Mixing The One

        So, for class we have been working on a mixing project. We had a choice between several songs to mix, and of course I decided to pick the song that had over 4 dozen tracks. What can I say, I love a challenge. What really attracted me to this song however was that it sounded so great and I really wanted my chance to put my own spin on it. The song I mixed is called "The One" by a group called Memnoir. You can get these tracks on this website and download a zip drive of the tracks unedited just as I did. I'm using Pro-Tools 10 for this project.

        The first thing I had to do with this project was to organize the tracks. When you have over 50 tracks, if you don't have some clear way to tell them apart, you get lost so easily. So what I did was I grouped all the similar tracks together and then color coded them so I could identify the groups quickly. Here is a picture of some of the tracks:

        After I had something I could look at without completely doubting my choice in song to mix, I took a look at the tracks and saw that there was a lot of repeat tracks with similar content. So I decided to do some panning to make room for all of these tracks and give it a bigger and fuller feeling.

        After I had my tracks panned and in a format I could look at, I turned my attention to mixing the various aspects of the mix--starting with the drums. I muted all the other tracks and focused solely on the drums for awhile, mixing them to sound good alone. I spent a lot of time on the toms especially to get the sound I wanted from them, much crisper and clearer than the original tracks. I also upped their power towards the end to give the feeling of highly boosted base. After that, I did some further edits to make it fit with the song as a whole.

        I then took a look at the vocals and worked on getting to a place I was happy with. I added reverb to several tracks to add to the voice and make the vocals fuller. After cleaning up the vocals, I turned to the synth tracks and added some automation in order to get the volume levels to the point that they were part of the mix but not dominating it at any point.

        After this point, I found out that I had been missing something critical to my mix. When I looked over the tracks, I listened to the guitars which were marked as DI (Direct Input), and heard how quiet it was and that there really wasn't much there. I was disappointed but moved onto the rest of the mix and forgot about it, ignoring it for the time. But I had my professor take a look at my mix and found out that because it was a DI track, there was a plug-in that Pro-Tools had that would allow me to make it sound like an electric guitar track. This really lived up the track, and then I added reverb and automated it so it was active at specific points to make the guitar feel less like a DI track and more like it was recorded in a real room.

        After I had my tracks mostly done with, I then added some more Aux tracks with reverb, delays, and chorus effects. When I finished this, I realized that what I was left with was a lot of really loud tracks that kept clipping in various places. So I went through the tracks and lowered volumes, and used automation to keep the tracks from clipping at all. Here is a screen shot that shows some of the automation I used:

        Going into the Automation a bit more, one of the things I did was notice that the guitar tracks were at some points too loud, but if I turned them down then they would be too quite at other points. So I automated it so that when I needed it to, it would quite down so they didn't over power the vocals, and then when the vocals got stronger, it would get louder again.

        After that, I did some final automations such as a fade out for several tracks, compressed several of the tracks and put a maximizer on the master track. After that I was finished and bounced the track. I hope you enjoy listening to it, as I put a lot of work into the mix!