Mixing Session #1

We were back to the recording studio on Thursday. The basic recording is done. Now it's onto mixing. It was a real eye-opening session. Our recording engineer broke one of our songs down to it's basic elements and then put it all back together again.

We started with a fairly simple track- just bass, drums, acoustic guitar, vocal, tenor sax. We brought in sample some tracks to use as a sort of template for the type of mix and sound we are hoping to achieve, we listened to the tracks and talked about what we liked and what we didn't.

We ended up using Cat Power's "The Greatest" as our base example - a real nice mix. Our engineer started tweaking our tracks - he made the bass a little cleaner and warmer, he pumped up and tightened the sound of the snare drum, he added a little echo and reverb to the voice, added reverb to the sax and added a little compression to everything.

The final result was startling good. To our ears our track stood up well in comparison with our example. Suddenly a decent track sounded multi-dimensional, full, strong and complete. We walked out of the session riding on a cloud. There is a ton of work to do, but we saw a glimmer of how good this set of songs could be... to be continued...

Note: Of course our track doesn't have piano or a synthesizer, and Carla's voice isn't really like Cat's, and we have a sax, and our drummer uses cymbals, so in many ways our song is nothing like this example. Still, check out the feel of the drums and listen to how Cat's voice is mixed in with the band. That's what we're going for!