Final Write Up

Danny Bresson

Audio 3 Major Project write up

For my major project, I mixed a rap song named Green by a local artist named Abel Battery...  This song was very interesting to say the least.  This was the first rap song I have ever mixed and I thought it would be good to try something new because this is my last semester where 006 is available to use.  This wasn't an easy project for me because a majority of the tracks, when I first received the project, were constantly peaking.  This mix took many hours to sound better but I think I made the mix sound a lot better than it originally was.  I am also mixing the rest of the album, which added 8 times the work I have mixed on the first song.

To begin this project, I had to re-record some of the vocal tracks.  The problem with this was the fact that some of the vocals had to be kept in the song because there were many artists contributing to the song and I couldn’t get them into the studio to rerecord their parts.  A lot of the parts had many different levels and in the original tracks there was sometimes a lot of background noise from loud headphones playing into the microphone.  After re-recording some of the vocals, I started with the levels with the drum set and bass to have them flow together.  Some of the drums were very tinny sounding and were hard to fix.  After finding those levels I added the song sample the artist chose to use and found the level for that. I finally added the vocals, which took a majority of the time mixing.  There were so many vocals and ad libs that I had to pan to different positions, so the vocals weren’t so jumbled together.  That was another hard part I had in the song. The music tracks did not blend in easily with the vocals and the female vocalist was a lot better than the male vocalists and the song shows that. 

After turning in rough cuts I decided to try another song due to explicit language, many peaking levels and used a better flowing song off of the album.  After changing songs, the process went a lot smoother. 

I am not sure if I am proud with this project but I spent a lot of time on it and I believe I made it sound a lot better than it originally sounded.  This being my first time mixing rap music, I didn’t know where to start like I would a rock song or a jazz song.  It was a new experience for me and I think I did the best I could on a new genre and the only way to learn is to try new things and leave your comfort zone, which I felt like I did.