Project Update 5: 02/17

We have begun the mixing process! I have been hard at work in studio C mixing both tracks in Atmos, and I have learned a lot from it.

I started with the track that inspired this project, Bobby Sox. I am really excited about how this mix is going. The guitars from my amp modeler ended up being really fun to work with. I started on those by just taking out some mids to get that classic pop punk scooped tone. I lightly compressed each track individually, then grouped them and did another light bit of compression to glue it together. I did end up doing the panning exactly how I thought I would. The guitars surround the center point which gives this super stereo effect almost. It is a really cool sound to hear in person.

The next thing up was the vocals, which I found some very interesting techniques with. To start, they were compressed quite a bit. I EQed out some of the lows to get it less muddy sounding. The interesting part comes with the reverb and panning. I panned the vocal verb to the back of the space which gave everything a little more depth. I then wanted to recreate the sound of stereo double tracked vocals in Atmos. What I ended up doing for this was taking my double track and panning it hard left and right as usual, but then I took a duplicate of each and panned them hard to the opposite corner in the back. This creates a triangle of speakers that the sound is coming out of which just so happens to create stereo widening in 3d space. I love this technique so far, and I am very excited to see what else I can do with it.

Simple Plug-in set up

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/69cf1f_3f536ff69f0d47f18f6407920aad13b9/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

The second track, Whatsername, ended up being pretty similar. I used all of the same techniques again which still sound pretty good with this track. I have been running into a bit of an issue with the guitars on this one just not being as punchy as the other track. I may go back and re-record those.

Volume Pre-Mix

So far, this project has been such a great learning experience for me. I am really excited to finish these mixes and show them off.