Minor Project write-up

For my minor project, I chose a song off of the Cambridge website called "The One" by Memnoir-my regret was immediate.  I was looking for something that would take a little more intricate mixing rather than editing, and believe me, I found it.  

I believe the original track count was somewhere around 50, which wouldn't be an issue if I had software other than PT8 LE, but unfortunately that's what I have so a bunch of tracks had to go from the start.   Thankfully there were about 35 vocal tracks, many of them even more horrible than those that remained in the project, so they were quickly removed.  I wish I would have opened my project first in 006, because I would have been able to submix and print all the extra vocals down to one or two tracks, which would have helped the vocals not sound so alone in the mix.  

There are two guitars in the mix, both of which were recorded direct (I'm not sure why), which was good and bad.  Good because I could re-amp them through whatever I wanted, and bad because I didn't have an amp that would give me the sound that I wanted.  I patched the audio from the guitar tracks (one at a time obviously) through my Pod XT Live (guitar processor/amp modeler) and into the "fantastic" practice amp in 006 and then mic'd it up with a 414.  Needless to say, the speaker in the amp was just too small to produce the sound I wanted and I basically wasted my time.  In the end, I just ran both guitars through ELEVEN, with slightly different tones and effects to separate them a little.  Both guitars and basses were mixed and routed to one sub, giving me control of all of the strings on one fader.  

The drums were pretty straight-forward, and everything sounded decent to me.  If you listen to my reference track, "Blood" by In This Moment (Don't watch the video....it's a bit disturbing), I love how the drums sound in that song and that's what I was going for.  Unfortunately the snare just wasn't crisp enough, and I'm not a fan of completely changing the way something sounds with an eq, I think that's cheating, so I worked with it as-is and ended up satisfied.  I honestly think I could have deleted every drum track but the one titled "ALLDRUMS", which I think is a midi track used to reinforce the actual recorded drums.  It sounded pretty good by itself, but added a lot of punch when coupled with the actual drum kit.

The Vocals (sigh).  I tried do do a lot of things with the vox tracks, but nothing fit.  I tried lo-fi vocals, distorting them slightly, heavily, adding delay, chorus....everything(except Melodyne, because lets face it...I didn't have 5000 hours to pitch correct that mess).  None of it helped.  For my second mix I muted all of the vocals and smiled.  

That's basically my process, I'm looking forward to not listening to that song any more.