Minor Write Up

For my minor project I wanted to work on a song that is going to be on my EP, releasing on itunes in April. The song is called "J Ride." The instrumentation is all virtual instruments recorded in pro-tools. The vocals were recorded in 006 with an AKG C414 microphone. Having perfected my recording craft, I spent only about on hour of actual recording time, noting that the main focus of this project was the mixing. After recording I went to work on my vocals. I had all my vocals going to a sub mix channel on which i applied a compressor and EQ for all the vocal tracks. Once I had them sounding pretty clean, i applied some effects to my layered vocals. I normally leave my first layer on the dry side. On my vocal dubs, or highlights, I like to use some light reverb. On my ad-libs some form of echo is always needed, however, each word is edited on case by case basis and sometimes might apply certain effects only to certain words. For the chorus vocals I had 4 tracks. I put reverb on two of them and a flanger on one. Looking back on the work flow, I would definitely have added another submix for the chorus vocals, just to have had more control. After the vocals were to my liking, I played with all the faders until my time in 006 was up, and by that time my ruff mix was sounding decent....

As always, after recording something, I spend the next few days listening to it very frequently and constantly assessing what I can do to make it better. For this particular song I wanted to mix the beat in an extremely trippy and spacey kind of way, I want it to make the listeners feel like they are floating.
When I returned to work on my mix, I muted all vocal tracks to focus just on the beat mixing. I started off by panning everything to my liking, attempting to put all the instruments in a unique spot and create a very wide dynamic mix. I them began to EQ each instrument. Since they are all software instruments I wanted to use EQing to bring them to life and make them sound more realistic, for some I think I accomplished this well, for others I'd like to hear how I can make them better. I really want to go back and work on this mix some more, and probably will in the near future when I get a chance, because I want the kick to be better.

Over all what I learned from this project was the importance and significance of the EQ and how drastically i can alter the sound of an instrument. I have recorded many songs, but this is my first time having to edit the instrumentation that i rap over and my firs time trying to make all instruments fit properly together in the frequency spectrum. I really like having the control of how the instrumentation is mixed. I have been listening to my bounce for some time now, and while I am pretty satisfied with the overall clarity of the song and panning of the mix, this song definetly needs to have more of the floating spacey feel that my heart desires.