Audio files to accompany the article.
Mix Rescue: The Woodleys
Audio Examples
The audio files on this page accompany the mix article in SOS April 2015, in which I discuss my approach to mixing the track ‘Sometime’ by the Woodleys. As well as providing a copy of the full final mix (example 14), I’ve also given you a number of ‘before and after’ examples, to help you get a feel for the contribution made by some of the different techniques described in the article. The filenames should make the files fairly self explanatory — and make auditioning them in your DAW easy — but I’ve included a brief description here also, just to be sure.
- 01-Gated Kick-And-Snare
This is what the kick and Snare close mics sounded like after being gated and before being added in with the overhead mics. The drums now have more individual clarity but notice how I’ve left a reasonable amount of spill to ensure things still sound fairly natural.
- 02-Drums-Raw
How the full drum kit sounded before any real processing
- 03-Drums-Processed
The full drum kit with my processing such as gating, EQ and effects applied. Notice the Low kick drum sample at the beginning and the delay effect on the snare drum throughout. The effects were only applied to the close mics via inserts, with the overheads left untreated — to balance things out and retain the clarity of the cymbals. I noticed a slight edit artefact coming back into the verse but this didn’t prove to be a problem when in with the whole track.
- 04-Bass-Guitar-Raw
The bass guitar track had been well recorded, via DI, and had been compressed at the tracking stage. It required very little processing.
- 05-Bass-Guitar-Processed
The bass guitar with a a high pass filter at 25 Hz and a small boost at 1.2Khz. A small amount of the bass was sent to the main echo effect return as well — to help tie things together. Because I had used a high pass filter on the effect return it ensured the really low part of the bass wouldn’t be ‘muddied’ up by the effect. The effect gives the bass a little width as well.
06-Acoustic-Guitar-Raw
The raw acoustic track, notice the hiss in the early section.
07-Acoustic-Guitar-Processed
The hiss was brought under control with a noise reduction plug in and,using a high pass filter, a little low end removed to help it sit with the bass and piano parts. A small amount of smoothing compression was used along with some of the main echo effect.
- 08-Piano-Raw
The raw piano files with the left and right channels hard panned.
- 09-Piano-Processed
I removed some low end with EQ to make room for the bass guitar along with a little boost in the mid-range around 1.7Hz. As well as a little compression too, to make it more even, a generous helping of the echo effect was applied.
- 10-Lead-Vocal-Without-EQ
The raw lead vocal without my EQ processing
- 11-Lead-Vocal-With EQ
The lead vocal with my surgical EQ cuts, at 1207Hz and 2607Hz — to remove some mid-range harshness. The effect is quite subtle but helps smooth things a touch.
- 12-Vocals-Raw
All the raw vocals balanced, but without any other mix treatment.
- 13-Vocals-Processed
All the vocals with my mix processing applied. Notice the subtle tuning on the lead and main backing vocals along with some compression and the echo effects. The vocals were also high pass filtered at around 100Hz.
- 14-Sometime-Final-Mix
The final mix, for your delectation!