The Mix

To start off, I made sure that all of the tracks had the same output, as the vocal track could not initially be heard, and so required its output to be changed. I then listened to the song once in its entirety, before listening through it a second time, soloing each channel one at a time as I listened.

I then began by working on the bass, to which I added a 7-band EQ and increased some of the low end and also some of the mid-range in the bass as I felt this gave a fuller sound, and used the same EQ for all of the Bass Tracks. In addition I also used an Aux Track for the Bass to add some reverb. I also increased the levels for the mic recordings, while leaving the D.I slightly lower due to the fact it was a fair bit louder.

For the drums, I increased the volume of the Kick, Snare and the Tom tracks, while slightly decreasing the overheads. I added EQ to the Kick, and removed some of the lower mids as it appeared to sound a little boxy. I also removed a lot of the mids from the Top Snare, as well as adding an expander gate to get rid of some unnecessary sound.

Mix Window Jenny
My Mix Window

For the Electric Guitars, I added a little bit of reverb, but also significantly reduced the levels for all Electric Guitar tracks, as it was a bit overpowering compared to everything else.

For the vocals I added reverb in an aux track, as otherwise the vocals appear to sit on top of the rest of the track. In addition, I used EQ to slightly boost the mid range frequencies. I also felt that at certain points in the song, the vocals were too quiet and therefore somewhat inaudible, and so I went in and adjusted the volume at those specific points in the song.

Edit Window Jenny
My Edit window, also showing where I adjusted volume to vocals

Like the vocals, the Guitar Solo sounded as though it sat on top of the rest of the track, and so I also added reverb via aux to this, as well as using an expander gate and exploring the channel strip to remove some of what I felt was unwanted low-end.

For the acoustic guitar I just added some reverb via aux to give a softer sound. However I had always noticed when playing back that I felt the Acoustic was barely audible due to being overpowered by the electric. For this reason, I made the decision to pan the acoustic moderately left, while panning the electric (minus the solo) moderately to the right.

I mastered the track 3 times to hear what it sounded like as an MP3, listening to it on several devices and then tweaking it wherever I felt necessary until I was happy with my 3rd and final mastered version of the track.

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