Attack of the Sci-Fi Keyboard Effect
Last night Randy & I wrangled a track that we hadn't touched in several months... "Superdave". The previous mix of this, while good, had fallen from grace a little bit in the sonic light of the other songs. I felt some of the tracks where fighting for attention too much and a lot of the musical joy was being cancelled out. So we rolled up our sleeves and started making some painful decisions - "unmixing" some of the guitars & keyboards. This is akin to going into a pot of soup on the stove and removing some of the spices & vegetables you plopped in a few minutes earlier. Difficult, exacting, but ultimately, or hopefully, you have a better dish.
First we did some tricks to supplement the snare sound. Jim's drums sound best when they are at their "livest" - meaning that you let all the idiosyncracies shine. Often drums are deadened in the studios with loose heads, blankets, tape and super close micing, then brought back to life using compressors, gates, eq & reverb in the mixing stage. For Jim this approach is rarely needed. This doesn't mean that Randy doesn't work some serious alchemy to achieve a kick-ass drum sound... but it does mean that you can't always tame the bull to behave in the china shop. Such is the case with Superdave... with the wide myriad of guitar sounds in the verses, Jim's "loose hi-hat" approach meant that some of the snare impact was lost. So Randy & I spent a chunk of time sprucing up each individual snare hit so that it really punches through the hi hat and guitar sounds.
I learned long ago that most listeners only "hear" the beat & vocals of a song. While I spend countless hours laboring over carefully crafted guitar parts the average listener will never hear them. They may hear the guitar as part of the overall sound... but primarly the song is made up of beat and lyrics - to the typical fan. Of course, a Screaming Mimes fan is special, so we pay extra special attention to all the little musical spices we put in the mix - all for your advanced pallate.
After the snare stuff was done (and by that I mean my role was finished but Randy still had hours of syncing to do to the track) we moved on to the guitar intro. My vision for this has always been the classic 70's guitar hero intro... the kind of riff & sound that 13 year-old me would love to air guitar along with. We stripped away a lot of the room "effect" that we'd worked so hard on (sniffle) and cranked up the volume on it to the point of ludicrious. So wonderful! I hope you strum along when you hear it.
Next we went through the song and did the "rob Peter to pay Paul" approach to mixing... we had a balance, and every new instrument that was introduced into the song came at the sacrafice of another instrument or part... for the first pre-chorus, we took out the 12-string melody and brought up the keyboard. Second one, we reversed this. For the second verse, we took out my guitar completely and brought up the chimey 12-string part. For the bridge, we cranked up the keyboards and took out the 12-string. The guitar solo was cranked up at the expense of the rhythm guitars. And so and and so forth. All in all, we listened to the song for what seemed like a hundred times, tweaking and tweaking all the individual levels.
For the keyboard solo we wanted to bring the sound to life a little more. Randy found a spectacular effect that modulated the pitch ever so slightly... but then for the F# minor build before the final chorus we cranked up the frequency of the effect until the keyboard "warbled" wildly, like some silver laser gun out of a sci-fi movie... it struck me as the perfect reflection of the lyrics of the song... the bridge is all about Superdave versus a super villian... the solo section is guitar verses keyboard... in the climax the keyboard sounds like it's zapping the walls and bringing about the end of the world. Awesome!
The contrast between the solo section and the final chorus is incredible. These are the moments in the recording studio where the engineer really gets to show off. Randy has all the elements building and building until suddenly the scene changes to something completely different. Very dynamic and cinematic.
For the very very long ride out we wanted to add a "flying off into the sky" effect to the "up, up and away" lines. Randy's solution was to increase a large spacial reverb over the chorus of the ride out while bringing down the vocal... Superdave keeps singing, farther and farther into the clouds... is he running? Is he off to save someone else? We'll never know!
With all the guitar parts that begin popping up over the ride out, we began stepping down the volume on other instruments and vocals to clear up some sonic room. There were some real treasures buried there that are now rising to the surface, like a lingering spice. In the end an interesting effect was achieved... like the "song" was stepping away from centerstage and a heavy guitar band was taking over. I guess when you dub nine guitar parts these things happen.
