Post Production/Mixing

First, I organized my session. I went through playlists taking the parts best suited for the arrangement, organized audio that could be useful, and trashed audio that didn’t cut. Then, I checked the phase and found a slight but expected discrepancy between the pair of AKG c214s and aligned the phase manually. My tracks are labeled and color-coded routed to buses and routing folders eventually hitting the 2-bus for final polish, glue, and loudness.  I started by listening to different takes splicing them together arranging sections, layering tracks, slight EQ, and compression to give me direction. I marked areas that I liked but needed rhythmic or melodic correction to come back to after my arrangement was in place. While listening I noticed that some audio has this static sound baked into it which I really couldn’t fix but I could work around. I used Pro Tools clip gain to lower some peaks and dynamic outliers. After I got my tracks organized and in an arrangement that I liked then I went on to EQ. Using Universal Audio’s emulation of the Pultec EQs I brought more clarity and tone to the 214’s by attenuating some low frequencies. On the foot pedal tracks, I also used a Pultec to add body, cut highs, and slightly attenuate to glue the mics together. On the room mics I just used similar settings tweaked them as necessary and utilized a Pultec HLF to get rid of irrelevant frequencies. I panned the low and high string mics left and right to a different extent throughout the arrangement. The room and foot pedal mics stayed relatively in the middle or slightly left-right. One thing that I wish I could’ve accounted for was the noise in the room I recorded, as I was applying compression (Overall between 1-2.5db max) I noticed the amount of noise from my mics came up considerably especially from the room mics being closest to the AC. I thought it was also cool in the beginning of the material there’s a pickup on beat 4, so I printed the metronome sound from the click track to sound like a movie is starting and it leads perfectly into the beginning of the piece. This is on the more felt artistic side of production, I had a voice memo of a car drive that had a mood similar to the piece, and it played throughout the whole thing. I did it to add character and ambiance and to further the distant yet present sound. I also created a couple of buses for delay (Galaxy Tape Delay, Echoboy), upward compression (OTT), New York style compression(Century Tube Strip/Studer a800), and a vibe bus (micro shift) with vibrato detune on it. I used a reverse reverb technique to transition between sections more seamlessly. Sometimes it's straight reverse reverb or a riser sample from my splice library. I used automation on various volumes and pans to give movement and progression to the mix. For the 2 Bus, I started with saturation. I love this plugin from Plugin Alliance called the Black Box. It’s my go-to other than Cradle the God Particle 2 amazing plugin for adding saturation, life, and presence to anything. Next, I opened another plugin from Plugin Alliance called bx_v3. I love this for the 2 bus because I have mid/side EQ, Left/right EQ, phase correlation meter, balance meters, a high pass knob that sums everything below the desired frequency to mono, and even dynamic EQ. I used this to clean up the overall tone, make it darker, and have more space in the middle since I plan on making this a fuller production, setting the “Mono-Maker’ to around 250hz, and widening everything slightly. Next, I used a Bus compressor from SSL to glue everything together. On the Master, I used an Oxford inflator for the lift it gave my whole mix. Finally, I used a limiter to bring the loudness up to compensate for different listening environments.