Everyone spent week 13 finishing their own individual mixes of Losing My Religion. I can’t say for everyone, but my mix differed from the one that was done one the mixing desk during week 12.

Feeling quite comfortable with mixing as I had some experience with it before, I went straight to the basics and started mixing the drums and vocals.

I started off with setting the vocals at a certain level almost as high as they would go without clipping and then bringing them down a little so I have some headroom should I need to boost them a little later on. I did this because vocals are the most important part in a pop song like this and is the one thing almost everyone pays attention then listening.

Next thing I mixed was the kick drum. Because of Billy’s consistent playing, the kick drum didn’t need much work done to it. I did, however use EQ to shape the sound of it. I cut the low end below 50 Hz as it’s not really needed in a kick drum and can create unwanted woolliness. Instead, I did a 6 dB boost round about 100 Hz to give it some more thump and allow to be heard next to a bass.

I also cut a pocket at 500 Hz for the bass to sit in. This is one of the differences between my mix and the desk mix. I had more EQ options at my disposal (4 sweepable EQ’s instead of one on the desk). A slight boost at 2.5 kHz brought out the click from the pedal hitting the skin; this allows it to cut through in a busy mid range mix of sounds.

Snare drum needed a little compression to control the dynamic range so I applied a single band compressor with a ratio of 4:1 to both top and bottom snare tracks to keep the sound consistent. That was another difference between my mix and the desk mix as it didn’t have any compression on the snare. Doing that allowed me to then bring up the snare drum in the mix a bit more to keep a pulse going throughout the song. I also added a gate to cut off the ring that was recorded with the top snare mic.

Also, my use of EQ was different to that used on the desk. I did apply a high pass filter, but the cut-off frequency wasn’t as high as on the desk (mine was at 100 Hz , whilst on the desk it was ~200 Hz). This gave my snare a little bit more body to the sound and a bigger thud. The rest was standard – boost at 1.5 kHz to bring out the crack of the skin and a slight boost at 10 kHz to give it more ‘zing’.

I mixed the overheads in the same way as on the mixing desk. Pan them hard left/right and apply high and low shelves to get rid of unwanted sounds and boost the necessary.

Toms were simply panned left for the high tom, centre for mid and right for low tom. I also used EQ on the low tom as it had a horrible thudding sound. I made a -14 dB cut at 500 Hz which fixed the problem.

Bass was next on the agenda and was quite an easy job due to the good quality of recording. All it needed was a slight low end boost at 120 Hz to give it a smooth, deep-sounding low end and a boost at 500 Hz to give it more growl and to make it sit in the pocket created by cutting the kick drum at the same frequency. I also added some more compression on top of what was already added during recording to smooth out the dynamic range. Bass wasn’t panned to keep the track balanced.

Next up were keys. I didn’t do much to them except for a high pass filter to clean up the low end below 60 Hz. This allowed the bass guitar more room to breathe as the keys weren’t using this frequency any more. During the recording process I avoided playing big chords with my left hand so as to not muddy up they low frequencies and this paid off; the keys and bass fit together nicely.

After the piano, I added the double tracked vocal parts and harmonies. HPF was used at 120Hz to clean up the low end. This was lower than the HPF on the desk and gives a deeper vocal sound. As with the lead vocals, I added a fair amount of reverb to all the vocal parts to make them sound more natural, something that was lacking due to them being recorded in the dead room.

Guitars were the last thing to be done. There were three rhythm guitar tracks, one lead and harmonies tracks. I panned the rhythm tracks left and right, leaving lead and harmony tracks centre.

With all the guitar tracks I applied a high pass filter at 200 Hz to clean up the low end. For the rhythm tracks I added a +3 dB boost at 2 kHz to give them more crunch to cut through easier and added slight compression with a ration of 2.5:1. For the harmony track I increased the HPF cut-off point to 350 Hz as even less low end was necessary. Reverb was also added to give more ambience and ring to it.

