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