Are you happy with the demo that you have produced as a group and what would you have done with more time/facilities/budget?

To really answer the question straigh on, Yes I am happy with what my group has produced. Now let me cover some things that make me proud of what we’ve done.

In our fourth session in the Neve, we completed a final mixdown of our ongoing work. I believe as a group we delivered a mix of quality. Very simple corrective EQ was done in the box across a few channels. Having done that, we started to layout channels onto the board, and then simply balanced and mixed it. This was repeated till we had everything laid out on the board. By this time it was lunch. Half of us went to grab food and we continue to mix, and we would swap. I don’t think we actually planned this, but it did work out. Some highlight to mention during the mix down were the use of available outboard gear. Vocals were there, but just a little thin. We put her through an 1176 compressor to help thinken it up then onto the Fatso Jr just to add a hint of sparkle to her voice.

Neve Genesys The star of today.

Coming back from lunch we did want to put all the guitars through a pair of distressors, and this is where the Neve started to be a bit fickle. We bussed all the guitars through the Neve’s matrix into a pair of the centre eight track busses. Those buses were than insereted into the distressor and then to a pair of API equalizers and than back into the console. We were almost ready to bounce. We added reverb and delay to the vocals and it just started to hit us that it didn’t sound as good as it did two hours ago. We’d kept trying to balance it but nothing worked.

We needed a break.

So we went outside to take a break and just hear the noise of anything. We came back and reapporached the issue, and now everything started to sound better. We started to bounce but, certain channels would freeze up and basically had to restart the whole console a handful of times, and it was just a little tough. In the end we managed to produce a mix that’ll we’re all happy with. There’s so many layers yet it works for the genre we picked for our demo.

What would I do different?

Real drums! Would love to record some real drums for this genre. I also guess organization of the project file. The session just had many layers, because the song did have a lot of layers. I think I would have layout things out differently. By doing so, we could have sent a balanced mix of guitars from the box and that could have saved us time. Small things like that. Having said that, I have asked a few friends of mine to come in and play drums and keys. Not because it’ll improve my mark or the mix for the course, but rather I want to take this group work and make it personal. Hopefully I’ll have real drums and then re-mix it, and of course I’ll share it with my group for feedback. I want to know how my take differs, both good and bad, to the mix we collectively produced.

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Nick W

Looking forward to hearing the finished remix. I’m not sure what the original sounds like but make sure you focus on a style and direction. Be aware that arpeggiators can’t help you to find notes, but you may be able to utilise some of the techniques we used in last Friday afternoon’s class in working out chord progressions.

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