Before mixing the final song, I received an audio file of a band from our teacher Ben for a practical purpose. Whilst mixing, i was writing down each and every step during the mixing process.
The instruments sound small and are not loud enough. The overall sond is dull and muffled. The instruments sound lifeless and lack the same sense of fullness.It sounds like several instruments in several spaces and the volume levels are not leveled.
Mixing process
On this screenshot you can see, where I added EQ and on which tracks. I went through all the tracks individually and played around with the EQ frequencies untill i got the desired sound. What i was mostly looking for was, making each instrument sound more alive, fuller and colourful. Scince that audio was originally quiet i was turning all the instruments up. I tried my best with pitching the instruments correctly for example, there was three different organ tracks that were doubled up, which made it six in total, all three of the organ tracks were played at a different pitch/octave. I made sure that the lower track was slightly boosted with some low-end EQ and slightly boosting the EQ at a higher frequency for the higher organs. I also made sure that the lower organs were not too dull and the higher organs were not annoyingly harsh and noisy. I tried making the bass clearer and punchier so that is doesnt sound muddy.For Panning I split the doubled audios into the left and right speaker as shown on the screenshot.
During the mixing, whilst i was playing the instruments individually, i heard that whilst someone was playing the trumpet you could hear the person taking a deep breath before playing the instrument.
As seen on the first screenshot i tried selecting that and deleting it. Unfotunately that didnt work. It cropped that part out but it moved the trumpet track and it wasnt playing on time with the rest of the instruments.
Was the practice successful/necessary?
I believe that this practice helped me develop and improve my skills on mixing techniques.
Evaluation of this mixing
I believe that the mixing of this audio was much more better that what I did for the band composition one. I believe that the mixing for this song was much better for example, The instruments sounded clearer this time. I levelled out sone tracks by panning.
I leveled out the volume of the instruments well enough for it to sound put together. I balanced out the instruments with panning and i made the instruments individually sound clearer for example when something sounded too bassy i adjusted that with EQ.
On the other hand i also believe that the band played pretty well in the first place which helped me a lot and i didn’t have to do major mixing. Also one more downfall of this would be that there wasn’t any singers in that band for me to practice my mixing on, as that was my set target from my last practical i have done. I would of preferred it to have singers as for my final audio there will be a singers for me to mix. What i could do to improve my mixing techniques even more, is to research a bit more on cropping as my cropping didn’t work and see if there are any other solutions that i could of done rather than just leaving the trumpet track as it was.