I began with my list of things to improve from my last session by immediately addressing the issue with bass. I went to my 5 bass tracks and listened to each in tern to refresh my memory of what I have. They are as follows:
The bass cab recorded using an MD421
A duplicate of this with some heavy eq and compression
The DI signal
The cab recorded with an SM57
A re-amped distorted signal with an SM57
Upon listening to them all I lowered the LPF on the distorted amp to 1.78 KHz
Took some of the high ends out of the other channel recorded with an SM57 and then increased the volume of all of them together where they are bused. This should hopefully be enough to give the track some more weight with out making the bass as an instrument to dominating in the mix.
I then started some work on the kick to lower its presence in the mix without loosing it all together. The first thing I did was to add a bit of the reverb I have on the kick out sample to the kick in sample to make them sit better together and also sit back a bit more in the mix. I then took some more of the low mids out to leave more space for the bass. I then went through the kick tracks that I had before and found that, although I didn’t like the kick tracks on their own before I substituted samples, the kicks sound quite good in combination.
Following these major changes I tidied up a few misc things from my notes:
Boosted the high end on the snare top
Increased the volume of the overheads by a few dB
Changed the panning of the toms to make them sound more natural.
I was happy with the way things sounded at this point in general so I then did some very critical listening, looking for things I could improve upon. Without going back to the tracking stage. I added an extra aux input and used this to add a very subtle flanger to the lead guitars in the verses, at a low volume this has the effect of thickening the sound.
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