@ColdRoomStudio Errm. Why have you written the same long piece twice in a single post. It is incredibly disconcerting. Interesting stuff, but waaaaaay too much to sit and read.
Thanks mate - I love you too 
Its what’s commonly known as a mistake. Made by humans like me more often than than I’d prefer… I shall fix it now.
Good post! Looking forward to read about the mixing process!
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Thanks mate - I will try to keep it coming.
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Part 3 - Basic Drum Mix
With the mix prep done, I was unable to get back to actually mixing the song for a couple of days, due to life and other commitments. I don’t mind this really, because it allows me to come back with fresh(er) ears.
My first step was to do a rough balance of the entire mix in mono, just using the faders and no other effects. Once it sounded reasonably balanced overall, then I panned things out to where I imagined they might sit best in the mix.
One of the interesting things I’ve learned about doing a rough fader balance in mono is that it’s a lot easier to balance the hard panned elements (like guitars) with the central elements (drums, bass, vocal). If I start my balance in stereo, I usually find that I have a tendency to under-mix the guitars. Usually, this gets redressed when I reference my mix against a pro mix. This is mainly down to how pan law affects our perception of levels, and I’ve found that since I started doing the initial balance in mono, my guitars end up being pretty much spot on once I pan them out.
With the rough balance done, I muted everything except the drum tracks. I spent a little time checking the phase relationships between the drum mics - First left overhead with right overhead, then kick with overheads, snare with overheads, and so on. Everything seemed to be pretty much in order, so I moved on.
The overall “sonic ballpark” I started out referencing was The Black Crowes “Warpaint” album from 2008, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Llu7Jjo_0
However, I ended up feeling that it sounded a little too “soft” and “mushy” for this particular track (sonically, not musically), particularly compared to the tracks I had already mixed for Bob…so I ended up aiming somewhere in the middle of those 2 points.
Starting from the overheads and room mic, I focussed on eq. At this stage, I listened for any undesirable frequencies and resonances that might impede the overall drum sound - usually in lows and low mids - and just cut them using Reaper’s stock eq. Once I had them sounding good to my ear, then I moved on to “polishing”. On pretty much all the drum mics, I used Slate’s Virtual Mix Rack, which has a great choice of compressors and eq’s.
With the overheads and room sounding punchy and vibrant as could be expected, I muted the room & listened to the kick with the overheads. Again I brought in the stock eq to pull out any nastiness I was hearing - In this case, some fairly heavy cuts around 200hz and 450hz. Next, the polishing with VMR - Cutting everything below 40hz and some further cutting at 400hz, a hefty boost at 4k to bring out some smack, a little boost at 100hz and 10k to bring out the extremes. Then into some compression - around 5db of gain reduction at a ratio of 4:1 on. I also used a little top and bottom “sauce” from the “Revival” saturation plugin, and the “Custom Lift”.
However, the kick was still lacking the consistency and punch I really craved hearing. The playing of the kick was actually pretty dynamic, so each hit varied in tone quite a bit even after eq and compression. I decided to bring out one of my favourite “instant punchy drums” tools, Boz’s +10db Eq/compression. The magic 25ms attack setting, 5:1 ratio, and about 10db (appropriately) of gain reduction followed the EQ with a 60hz boost, more 400hz dip, a 3k and a 6.5k boost. Kick done (for now).
The snare had a similar processing chain ReaEQ for cuts at 314hz and 512hz to tone down a resonant “boiiing”, then VMR with boosts at 2k and 7.5k, and a cut at 408hz. This was followed Custom Lift for a fair bit of “presence” boost, then 3dB of gain reduction from a compressor set to 4:1, some “thickness” and “shimmer” saturation from Revival. At the end of the chain, a little more 400hz cut and a narrow, deep 495hz cut to tame some resonance that was annoying me. Next came Boz’s +10dB compression and eq. - Same attack setting as the kick, but with 3dB of GR at a 3:1 ratio. The final eq had a boost at 163hz, a cut a 554hz, and further boosts at 3.5k and 7k. This comp/eq combination is killer for getting that in your face punch and snap from a snare.
