Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Let’s Remix The Tune

Photograph Compliments of James Kovin

“Hey Bro’, I’ve got these tracks laid down. The song is finished, just need to pull it all together and do post-production. Can you help me?”

I cough up the usual excuses; not interested in working on someone else’s recording, not enough time for myself, too many irons in the fire…

“It’s all done, shouldn’t take much time at all.”

“Alright, send me the tracks. I’ll take a listen.” God, I cave easily. “Alright, send me the tracks. I’ll take a listen.” God, I cave easily.

The Master mix is dull, lifeless, and spread with too much reverb. The individual performance tracks are clean and well-recorded, other tracks are ponged with multiple instruments. Then there are the vocals; good performance but super thin.

I’m hanging here with kind of a mess.

Recut vocals with a Neumann, using an UA LA 610 as pre amp, layering the vocals with two delays way back and a little plate verb.

Separate the ponged tracks to individual tracks; assigned a bass amp plug-in to the bass, compress and limit the track, squeezed tight and centered; EQ and compress guitar tracks; EQ keyboard tracks; Listen to each track individually, searching for audio artifacts, and, of course, finding a bunch of stuff that needed to be eliminated; assign sub mixes to everything, panning in place…

Drums, crap…great performance, but sub standard punch. Three great rim shot snares in the whole track. I created a sample of one of the rim shots and cut and paste it across the mix. I replaced the kick track with my own sample cut with a vintage Bellari tube pre. Sub-mixed the drums with SMACK, my favorite compressor plug-in, and light plate reverb.

Remix, remix, remix…weeks later, ready for mastering, and then we’re done.

Nope, shouldn’t take much time at all.

Is there anything we can help with?