Obsolete Commiserations - Final Mix

 Previously, I had recorded my track to the best of my abilities, but there were a few issues with the levels and peaking throughout the song.

Today, I have spent some time making some final adjustments in the mixing suite at WaterBear with the help of my tutor Tom.

The first issue I tackled was the fact that due to half of the song being recorded on a different guitar, with a different audio interface, the guitar sound changed drastically halfway through the song. To fix this, I duplicated the guitar track so that I could EQ the first half of the guitar recording separately to the second. I boosted some areas around the mid/high areas in order to get the required 'sparkle' the guitar was missing in comparison to the second half.

I also EQ'd my vocals a little bit to bring out the floatiness within them, and changed the room on my reverb from a chamber to a reflective hall, as I wanted a reverb that sustained longer and sounded more boomy.

In the very last section of the song, where I introduced an overlapping melody, the track was clipping as everything was too loud. To fix this, I added a compressor on my vocals, and used automation to fix a few singular notes that were peaking by creating a little dip in the volume. I am aware that this is not necessarily a 'professional' way of achieving this, so next time I record I will make sure nothing is clipping and that there is plenty of headroom in each individual instrument recording so that when I put them all together, the song doesn't clip.

I also used automation to level out the guitar and vocal recordings, as when I recorded the second half of the song at home, I only realised after I was finished that I had recorded it way too loud. Luckily, the automation fixed this very nicely, and I have learnt that next time I do a recording, I must check if the levels are correct in correlation to the rest of the track to avoid such things happening again. I am aware that using automation in this way is not exactly 'professional' either, however, it was the quickest and easiest way to sort out the issues I was having.

In the last section with the overlapping vocals, I panned the lead vocals and the harmony to the left and the overlapping melody to the right. My reasoning for doing this was that it gave the vocals more space to dance around each other, instead of them being on top of each other which made them sound as if they were squashing each other.

Lastly, I re-recorded the first line of the second verse, as my vocal was slightly out of tune in part of it.

Here are links to the track before and after this process, so you can hear the difference.

Before:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iEbPMz8iCfdJeoj2JVUPQ3q50x6gWUyb/view?usp=sharing

After:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aZfsW_j3_s_ZydYaGMgGKI0i1_S7-ipb/view?usp=sharing