Mixing Project

Going into this project was actually quite intimidating; I am by no means a mixing engineer as you can probably tell from my MIDI Remix. But I took this as an opportunity to practice my skills in mastering. For most of music career I produced exclusively instrumental music, and it was only recently when I started incorporating vocals into my work. And from all that I've learned, mixing vocals is hard, especially when trying to keep a natural tone on the mix and not over processing it. For the project I chose the song "Fall Down" written by Toad the Wet Sprocket:

You can clearly tell that this song is unmixed. The first things I noticed was that the guitars were way too overbearing, and the lead vocals were in the background. And as such, the background vocals were on the same level of the lead, which is not what you want. I made a perceived space graph of what I heard from this demo:

After analyzing what I needed to fix, I immediately started working on my mix of the song. My goals were to make the lead vocals consistently in front while not themselves being overbearing, keeping the guitars more or less as is, and then placing less emphasis on the background vocals. You can sort of see what I wanted it to sound like here:

And on that note, this is what my mix sounds like:

I'm very proud of how this turned out, I think the mix sounds great, and even without directly comparing the two I think you can tell. The vocals are much clearer, and background vocals serve as intended, and the guitars are right where they should be. But you may be wondering why there are gaps in between the background vocals. This is because you could hear some guitar present in the background of the audio, and while the effects I added for the vocals sounded great, they made a weird echo when on the guitar and so to minimize that effect I removed the parts without vocals.

Interestingly enough, something I noticed while working on this project was that (while still a challenge) it is significantly easier to mix acoustic instruments. Whenever, I had mixed vocals with my music before it was a challenge because the vocals were a completely different sound to the synthesizes and heavy compression used in EDM music, but the instruments in Fall Down just sound like they work together. This is probably because everything was recorded in the same room and is an audio track rather than a direct sounds from a DAW, giving them the same level of clearness which makes mixing them much easier. 

Though a challenge that did occur early on was actually the something to do with the vocals themselves. During the recording of the lead vocals, I guess the vocalist wasn't using a very good pop filter, so there are some audible puffs of air from certain words which you could hear. I tried to remedy this the best I could while keeping the tone of the vocals by removing as much low-end as I could using the OTT compressor. This worked somewhat, and they are not as blatant, but they are still there. There is only so much I could do retroactively to fix this issue, but hopefully it wasn't too noticeably until I mentioned it.

On the topic of the lead vocals, you can see below what I did to get them to sound clearer in the mix:

As I mentioned, the OTT compressor is there. It is a multiband compressor which I used to minimize the vocal popping. I also added a very very slight bit of reverb because there will never be a time when reverb doesn't sound good in a mix. A bit further down you can also see the route knob which I have outgoing from the lead vocal channel. What this does is it affects how much to vocals are pushed over the rest of the mix, and I have this connected to an automation track which made it louder or quieter depending on certain parts.

The vocals to the song are the tracks which went through the most adjusting, and the background vocals actually needed more work than the lead:

Once again I added compression to the BG vocals to make it sound cleaner, but its not as audible because of the rest of the effects added, but its always better to start with a clean sound than to have to drown out the muddiness in reverb. There was also some clipping present, which I fixed by putting a band pass on the vocals. And finally to give it the more distant sound, I lowered the volume a bit, and added a good amount of Reverb and a slight hint of delay. This is actually only for one of the voices in the background, since their were two tracks which I mixed separately due to the differing timbres, but the other track followed a very similar process.

For one final showcase, here is a direct comparison of both the mixed and unmixed versions of the songs: