Minor Project Write Up

              For my minor project I worked with a song called “Old Tree” written by a band called Creepoid. I got the raw audio tracks off of the shaking through site and worked with them to create a balanced and interesting final mix. The song has a heavy rock sound to it, so as reference tracks I looked at the Pixies, Silversun Pickups, and Smashing Pumpkins, with the Pixies being my main reference. This song contained vocals, lots of background vocals, bass, two similar guitar parts, drums, and what I deemed extras: shakers and tambourines. The tracks I was given were pretty well recorded, I don’t know the setup, but there wasn’t too much bleed between mics, some of the amps got some of the drum parts but it was was negligible enough to not make a difference. One thing I didn’t like was that there were compressors added to a lot of the parts that were labeled CRAP COMP, I get that they were used to make the sound more lo-fi, but I think detracted from the overall sound. They didn’t go far enough to really hit that style on the head, but were rather just a little worse than the regular amps, which I can digitally make dirtier and more lo-fi. I scrapped the crap compressors for the most part, and yes maybe my finished product isn’t what the band might have wanted for a commercial release, but this was my project for school; and that opinion is what I would give them if I was the producer for this band. That being said I tried to emulate the hard rock style as much as I could by using my own compression and some distortion. Also the mic choice they had lent itself to that style well enough. Mainly a combination of a ribbon and an SM57 on both guitar parts. There were two tracks for almost every main and backup vocal take, one clean, the other more distorted to varying degrees.              

              To begin I organized my session the way I normally do, grouping tracks with color and aux tracks. One thing I didn’t notice until the end of my second session in the studio is that my aux tracks somehow got panned oddly, the left fader was set to 0, and the right fader to 100% right. This was on all of my aux tracks and made my master more heavy on the right side, also kind of diminishing whatever stereo I was trying to set up. Thankfully I caught it, cause that could have done a lot of bad to the mix. I took out the CRAP compressors, a vocal track that just sounded bad in my opinion, and some of the guitar tracks that didn’t add much overall. I then did a small rough mix lowering the extras, balancing the guitar and bass, and panning out the background vocals. One crazy I had, which was inspired by a metric song, was doing crazy cross panning with the background vocals. I had a clean and a distorted track of each, and had the clean track 100% one way with the distorted 100% the other way, since I had two background vocals I balanced them out left and right, it’s most noticeable on headphones but isn’t too annoying, and sounds fine on speakers. I had to work with the distorting plug-ins a bit to balance out how the distortion sounded exactly. Also for my own sake I went through and labeled intro, verse, chorus, verse 2, breakdown, bridge, solo, etc to keep my place in the song. I also listened to what instruments were being played and made a note on what I think the band wanted to emphasize during each part, for example in the verse from the way they were playing it seemed like they wanted to have the vocals, bass, snare, kick, and shaker present. I didn’t try to mask anything, but I automated the volume a tiny bit to increase those parts’ presence. I panned out the guitar parts and put the bass in the middle. I also panned out the overheads and did my crazy backup vocal panning.

              The vocals were a good bit tricky in this mix, I knew that the style wanted some distortion, but not too much to be robotic, electronic, or too inaudible. The main vocals and almost every background vocal take came with a clean and distorted version to varying degrees. For example the male background vocal had a very usable distortion to it, but the initial female one had a small and almost unnoticeable one; so I added some extra distortion but had to pick the right settings, since it was being very sensitive and too much would make it sound like garbage, and too little wouldn’t be balanced with the other distortion. For the main vocals, I have two tracks going, one is clean with a send to a reverb track on it, and the other is slightly distorted. The challenge was making the vocals sound clean, and at the same time, distorted. Some reverb added room too. There was also a track called AAAAAH which was super distorted screaming, I used it, but not much. In between the guitar solos there’s a part where the female vocalist sings “And I know why” over and over, the producer side of me thought that adding some more “Oohs” like in the intro to the song would work well there so I took some from other parts of the song and moved them into place, with some minor time compression and expansion to have it fit the part and timing.

              The guitar is a prominent part of the song, carrying the melody and rhythm between both of its parts. On the two guitar parts there was an SM57 and an undefined Ribbon mic. I used both of those together to make the whole guitar sound, the warm tone of the ribbon mixed with the tone of the 57, which was less defined but complimented the dirty style more. It was recorded well and I had to be able to balance it in a way that let the other instruments stand out on their own. I played with the automation of the guitar a little more than other instruments, bringing it up and down depending on what was happening in the song. The beginning was a little more mellow, and the later part was exciting, I made an attempt to have the guitar mimic that. The bass was more consistent, but I also automated a little bit depending on the part of the song. It was the only track with a DI, which has a sound that I’m not the biggest fan of, but I think I made it work with the amp to make a complete sound together. I considered scrapping it, but it provided that fidelity that I think helped.

              I had some trouble with the drums, they are never really my strong suit. I threw EQ and compression on the snare and tried to make it stand out, since a big, clean, and short snare hit works with the style. I’m pretty happy with the way the snare turned out. The toms and kick were more of a challenge, they started as muddy, but I added some EQ on them, and put low cut filters on other instruments that could go without low end, to let the bass, kick, and toms shine through a little more. I added in the overheads, kit, and room mics a little bit to have some cymbal action and for room tone. The cymbals didn’t play a big part in the song and I think putting them a little more behind didn’t harm the song. There were some other percussion parts too, which I labeled as extras and gave them their own aux track, they didn’t sound very good overall and I kept them to the background. The recording wasn’t too great, and I don’t think they really complimented the song.

              Overall I enjoyed the song, the band has an interesting song, and this was a good project to do. I had my pitfalls with uneven aux tracks and the drums and percussion being difficult to work with. I see how a producer has to make decisions too, when I threw out some of the vocal tracks, the CRAP COMP tracks, and making the extra percussion less important. Granted I went off my own opinion, and if I was working with the band for a commercial product, I would have their input in as well. I got some experience with that by working with Sweat Life. I’m sure Creepoid would have their own vision and maybe give me different references and things to have in my head, but for a completely solo project it wasn’t bad to have to make the decisions myself.