you can’t quite capture an instrument as you’d hoped, but when it comes to the mix there are a few tricks that will help get you out of a hole.

This month’s track ‘Rolling In The Wind’ started life when Javier Barrios and singer Lindy were improvising at Javier’s home studio in Sheffield — Javier and Lindy are working on an album that mixes South American roots with folk and electronic music.

Recording Sessions

For this track, he started to play some improvised Bossa Nova harmonies on the guitar and Lindy improvised her vocal part. “As we liked the feel of it,” Javier explained, “we recorded the whole track as a jamming session... in one take, using a basic drummer track in Logic Pro X to set the tempo.” Javier also told me that the song was recorded via his UAD Apollo audio interface: the guitar was DI’d through the Apollo’s UA–610 Unison modelling preamp, which was used to add some subtle distortion. For the vocal, a Rode NT2000 large-diaphragm condenser mic fed a Focusrite ISA One preamp and, via the Apollo’s line input, a UAD LA-2A plug-in, set up to deliver three or four decibels of gain reduction.

Once the improvisation was recorded, Javier started build the song’s structure around it, and added several other layers. A friend of his, Damian, provided some rhythm guitars and brought along an Access Virus TI synth, which was used quite a lot on this song. The Virus, with Logic’s Arpeggiator triggering some of the parts, was recorded through the Apollo, with the UAD Studer A800 analogue tape-machine emulation in the signal path to add a little mojo.

With a more developed structure in place, Lindy overdubbed some vocal harmonies, and Javier recorded the bass guitar, which he tells me he probably re-did more than 100 times! “It was a very frustrating process because I just couldn’t get the sound I wanted. I recorded the Squier bass through the Apollo’s DI input, this time using the Unison UAD Neve 1073, which in my opinion sounded much better than a dry bass DI. At this point, I started mixing and tried lots of different things — but I couldn’t get the song to sound good! So I decided to contact the SOS team and Paul responded straight away, which was great news!”

Problems

Javier told me that he felt his mix generally lacked ‘punch’, and that he was still struggling with the sound of the bass guitar mentioned above. As it’s one of the more prominent elements in this track, that was obviously an issue I’d need to deal with early on. It wasn’t all bad news, though. The song blends pop vocals with an EDM groove and combines electronic instruments, such as the aforementioned Virus and a Novation Bass Station, with electric guitar, electric bass, MIDI organ and a couple of brief piano segments. The vocal arrangement is interesting, featuring a number of doubling and harmony parts as well as a couple of vocal effects tracks for use as ‘ear candy’ spins, and the parts are all nicely sung.

After I’d listened to his mix and responded to his call for help, Javier sent his complete Apple Logic Pro project to me — sometimes I like to receive just the multitrack audio files, but as I also use Logic, I was interested to see how he’d approached the project. On first listen, the project seemed generally to have been well performed and the arrangement allowed the song to build nicely. One of the breakdown sections seemed somewhat long, so I made a note to shorten it — it’s worth taking a note of your first impressions like this! There were also some sections where the vocal spins seemed to fight the main vocal, but Javier said he was happy for me to take a few liberties with his arrangement if I felt it would contribute to a better result. I could see what he meant by lack of punch, as the drum parts felt more than a little light in the bass regions, and the DI’d bass guitar had no impact or definition — it definitely needed attention.

Javier had done a lot of things that worked really well, such as recording the main synth parts as audio, with appropriate filter tweaks and effects ‘burned in’, and setting up some effective backing-vocal thickening patches, by cascading two stereo delays and offsetting the delay times slightly. Nevertheless, I felt that the vocals didn’t quite sit properly in the mix and everything seemed somehow too separate, and lacking in front-to-back depth; it really needed combining into a more coherent, three-dimensional whole. I liked the track and thought that, courtesy of a little creative processing, I should be able to inject more of a sense of mystery and textural complexity, as well as adding the necessary weight.

While I lacked a couple of the plug-ins Javier had used, there didn’t seem to be anything that couldn’t adequately be substituted. In any case, he had been quite liberal in his application of plug-ins and I decided early on that I’d try to simplify things where possible — in my final mix, some tracks ended up needing only a touch of reverb or delay! (That said, some parts, including that bass guitar, required more assertive processing — more on that later.) It wasn’t only the channel processing I simplified, though, as I also trimmed the number of send effects to just three: one general reverb, a tempo sync’d delay and a long reverb, the last of which fed into a 16th-note tempo-sync’d square-wave tremolo effect. This results in quite an ear-catching chopped-reverb effect, which doesn’t seem to ‘blur’ things in the way conventional reverb can. With these in place, I decided I’d do something to tackle the general lack of punch before homing in on that bass sound.

Little insert processing was required for the drums — just a tightening up of the sustain using the SPL Transient Designer plug-in and an EQ bump to bring out the kick — but Paul did reshape some of the kick sound inside Logic’s Drum Machine Designer.

