This is the unedited bounce of this track. It features no prior mixing whatsoever and while great talent was used to make it, the talent was not used to mix. As such, I was required to do my own mix of it, learning different skills as I did.
This process was going to be written instantly, but due to the heat in the room I passed out and was asleep for 40 minutes.
(Written on 10/1/24)
We started out by opening the unmixed bounce on logic and were told to listen to it. Things were clearly not edited and it was just the raw audio, which didn’t sound too pleasant. Upon soloing tracks, a lot of spill was present for most of the drum tracks, so we learnt how to use noise gates first to get rid of the sounds, by playing with different decibel levels and blocking out that unwanted noise. This was done by looking for noise gate in the FX section of a track, and the idea was to cut high sounds out for low sounding drums.
We summarised the tracks into easily accessible categories first so we could mute other instruments instantly, and not mute 5 different microphones at one go.
Then we played with the frequencies to get rid of further spill and make some better sounding drums. Because there was no snare recorded (with its own microphone) on the left overhead I had to play around so that mid-frequency was elevated and the snare was audible with the rest of the kit. I continued doing this until I got to the bass drum which sounded a bit lacklustre until I boosted the bass on it, making it sound like it was really being kicked.
15/1/24, we learnt about properly equalising and putting reverb on our tracks. I didn’t think that I had to learn about proper reverb as I had somewhat already known about it, but Lewis showed me what different things meant so I didn’t have to trial and error with what sounded good or not. When we went over what would and wouldn’t do well with reverb, so the drums, vocals and possibly guitars will get reverb, and the bass will not, because it supposedly muddies the sound. I will play around though and see what I can make work. I am already happy with the reverb I put on the drums and vocals, as it makes the singer sound even better, and the drums more spacious. (I don’t have a way to describe the sound of them.) The bass sounds a lot more full and deep that I found the correct reverb to apply, and I don’t want to mess with the EQ any more because it’s annoying to do.
(For context, I was posting MP3s of the music, but it seems that they were all the same version despite me clearly labelling them, and they had no changes to them either.)