On to the toms: The process was the same as the other close mics - ReaEQ first to cut the muck. These toms sounded great compared to a lot of the raw recordings I’ve heard - well tuned, with a lovely open sustain to them. Still I usually find toms need a LOT of reductive eq, usually in the 200 - 500hz area. In this case, some of the toms had up to 8dB of cut in this area. I followed this on each of the toms with more VMR, adding EQ and compression. The eq involved boosts to the lows, targeting the resonant fundamental “note” of each tom, some more broad cuts in the low mids, and usually a boost somewhere between 3k and 7k to bring out stick attack, depending on the drum. The compression was fairly gentle - about 3dB of GR at most. Finally, on the tom group channel I did a very gentle low cut centred at 40hz, as I noticed the low toms were activating the sub frequencies just a bit too much.
Moving back to the overheads, it was time to do some polishing to bring out the cymbals and even out the dynamics a little. Using VMR modules, I high passed them at 240hz, cut some boxy room sound at 570hz, ran into a compressor set to 2.5:1 ratio, medium/fast attack & release, triggering about 2dB of gain reduction. This was followed by further eq cuts at 400hz and 718hz. I started to notice a really piercing resonance in the high-mid to high range, so I chased that down with cuts at 6.9 and 9.9k.
The drums were sounding really punchy now, if a little clinical. Time to bring back the room mic for some character…
Room mics can be tricky. The excitement & sense of space and realism they add to a drum mix can be seductive, especially when you really over-compress them, smashing the transients and bring up the character of the drum sustain in the room . They are also a double-edged sword in that they can introduce a LOT of harshness to the cymbals. Fortunately, drummer Aaron is a not a cymbal basher, and the room mic had been recorded in such a way as to keep cymbal bleed to a minimum.
The room mic processing involved a 412 hz cut to take that boxy room resonance out, followed by a broader cut at 600hz to further clean up the low mids, and a boost at 4.9k to bring out some of the crack of the drums. I then smashed it into an 1176 compressor emulation set to 20:1, slowest attach, fastest release, with about 5dB of gain reduction, but working in parallel on about 75% of the signal. This was then followed by an 80hz boost to push the low end a little and bring out the beefiness of the kick and snare. The same annoying resonance that was in the overheads was present in the room mic. In this case, a fairly narrow cut at 6.44k seemed to nix it.
Then there is the hihat mic, which was mixed in pretty low, due to the fact that the drummer featured the hihat prominently in the way he naturally balanced himself. It was high passed at 173hz, a gentle shelf reduction at 7.5k, and a fairly wide bell cut at 7k to get rid of some harshness, followed by Revival with some “thickness” saturation and some fast/medium attack compression to tame the dynamics.
The overall drum buss processing was fairly straightforward: Gently boosting lows and highs with Slates Neve EQ emulation, and running into some fairly assertive compression at 4:1, slowish attack and fast-medium release, with gain reduction of about 5dB.
Here’s the original, raw “just faders and pans” drum sound:
And here is the basic processed sound we ended up with. There is no reverb or sample-layering present at this point:
Next: Getting to the finished drum sound.
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Part 4 - The Final Drum Sound
It’s hard to write about doing a mix in strict chronological terms, since it is by nature an interactive, interdependent process - A change in any one area could affect many other things simultaneously. Hence, a lot of the changes I made to the basic drum sound I established at the beginning of the mix were made in response to the demands of other elements as they were introduced and the overall vision for the song. I’ll focus on these changes now, and try to explain why they were made.
Introducing additional ambience:
Since the drums have imprinted on them the space in which they were recorded, and the other mix elements were recorded in different spaces, often with little or no natural ambience on them, I looked for a “neutral” kind of ambient space that would be the basis to tie all these elements together as a cohesive sounding whole. This is a fairly subtle thing, but it does make quite a marked difference to the final result.
For this role, I used Slate’s “Verbsuite Classics” plugin running the Bricasti 'Studio A" preset which is a fairly neutral sounding room algorithm with a relatively short (548ms) decay.
Here’s the processed drums without room reverb:
And here they are with it added:
Subtle, but it forms the basis for my “cohesive room” tactic, which will comes into play later.
