Justin Myles-Alone With You
Today I was back in the studio and did a one hour mix challenge. Today's song was alone with you by Justin Miles.
(Defioirgio, 2018)
Preparation
Before I start any mix I first look at the supplied files. In this case I was supplied with 44.1kHz 24bit WAV files. This meant that my session needs to be at the same setting when it is created. This will allow me to not process the audio and simply mix with the files I was supplied. After creating My Protools session I then arranged my session to a layout I am comfortable sorting each group of instruments into their perspective groups with individual buses for each group. While I did this I listened to the whole track analysing where I could do things and planning out the remainder of my hour. As this song is 7:37 long I needed to plan accordingly to make sure I can record the track and export it in time to meat the 1 hour deadline.
The Mix
Next I moved onto the correction stage where I run through each channel and EQ, compress & gate where required. There was a little bleed in the drums so I went through and set up gates on kick and toms. EQ'd each channel finding a nice balance in the drums, I also decided the drums could use some more punch so I decided to set up parallel compression on the drum bus to give give the drums more punch in the mix. The picture below is the settings for my drum parallel compression.
Moving onto the guitars and keys I realised I had some great recordings so I EQ'd to achieve balance. Slightly changing the EQ for each instrument to enhance its natural resonance and give it space in the mix. While I was working on each track I panned each instrument to give it space in the sound field.
Next I moved to the vocals which were really great to work with. With a little compression and some De-essing on the lead vocals I achieved a really nice tone. The vocals needed some reverb wich lead me onto the creative side of this mix. I created three FX buses and set up 2 different reverbs and a nice delay.
After finishing my work on each channel and getting some nice sounds with the reverb and delay I created a master bus, bounce audio track and Master fader. Putting Izotope Insight on the master bus allowed me to monitor the stereo field, phasing and loudness of my mix. With this plugin launched I mixed the whole track together trying to achieve a nice balance. Luckily my first thoughts were quite good and I was able to get a rather nice mix quite quickly.
I was now at the 40 minute mark so time was running out. As I was happy with my mix it had a great stereo field and nice balance I decided to bring it up to a nice volume. Using Izotope Ozone 8 I just ran with a preset and adjusted the limiter to give me an integrated LUFS reading of -13. Then recorded my mix to the bounce track.
The Song
Here is my final mix completed in 56 minutes.
Reflection
This was a great exercise for me. It's a really good feeling when you manage to pull of a nice mix in an hour. Looking back at my processes I am had great time management by not spending to much time on each instrument rather doing what is needed to achieve the result I was looking for. As for the mix I think the vocals are a little high in the mix however, as this is a Justin Myles track making him the lead is not a bad thing. Next time I do a mix I'd like to spend a little more time on the mastering process and rather than just using a preset actually make more accurate decisions tailored to the songs needs.
References
Defioirgio, A. (2018). Justin Myles. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxfycJ1vyj0