TASK 2: Development Blog

What I am aiming on improving over the progression of this task is my Mixing ability, primarily centred around mixing live instruments. This may include, but is not limited, to Mixing Live drums, taking into consideration what mics may be used and how this may effect the sound or mixing style; Recording and mixing guitar, thinking about what microphones to use in what scenarios (such as if i wanted a muddier more distorted guitar, would I prefer to use a Dynamic or condenser mic? And would i want to add effects during the mix or during the recording using guitar pedals?); improving my mixing of vocals, as I have little knowledge on this and looking at techniques from videos or asking teachers tips and methods would help my mix sound clearer with more clarity

This video from a first watch seems very useful and includes plugins and techniques I haven't used before to mix vocals, also focusing on the plug-ins provided with logic, allowing me to follow along with techniques. I will try to refer back to this video frequently as to improve my vocal mix.

The reason I would like to focus my attention to developing this area is because being able to make a cohesive mix with live instruments puts you forward to be able to get a repertoire which would help me get jobs in the field of a music engineer. Another reason is so that I can begin to mix my own music to a more professional level, which would encourage me to release music I create and give me more experience in the industry.

The aims I have for the duration and end of this project is to be able to mix vocals, guitar and drums individually, but also collectively and be able to create a cohesive mix.

Week 1

This week, I am aiming to find and work on methods for mixing drums, and I will attempt these techniques on a drum recording.

For my first week that I'm developing towards this target, I am going to watch this video i have found, which discusses the best way to layout your drum stems and how to utilise buses to make your mixing more efficient. I will then apply this to some unused drum stems and see if it helps me when doing a basic mix and if I find this preferable to the current template I use, this simply just being the use of a track stack for my drums.

This is how I usually layout my drums, this is still good as it allows you to mix the drums individually and as a whole easily, however if there are certain plug ins you want to apply to most of the kit and not all, you still have to apply a bus, so doing his in the first instance would be easier but would also allow you to apply more gain of that plug in to each part of the drums and give you more control

Just by doing this fixed the issue I mentioned above, as now I can control each part of the kit and how i mix them individually and as a whole, however its still more efficient to create other aux's for plug ins which are important when mixing drums i.e compression and reverb. Its also worth mentioning that in by not sending it to the drums this will be in the stack howwever it will not be able to be controlled by he main drum fader.

This image now shows that each of the aux's for the drum parts are now sent to bus 8 (compression bus), which allows me to control how much compression is applied to each part. Also, while it isn't visible in this screenshot, I have also got a reverb aux which is being sent to the main drum aux, allowing me to put the same amount of reverb on the entire kit.

This is what the new layout looks like. I found this layout slightly confusing with how everything is sent to each other and I feel that would be easy to forget and get confused over, like, for example, forgetting to send your drum parts aux's to the main drum aux and getting confused why the kit reverb isn't getting applied. This i feel could be avoided by me just merely memorising the layout and remembering to send everything. I found this method good for mixing as after laying it out it was very easy to apply compression and reverb and didn't take me much time at all, and this I imagine made my file much smaller which is good as i tend to have large projects which take a lot of processing power, so doing this will help with that, and it may also help me utilise buses and sends more so that my projects can use even less processing power and maybe become easier to mix.

Week 2

My aim for this week is to continue working on ways in which I can mix my drums.

This video is focused around making drums more punchy and giving them more of a room sound to emphasize size or to make the drums sound "massive". He goes about this by using 2 compressors which are applied to drum buses, and he works in the same format that I learnt about in the prior week of my blog.

Another thing I have learnt is that the method used is parallel processing, in which you have 2 of the same signal running simultaneously and placing effects on one of the signals (bus) and dialling it in either through gain or a volume fader.

The first thing I did was EQ my 1st compression channel, This was to emphasize certain frequencies like the highs for the cymbals as to not lose them in the mix after the compression was applied and to give everything a punch when it is applied.