Another subtle effect was the actual reverb on the snare close mic. This was again Verbsuite with a Plate algorithm this time and a longer decay of 1.11secs. Here is that added to the drums:
Remember, I was going for a relatively dry-ish drum sound, thus the light touch with these processors.
Next, the toms - they really needed something to help them sustain and thicken in the stereo field. I ended up using 2 reverbs on them. The first was a Verbsuite room preset called “tom tom” that was fairly transparent, the second was from Valhalla Room’s Chambers algorithms called “GateDrumRoom”, which was a bit more colourful.
Here are those added in:
Problem Solving: Crash Cymbals
As the mix progressed, I began to notice that Aaron was so light when hitting the crash cymbals that they started to disappear as the mix became more dense. This is unusual, because most drummers I have mixed have the tendency smash the snot out of their crash and ride cymbals to the detriment of all sorts of other elements in the mix. So why not just turn up the overheads? I tried this, but found that the hihat then just became ridiculously loud in the mix. What about just automating up the crashes? While this may be effective for the initial hit, it’s almost impossible to keep the sustain of the crash cymbal loud without negatively and very noticeably affecting all the other drum sounds that are part of the overhead mix.
My solution was to add in some crash cymbal samples underneath the existing overheads. This was relatively easy to do. I just solo’d the overheads, opened BFD and searched for cymbal sounds that matched the respective crashes in the drum mix. A little bit of tweak of the pitch was necessary in one case, but then it was just a matter of triggering them via midi, putting them on their own tracks and feeding them into the overhead buss.
Sample Layering
Again, as the mix progresses, I find that the parameters change and you often need to look beyond just basic processing to achieve the sound you’re aiming at. It’s really hard for me to specify exactly why I chose to use the samples I did to enhance the existing drum sound in the context of the mix. Probably the best way to explain it is like painting a picture - You start with a basic shape, and then you use various brush strokes, shading, the pallette knife and other colours to help something come to life and be more engaging to the viewer (or in this case, the listener). It’s a pretty intuitive process, but I’ll do my best to explain it nonetheless.
In the case of the kick drum, I initially mixed in 3 additional samples. I felt the original kick drum didn’t have enough sub low end in it, so I found a nice, dry sounding 1 shot sample that had a solid fundamental around 60hz. I added another 1 shot kick that had a cool subtle slapback effect that enhanced the perception of loudness. The interesting thing with these 2 samples was that they needed their polarity reversing to work properly, which is a reminder to always check phase when adding samples. Finally, I added a completely ambient room sample from Slate’s Trigger 2 collection, again to add some bloom presence, and sustain to the existing sound, since the slower tempo really suited a bigger kick sound.
Later in the process, I decided to add yet another kick sample, this one having a really “sucked mid” sound to push both the lows and highs a bit more.
Here are those 4 kick samples added in:
Moving onto the snare, it was time to get a little less subtle. I was aiming to add some width, presence and “sound bouncing of walls” impression of loudness that the space in this songs’ groove seemed to demand. This involved 2 samples, both completely ambient in nature. The louder of the 2 was the room mic only sample of the Black Beauty snare from the Slate Deluxe 2 collection. I usually tune the sample to match the tuning of the original recorded drum, but in this case, they seemed to match pretty much spot-on. The second sample, mixed in just barely loud enough to be audible, was “gunshot” sample - the ambient tail of a gunshot sound. These 2 samples seemed to provide the sustain and space I needed. Here is the previous drum sound, now with the snare samples added:
I was pretty happy with that, but later on, after some great suggestions in BTR, I added a snare bottom sample to the mix, just to add a little sizzle and make the snare less “tom-like”. Here is that added:
Parallel Tactics
We’re almost there, with one significant part of the puzzle missing: parallel processing. Distortion and saturation can be wonderful tools in mixing. If a sound needs to be thicker, to cut through more, but not be necessarily “louder”, then parallel processing is a profoundly effective tactic. In rock mixes, I use it pretty much 100% of the time on drums. Additionally it adds character and grit - “un-sterilizing” the audio, which is perfect for rock.