We left the night drained but excited over the changes in our good friend Superdave. I can't wait to hear the latest mix...
Up up and away!
Dave
First we did some tricks to supplement the snare sound. Jim's drums sound best when they are at their "livest" - meaning that you let all the idiosyncracies shine. Often drums are deadened in the studios with loose heads, blankets, tape and super close micing, then brought back to life using compressors, gates, eq & reverb in the mixing stage. For Jim this approach is rarely needed. This doesn't mean that Randy doesn't work some serious alchemy to achieve a kick-ass drum sound... but it does mean that you can't always tame the bull to behave in the china shop. Such is the case with Superdave... with the wide myriad of guitar sounds in the verses, Jim's "loose hi-hat" approach meant that some of the snare impact was lost. So Randy & I spent a chunk of time sprucing up each individual snare hit so that it really punches through the hi hat and guitar sounds.
I learned long ago that most listeners only "hear" the beat & vocals of a song. While I spend countless hours laboring over carefully crafted guitar parts the average listener will never hear them. They may hear the guitar as part of the overall sound... but primarly the song is made up of beat and lyrics - to the typical fan. Of course, a Screaming Mimes fan is special, so we pay extra special attention to all the little musical spices we put in the mix - all for your advanced pallate.
After the snare stuff was done (and by that I mean my role was finished but Randy still had hours of syncing to do to the track) we moved on to the guitar intro. My vision for this has always been the classic 70's guitar hero intro... the kind of riff & sound that 13 year-old me would love to air guitar along with. We stripped away a lot of the room "effect" that we'd worked so hard on (sniffle) and cranked up the volume on it to the point of ludicrious. So wonderful! I hope you strum along when you hear it.
Next we went through the song and did the "rob Peter to pay Paul" approach to mixing... we had a balance, and every new instrument that was introduced into the song came at the sacrafice of another instrument or part... for the first pre-chorus, we took out the 12-string melody and brought up the keyboard. Second one, we reversed this. For the second verse, we took out my guitar completely and brought up the chimey 12-string part. For the bridge, we cranked up the keyboards and took out the 12-string. The guitar solo was cranked up at the expense of the rhythm guitars. And so and and so forth. All in all, we listened to the song for what seemed like a hundred times, tweaking and tweaking all the individual levels.
For the keyboard solo we wanted to bring the sound to life a little more. Randy found a spectacular effect that modulated the pitch ever so slightly... but then for the F# minor build before the final chorus we cranked up the frequency of the effect until the keyboard "warbled" wildly, like some silver laser gun out of a sci-fi movie... it struck me as the perfect reflection of the lyrics of the song... the bridge is all about Superdave versus a super villian... the solo section is guitar verses keyboard... in the climax the keyboard sounds like it's zapping the walls and bringing about the end of the world. Awesome!
The contrast between the solo section and the final chorus is incredible. These are the moments in the recording studio where the engineer really gets to show off. Randy has all the elements building and building until suddenly the scene changes to something completely different. Very dynamic and cinematic.
For the very very long ride out we wanted to add a "flying off into the sky" effect to the "up, up and away" lines. Randy's solution was to increase a large spacial reverb over the chorus of the ride out while bringing down the vocal... Superdave keeps singing, farther and farther into the clouds... is he running? Is he off to save someone else? We'll never know!
With all the guitar parts that begin popping up over the ride out, we began stepping down the volume on other instruments and vocals to clear up some sonic room. There were some real treasures buried there that are now rising to the surface, like a lingering spice. In the end an interesting effect was achieved... like the "song" was stepping away from centerstage and a heavy guitar band was taking over. I guess when you dub nine guitar parts these things happen.
We left the night drained but excited over the changes in our good friend Superdave. I can't wait to hear the latest mix...
Up up and away!
Dave
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