This week I mike and I have been working on our mixes for Local Animality. This has been such a rewarding week as we have both come so far with the whole process of the album. We are so excited to have two tracks almost complete. I am going to walk through my mixing process of Bad Sext’s cover of polyester girl.
This mix was definitely a learning curve for me. I decided to purchase some new VST’s but I didn’t want to get a whole subscription thing and end up with like 100 plugins and I only want or use 10. So I did some research on what I should get. I had to keep in mind that I am currently working with 8g of RAM so I am constantly having to freeze tracks. I listened to all the local animality tracks and thought what as a whole they needed the most.
There were definitely some things I needed. I decided to get a Slate Digital subscription in the end because there are a lot of great youtube videos that post using their plugins and they are very common among a lot of other producers I know who record bands. I especially like their mix buss effects rack and the presets. It was super helpful to work out what direction I wanted to take certain parts of the mix such as drums.
I had a look at a few VST website memberships to see if there was any that had some of the things I thought I would need. I decided that I needed a tape saturation, transient designer, reverb, delay, a graphic EQ, a ‘dirty’ EQ, some buss compressors/ processors, a limiter, a bass amp simulator and some heavy compressor I can use for side chaining/ parallel compression.
I signed up to ‘Plugin Boutique’ online and downloaded some of their free plugins to test it out. It was super easy to use so I decided to buy some versions of these plug-ins on my list to check it out. I got a saturation/ transient shaper from….. I wanted to use this on the snares and bass in a lot of the songs to get a bit of extra attack out of the tone. While I was scrolling through the 100’s of transient shaper plugins on this site I found something called ‘Snare Sizzle’. It was pretty cheap and the audio examples it came with sounded awesome! I wanted to use this to replace some of the ‘Snare Out’ tracks that we had recorded. Some of the kits just had super ugly, floppy sounding wires that didn't really translate as well as we would have liked. The ones that were tight and great sounded great though it was about 50/50. Using this on one of the snare top mics gave a super subtle snare sizzle sound. I tried using it as a send effect as well. This was easy to control but it didn’t have the impact that I wanted it too for the really 60’s wirey sounding snare in Polyester Girl. I used the original snare bottom track that we took and put it on that. I gave it this super bright but rounded snare sound. It is super customizable as when you are using the interface you can easily change the tone by changing what type of room and how far away the mic is.
Another thing that I brought that really made this mix a lot easier to control was the Slate Digital Infinity EQ. I have alway been a Logic user well… began as a Garage Band from when I was 12 haha so I was used to visualizer EQ’s. I haven’t purchased or used one in a while because I wanted to get a better ear while studying. Getting this, honestly I was so stoked. It is super smooth which is what I wanted and having the visualizer makes it so easy to pick out weird underlying frequencies as it’s super detailed. I really liked some of the presets that were built in and so I tried a few of the recommended ones to see how it worked! I used this on a heap of this; individual tracks, busses and even my master!
I had been using WAVVES audio reverb for a while now as well as just the AVID one (ew). So I decided to see what all the fuss was about and get Valhalla Vintage Verb. I definitely shortly realised the difference in my mix when I began to create space using this. It was very lush very 60’s, very saturated, I like it. I also downloaded all the free reverbs that Valhalla has on their verb site which are also awesome. They are all defiantly a bit more extreme
Here is some screen shots of the reverb settings I used on
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