To begin with, I EQ’d each drum to add warmth to them and to bring out different parts of the drum kit. To do this I brightened up the overheads slightly so that the cymbals could be heard. I played around with the kick drum a lot, but found it hard to choose what to do with it so ultimately decided to use a preset called ‘Vintage Kick’, and slightly tweak the settings. I put a gate on the floor tom in order to get rid of any spill from the other drums, and completely deleted the rack tom because nothing was played on it. I also boosted the high end on the room microphone. I then compressed bass guitar (both the DI and microphone) to avoid any peaks. When EQing them, I cut off the bottom end of the microphone recording in order to just get the mid and high frequencies. For the DI I reduced the mid-range and high frequencies, and reduced the low frequencies a tiny bit, just to stop the song being too boomy. When compressing the guitars, I compressed one and then copied that compressor over to the others. One guitar had to be compressed slightly more in order to stop it peaking. I used a High Pass Filter on all of the guitars in an attempt to get rid of a lot of the lower frequencies, and boosted the mid and high frequencies. For the overdubbed guitar I also cut off the low frequencies and brightened the mid and high frequencies a lot, in order to be able to differentiate between the guitar parts. I compressed the vocals to even out the velocity of each note, and also manually automated some words in order to keep them at roughly the same level. I also edited the track by cutting out any mouth sounds between words, and got rid of heavy breathing, leaving in some more natural breathes. I played around with the 7-band EQ to add warmth to the vocals. For the backing vocals I boosted the low-mid frequencies and slightly raised the high-end. For the guitar solo I used all three microphones, and compressed the condenser and dynamic. I EQ’d them by boosting the mid-high range and added a HPF to get rid of any rumble. I also added delay to one of the guitar’s to make the solo different and to add a different sound to the song. I compressed the piano quite heavily in order to even out the note velocity, which jumped around before compression. I added EQ to lessen the low-mid frequencies and slightly boosted the mid-high frequencies. I made the piano slightly louder during the guitar solo, because it was getting drowned out. I created one Aux track for reverb. I only used one because I felt as though the song only needed a short reverb, and no track needed a separate Aux track with a longer reverb. I also put a fade out on the master fader toward the end of the track rather than having it continue at the same level all the way through. I made the piano part quite low in the mix, with the drums quite loud because they carry the song along. I didn’t want the guitars too loud because there are so many of them that they add to the timbre of the song without having to have them high in the mix. As I have said, the vocals were automated in an attempt to make them sound constant throughout the song, and I tried to make it so that they blend in with the mix rather than sitting on top of it. The bass is quite quiet, but still audible – I didn’t want too much bass in the song.

This week we produced a monitor mix. For this we did a small amount of editing in order to make sure that the recordings flowed. We also roughly balanced the mix, making sure that each drum was at a good level, and then doing the same for the other instruments. We made sure to put the keyboard low in the mix, and panned made sure that the guitars and drums were panned correctly.