I have been mixing the podcast that I did the other week with Bad Sext and thought I'd do a little post about how I went about my mix of the two songs they played. I mixed them both pretty similarly as I was going for an intimate 'Tiny Desk' sort of feel. Here is a tiny des performance I used as a reference track for the mix.
In the interview the girls mentioned they have both been compared to Courtney Barnet in the way they sing. I thought using an Australian female singing voice with the real twangy sound that Meg and Ella both over exaggerate would be a good place to start. However this performance is even more raw and stripped back than the performance I captured. I used this mostly for the vocal processing and how compressed it. I liked how you can hear a lot of the breaths and room sounds.
Lets have a look at how I mixed this. I recorded both songs in the same session and just duplicated the tracks that I had made for one song then. While I mixed I juts switched between muting and un muting them as I went. This made my work flow a lot easier than dealing with two seperate sessions as I was trying to make the songs sound live it was best to have them constantly there so I could compare them. I grouped the two songs so that soloing and muting the tracks was easy. I felt it was possible to work this way for a track that only has a few tracks per song. I would usually never work like this but I felt it was really important to be able to compare the two as I worked.
You can see this on the side of the session shot here.
This way of working was really helpful when making choices about how much saturation, compression and how I EQ'd the tracks. I used these tools to enhance the acoustic value of what was already recorded I didn't want to over process the parts but just make them even and add a few creative choices. In saying this I also didn't want to edit one song then the other one to mach. As they are a little bit different in style I compared EQ's of Meg and Ellis voices as I went for both tracks to make sure they were still sounding equal.
Have the two tracks in the same session was great as I could juts pick which reverb I wanted for them and then send both the tracks to the same one. This helped with the over all balance between the songs. The EQ I picked was defiantly a creative choice of my own. I wanted the reverb to pop out and make their voice's just that little bit more airy as they are both quiet loud singers. I went through just about every 'space' reverb there was and in my head I was thinking I wanted a room reverb or a small chamber. None of the ones I found were having the effect I wanted. So I switched a different verb that I don't usually use. I found this setting on the ReVibe II that was a large studio preset. This was more the effect I was after as I thought even though it was quiet over dramatic for the style if I played with the wet/dry signal I could maybe find a balance that was more natural.
This was really something I had to make sound perfect when it came to the mix. I want it to sound like they were playing in a room that was almost empty so it would sound like maybe you are the only person there. I still wanted it to be raw like they are playing to you in your bed room, which is in a Queenslander with wooden floor boards, but like, a carpet on the floor.. you know? Anyways, I had a vision. and all the room tones I tried weren't right. So to achieve this final sound having a little bit of pre delay and then playing with the EQ were what really brought it together. I cut out the high end of the reverb to get rid of a lot of more digital sound and gave a little more to the bottom end to try and add some resonance to the bottom end.
Another creative choice I made to get this bedroom sort of feel was add a saturation effect. I set this up as an AUX send rather than an insert so that I could adjust the level I wanted it to be in the over all mix. I had never really played around with this sort of effect before this project. Essentially it makes the mix sound more like an analogue recording. As all the EQ's and compression inserts used were digital this just adds some noise. This helped create a more 'room' sounding tone.
I used compression to bring up the over all mouth sounds and natural sibilance I wanted to replicate. By making the attack fast and release just able to pump wiht the vocal I was able to bring out these noises. Also changing this input and out put higher made the vocals really pop out. This is the Compression I used for the lead vocalist Ella.
Here is the compression I used for Megs vocal. She has a more resonant tone to her voice I didn't feel was being pick up so much by the mic that though was important. So I boosted the input even more. I changed the release of the compressor as well to help with this.
did not touch the guitar much at all I really just captured the right sound as I was recording using two microphones so I had a full tone to work with then EQ'd both the mic's to have opposite fundamental ranges. One for the Low's and one for highs. However for the high microphone I still added some lows as there was very little bass in the over all sound field and I need to make it up to sound full.
I think that I was able to use mix this in a way that gave the songs the intimate vibe I was going for. The band are really happy wiht them and here is a lil' link for you to check them out!
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