Here’s the way I do it: I add auxiliary sends to the kick, snare & toms tracks that feed into a “parradrums” track with just UAD’s “Fatso Jnr” - an emulation of Empirical Labs famous hardware compressor/tape emulation/saturation/distortion device instantiated. I call up a preset called “Warm Crunch”, then crank the input control pretty much all the way up. I then solo the “paradrums” track and balance the send levels so that the balance is primarily weighted toward the snare, with slightly less toms, and the kick softest in the mix. Here is what the solo’d “paradrums” track sounds like:
You can understand why I am so diligent about gating my close mics. If there was stray cymbal bleed, or gates weren’t closing fast enough, the amount of gain and distortion on this track would make an ugly mess of that very quickly. Instead, what we get is “controllable mayhem”. It just adds that certain thickness, that excitement and character needed for a rock drum sound.
So here is that added in to taste:
That’s the completed drum sound on the track…
Next up: Bass
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Thanks for sharing! Very interesting and inspiring reading!
Massive improvement on the drums!!!
Thanks Gustavo! Glad you enjoyed it…
The drums were actually really well recorded (& I’m pretty certain they were recorded at a pro studio), but that amount of change is necessary to achieve a sound that is comparable to what else is out there currently.
Part 5 - Bass
Listening to the raw bass track, although Bob had clearly done a superb job of playing it evenly and smoothly, I was initially concerned about getting enough consistent low end, as the bass part was played across both high and low strings, and up and down the neck. As you can hear in the raw DI, the tonality varied quite substantially through different parts of the song:
I also wanted to retain the clarity in those chorded bass licks, while retaining the midrange thickness and beef to cut through a rock mix.
I felt this was an ideal circumstance where my usual 3 pronged “multiband” bass processing would be put through it’s paces.
First, I established a full, beefy tone focussed mainly on the low and sub harmonics. This involved using VMR to supply eq with a generous low end shelf boost around 80hz, running into an 1176 clone with medium and slowest release hitting about 10dB of gain reduction. Here is what that sounded like:
I duplicated the same DI track, then added Amplitube’s Ampeg SVT-4 Pro amp sim. I was looking for a tone to really bring out clarity in the midrange, so the tone here is quite spanky and modern. This would help with those chord tones:
I copied a third version of the DI track and sent it to Guitar Rig’s Sansamp emulation (cunningly called “Transamp”) for some real gritty midrange distortion. To take the edge off it, I inserted an instance of ReaEQ following it and low pass filtered it at 3k. Here is that channel solo’d:
Mixing these together to taste and feeding them into a “Bass Buss” track, I first check that they were phase-coherent, then I did some further processing to the combined sound as a whole. UAD’s Neve 88RS channel strip plugin was first in line, with fairly high ratio compression pulling everything together with about 3dB max of gain reduction. In the eq section, I added a nice wallop of boost around 50hz, high passing the bass just below that boost. In the high mids, a full boost at 1.5k and a slight boost around 3k were made. I followed this with 2 instances of Waves Maxxbass. The first adding a little more harmonic in the lows, and another adding harmonics to the subs. After a few revisions, I did a few cuts to the bass with eq around the 100 & 200hz mark.
Here is the completed bass tone:
And here is the completed bass in context with the drums:
Next up: Guitars.
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O my… this is AWESOME reading, thanks heaps for taking the time to outline this… it’s inspiring and daunting at the same time… 
Loving the samples, they give such a clear demo that really gives an effective illustration… yay!!
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Fascinating stuff. It’s like in every major post so far, there’s been one little trick I’ve never heard before and plan to try.
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Thanks Emma!
Thanks John! Glad you liked it.
Wow, if I’d known you’d have to do so much work I would have played better. Seriously though, since you prefer raw tracks, would there be a benefit to me doing mild processing on the way in to make your life easier? For instance, mild compression for peak leveling, or is it better raw? I’m feeling like some of this could be pre production if you do it all routinely.
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That’s actually a really difficult question to answer categorically. Sometimes pre-processing can make life easier; sometimes it can tie your hands. A little mild compression and/or peak levelling would probably be fine on vocals and bass. I definitely prefer drums raw. Any added ambience is best to leave to the final mix too.
