Minor Project Write Up

The song for my minor project was a song by Secret Mountains.  When I started my project, the first thing I did was listen to the song a couple of times then brought down all of the levels.  I brought up the different drum levels, panned the tracks respectively, and made a rough mix.  After the rough mix I made a sub-mix for the drums.  After the drums I went to the bass guitar tracks brought their levels up and found the levels I liked.  I then added the guitar tracks in and panned them each differently to give them an ambient sound to them.  I made a sub-mix for the guitar after the levels and panning was done.  Next I brought the vocal track levels up and panned the different background vocals to give them an ambient sound like the different guitars.  After the basic tracks were set I added in the piano, synthesizers and the other random sound tracks that came with the song.  After levels and panning were completed I added delay to the piano and vocals to try to have the tracks blend in more with the feel of the song.  I also added EQ to clean up specific drums.

            While working on this project I ran into a few problems, that I believe got through and fixed them.  The drums just needed to be tweaked so they sounded fuller and cleaner, so I added EQ to a few of the drums and that fixed it.  Another problem I had was the weird sounds that were given with the song that sounded like white noise.  They didn’t really sound good unless they were brought down.  There weren’t any major problems, the reference tracks helped me with the timbre for the song and helped with the levels of different tracks of the song, like how high the vocals should be compared to the other instruments. 

            My mixing influences included Metric and The Cranberries.  I found the Cranberries song first, but when I found the Metric song, I relied more on that than my original pick.  The song helped me find good levels with the synthesizer levels and vocal levels, so that they didn’t sound too distant and hidden by the other instruments.  I also tried to give the guitar tracks the same “airy” sound like it was traveling throughout the room with reverb, just like in the Metric song.  I believe that this track helped me a lot with this song and I wouldn’t have gotten it to sound the way I have it now, without that reference track.

            The second track I took out the multiple guitars and left one and left one bass.  I did this because I wanted a basic tracked song, that wasn’t as complicated as the original mix.  I took out the synthesizers and the weird tracks so the band would sound completely different.  I left the pianos in there and had the two piano tracks be the base for the song with the vocals.  I think the second version is more of a simple set, almost like a small coffee shop set.

            I wanted to make the second mix simpler than the original.  I almost took out the vocals completely, but then the song would sound very repetitive and it would be a long six minutes to listen to, so for that reason I left the vocals to keep the song interesting.