I was almost suprised that I didn't have to stay up many nights in a row to finish the mixes. I got some tracks pretty late due to some mistakes but there was no panic in the air. All in all the mixing process was pretty scattered, because some tracks were always missing. It helped a great deal that Riku and Olli did a lot of recording on this album. It would have sucked so much to mix after a long day at the studio. We found the "basic foundation" to our sound pretty soon after the guitar re-amping and did only minor adjustments to it. Then it was all "add this and that" kind of stuff. It was so much easier to mix this album than play (+edit) the drums on it! Arto: have fun with playing the songs live! LOL!
Thursday 18.12.2008 (V1)
Jaakko (the mastering engineer) started preparing the files by himself. He upsampled them to 96 kHz because it apparently sounds better and "makes the job easier". Cool. Ok, we wanted the album to be a pleasing listening experience, so we didn't want to make it as loud and aggressive as possible. The mixes sounded good and I was relieved that we didn't find anything to fix in the mixes!
Monday 29.12.2008 (V2)
After listening the album in various places we found that the guitars were "lost" when listening in a car. I was worried that I would need to make new mixes with better guitars, but I didn't, because Jaakko is the man! He showed us how much you can do with a little EQ, distortion and limiting. The difference was huge! We also did some minor volume automation fixes. Everyone was happy with the version 2, so IT'S FUCKING READY!
Having mastered the previous Dauntless album, I was excited to hear what the new one sounded like. The mixes did not let me down - they were pretty damned good and required no major brain surgery. Santeri told me that the sound they wanted was something that is easy on the ears and enjoyable to crank up in volume. So I selected the "easy listening" preset from my finalizer plug-in and that was pretty much it.
Well, not quite!
Session one
Looking at my notes, I generally used very little EQ. All corrections seem to be in the 0,5dB - 1,5dB window, and I have used four bands of EQ most of the time. Usually, it was a bump in the bass between 60Hz-70Hz, a little low mid cut at around 180Hz-220Hz, a high mid cut around 3,5kHz and a tiny bit of boost between 10-12k. The EQ used was my trustworthy analog parametric EQ.
For the compression I used a Gyraf vari-mu, to which I seem to keep on coming back. It's a sign of good piece of equipment. I did not crank up the input much to keep the distortion low and the bass nice & tight, and the gain reduction was usually kept between 1dB-2db with slow attack and fast release.
For A/D conversion I use a Crane Song HEDD192, which has a few nice tone shaping options. I used a little of both Pentode & Tape process. The Pentode control adds air and presence in a very natural way, while the Tape does nice things to the bass and low mids.
With this set-up, I just kept on balancing EQ, compression and the HEDD process controls until I got where I wanted with each song.
The sequencing went smoothly, and for the final touch-ups we ended up turning some parts of the songs down in volume since the compression had brought them up. It gets boring pretty fast if everything is loud all the time. I used a little of Voxengo Elephant to bring the volume up, but left plenty of headroom, just to see if I could get it through..
I gave the reference copies to the people present, shut down the studio and headed for the christmas holidays.
Session two
Revision time! There was a general agreement that there was slightly too much of bass and the guitars could stand out a touch more. Otherwise everything seemed to be fine. The volume needed to be slightly louder, too.
The bass issue is probably due to the learning curve with the HEDD (and my obsession with old-school Chicago house music?).
It's just so easy to overdo it with the Tape control. It adds bass, but it's good bass I've captured, so I simply brought it down using a Sonoris linear phase EQ. A less than -1dB shelf from some 100Hz down and brining the low cut up in frequency did the trick.
This is something I do now and then - capture a slightly pushed tone and then bring it down a little. This time I just did it by accident..
For the guitar presence I tried several things. The already captured (non-limited/clipped) sound was very healthy, and I wanted to adjust that tone, not the source. M/S EQ sounded like M/S EQ does sometimes, a little disjointed. Limiting alone did not bring the guitars up enough, so I decided to try the HEDD in digital mode. Only a touch of Pentode, and a nice sheen of balanced distortion appeared on the sound. That we decided to try, so pushed REC and we waited for the
capture.
I pushed up the limiter a little more and burned the new copies.
A few days later an approval came and I burned the master. Nice!
Thoughts about the job
I learnt a couple of things, as I do from most of the mastering jobs I do. I think that with every new piece of equipment, there's a learning curve. A mastering engineer needs to know one's equipment throughly, and this takes time. The HEDD I had only had for 1,5 months, which I consider to be just enough to know something but way enough to toy around in dangerous ways.
The other thing is the guitar presence. Lately, I've done a lot of jobs in where I've shaped the presence by cutting some of the edge off. This sounds good IMO, and results in sound you don't want to shut off. Loud and balanced can be cool, while loud and piercing just results in ear fatique.
I'm listening to the record as I write this text, and I consider it to be one of my better jobs. It's the combination of good mixes and a skilled mastering engineer that results in good sonic outcome. No corners needed to be cut, and nothing was fixed while doing this album, apart from my ghetto bass.