Part 6 - Guitars
Guitars were probably the easiest part of this mix for me - for 2 reasons:
- Bob is an awesome guitarist, and since 90% of the guitarist’s tone is in his fingers, Bob’s playing and tone are brilliant
- Bob knows how to record excellent guitar tones.
It was simply a matter of me getting out of the way and not messing it up. Having said that, as a guitarist of 41 years myself (many of which I spent being totally tone-obsessed), I have fairly firm ideas about how guitars should sound, and I think it helps that Bob and I are relatively on the same page in that regard.
Incidentally, when I reach the stage in the mix where I’m starting to mix the main supporting instrumental core (in this mix, guitars, drums & bass), I like to fire up the lead vocal and put it in as a “placeholder”. To get the vocal into relatively good shape in short order, I use Izotope’s Nectar Elements plugin, which contains all the processors you need to create a “finished”-sounding vocal in one convenient plugin. It’s just a matter of slapping it on and choosing a preset that will get me in the ballpark of the final sound I’m after. Then later, I return and work on the ‘final’ vocal tone.
It’s much easier to mix around the actual vocal than try to imagine it being there. I can hear clearly any potential frequency-masking problems, and it stops me from making the guitars take up too much space in the mix unnecessarily.
So what kind of shape were the guitars in when they came to me? Very good - here’s an example of one of the main rhythm tracks:
Remembering that I had already inserted Slates Virtual Tape Machine on each track and gain-staged it in analogue style, as I did on this one, I applied my reductive eq first, using the stock ReaEQ. This involved high passing a 105hz, and pulling out some mud and boxiness at 384hz and 572hz respectively. Next, I ran it into VMR for some polishing: I used the Neve preamp emulation first in line. I pushed the preamp input until I heard audible distortion, then rolled it back a way. It just added a nice bit of weight and thickness to the sound. Next into Slates SSL eq emulation, cutting more lows at 80hz, pushing some with a bell filter at 117hz, and a very gentle boost at 200hz. I also pushed the high mids at 6k with a wide, fairly assertive bump of almost 4dB. Next came some compression from Slate’s FG401 compressor - 4:1, slow attack, fast release, with about 2dB of gain reduction. That was followed by Slate’s “Revival”, pushing some low end saturation or “thickness”. Here is the resulting tone:
All in all, there is not a massive change in the guitar tone - it retains the same basic character, just slimmed down to fit within the mix better.
You might wonder why I bother to compress distorted guitars, since by nature they are already highly compressed. The answer is not to further reduce the dynamic range, but rather to accentuate the dynamics…sounds strange I know, but bear with me…With the attack and release settings adjusted correctly (slow-ish attack, faster release) each pick attack jumps up slightly in volume as it sneaks through the compressor’s detection circuit before being clamped down upon, then quickly released in time for the next pick attack. This actually gives the feeling that the guitars are moving forward at the listener and “jumping out of the speakers” - they sound brighter, have more impact, and are more “in your face”. With the right eq, they maintain definition and clarity, despite being often highly distorted.
Without going into all the gory details about the other rhythm tones, suffice to say that I followed a similar method with the other rhythm guitars, of which there were 4 in total. I listened to each tone in turn, eq’d out the undesirable stuff with ReaEQ, then polished them with VMR’s processors. I varied the areas when I boosted and cut, not only to enhance the tone, but to provide complimentary contrasting tones to create greater difference left to right in the stereo field. This technique has the benefit of creating the perception of greater stereo width, which is an excellent additional mix tool to emphasise the impact of new parts.
The other 2 guitars played parts which I would describe as “colouring rhythms” - not necessarily fundamental to the song’s structure, but parts that enhance and create interest and change in the arrangement. I panned these two parts hard left and right, but then sent them to their own buss, where I automated the stereo width of them from 40% to 100% throughout the course of the song. I also automated the volume on this buss greatly, so that they kept low and in the background during the verses, but came up almost equal volume with the main guitars during choruses. This had the effect making the choruses sound wider and more expansive.