The next thing I did was add the vintage VCA compressor to this same channel, setting the threshold to where it was catching the peaks of the drums and not the cymbals. I then gave it a 4:1 ratio and gave it a mid speed attack of around 45ms and a release of 100ms, This meaning it would let the initial hit through and then quieten down after the initial hit of each drum, this making it more punchy.

This is what the track sounded like before applying the first compression.

This is with the addition of the first compression.

This image shows me applying a second compressor on a separate bus. For this compressor I was aiming to get a airy sound to the drums, so i used a FET compressor (the video suggested to use this or the Vintage FET, I decided on the FET compressor as I was most comfortable with this compressor, however looking back the vintage could have been better or provided a more preferable sound and I should have experimented using both). I set the compressors threshold so it captured each drum hit, but not drastically, and I set a very fast attack and release at a threshold of 4:1, meaning the each time a drum hit was put past the threshold, it would reduce the volume of the initial hit, creating a more airy drum sound.

This is how the second compression sounded without the first compression applied.

This is a before and after shown above. Overall I found this very difficult. This is a very slight difference and my ears aren't trained well enough to hear a significant difference, however, from what I could hear it did add a bit more size to my drums. In the future I would experiment with this more and see what sounds I could get out of it and if I could make it more coherent so that I could properly assess the utility of this technique. I did find this very easy to do for the drums and not very time consuming so in the future I may return to this and experiment more to hear more of the differences and the benefits to this technique.

Week 3

My aim for this week is to get a better sounding snare drum.

When searching up "how to better mix a snare logic", I found a website (https://www.toughtones.com/fat-punchy-snare/#:~:text=Depending%20on%20a%20snare%2C%20boosting,give%20the%20snare%20some%20energy.), which says that

"Depending on a snare, boosting somewhere around 2,5 – 5kHz is a great for emphasizing attack and snap. In case your snare sounds a bit boxy, boost around 500-700Hz to find the frequency and cut it out. Lastly, around 200Hz gives that nice fatness and low end. After EQ use a compressor to give the snare some energy."

This compares the sound of the snare unequalised and EQ'd to the suggested variables on the website, however I decided the tightness of the bell curves as it wasn't specific, so I altered these to what I thought sounded good.

Since the website wasn't specific on the compression, and stated just to 'give the snare some energy', i decided to use a harsh compression, alike to the harsh compression I used in week 2 (compressor 1) however I used the vintage FET, as it is a aggressive compressor.

Overall, I found this helped make my snare snap more and definitely did add energy as the website said, however, I found that when I did this, the snare lost a lot of power as it had less low end, this being when I realised I misunderstood and that I was supposed to boost the frequencies at 200 Hz, so if I were to do this again I would change this, however from this outcome, I have found that cutting frequencies at 200 Hz can give a really good snap to the snare and may be a good 2nd layer to a snare to make it stand out more in a mix.

Week 4

my aim this week is to mix a better kick drum.

when searching up how on google, I found a useful image on the website https://www.musicguymixing.com/how-to-eq-drums/. This would be a very good reference, despite if i decide to copy this exactly, as it could help me fix certain aspects of my kick like, for example, adding more click or creating more punch.

This is the result from using the image as a reference for mixing my kick.

This is the result from EQing my kick with no outside help.

To compare, I found that the kick, which was mixed with assistance from the image, had a lot more clarity to how I would mix it. The version mixed with assistance also had more punch to it, making it a great sound for a kick. In the future I will definitely consider referencing this image more as it has transformed my kick.

Week 5

My aim for this week is to effectively place reverb on to a kit to either make it sound more natural and in a room; or to make them stand out more in a mix.

