Mixing and Mastering

Mixing and Mastering

Organisation: before getting into the the mixing of the track i first had to organise the file. I did this by by colour coding the instrument tracks. this meant it was easy to differentiate between instruments. i also cut the unwanted areas of the tracks out as this meant that there were no unwanted sounds in the tracks when the instruments were not playing, i took care to make sure that only unwanted sounds were cut out and not part of the song as this would take away from the quality of the track.



EQ: The next step that i took was to EQ each track. I did this by opening the EQ tab and then dragging the frequencies to different volume levels which i thought fitted the specific instrument. The first instrument I used the EQ for was the Kick drum. for the EQ of the Kick drum i wanted it to have more clarity, to do this i used a high pass filter below 50Hz to make the drum tight while cleaning up unnecessary low end. For the bass guitar I increased the volume around 100 Hz to highlight the bass sound and decrease the higher frequencies as this would make the bass sound clearer and would give more room in the mix for other instruments with higher frequencies. When editing the EQ on the snare drum I slightly increase the mid range but then decreased the high end sounds to stop the track from sounding tinny.

Compression: Compression is an electronic effect unit that reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds by narrowing or "compressing" an audio signal's dynamic range. To use this effect I added compression effect to the inputs of the channel I then edited the threshold and ratio of the compression until i found the best sound of that specific instrument.


Reverb: Is an electronically produced echo effect in recorded music, To add this effect to my tracks I used the Roomworks input on the track, I then edited the reverb time, size and pre-delay level until I was happy with the sound of the track.

Using effects channels/sends

Whilst Mixing the track I used channel sends to group specific instruments together. this allowed me to add effects such as compression and reverb and also edit the EQ. By putting these effects through an channel send I was able to apply an effect to to a group of instruments instead of just individually editing each track. The instruments I grouped together were the two acoustic guitar tracks, the vocal tracks and the brass instruments.

Track List

Lead and backing vocals: On the vocals I used the compression effect and reverb. I also edited the EQ levels to decrease the low frequencies.

Bass Guitar : I added compression to the bass line to make the quieter sounds of the bass the same level of volume. I also used the EQ to increase bass frequencies and decrease the very high frequencies. 

Lead guitar and Rhythm Guitar: I used the Amp Simulator effect on both the effects to give the sound some Distortion. I also used reverb to give the sound some ambiance.

Trumpet and Trombone: I edited the Eq to boost the mid range frequencies and slightly decrease the low frequencies.
Kick Drum: I used the EQ to increase the low to Medium frequencies.

Snare Drum: I edited the EQ to slightly increase the Mid ranges and decrease some of the Higher frequencies to tighten up the sound.

https://soundcloud.com/beatenyoualready/stick-together-final-master - stick together 
https://soundcloud.com/beatenyoualready/lewis-yellow-full-track  Yellow