Day We Ran 1

Foaming was the last song of Day We Ran’s set, so I am using this example as it is high energy, and a crowd favourite with audience participation. I am working with the stereo of the room, so the mixing is basically a stereo master. My processing was a mix of EQ, Compression, and tape saturation. One technique I tried was to compress before using EQ. This dramatically improved the clarity of the stereo audio as the EQ felt more evenly applied. I had one 1176 emulation before applying EQ with an SSL bus compressor after compared to this version with both compressors afterwards. Both tracks have the same EQ and tape saturator plug-in to add more warmth. There are 2 7-band parametric EQs and 2 1-band parametric EQs all with small adjustments, especially many attenuations in the mid-range area as 2 guitars, a bass guitar and 3 male vocals were fighting for that space. 

Betty Taylor

This set was recorded without any room mics, only a close mic multi-track and LR crowd mics from the stage. To emphasise the live recording energy, a room reverb was added to channels such as the vocals, guitars and crowd mics, and a short delay to the lead vocal. I only used the crowd mics at the beginning and the ending of the track as they did not add any useful crowd participation, only a muddy echo of the PA during the song which reduced the clarity. I muted the tracks during the song and faded them back in when the crowd joins in. This is also an example of how you can edit introductions with cross fading to a song to make it flow and to add interest. 

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Unfortunately, this song sounds drastically different to the recorded studio version as the acoustic guitar had its gain turned up way too much during the song and has given it a very distorted heavy electric guitar tonality. All I can do in the mix is work with it and emphasise that tone with EQ and reverb. Compression was not needed in this instance as the signal was already too squashed. I chose to use a gate on the floor tom as I had it set to a fast attack and slow hold and release as whenever the floor tom was played it was played continuously for a duration, so it stayed completely open during those sections and closed gently after these sections to mute the channel in between. I would not recommend this technique where one off hits occur on the floor tom in a song, like drum fills, as the opening and closing of a gate at that speed and for that duration can be heard and jarring to the energy and flow of a song. 

Day We Ran 2

For Day We Ran’s second show I was able to mix a full multi-track with crowd mics and have that separation and clarity to mix. These are some key differences to this recording compared the first one for the same song. 

Firstly, as this session was significantly larger than the first few, bussing together elements such as all the drum mics, guitars, vocals and crowd made automation and controlling volume levels much easier and more uniform. Increasing the volume of vocalists talking to the crowd and pulling back on reverb and delay effects is key when including these in sections before or after songs so they are clear, brought to the forefront, and grab the listeners attention on social media content, like I have done in their track Carolina. I have utilised muting channels such as the backing vocals when they are not actively singing, as I found the bleed picked up in those microphones were not beneficial to the mix and the processing I have used for the vocals reflected badly. Proximity effect was also strongly evident in the lead vocal here, so a high pass filter was used to start rolling off low end from 200Hz. All this additional bass in the vocal would cause the kick and bass to lose presence in the mix and reduce the clarity of the vocal. Elements such as the crowd mics, lead vocal, guitar, the grouped basses, and hi-hat were individually volume automated to maintain equal energy and volume level throughout, emphasise the crowd when they’re bringing the energy or take away some hi-hat when way too much crash cymbal bleed was unpleasant. I have once again emulated a bigger space on the multi-track with a room reverb on the vocals, guitars and crowd and short delay on the vocals. With a relatively clean multi-track for a live recording, I experimented with creative reverb and delay automation in the second verse to re-create the effect of the lead vocal echoing away in the original studio version and exaggerate the attempt of the vocalist to do this. I also felt a long fade out as the crowd was continually cheering and clapping was reflective of the nature that it was the last song of the set. All elements have been simply and subtly panned to reflect where the band members were standing on stage and create a sonic landscape that is expected from a listener. 

The Faith Estate

This recording has 0 separation between any tracks I had to work with and there was no ability to treat each element individually. The approach to this mix is to emphasise the capture of the FOH mix in the space rather than perfect the sonic balance of each element. I also believe that working with predominantly room recordings, having the FOH mix with all the vocal processing printed on to it adds to and works well with the room recordings. This is rather than having to replicate the vocal sound into the dry FOH signal and blend it with the other channels. I chose not to automate for this song either as all the tracks were loud and contained so much bleed, so the use of automation and excessive processing would have lost the energy of the audio. To improve the clarity strategic compression to control transients and attack and frequency balance channels to blend and mix made the difference. 