This video goes over 5 approaches to adding reverb to your drums, however this is less centred around trying to make them sound reverberated but more round how you can create a space for your drums and saturate them. There is also a really interesting means of adding reverb to a snare, this being by using a trigger, in this case the "Steven Slate Trigger 2", this working by the plug in detecting the hit of the drum or instrument and playing another sample as the hit happens, making it great for layering drums. This is more difficult to do on logic as I don't have access to the Steven Slate Trigger 2 and logic has no built in trigger plugin, however there are ways around it which I may explore this week. In this video there is also a lot of good information about effective ways to use reverb buses and ways in which you you can use EQ and reverb to create a more saturated sound.

the first tip in this video emphasizes the importance of picking a good reverb first, so I decided that I would use space designer (as I find that Chromaverb tends to be very saturated and therefore wouldn't be the best for creating a realistic space with a small verb), using the clean room reverb. before I did anything with this, I started out by creating reverb buses, first starting out by creating a small and large reverb bus (the clean room going on the small reverb bus).

Next, I put the reverb I had chosen on the small verb bus, reducing its decay as it was originally set as 2.3 seconds and was making it quite airy. I also messed around with the wet and dry sliders to see what sounded best and found the both wet and dry at -5.0 dB. another thing later mentioned in the video was EQ-ing your reverb, I don't have this shown as a screen shot but I did a low cut and a high cut as to remove and rumble and harsh hi's being reverberated.

I then did a similar thing with the large reverb, however as it is a large reverb I used a reverb with a longer decay, and with the dry and wet I made it entirely wet with -5.6 dB.

Next I added a reverb for the parts around the kit (ie cymbals), again using space designer. For this I went for a 1.2 second decay and turned my dry all the way do so that I could fade it in on the Space verb aux track.

These were the results, from where i started with no added reverb and the final product. Whilst the addition of the reverb was quite slight, due to it being a very busy drum track and not wanting to wash it out with reverb, I can hear that in comparison to where I started with no reverb, The snare sounds alot more full and stands out nicely in the kit. Also, the cymbals have an added brightness to them which really fills out the soundscape. Overall I found this very simple to do, the only thing I struggled with was where to find the correct ballace between the volume of the reverb tracks and the gain of the bus on the track, along with how wet I should make the reverb. Looking back I should have been more confident in the wetness of the reverb as this is easily made less noticeable by adjusting the volume of the reverb track and adjusting the gain.

Week 6

My aim for this week is to learn how to EQ Vocals.

At thhe start of this week I wanted to refer back to the video at the start of this project about mixing vocals and do a full vocal mix, unfortunately due to transport issues I wasnt able to come in and do that. With this in mind and the time constraint for this week, I decided simply to learn how to better EQ vocals. When searching how to do this, I found this website ( https://www.musicguymixing.com/vocal-eq/ ) which had a cheat sheet, this being a website I have found and used before in week 4. I decided to use this technique and again compare it to how I wouuld usually mix vocal EQ. This is what the vocals sound like before any altering.

First i started out doing my own EQ and how I would usually approach this, using the sweep technique to highlight the good and bad frequencies. Usually I would also add brilliance to add more space to my vocals, however I found this not to sound very good and ended up cutting frequencies at 15 to 20 kHz.

This is what my EQ mix sounded like.

Next I moved on to EQing by the cheat sheet, however I did cut and raise more frequencies than what was displayed in the cheat sheet, Just because this will change for different vocals and voices.

This is what it sounded like with use of the cheat sheet.

The first thing I noticed when doing this was how similar the EQ patterns were, however there are differences, such as the boosting of frequencies at 250 Hz in the cheat sheet version and the lesser cut of the higher frequencies. When listening back, I realise i should have boosted the frequencies at 250 Hz, as it adds a lot more emphasis and even punch to the vocals. And with the lesser cut in the higher frequencies you can hear a lot more air and space in the vocals, however sometimes this is less preferable and you want to remove this more. Overall, I would say I should start using the trick of boosting the frequencies at 250 Hz more often, as I think it would add alot more character to my vocal mixes, and I will definitely refer back to this for future mixes.

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