My Mixing and Mastering work in 2014

[bladerunner]

All done with good 'ol Reap

These are tracks I've both mixed and mastered. For some reason I got hired mostly for top 40 style pop last year. It was a lot of fun and I learnt a lot (having not specifically mixed this style before). Super high track counts and being compared to what's currently being played on Radio 1 made me sweat over these mixes until they were right(actually super stressful but in a good way...).

https://soundcloud.com/loz-grover/mixing-portfolio-1

These are tracks I mastered. Artists include Ulrich Schnauss, 808 State, Richard Devine, Robert Leiner, Ceephax Acid Crew and Wisp.

https://soundcloud.com/loz-grover/mastering-portfolio-1

2015 should be an exciting year for me - going to be working with plenty more high level electronic musicians. Hope you like the music

[beingmf]

Great, Loz! Ulrich Schnauss is one of my favourite current electronic musicians. Good job as well!

Any outboard you were using for mastering? Or is it all ITB?

It really must have been fun to mix those cheesy top-40 tracks

[bladerunner]

Originally Posted by beingmf

Great, Loz! Ulrich Schnauss is one of my favourite current electronic musicians. Good job as well!

Yep, it was a real pleasure to work on his music

Originally Posted by beingmf

Any outboard you were using for mastering? Or is it all ITB?

All ITB and mostly freeware.

Originally Posted by beingmf

It really must have been fun to mix those cheesy top-40 tracks

Well, out of everything I've ever mixed it does rank up there with being the most fun. The track counts are much higher than say, your average rock song, and you really get to see how that big sound is achieved with multiple layered synths and drums (in one of them there were 4 kick samples layered to get the end result). Some of those tracks have 12+ vocals layered in choruses. Controlling all that, and making it sound as huge as possible, is actually, from a technical point of view, a huge amount of fun and very rewarding for me personally.

[KevinW]

Congrats. Sounds pretty good here on my iPad!

I've always wondered how electronic music is done. Did you do the tracking? Did you just get the stems from the artist? Is editing midi part of mixing, or is that more in the tracking part, and if so, is it the artist or the recording engineer who does it? Being just a home studio hobbiest, that aspect of the music industry is a mystery to me.

[beingmf]

Originally Posted by bladerunner

Well, out of everything I've ever mixed it does rank up there with being the most fun. The track counts are much higher than say, your average rock song, and you really get to see how that big sound is achieved with multiple layered synths and drums (in one of them there were 4 kick samples layered to get the end result). Some of those tracks have 12+ vocals layered in choruses. Controlling all that, and making it sound as huge as possible, is actually, from a technical point of view, a huge amount of fun and very rewarding for me personally.

Yeh, you don't have to "like" the music to enjoy working on it. It's so satisfying to solve technical/artistic problems, so to say.

Hey, Loz - wouldn't it be interesting to share some insights? What different purposes did the 4 different kicks serve? (I guess I know the answer but others might not ). How did you spread and process the insane amount of vocal tracks? Synths layers are like what: detuned version of the same patch or different filter settings for L/R? etc.

I think that might be highly entertaining AND educative at the same time. Even for non-top-40 arrangements! Whatcha think?

[Jorgen]

Yes, I like to know about the process, too... always interesting.

[bladerunner]

Thanks for the comments everyone - I will write a post later about a few things

[bladerunner]

Originally Posted by KevinW

Congrats. Sounds pretty good here on my iPad!

I've always wondered how electronic music is done. Did you do the tracking? Did you just get the stems from the artist? Is editing midi part of mixing, or is that more in the tracking part, and if so, is it the artist or the recording engineer who does it? Being just a home studio hobbiest, that aspect of the music industry is a mystery to me.

Cheers No, all these mixes were sent to me the standard way - the artist consolidated everything as audio. At higher levels (big name top 40 artists) the mixing engineer often crosses the line into production and even composition - the mix will usually be passed around as a pro tools file so that midi etc. can be worked on by anyone at any stage of the mix - but I haven't really done that myself. Sometimes I've omitted a part of the original composition as it wasn't 'working' for me and, every time I've done that so far, the artist has agreed (lucky for me!). A tricky one that - you have to assess whether the artist/band is open to that kind of critique.

Originally Posted by beingmf

Yeh, you don't have to "like" the music to enjoy working on it. It's so satisfying to solve technical/artistic problems, so to say.

Yes, it is and it's very much what you're getting paid to do. The amount of times I've posted music on forums and got responses that pertain to the fact that folks don't like the music (on a taste level) and then direct that at you!! The job is totally separate from whether or not you like the music (although it helps if you dig the tune ).

Originally Posted by beingmf

What different purposes did the 4 different kicks serve? (I guess I know the answer but others might not ). How did you spread and process the insane amount of vocal tracks? Synths layers are like what: detuned version of the same patch or different filter settings for L/R? etc.

