AA2 Week 9 - Mixing Part 2

This week I was all pumped to do a completely different remix of Drama Queen. I was thinking of doing either a chilled house remix or an upbeat drum 'n' bass remix. When I went to Studio 2 the soft synths in Logic were not working for some reason. I then went to Studio 5 to use the Native Instruments, but couldn't work out how to get sound to the speakers and also the MIDI wasn't working. By this time I was stressed and had lost all my enthusiasm so I decided to just work on the ProTools session.

I spent quite a bit of time working on the vocals and trying to isolate them to sound good. I know the exercise was to only use the vocals as a guide, but after hearing many of Ben's mixes I saw that it was possible to make them sound good. I have no idea how Ben did it but I just couldn't work it out. I tried using distortion, compression, EQ, de-esser but nothing worked for me.

In this mix I got rid of many of the guitar tracks because I though there was just way too much. I changed the type of distortion and added some delays to the main lead. I also made use of the guitar riffs at the end of the session and cut them up and matched it to the song.

One very stupid thing I did was spend lots of time aligning two guitar parts and was pulling my hair out wondering why they were out of time. Then I realised I have a delay on one of the tracks that I forgot about! Grrrrhh! That was a waste of an hour!

I have a guitar wah effect on one of the main guitar parts, which complements the other part. I think the idea is good but the overall sound isn't the best because I had to work out which riff goes with each part of the song and I didn't know what the notes were. So, because it was all by ear it was time consuming and not always matching perfectly.

I have a screenshot of my mixer window to see the effects and an mp3 of the final mix both with and without vocals.

I know, there's a bit of clipping

Mix with vocals [4.1MB]

Mix without vocals [4.1MB]


[1] David Grice "Audio Arts: Semester 1, Week 9; Mixing" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 8th May 2007.