I found the relatively close room mic’s for this gig reduced the amount of extra noise and conversation that was picked up due to the loudness of the music in the space. Working with the engineer who knew the room, those recorders were placed where a lot of bass information was picked up from one and more high-end from the other. To emphasise this, I used a low pass filter on the track with more bass and a high pass filter on the one with more high-end information for extra separation and control of the frequency range. In saying this, I attenuated about 7.5dB of high mid information around the 6kHz range as the cymbals are very prominent in all audio channels and had to be tamed. The FOH LR stereo mix was mostly vocals, so I treated the processing like a vocal track with a UA 1176 compressor, a de-esser and an EQ, boosting about 2dB around 4kHz, and cutting about 1.5dB around 600Hz. I didn’t roll off low end like you would with regular studio vocal recordings as this signal contained extra kick and bass DI, however I made the compressor attack speed fast with an 8:1 ratio to tame the transients of the kick punching through these channels. 

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Letters To Lions

The audio I captured from this show was a LR mix from the FOH desk and a stereo room recording from just above the desk. I only had 4 tracks to work with after I separated these stereo channels into mono ones to mix individually. 

Compared to the one stereo recording from Day We Ran, I used a lot of automation as this performance was very dynamic and energetic in Easy Honey. To consistently maintain that energy, automation brought it all to a fairy consistent level, blending the audio from the 2 different sources. The FOH mix was an independent mix I created with the live sound engineer to include the LR mix but with more kick, snare and bass D.I. I added a parallel compression send to these 2 tracks to add more saturation, punch and body to the mix of the close-mic’d elements. I also set up a reverb send to feed the room mics through. Separating the room mics into 2 mono channels was essential as the recorder was placed on its side to be secured to the wall, so one microphone pointed to the roof capturing the roof reflections and one pointed directly down to the crowd. These both had to be processed independently, as the tonality of them were quite different, with a lot more high-mid-range coming from the side pointing to the roof, while the one pointing down sounds much thinner and airier. I would advise not to record a room recording with this set up and find something where the stereo microphones are facing more directly to the stage. I still panned them left and right to maintain a stereo image, ensuring the tracks are still phase. With this mix, the snare drum is poking through a bit too much from the LR mix and the band mentioned how the bass player’s vocals were a bit too loud for their liking. Sadly, this cannot be adjusted at this point of mixing with the audio we have to work with, but this mix could have been different if a sound check recording had happened and had created a mix for myself before the show had started. 

Fat Salad

For the mixing of this set, I used LUNA, a DAW I am less familiar with but wanted to evaluate as a free alternative to DAWs such as Pro Tools or Logic. 

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LUNA only has some stock hardware emulation UA plugins. Mixing in LUNA is not ideal for people used to mixing or using DAWs as it emulates hardware mixing with channel strips, signal flow and inserts, for example there is no parametric EQ. I recommend LUNA for a more sophisticated mixing process, however if you are new to mixing and DAWs, GarageBand is the most basic and straightforward free DAW to use to create a basic mix (I will also mention I had issues with LUNA crashing when trying to close or open different projects which as really annoying).

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For this recording, no sound check was tested first and each track that was recorded into LUNA doesn’t quite match the FOH desk set up, indicating the multi-track recording patching from the FOH  desk was not correct. Additionally, in the tracks we do have to work with, there is so much bleed from everything on stage because of to the tiny stage for the 4 band members and loud guitar amps and drums. In this particular case, the band was using monitor wedges, that most artist playing these size indie-rock gigs do, however they were extremely loud and are feedbacking in the recording from the vocal mics and causing this phasing effect that you can hear when the band talks to the crowd during this song. This is one thing to be mindful of and can be checked during soundcheck. Unfortunately, the attempt to make a multi-track recording was unsuccessful as there is almost no separation between microphones to process each element individually. Proximity effect is prevalent in most tracks creating a lot of muddy low end without clarity or punch. I have only done some basic mixing with EQ, compression and reverb send for the room. The loudness of the performance is well reflected; however, I believe this mix and recorded audio was not ideal for bringing out clarity from the performance while keeping this energy.