Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Greenrooms 2
Today I went into the studio with a friend of mine, Alex Shepard, he did a very similar degree to me at Huddersfield a couple of years ago. We arrived at 17:15 and were sat down with the session loaded up by 17:30 and I had made a very quick fix to the bass making a cut on the bass bus. We then sat back and listened to the mix and spoke about how it had developed and what I was trying to do with it.
Alex was complimentary of my mix saying that I had got everything well balanced. But, he also said it was missing a tiny bit of glue, things were too well separated into their individual position. The suggested solution was not one that I had heard of, or considered before. It was as follows:
1. Create a second stage master bus (run everything into master bus 1 and then run that into master bus 2.
2. Create an aux return
3. Send from Master Bus 1 to the aux return
4. On aux return add an EQ, compressor and a reverb
5. Reverse the panning so that right is sent to left and left to right
6. Send this to Master 2 at a low volume
I wasn’t expecting much from this but as we played around with different reverbs, settling on quite a short delay time and EQ’ed heavily before to keep bass and kick out of the reverb, I found that it sounded really great. It knitted the whole sound together without raising the gain to much.
A lot of our time was spent talking about and experimenting with this idea but we also had the time to talk about mixing in general. He asked me how I know when a mix is done, I gave him the only answer I knew, when the deadline arrives. This is how I generally work, most of the things I do are under a deadline, even if it is one I set myself but perhaps it is something for me to think about a bit more.
Alex had to leave before the end of my session so I began some more work, compressing the vocals slightly more to try and make them a bit more aggressive, it was my original intention to retrack the vocals in this session but I decided it would wiser to take advantage of Alex’s ears and experience while I had him.
I printed before I left as always and took the mix home to my own HS5’s and listened through those and to my surprise the bass now sounds much more controlled and the track as a whole works very nicely, everything gelling well. I also listened through some ear buds, beyerdynamic DT770 pros, and some hifi speakers. Through all of them the mix sounded very close to finished, the only exception was that through the ear buds the bass still felt a bit prominent, possibly a bit muddy.
In my next session on Boulevard of Broken Dreams I will retrack the vocals and substitute the new vocals in. This will hopefully be the last session!
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