It's alive
(Yaominute, 2011)
Silence
Project "Silence" the Techno collaboration with Amor I've been working on for the last few weeks has been getting the Doctor's treatment this week. I've been tasked to bring the arrangement up to a point where it is ready to once again go through the Neve Custom 75 for a final mix. I have had complete creative freedom to bring this alive in my own way. Firstly I imported the Ableton and Neve Audio files over to my preferred DAW Logic Pro X. The next task was to set up all my groups and buses.
Bass
I also decided (thanks to some good advise from a colleague) to split the bass audio into a low frequency mono channel and stereo high frequency channel. This allowed me to side chain the lower mono channel with the kick and allow the beautiful analogue upper harmonics to be unaffected. It was also suggest to use a linear phase EQ (Producers Choice, 2012) to avoid any phase distortion (Larkin, 2015) in the mix. I split the frequencies with a low pass filter set at 100 Hz and a 24dB slope and the upper with a high pass filter at 200 Hz and 24dB slope creating just a subtle dip between 100 and 200 Hz to reduce mud in the mix. I also used the Fabfilter Saturn plugin to add a little saturation to the upper harmonic channel.
Descant
I'm really enjoying this piece however, I felt it was missing something. I drew on my reference track Chloe - The Dawn (Dixon Remix) [Check out my case study here] as it had a descant line running above the whole track so I tried to emulate this. For this line I used the FabFilter Twin 2 plugin and started with the Double Gate TEK preset tweaking it until I found the sound I was going for. To give it life to match the other analogue parts of the piece I went hard on the processing using Volcano 2 and some mid side EQ to broaden it out really made it pop.
FX
For time based effect I also used the FabFilter Suite's timeless and the built in Space designer plugins from Logic Pro X. My last challenge was to bounce each individual instrument out pan centrally and normalised so we can do a mix session on the Neve this Thursday. I have just finished all of these tasks and am ready to get back into the Neve tomorrow to make this tune a reality. Check out below for a little sneak peak.
(Doctor Duck, 2017)
References
Doctor Duck. (2017). Amor & Doctor Duck - Silence (Preview) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r4TIGfgQi8&feature=youtu.be
FabFilter. (2017). FabFilter - Quality Audio Plug-Ins for Mixing, Mastering and Recording - VST VST3 AU AAX RTAS AudioSuite [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.fabfilter.com/
Larkin, O. (2015, March 18). What is phase distortion synthesis? | MusicRadar [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/what-is-phase-distortion-synthesis-618081
Producers Choice. (2012, March 28). Linear Phase EQ Explained [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.theproducerschoice.com/blogs/articles/5892301-linear-phase-eq-explained
Yaominute. (2011, June 21). "It's Alive!!!" [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xos2MnVxe-c