Mixing

I learnt how to mix when producing electronic dance music, where I was aiming to create the cleanest and most polished sounding mix with only samples used. This meant that trying to keep the humanity and the reality of the music for this EP was at first counter-intuitive. I had mixed a rock EP before but mixing for 6 instruments with songs that had very contrasting sections made it far more challenging but I learnt a lot along the way. I watched many Youtube videos of mixing/recording engineers of some of my favourite albums that I would consider to have a raw sound like Steve Albini, Butch Vig and Andy Wallace to engage with their approaches. While raw (to me) means trying to replicate mixes like Nirvana, Polvo and Modest Mouse, it also means trying to keep as much human as possible in the music, as much energy as possible. The lyrics about relationships helped tie in this whole theme.

I had to first experiment with each section to see where I wanted each section to sit. I imagined a band playing live, so all of the drums and guitar would be in the same place throughout (midground). I wanted the drums to sound like 1 instrument not 5 (i.e. the snare and the kick in different areas). There would also be very minimal overdubs and sax and harp consistently hard panned right and left respectfully unless they are in the foreground. When mixing so many instruments I also found that making visual diagrams of where I wanted each instrument to sit helped significantly in remembering what my vision for each section was.

To try and keep things organic I wanted to keep as many mistakes in without the parts clashing. I also used minimal fx in post-production and made fx chains between the tracks similar to keep continuity. Things like not using auto tune on the vocals, minimal vocal breaths, keeping some amp hiss, keeping in sax breath and squeaks were also creative choices to help hold the organic feel.

I wanted to keep the tightness of Lucas' and Lilies playing (the drums and bass players), so I recorded every movement with them together. Unfortunately, this meant that the bass mic turned into another drum room mic due to bleeding but luckily I had a DI. To avoid stale dynamics and tempo changes in the second half of movement 3 they didn’t use a click track, I encouraged them to speed up which they did and it sounds far more human because of that. For the same reason, in movement 2 the guitar and vocal track were recorded live. This allowed us to keep a human feel which is what raw means to me. 

While in the past I used a return track to send my reverb to, for this EP I thought I’d try something different. I set up a room mic in the same spot and left it recording. Then at the end I grouped them and made each room mic's volume relative to how close to the foreground the instrument should be. I found this a very interesting process but not as effective as I hoped, in the future I’ll use plugins as they save time and have the same level of quality.

Below - A screenshot of my DAW while I was mixing

Below - a mixing sketch