Here is all the guitar parts together, solo’d for a verse and chorus to give you the idea:
You might have also noticed some very subtle ambience on the solo’d rhythm guitar track. This is actually the same “room” ambience I described earlier on the drums. However, rather than send the guitars directly to the room verb, what I like to do to ever so slightly intensify the sense of depth and front to back image in the soundstage is to send my guitar reverb sends to a “guitar room” track. This track has just has Reaper’s stock “ReaDelay” plugin on it, set fully wet, no repeats, with a delay time of about 40ms. This then runs into my “room verb”. Why?
What I noticed when setting up reverb plugins is that perhaps the most powerful control on a reverb is pre-delay. Predelay delays the onset of reverb and separates it from the source sound. Psycho-acoustically, it brings the source sound “closer” to the listener, and “further” away from the boundary surface of the imaginary “room” being suggested by the reverb. Since sound travels at roughly 1 foot per millisecond, it’s easy to imagine a room with the band set up, the drummer at the back, closest to the rear wall, with the keys and background singers just forward of the drummer, perhaps the guitars in front of the keys, and our lead singer right out front…
As it has it’s own self-contained low and high pass filters, I also use ReaDelay to high and low pass the respective “rooms” at different frequencies. Since when sound travels it loses high and low end the further distance it has to travel, it stands to reason that the further our imaginary “boundary” is away from our source sound, the less high and low end the reflected sound will contain.
So this is how I set up my “room”. The “room verb” that all the other “rooms” feed into has no predelay. I have a “keys room” with a predelay of 30ms, “guitar room” at 40ms and a “vocal room” of about 65ms. This is, of course, by no means scientific, just an efficient way to create extra depth while keeping everything in the same “space”, without using a ton of different reverbs.
With the rhythm guitars, I kept them all pretty dry, because they already have some room tone "baked into the recording of them. If you listen in headphones and compare the raw guitar with the processed one, you’ll hear some subtle roominess on the raw file, but you’ll also clearly hear the delayed reverb panned to the opposite side of the stereo spectrum on the processed file. I really like this technique. This “crosstalk” creates a subtle connection between the left and right sides of the mix - it joins everything in a cohesive way that retains great separation at the same time.
What about the solo parts? There were a couple of slide guitar parts that Bob recorded as part of the rhythm guitar “colouring” tracks. These were lower in volume than the rhythm parts, so I needed to volume automate them to stand out in the mix. I actually “multed” the slide on it’s own at the beginning and end so that I could pan it and treat it individually, but the eq and compression settings were essentially the same as the rhythm parts. Since the slide’s role turned out to be a foil for the rollicking piano part that came later in the production, I ended up panning it to the opposite side of the spectrum so they could “play off” each other. As the song progresses, I add delay to the slide parts to increase the sense of excitement:
Here are those beginning parts.
And here is the ending slide with added delay for more vibe:
The lead guitars followed a similar tactic, although they have a fair bit of the same additional ambience as the lead vocal (which I will explain later).
The first lead is a little dryer sounding:
While the second has considerably more delay effect to give it more impact and excitement: The ping pong delay features pretty strongly here:
That’s pretty much it for the guitars - next up: Vocals
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Part 7 - Lead Vocals
Ok…Well to the 2 or 3 people who might actually be bothered to read this, I hope you get something beneficial out of it. Certainly, writing about a mix in any meaningful way probably takes about 5 times longer than actually mixing!..
So…vocals… As I mentioned at the outset, Bob’s vocals are always great - full of soulful tone and powerfully passionate, not to mention pretty much spot-on pitch-wise. The goal was then to simply get them to sound as good as possible, and to emphasise the attitude and emotion in a way that matched the vibe of the music. Here’s a sample of the dry vocal recording I received:
I had already evened out the dynamics manually (see mix prep), so the next step was to listen for any resonances that didn’t sound so great and reduce their impact. Reaper’s stock ReaEQ took care of this task with a high pass around 112hz and narrow dips centred at 270, 439 and 697hz. I then fed the vocals into Slate’s Virtual Tape Machine. I find this to be one of the most effective de-essers around. Since I started using it on lead vocals, I rarely have to de-ess at the end of the chain.
