Recently I and brandon Clare recorded “Lohman Complex” a band of Capital students led by the multitalented Chris Brown. Here’s a video about our process:
We recorded the bass, lead guitar, sax, and drums together live. We did around 5 takes as the band refined certain things each time. Later, the trumpet player came in and we tracked trumpet, vocals, and auxiliary percussion at the same time. We did several more vocal takes after to iron some things out. Between every other take or so we had the band come in and listen. Their comments gave us ideas on how they wanted the mix to eventually sound.
After some time in the mixing suite I came up with this first draft of the mix:
After some more listening and mixing, here’s the final version of the mix. I consulted with the band leader and listened on a lot of different speakers and devices. From this listening I made little adjustments to every track and started adding automation mainly to volume. One of the main changes i had to make was to bring the vocals down dynamically so they would fit into the mix better. Sometimes this also meant bringing the ensemble up to match the intensity of the vocals. I fine tuned some compression and EQ on the Guitars to make them more distinct in the mix. I added some delay and phasing to the guitars at the beginning to give it some interesting ambience. In my revision I added a second compressor to the vocals just to catch the belting type singing. I changed the settings on the other compressor to smooth the vocals more evenly. I also used clip gain to tame some of the really loud sections. I upped the verb send on the Hi-Hat track to make it more in the space of the rest of the kit. Hope you enjoy!
Eli Shapiro MUS410 Advanced Blogging Techniques 