Well, this was interesting. I originally listened to the studio version of the track and was super excited because of all the attitude it had. Then, I opened the live tracks. Lots of attitude, but some things were a mess… most notably the vocals.
SO… I wanted to approach this like the studio version, lots of stank on the drums, and try to maintain the attitude and vibe of the original. I didn’t clean up a ton of bleed, I wanted to see if I can keep the live feel but still sound half-decently produced.
I did 2 very slightly different versions. On the first one, I’m smashing into my analog summing box. It’s mostly an experiment to see what happens. On the second, I back off a bit so it’s a bit more dynamic and open (although still not all that open). Interested to hear people’s take on it.
A couple of things that I’ve picked up on:
- there’s a lot of saturation/distortion… some baked into the tracks and some that I added… I may have overcooked it a bit.
- probably need more vocal automation… I might do some surgical editing on the female vox, they didn’t appear to compress it on the way in to the recording. I’ve compressed them pretty hard but I still feel like it’s not as controlled as I’d like.
- struggled a lot with the hi-hats… if I left the OH at a consistent level the hats are overbearing, so I put on multiband compression (sidechained by the actual hi-hat track and only active during sections that use the hats) to tame them a bit.
- I feel like it kinda turns into a mess around 3:00… I’m still deciding if and how I want to clean that up. May have painted myself into a corner though.
Anyhoo… BASH BASH BASH
Version 1 (summing bus destruction)
Version 1a (summing bus mild beating)