As with the desk mix, I didn’t think the room mix recordings were necessary so I just didn’t use them. The close mic’d parts were enough to give a good representation of the guitar sound.

Mastering stage involved using a maximizer to boost the overall volume of the track, a multiband compressor and a stereo enhancer to give the track some more width. This obviously is different to the desk mix as no mastering was done on the desk.

Overall, I kept the use of effects minimal, only applying some EQ and a bit of compression as I didn’t feel it was necessary to add any more and I feel the track is a good representation of the performances and the natural sound of instruments used

Week 12 was all about Pro Tools and basic mixing skills on the recording desk.

Monday session was spent learning about how to send the recorded tracks in Pro Tools back to the mixing desk and then do a basic mix that can later be bounced down to a CD or even sent back to Pro Tools again.

While the mixing desk does’t have quite as comprehensive EQ as Pro Tools, it is good enough to achieve perfectly reasonable sound if you know what you’re doing. I really enjoyed the session as I would prefer to mix using hardware rather than software because I find it more satisfying to work with hardware than software when it comes to things such as recording and mixing.

Week 11 was my time to perform on the track. Piano was the last instrument to be recorded for the track as we had run out of time and the group felt there didn’t need be anything more recorded after that. We used the electric piano in the dead room as that is the closest thing to a real piano in the studio. All the settings on the piano were left on default to get a natural sounding piano.

Stereo outputs on the back of the piano were used to DI it to the recording desk. I had problems with the guide track I was receiving in my headphones. To start off, the piano was sent to the mixing desk and then back to the headphones so I could hear what I was playing, but the levels were set far too high and I could barely hear the guide track.

After that was fixed another problem arose. As soon as the guide track was boosted to a suitable level, heavy distortion was audible which was quite distracting when playing, but we didn’t have time to fix that so I just persevered and kept playing through. We had to record several times as I did make a few mistakes, but we did manage to complete a full take.

No EQ or effects were added on the desk as all that would be done later on in Pro Tools.

During week 10, it was turn for the vocals to be recorded. Main vocals were performed by Vashti, harmony parts were performed by our new group member Lindsey. All the vocal parts were recorded in the dead room with lots of reverb-absorbing foam padding on the walls.

A single Neumann U87 condenser mic was set up. This mic was chosen for its high quality mid-high and high frequency response that would really bring out the best from Vashti and Lindsey’s singing. Polar pattern was set to cardioid for all takes and a pop shield was placed about 5 inches away from the mic to minimise the loud popping sound caused by singing words starting with p, and also cut off some sibilance.

As Vashti’s singing was very consistent, we decided to double-track her performance to thicken up the sound. To add to that even more, Lindsey performed harmony parts, singing a third or a fifth above the original melody.

Compression was added to the recording via the patch bay. Quite heavy compression ratio was used (4.5:1) to bring the dynamic range under control.

For the guide track, we used everything else we had recorded up to this point – drums, bass and guitars.

For week 9, it was time to record the electric guitar parts. Our group had two volunteer guitarists – Jack Bartley and Jack Johnson. J.Bartley played the rhythm parts while J.Johnson did the lead bits and harmonics.

All the recording was done in the live room using an amp mic’d with three mics. A Shure SM57 was place about two inches away from the protective grill pointing directly at the cone. A second SM57 was placed 5-6 inches to the right, off-axis pointing at the edge of the cone to give us a grittier, crunchier sound that will cut through more in the mix should it need to. A third mic, AKG C414, was place about 7 feet away from the amp with the omni-directional cardioid pattern selected to recorded the general ambience of the room. A we were recording in a live room there was plenty of natural reverberation that was recorded with the C414 mic.

On the recording desk, a high shelf at 60 Hz was applied with a -6 dB gain cut to remove unneeded bottom end that a guitar doesn’t use anyway. No FX or compression were applied at this stage.