Speak Softly - Like Horses
Another week another one hour mix challenge. This was a tough one too it was a track by Speak Softly titled Like Horses.
(Speaksoftly, 2012)
Preparation
As with any mix I like to start with look at the supplied files. For Like Horses I was supplied with 44.1kHz 24bit WAV files. After creating My Protools session using these bitrate and sample depth settings I then arranged my session into my preferred layout (with a few tweaks, as I've never used VCA channels i decided to set them up in this session as well), as seen below. While setting up my session I listened through the track and realise there is a lot of synthesisers and piano parts. Working with the one hour time limit for this was going to be a challenge.
The Mix
For this mix I tried a new approach and tried to work with what I was supplied and get it to sound the best I could without too many plugins. To that end my first task was to check phase correlation on all individual tracks. By doing this I discovered a few of the keyboard parts were stereo pair and I decided to combine them to stereo tracks. A few tracks in the drums needed to be budged into place and I clip gained each track to a more uniform level for each channel.
The drums sounded pretty good so I decided to just boost a little on the kick and find a nice balance between the looped electronic drums and the acoustic drums.
Moving on from here was the bass. When listening to this track all the way through I realised the bass got a little lost. To that end I decided to put a bass enhancer on the bass channel and compress it quite aggressively as well. Once I pumped the bass up with the compressor it was clashing a lot with kick drum so I set up a side chain on the original compressor to allow the kick to cut through the mix. I also boosted a little more on the bass bus which achieved my desired bass sound.
Next was the synths, having so many competing melodies was a tough one so I decided to use stereo panning to seperate them in the mix as well as balance them.
Moving on to the vocals, I used the same technique and separated each voice in the stereo field. Then I decided to create some FX sends to create more movement in the vocal lines. I got to test out my new Sound Toys plugins which were really fun to work with and got a lot out of the vocals.
By this time in the mix I was really running out of time and only had 10 minutes left. I decided to try a manual simple master just to boost the volume. To do this I started with a mild EQ with a high pass filter and low pass filter applied. I followed that with a gentle compressor to clip the peaks and finally a simple limiter to boost the whole track up to unity gain.
I ran out of time recording the track to the bounce track so I just exported the bounce and got the whole thing done just in time.
The Song
Here is my final mix completed in 60 minutes.
Reflection
This is far from my greatest mix ever. In hindsight I should have stuck with my normal workflow and approach to mixing. It was fun to try a new way of mixing however, as you can here the results did suffer. I am going to keep experimenting with this workflow and incorporate phase correction and VCA group faders in my workflow but develop my skills to effectively implement these strategies in a more timely fashion. Also by rushing my mixing process I missed some sections in the keys that had a lot going on and clashed in the mix which I should have EQ'd to get a better result. I really enjoyed the challenge of this song it showed me where my skills can be honed and developed.
References
Speaksoftly. (2012). Like Horses. Retrieved from https://speaksoftly.bandcamp.com/track/like-horses-2