*inhales deeply* 

 Smell that?  It smells like "not doing projects" and it smells fantastic.  Not that I dislike projects--in all actuality I enjoyed the heck out of my 5.1 project because it gave me the opportunity to work on something that, otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to (mostly because I can't afford the necessary hardware).  My major project was much more enjoyable than my minor project (which I will never again listen to unless it's necessary to cure HIV), so let's discuss my overall experience and process.

Originally, I had planned to work with a group of guys I went to high school with (who are fantastic musicians BTW) and are just finishing up another album, but like always their productivity was overshadowed by their laziness and they never sent me anything.  Which really is unfortunate because they have a style all their own (look up Symphonic Haze if you get the chance).  Thankfully Jordan, the lead singer of a band called Fiction 20 down and owner if his own studio, gave me the stems (grr....we'll come back to this) of a song they had just finished--so I had my project.  

With most of my audio projects, the first thing I do is get the drums sounding the way I want.  This brings me back to the stems I mentioned earlier: They recorded and mixed the drums at a different studio (owned by Drew Mazurek), and considering they dumped them all down into a single stereo track, they actually sound pretty awesome.  But with the drums shrunk down to just a single left and right, that really limited my options for surround panning--so I had to get creative.  Basically I just duplicated the entire stereo track, cut out a lot of the low end (to get rid of some of the punch and help add some "air"), and bussed it mostly to the back.  This helped me spread the kit out a little bit and add some excitement to the rear channels.  I did have to be careful though, because It can get a little phasey at times.  It was interesting to  walk from the front of the room to the back while the drums were playing.....just to hear the phasing.  The only other "creativity" I did with the drums, was the stereo jumping delay on the kick.  All I had to do was duplicate the drum track again, split it into mono, and delete the parts I didn't want to play--pretty simple.

I didn't really have to do too much to the other tracks, they were all pretty straight forward.  I duplicated, and split into mono all of the vocal stuff, just so I could have independent control of the levels going to the center channel and surrounds.  I added some reverb to just about everything, but added a quiet delay to a couple of the main vocal tracks.  Just to spice things up a bit.

I basically left the guitars alone, except for the bass.  I sent it out through the API compressor to help level it a little bit because it jumped around some (and because I HAD to use outboard gear even though it wasn't really necessary on anything).

My stereo mix is very similar to the 5.1, I just dropped a lot of the duplicated tracks and boosted the vocals a little bit more to make it a little "poppy-er"....at least in my brain.

When I tried my hand at mastering, I realized that you can actually do a lot with a little parallel compression and some very specific eq'ing.  I forget the exact frequencies I messed with, but I found that I could actually adjust how well all the vocal tracks blended together.  I think it was around 1.5k, but if I adjusted the q and the level, it would kind of "mush" everything together or pull it apart.  Cool stuff.  It wasn't what I would call an amazing improvement, but it definitely helped.

And that was basically that.  The major project was a lot less stressful (read: terrible) than my minor project. I spent most of my time trying to figure out where to pan everything.  I think I got it all sorted out, but to be honest with you.....I'm ready to give my ears a little break!