Now, I'll preface this with saying, these aren't tutorials. There might be some nuggets of "how-to"-ness in there, but these are softer, more philosophical pieces that take you into the challenges I faced and how we got from "sure, I can help!" to "that's it! It's perfect as we're going to get it! Let's do this!" For the record, we're not there, yet. Are we ever there, yet?
So…there’s this song. It’s got a good hook and a good guitar line. The vocals are good on the scratch track. All in all, it sounds like a good track, probably on the back end of the album to help balance it out and make for a solid album start to finish. Then something happened. We brought in this fella John who was to play “fiddle.” Well, John so happens to be brilliant and talented through and through and within one practice take with this song, we were all looking at each other like…”wow!”
At that point, the rest of the track needed to be laid down and with each piece, the monster grew. Soon, there were re-recorded vocals, guitars, bass, bagpipes, bodhrun, djimbe, drums, and violins. Some didn’t make the final cut. Some takes got spliced and reworked enough to make a couple of solid tracks with the best all in one place. If you were to place all the tracks into the mix and just let ‘em go, it would make you twitch – there’s THAT much going on in this song.
As happens, there were, in total, 48 mixdowns of this song to get it “right,” and, I think I mentioned, I’m not sure we are 100% there, but, we’re really close and part of it came from understanding that compression does when met with four main sources of volume in a track, even when there are 16 total tracks (excluding fx tracks). We ran into a problem with the monster, once everything was fixed, tonally through EQs and light compression, some reverb here and there, and so on. What’s the problem, you ask? The monster gets hungry and has to eat things.
OK, so the metaphor may be getting stretched a little, but here’s the bottom line – when one thing gets loud, something else gets soft, and finding the balance is the true monster. I tried so many methods to get the vocals to sit nicely while still allowing you to hear each part clearly. It was almost comical, though, as I’d have what I thought was a good balance, and then after mixdown, the vocals would either be lost or so up front to a point where everything else sounded lost in the background… So many iterations! I finally discovered the culprit – the compressor in the Master track.
Full disclosure – I use the Slate Digital FG-X Mastering plugin and I really like it. That said, it does what compressors/limiters do – when one thing gets louder than the threshold, it makes it quieter and when one frequency range is dominating the mix, bad things happen, overall. What I found was, each individual track sounded absolutely fine when solo’d. When I had vocals and “instruments,” it was fine. The culprit? The drums. The train driving to oblivion was, in fact, obliterating the mix. When I added the drums back in, the overall sound dropped ~3dB and, specifically, the vocals sank closer to 4dB.
So, how does one tame a monster like this? I basically figured out that I had to do what I tried a while ago – mix down the instrumentation and vocals separately and bring them together for a mixdown and then send that mixdown to the mastering round. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was the only solution I found – remember I’m a bit of a rookie with this! – that allowed the full dynamics of the instrumentation (all of it!) and vocals to coexist. The end result? An Irish Rebel Rock song that feels a lot like the Motörhead “Orgasmatron” cover train looks.
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