I think that might be highly entertaining AND educative at the same time. Even for non-top-40 arrangements! Whatcha think?

Each kick is serving a separate role in the overall kick sound - different frequency areas (one part sub, one part 'impact' sound higher up in the Hz, one part 'click' etc.) or one part might be a 'noise' (a kick that's been sampled with the hihat playing at the same time for example - you might isolate the hihat part and layer that). Sometimes you may be provided with a single kick but later in the mix decide that another kick layered might sound better. Same thing with snares/claps sometimes too.

As for vocals and instruments - one of the main things to remember is to make sure that each part is doing what it needs to do and no more. This means high pass/low pass filtering and surgical eq'ing a lot of the time. Before starting a mix it can sometimes be beneficial to get a piece of paper, listen through the umixed track a few times, and write down decisions about the role each part is playing for guidance ie. What's there to: be sunk into the background; to create excitement; to be heard loud and proud; etc. etc. Some of the artists I've worked with have given me very specific instructions about this kind of thing.

In this kind of pop vocals are usually the loudest thing - the thing that needs to heard the most. Again, you have to decide upon their role - which backing vocals can be pushed right out (hard panned) - which can be almost central but pushed back into the mix with reverb. It's a lot of fun I tell 'ya and very fulfilling from a mixing point of view. Some vocal parts might be just accentuating a single word - some might be a very high falsetto that's designed to be only just blended in to add to the density of, say, a chorus line. Anything goes really - there's certainly a lot of creativity in this kind of music as far as vocals are concerned. I was just reviewing one mix while writing this - 11 vocal parts that can all be heard at some points in the song - all doing their little bit to add up to a rich and dense overall sound.

Synths are very much the same - just letting them do their part and no more. Something I will often do with synths (sometimes synth bass too) is split them into different frequency ranges and treat them differently - 300 Hz and under goes mono, 300 - 1200 Hz will have a touch of stereo widening then anything above that will be widened further to really spread it across the stereo image. Another trick is to pan a synth one way but pan its reverb send to the other side - creates a nice effect (especially when you use quite large pre-delay amounts). One thing I like about big track count mixes is there's usually a good amount of room to experiment.

Oh, and everything goes to busses (drum buss/synths buss/vocal buss etc.) - and each of those busses will sometimes be processed.

Sorry if this comes across a bit rambling - just saying stuff that comes to mind as I write. Feel free to ask any more questions

[OpIvy]

I love to know how you get that thumping kick.
Nice work man. Do you do all and any type of music?

[bladerunner]

Originally Posted by OpIvy

I love to know how you get that thumping kick.
Nice work man. Do you do all and any type of music?

Thanks Yes, I pretty much take on anything that's given to me. I'm a pretty fast learner so even if a style/genre is not too familiar I can usually get up to speed pretty quick (of course, the basic principles of what you're trying to achieve with mixing doesn't change but there are always stylistic things to be aware of from genre to genre).

I think every engineer has different methods of getting a thumpy, heavy kick. On the last track in the mix portfolio I had the kick going into an eq (narrow cutting 7dB of 67 Hz and narrow boosting 8 dB at 46 Hz) - this focused the thump lower down than the original sample. Then it was slammed into a limiter (around 5 dB of gain reduction there). Then into Voxengo's Tube Amp for a bit of crunch and finally into Wok's Bassplus for adding more bass. The whole drum buss was going into Digitalfishphones Endorphin where the kick is triggering around 5 dB of gain reduction on the bass side (Endorphin is a 2 channel multiband compressor). So, a fair amount of signal smashing to get that sound! And on any given day I might have had a completely different signal chain.

[transtrans]

Thank you for the explanations, this is very interesting.

[OpIvy]

Thanks alot for the explanation on working the kick.
This is pretty helpful as it's similar to what I've been doing. Haven't used endorphin before though. Must check it out

[bladerunner]

Originally Posted by OpIvy

Thanks alot for the explanation on working the kick.
This is pretty helpful as it's similar to what I've been doing. Haven't used endorphin before though. Must check it out

Glad it's been of some help Endorphin is like a poor mans Vintage Warmer - great for buss compression/warming saturation.

[HugoRibeiroDotCom]

You're stuff is always topnotch!!

cheers

[bladerunner]

Originally Posted by HugoRibeiroDotCom

You're stuff is always topnotch!!

cheers

Thanks man! Made my day to see that

[calvinmorrismusic]

I started following from my soundcloud - will check them out later!

[bladerunner]

Originally Posted by calvinmorrismusic

I started following from my soundcloud - will check them out later!

Cool, will check out your soundcloud page too

[bladerunner]

Here's a nice example of a 'before' and 'after' mastering (thought I would put it here rather than start a new thread).

This track (mastered a few days ago) was brought to life with eq, pretty heavy compression to create the pump, tape saturation, high end exciters and final limiting.

https://soundcloud.com/loz-grover/mastering-example-3