A New Mixing Desk

When I got into the studio today I got myself sat down and my pro tools session loaded. And began to look at the SSL XL Desk. It has a bus compressor that I used later in the session and 4 mix buses. Not a desk that I’ve used before but its simple enough to find your way around once you’ve worked out that 500 means EQ.

Once the protools session had loaded I got my output set to the 1st 2 channels on the desk so I could use the desk as a whole as a  master bus for everything else and hit play. This didn’t have the effect I had hoped for, the track played about twice as high and twice as fast as usual, the person before me must have  fiddled with the sample rate of the sound card. I took a look and it was at 96KHz, an easy fix, you’d think. I attempted to change it back to 44.1 but to no avail, it jumped back instantly to 96. After a bit of messing around the solution was just to turn it off and on again.

I started work with the kick samples, I had taken them from another track that I had recorded so I had to gate them first to get rid of bleed and then I compressed them both with an 1176. This was quick and easy. On the kick out I then used protools 7 band eq to put on a HPF at 80Hz, a low bump at 120Hz and a high bump at around 1.6 kHz and to cut out a chunk in between. I also put a tiny bit of reverb on the kick out. I was happy with the sound of the mics together and moved on. I then made some adjustments to the snare, cutting the high frequencies down slightly from where they were in my last mix and putting a limiter on to bring the loudest 2 or 3 peaks down by a dB or 2.

The next place I attacked was the bass, I had 4 bass tracks in the mix, a DI signal, a cab miked up with an MD421, a cab miked up with an SM57 and a distorted bass signal. On the advise of one of my lecturers, Austin, I duplicated one of the tracks and set to work fattening up my bass sound at the low end. To do this I duplicated the MD421 track and made an extreme bass boost at 80Hz, I boosted by 12dB. I then ran this signal into an 1176 and compressed it heavily taking out 11dB at times. The result of this was a very smooth bass tone that when blended with the other tracks underpinned everything. I kept this track very low in the mix however because it felt very bass heavy in the room. I would later regret this listening at home  through my own monitors. 

Work the began on guitars and I was very happy with the outcome. I roled off the top end of the tremalo guitars in the verce by a dB and gave 270Hz a gentle tickle just to fill it out slightly making sure not to tread on the toes of the bass. I did this with quite a wide Q but with a low and subtle  amount of gain.

After all of that I was content with the quality of my work and started to play around, mastering the track in a hybrid way. This isn’t a final mastering session, more of a practice for me becuase I hadn’t listened through any contrasting speaker, monitors, headphones to critically judge  the mix. I did this mastering in a hyubrid way using an LA2A in the box with a gentle EQ making a  tiny cut of just 0.3dB at 309Hz. The LA2A was just there to limit the very loudest notes bringing them down by a maximum of 1dB. When I came out onto the console I ed’ed in a way trying to imitate the “retro iron” section of the Audient asp8024, boosting at 80Hz and at 16kHz. On the audient the “air” boost is at 20kHz but the eq on the SSL will only sweep as high as 16kHz. Both of these eq changes were minute. Finally I got onto the bus compressor on the SSL and recorded with several diffrent setting on the bus compressor for experimental purposes. I made prints where I literally just tickled the meter and ones where I could watch it take 4dB out in places. 

 Critical Listening:

When I got home I listened to all of the mixes one at a time with the varying compression settings and found a few things to work on when I next go in. I found that the mix as a whole had a disapointing lack of power in the low end. This could be attributed to a number of things, different speakers and a different room for example but I still found it slightly lower than I would have liked through Beyerdynamic DT770 pro headphones. I am going to listen through some more speakers before making a final decision about how to face this. I will also take out some more of the low mids from the kick when I’m next in and put the high end that I took out of the snare back in to give it some more bite. I will finally bring up the overheads slightly and increase the amount of reverb on the kick out a small amount.

And then listen to it all over again.