Drums & Synths

The drum part was fairly easy to beef up using a combination of a generous EQ boost in the kick region and tweaking the kick drum setting in Logic’s Drum Kit Designer, to add a little sub-bass and a hint of distortion. I also used an SPL Transient Designer plug-in on the overall drum mix, just to shorten the decay times of the all the hits slightly — this not only contributed some helpful punchiness, but also reinforced the groove a little.

After the long breakdown, around two thirds of the way through the song, a second Drum Machine Designer track joins in, adding a much brighter layer featuring electronic claps. To liven this up, I treated it to some early-reflection ambience, by following an instance of Logic’s Platinumverb plug-in with Logic’s bog-standard Limiter, set to trim around 6dB from the peaks. This may not be the world’s most precise limiter — I have other options for that — but it does seem to impart a usefully ‘snappy’ sound, which is sometimes desirable.

Most of the original synth sounds just needed a little low-cut EQ to keep them clear of the bass sounds, though I treated one rhythmic Virus pad to both high- and low-cut filtering, along with a 1.8kHz boost, which cleaned it up and helped bring it into focus. The tempo-locked delay on this part, which Javier had set at around 230ms, already worked well, so I didn’t touch it. There was also a filter that opened gradually, causing the synth track to get progressively louder. The idea was a good one but the effect was a little too much for my taste, so I used level automation to make the level change a little less radical.

Several plug-ins were used on a Virus synth part to give it an interesting chopped-reverb effect.

A pulsing effects track (again, courtesy of the Virus) at the start of the song included a ticking element that I thought sounded a hint too much like a click track on occasions, so I treated this track to the rhythmic-chopping effect I mentioned earlier, along with some mid-range EQ boost and some flanging. The result was a much more textural sound that didn’t get in the way of other elements. Another lovely Virus pad, in the first section of the song, had gentle flanging already applied, and this needed only a little level automation to make it sit nicely in the mix.

Bass Desires

But what about that bothersome bass guitar part? Ultimately the solution lay in a combination of processes: EQ was an obvious step (more on that in a moment) but I also used the SPL Transient Designer plug-in to improve the note definition by shortening the decay, and shaving a little off the attack to tame an undesirable ‘clanginess’ I could hear in the note onsets. I also applied some gentle gating to keep the spaces between the notes clean. The biggest difference, though, came courtesy of Logic’s bundled bass-amp modelling plug-in. Using this, I came up with a much better-defined, almost piano-like bass sound. The EQ featured a mid-spectrum boost, centred around 1.3kHz to bring more of the harmonics of the sound out, and a high-shelf cut at around 3.3kHz, to remove some of the fret noise and general rattle. I placed Logic’s Limiter at the end of the chain, just to catch a few excitable peaks in the closing section of the song.

The numerous plug-ins used to perform radical surgery on the bass-guitar part.

Finally, I added some tempo-sync’d delay to the bass. You do have to be careful with delays on bass parts —it can lead to mudiness and smearing if you get it wrong — and when this effect was solo’d it sounded as though it might belong to an early Pink Floyd song! But when added to the overall mix it just worked well, carrying most of the ‘weight’ of the track alongside the drums.

Guitars

A second echo guitar part starts on a separate track when the drums kick in, but I didn’t feel that it reinforced the track quite as it should, so I took the liberty of feeding that through a 16th-beat tempo-locked deep tremolo, which turned it into something altogether more glittery and rhythmic. It seemed to work nicely: its bright, pulsing sound had more impact and could be pushed further forward in the mix without it sounding ’stuck on’ or in any way loose. This guitar returns in the end section of the song, playing a funk-style rhythm part, and I left the effect running to help nail down the groove.

The tremolo effect used to help find a better place in the mix for an electric guitar part.

A further ‘Bossa’ clean rhythm guitar part worked well enough in the first part of the song, but as Javier agreed with me that its appearance at the end was unnecessary, I dropped it out. There was already a strummed clean guitar with delay in the end section, as well as a couple of pianos, and adding another layer would just dilute things. If parts like this don’t add anything to the arrangement and you’re finding the mix difficult, you’re often best off cutting or muting them like this. For the parts of the song where it did appear, though, the Bossa track was sent to the delay and reverb, and given some high–shelving EQ boost at 4.1kHz, as I felt it could use a little ‘air’.

Vocal Treatments

I had lots of options available to me for the main vocal part, but as I’d just installed the Waves Greg Wells VoiceCentric plug-in for review, I decided I’d try that out, and fortunately it worked extremely well, giving me a finished vocal with no other processing needed other than a Waves Vocal Rider to even up the vocal levels. Essentially, VoiceCentric has one big knob that simultaneously adjusts the EQ and compression (and perhaps some other secret ingredients), while three further controls add in Greg’s reverb, doubling and delay settings. With Vocal Rider on-board, the amount of mix automation required to make the main vocal sit correctly was minimal, and no extra compression was needed as Javier had already applied enough of this when recording.