Next came my 2 go-to vocal compressors in series - first the Waves CLA-76 Blue Stripe (1176 emulation) set to 4:1, attack set in the middle, fastest release, with about 5-6dB of gain reduction. Then into the Waves CLA2A (LA2A emulation) set to “compress” mode with about 3dB of gain reduction. I love this 1-2 combination for vocal compression. The combination of these two processors just pin the vocal in place perfectly. The 1176 knocks down the bigger peaks, then the LA2A brings up all the lower level detail.
Here’s what that sounded like:
You might pick up some prominent room sound at the end of the word “raindrop”. That is actually due to the raw file being “gained up” on the “as” word that follows “raindrop” by about 13dB! Probably unnecessary in hindsight, but it worked out fine in the context of the full mix.
Next, time for some “polishing” eq, a little more compression, and some more eq. I used Virtual Mix Rack for this: First the Neve Preamp emulation for a little more attitude and texture, then into the Neve EQ with a little boost at 108hz for some “girth” and a bit at 4k for some “cut-through”. Following that, the Slate 1176 in parallel mode just bringing in a little more detail. Finally, the Slate SSL EQ with a boost around 5k and pulling out a little from 10k up with a gentle shelf, so as not to get too “glossy”.
I still had a hankering for some more grit and bite from the vocal, so I called up Soundtoys’ “Little Radiator” plugin. This can get quite distorted, but the secret is to use the “mix” control to blend in the nastiness until it’s just “nice”. It tends to add a fair bit of noise, so I followed it with a gate to get rid of that when a signal wasn’t present.
One more thing I like to use to get a vocal to sound “larger than life” is to use a little bit of stereo pitch-shifting the spread the vocal out from the centre of the mix. Soundtoys “Little Micro-Shift” is my go-to for this, used very, very subtly.
So, here is the finished, dry vocal tone:
If you compare it with the previous clip, you can hear that the distortion and extra processing just adds that little bit of excitement and “edge” that pushes the vocal right forward and “in-your-face”.
But the insert processing is only part of the story… The ambient effects are the secret to getting the lead vocal to really “nest” into the mix, as well as creating a sense of movement, size, progression and excitement.
I mentioned my “room verb” I set up for the drums and guitars earlier, and how I use multiple busses with different pre-delay times to feed the room verb to provide a very subtle sense of depth… So the first send effect is to the room verb with 65ms of pre-delay. Here’s that sound:
Next send is my “excitement + glue” mono slap delay - set to 166ms. It’s dark, rolled off on the low and high ends, and a little bit distorted. This one just works - it makes quite a difference!..
Another send effect is the “Stereo 8th Delay”. This is another quite dark delay without much low end set to an 8th note repeat on one side, with an additional 10ms on the other side, spread out wide. It’s quite subtle in this example, but I pushed this up for the choruses and at other times for highlights in the mix:
Then we have the plate verb - this really adds some “size” to the vocal. This is a Bricasti plate emulation with the lows rolled off and a massive 150ms of pre-delay:
Finally, we have 2 more “special FX” delays. The first is an 8th note ping pong delay that is used both for a “delay throw” on certain words, and as an “excitement” delay for the chorus. The second is a quarter note ping pong delay that is much wider, very “am radio”-filtered, and only used as a delay throw on certain words.
Here’s the whole section from the verse through to the chorus with all the send effect processing on the lead vocal:
So, that’s about it for the lead vocal. Next up, backing vocals.
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Just one?!?!? This is really great stuff!! And +1000 on what Emma said as well.
A heartfelt thanks and much gratitude for taking the time to so painstaking put all of this down.
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The treatment is very nice, although it’s interesting to hear how much the delay and reverb become less prominent in the mix. It’s also interesting to hear me hit a couple of those notes flat and have the ping-pong delay repeat my errors multiple times. Nice job with the processing, always love the delay in your mixes.
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Thank you to @ColdRoomStudio and @StylesBitchley for this thread!! This is fantastic reading for all levels/abilities. You guys rock!!! :beerbang:
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Come on Andrew, the suspense is killing me. What did you do to make the Bobettes sound so good together in the background vocals? Don’t leave me hanging.
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