This week I have been reflecting on the decisions I have made and things I have learnt about mixing over all this trimester. One of the biggest things that I learnt is that I'm leaning and that these aren't going to be perfect as much as I hate to admit that. I also have never had the pressure to mix something has these stakes to live up to. However they are only dead lines and things we have made for ourselves and therefore they are realistic I think for where we are at at the moment. We had a lot of time for mixing the project. As we recorded over a long period of time it was great to have days in-between tracking so Mike and I could get started on the mixes.
We only really decided about 2 months ago how we were going to finish off the mixes. We decided that taking half the songs each and then giving each other feedback and creative direction if we needed it would be most efficient. In the past Mike and I had mixed projects together but I think that both of us were keen to spend some long long hours editing and perfecting these as much as we could. The easiest way to do that is to mix separately and share our thoughts and frustrations and findings as we went.
Mike and I didn't have a set plan to get the mixes sounding consistent. However we had already kept consistency though the tracking process so that there wasn't as much pressure when it came to mixing to be consistent. Also we came to the conclusion that all the songs were really different and there for constancy in mixes was not going to happen any way. Mike and I are both really into plug ins and so we decided to use some similar plugins for certain aspects for the mix. For instance we used a lot of the same distortion plug ins though out the mixes on drums and vocals mostly. We Used the Devli Lock deluxe the most I think. This and the Slate VMR which has really nice simulations of NEVE compressor as well as my favourite Distressor plug in I have used were really the main ones I used to get the mix sounding fat and compressed.
On another note Something I did a lot while mixing my 5 songs was start the mixes again. I think that most of my songs have around 15 mixes each from my send that are at previous stages. I went back and re opened session back up files from weeks prior sometimes even up until a week before submitting I was going back to old sessions and starting again on some elements.
It was a really valuable lesson to learn how to save the session at stages I could go back to easily and work out what worked for me and more importantly what didn't. I am hoping that next time I mix a whole album it won't take me as long to mix and I know I have processes that I like to use on my mixes now but I am also very keen to practice and make some session temples for the future.
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