The new Waves Greg Wells VoiceCentric plug-in, under test in Paul’s studio, was used to apply a little vocal polish.

The vocal pitching was already pretty good, but as there were several harmony lines that appear at various parts in the song, I decided to apply Logic’s in-built pitch-correction plug-in to all the vocal parts, with the retuning speed set fairly low so that the natural inflections wouldn’t be damaged. This worked well, making the harmony sections sound more precise — something that seemed appropriate for the style of this particular song.

Noise Annoys

The track starts with some atmospheric ‘Mmmm’ vocals followed by a few ‘spins’ and an electric guitar part, recorded with echo already printed, so after pruning away any vocal parts that I felt weren’t contributing anything useful, I set about adding effects to the layered parts. I noticed that there was a little background noise at the tail ends of the opening two ‘Mmmms’ — a combination of a sort of hiss, tongue/palate clicks and a couple of what sounded like chair creaks. So I tried a few things, such as fading out the phrases and applying top-cut and notching EQ, to minimise these. I also dropped the level of some breaths slightly, as compression tends to exaggerate them. This worked to an extent, but as this section of vocal is quite exposed, once compression had been applied that little creak noise in the background was still there. I tried various signal-processing tricks, including spectral editing, to get rid of it and even roped in a colleague to see if he could do any better — but none of our efforts was 100 percent successful; there was always an unacceptable trade-off when we managed to make the unwanted sounds disappear.

This is a classic illustration of why you need to pay attention when recording your parts: had this been my own session, I’d simply have had the part sung (or hummed) again — it would be just a couple of minute’s work for a vast improvement. In this case, though, I ended up copying the tail end of the third ‘Mmmm’, which sounded OK, and grafting it onto the ends of the first two. To stop things sounding too ‘copied’ I time stretched the second occurrence by around 10 percent. The result seemed acceptable enough in the circumstances.

Spins, Harmonies & Doubles

Javier had, very sensibly, sent all the harmony and ‘FX vocals’, comprising three separate tracks (Vocal FX1, Vocal FX2 and Vocal FX3), to their own bus, but he left the main vocals and double-track parts routed directly to the main stereo output. He’d put a reverb plug-in on the harmony vocal bus (Logic’s Space Designer, with a Blue Plate preset) and also some high- and low-shelving EQ to ‘bracket’ the sound between 120Hz and 5.5kHz. It sounded fine to me and I’m a great believer in the old saying “if it ain’t broke...” so I left it alone.

Vocal FX 1 was processed with low-cut EQ, gentle pitch correction, a slow rotary-speaker effect, and then a dash of Logic’s Limiter, just to keep the level even and the tonality assertive — this helped it cut through when mixed in at a fairly low level relative to the main vocal. A short section of reversed vocal on the FX1 track was used to reintroduce the song after the long breakdown, and added a nice touch of mystery and texture. Also, some of the opening ‘Mmmm’s were copied to this track, to add a different texture to the song’s intro. Vocal FX2 was simply pitch corrected and treated to some of the chopped reverb and delay effects I’d set up earlier. The chopped reverb effect added a nice flutter to the vocal spins. Again, I deliberately set the spins at a lower level than the main vocal, and the effects created the impression of them being slightly further away, an illusion I reinforced by panning the two layered parts hard left and right.

The harmony and doubled vocals has been sung well, and in only a few parts could I hear that the timing was far enough out to warrant attention — something easily remedied by moving individual words and time stretching the odd errant syllable. The main vocal had already been tidied up pretty well in this fashion by Javier, though I did nudge the timing of a few phrases in the breakdown section, just to lock their timing more closely to the bass guitar. I also copied a few bars of main vocals and harmonies right at the end of the song to make the ending a little more emphatic.

In general the harmony parts were panned left and right of centre and mixed with more delay and reverb than they had in the original mix, and I also pushed them down a little in level, again with the aim of making them seem to sit behind the main vocal in three-dimensional space.

Pianos & Organs

With the mix coming together, I turned my attention to the remaining elements of the song. An electric piano track was left pretty much alone other than to balance the level; it required no processing other than some low-cut EQ. An arpeggiated staccato organ part played along with it during the first half of the song, and I added some slow rotary-speaker effect to that, balanced it with the electric piano, opposite-panned the parts (to 10 o’clock and two o’clock on Logic’s pan knob), and then mixed them in fairly low. A further organ track, this time presented as MIDI, seemed to be playing a similar part but without arpeggios — perhaps it was the initial recording? Whatever the purpose, I decided I’d use it, as it seemed to add a useful texture, and again I gave it the rotary treatment and mixed it in at a fairly low level. Towards the end of the song, a new electric piano part comes in and is doubled by a sampled acoustic piano. These were again panned apart, and the tape delay Javier had put on the acoustic piano tracks was left as he’d set it.

The final arrangement — Paul did a bit of editing to enhance the arrangement and tighten the groove, including bringing some vocal parts into line with the bass, and duplicating vocal phrases in different parts of the song.