With social media fragmenting and in some cases imploding, I figure I might as well do an old-fashioned thing and blog. I haven't written here since May because I haven't felt moved to do so. Now, I feel more like writing. Not many people read what I write here, but that's not really the point. The point is that I went through the process of writing it. It's for me. Sometimes my private journal is not enough.
I find the process of turning sounds into better sounds immensely satisfying. It's intense brain exercise. I learn something almost every time I sit down to work through a mixing or mastering session, something that feels good to know. Every mixing and mastering run has let me do a better job the next time. It informs my listening, which in turn informs my work. Maybe it even makes my brain work better.
I started remixing a song from Mostly Still Underfoot just to have fun. With me and something I love, however, fun tends to turn into serious fun at some point. I started to compare results of my mix to the studio mix of the same song.
The studio mix is very clean. There's no noise, no extraneous sound. It has a shininess that seems to be a bit of magic that I probably don't have. But it's interesting how close I can come (now that I know a thing or two) to what a professional engineer at a professional board in a professional studio produced.
One thing I don't like about the studio mix is that it sounds somewhat disembodied. The mix is very skilful, but the sounds feel isolated from one another. It's that digital complete lack of noise. It's probably just my own preference to like recordings in which you can hear the room in which the music was played. Even if it was mostly done with overdubs, I like to have some room sound, around the drums anyway.
In the setup the original engineer used, there are four mics that pick up snare sound: close, hi-hat, and two overheads. Most of the snare sound in the studio mix comes from the close mic. The thing is, the recording was tightly gated so that the raw snare sound is very short and very crisp with no natural drum sound. It's a sound with which to drive effects. Adding reverb is the only thing that livens it up.
The hi-hat track is useless. The mic picked up some snare but mostly hi-hat. You rarely need much hi-hat. There's so much of it in the other microphones that I don't really need that track at all.
I am, however, blending in more of the two overhead mics. Those are intended to pick up cymbals, but I like the way they pick up the whole kit and the room as well. Except for some songs that need reinforcement on the toms, I'm using mostly a modified Glynn Johns setup — kick, snare, two overheads.
Bass guitar is often recorded two ways: with a microphone on a bass cabinet in the big room with the drums, and direct from bass to board via a magic box of some kind. We just called it a DI — direct interface. Much as I like live bass through a cabinet, even a heavily gated microphone picks up a lot of drums and other ambient sounds. That track is not useful. The DI track works very well on its own.
I couldn't remember exactly what was done with the guitars in the studio remix. At the time I didn't record, say, two strummed guitars as I probably would now. And each guitar is completely dry — the modified Fender Bassman head had no reverb. Adding reverb wasn't really doing the trick of making the guitar bigger and take up more space.
But I realized that if I duplicated a guitar track and ran it through reverb, retaining only the "wet" part, I could get a blend of dry and wet with the dry in one direction and the wet in the other, and achieve a spaciousness that wasn't there before. I'm surprised I hadn't sussed out this trick already.
I haven't yet figured out how to make the vocals sound quite as good, but they still sound good. The studio had a good vocal mic, and Cilla sang very well. And the overall gloss, well, that's some kind of special sauce I might never figure out.
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