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Mix Rescue: JULY 2008 Audio Files

Hear For Yourself
Published July 2008

Mike Senior takes you through the before and after files of his Mix Rescue of Two Spot Gobi's live-recorded track:

The original kick-drum didn't feel solid enough at the low end to me.

The main kick channel as it appears in the remix.

The parallel kick channel was gated and EQ'd to add extra weight without uncontrolled low-frequency resonance.

The combination of the main and parallel channels along with the short reverb which was used to blend the composite sound into the mix.

The main problem with the bass guitar part was inconsistency, both in terms of overall level and in terms of spectral balance.

Creating a parallel channel focused on the low-frequency components of the signal allowed some useful extra control over these frequencies.

With the parallel channel supplying extra weight, the frequency balance of the main channel needed to be tilted to favour the higher frequencies by contrast.

Here is the complete mixed bass sound, including not only the main and parallel channel signals, but also a chorusing effect I used to smooth out and widen the sound.

The original piano files was not only quite muffled sounding, but it also sustained much more at the low end than at the high end, and this proved to be the opposite of what was required.

A solution to this problem was to use a parallel channel to add in compressed high frequencies, although this also had the effect of increasing the levels of background noise.

With the parallel channel providing the additional high-frequency sustain, the main channel primarily needed just some high-pass filtering to stop it conflicting with the bass part.

The final mixed piano sound built from the main and parallel channels, and rounded off with a healthy dose of delay and reverb and a bit of pitch-shifted delay.

The raw vocal was a little on the dull side for me, but the sibilance levels were already obtrusive so simply adding treble boost was not going to be the answer.

Without access to a de-esser or multi-band compressor, I used another parallel channel to solve the problem instead, isolating the HF band, compressing it to duck the sibilance, and then mixing it back in with the unprocessed signal.

Once the parallel channel was in the mix providing more brightness, the main channel could then be cut at around 9.5kHz with EQ to reduce the excess sibilance without impacting unduly on the overall vocal tone.

The combined main and parallel vocal channels, together with the send effects as used in my final mix.

David Greaves' original mix of Matt James' song 'Looking For Something'.

My version of the same song, remixed on David's own Yamaha 02R96-based hardware mixing system.

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