The first week was mostly organising levels and adding some EQ. I cut and replaced some parts, like the stumble at the end where we all fell out of time. I found this difficult as the band chose not to play to click and we played with a lot of variation in speed.
This is how I set EQ for each instrument. I also used compression on the drum bus. I was sick and couldn’t hear anything accurate to what it was actually like. Brain fog got the better of me so most things that make sense usually didn’t, but I tried duplicating and panning the rhythm guitar as well as hard panning overheads to make it feel less flat.
I cut apart the song a lot as I felt as though errors and stumbles should be replaced. In addition to this, I cut empty parts of the vocal recordings to reduce noise as well as cutting bass and guitar during the last verse as there’s two bars of just the guitar and vocals with a kick on every beat.
It took me a lot of time to cut out and replace errors in both guitar parts, bass and line up the vocals. All I had to do with the drums was replace the end with the same part played at the end of the chorus. I experimented with different sounds like using the amp (shown below) but I didn’t decide to keep anything and stayed with the same tone.
I put a little bit of phaser on the lead guitar to give it more presence and make it have a different sound, but didn’t want to go overboard so it’s very minimal.
This is what I have at the moment (8/2/23) and although I’m still sick and my hearing isn’t completely back to normal, this is sounding good to me.
It felt weird that the guitar previously started off more to one side, so I made a new track and copied the chord sequence to make that one sequenced and the other two panned to about 30% each way. Joined with every other instrument, it feels like it jumps into a more immersive, impressive part when the panning is introduced. To emphasise the panning, I slightly shifted the duplicated audio by milliseconds to separate the overall sound. I wanted that first part to have a kick on each beat but it was hard to line up the existing isolated kick part so I made a new track with a drum kit that sounded similar and closest to what I had in mind.
I decided to only have the lead guitar in the chorus as my sickness prevented me from recording a vocal part for the chorus and it needed something to help it stand out.
This last version sounds a lot less muddy since I used custom amp settings to brighten up the rhythm guitar and put an exciter on the bass which adds harmonics to the bass, allowing devices that don’t have great bass to still have it audible.
I also added a limiter to Luke’s vocals, which makes it sound more at the front of the song and gives it more presence.
So to finish it all off, here’s the mixing panel.
I want to look into the specifics of my choices in EQ, so I’ll start with bass and go down the list.
Bass
So the bass has two sections. The verse is much more focused on the lower end while in the chorus I’m playing octaves, so they need to be heard with clarity.
This is the EQ during the chorus when I play a high note. The low frequencies and boom-y sound is boosted while the higher notes are emphasised for clarity.
Guitars (Rhythm)
I cut out the highest and lowest frequencies in the guitar to focus on the middle frequencies to make it sound brighter without risking picking up noise. That’s about all the thought I put into it, I think this sounds okay.
The lead guitar isn’t much different. The same thought process was put behind it.
I think I could have tailored this EQ more to this guitar as the focus should have been on mid and high range notes with very little bass, but this worked decently to emphasise the brightness without making it sound harsh.