I had the opportunity to track and mix a record for a local band called, Holy Smokes. The track is called Nucifera, and a group of engineers and I did the tracking while we all had our own mixes of the song. When mixing this song, like every other band I mix for, I started out with the drums. The kick I accentuated some of the fluffy low-end while trying to maintain some of the beater head for attack. With the snare, I ran into a little trouble with a ringing tone within it, to attempt at alleviating the problem, I did some gating and heavy compression for the fills' volume to be uniform to the rest of the snare and to focus the snare's sound on the initial attack and not the ringing tones that came from it. The hihat I tucked further back into the mix and panned to the left. I split the toms accordingly and accentuated the bounce-y tone they had. I compressed the overheads and tucked them back into the mix so the cymbals wouldn't be too ring-y as to not have the mix too top heavy. I just compressed and put distortion on the bass to give it some character since it was recorded DI. Similar to the bass I just gave slight compression and EQ to the congas and tamborine (aux percussion). The lead guitar was EQ'd to make it sound brighter, so less low end more high end while taking out that mid-range muddiness, then there was an autoamated a spaced delay when the chorus comes in, there are two takes that were panned as well. The rhythm guitar was EQ'd and compressed very similar to the lead, but I didn't add any extra delay, but rather a little reverb, and a filter and chorus in the intro of the song. When mixing vox I first make sure I can get the vox as clear as possible before doing anything else to it, so taking out a lot of the super low frequencies and adding in some higher frequencies in order to brighten up the vocals; the same to the background vox before panning to each side. Then I added a reverb and delay to both the lead and background vox. Also, I used a technique learned to create more dynamics in a mix and boosted the chorus about 1dB on the master track to clearly identify the chorus from the verses. You can listen to the final mix on my Soundcloud here or at the button on the bottom of this post.
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