I have a friend, who shall remain anonymous so let's call him "John Doe", who sent me an S.O.S. via MSN just moments and went like "can you do something to these files". He just received EP multitracks for mixing from a band, who also shall remain anonymous so let's call them "The band", but they recorded themselves and wanted the EP to be mixed by someone else. The band sent John the multitracks and they seemed otherwise fine (miced gtr and bass), but there was a few reasons why this proves to the world that even tho you have the internetz and everything, there is still need for a professional and semiprofessional sound engineers and producers.
The band did record the whole thing live, but still: the playing is REALLY horrible, the bass player stops playing at some points because he fucks up and judging from the short clip I heard, the stuff sounds like the instruments and singing are out of tune. BUT, the cry for help came when he said that the main problem was that there was no stereo overheads. And no kick, no toms, no hihat. Just one overhead for the whole drums. And the drum track (note singular form, not plural) sounded like this. And the band wants to sound like 80s glam rock or something. So I was like, wtf do you do with just one overhead mic?
First I thought, well at least putting the playing on grid without phase problems should be easy, with just one track I mean
Then what I did was that I tried to at least salvage the kick, snare and overheads from there, or at least try if it's possible. What I did was that I took the track and duplicated it three times, named the tracks BD, SN and OH.
Then on the BD track I used the AIR Kill EQ that comes stock with Pro Tools 8 and turned on only the low band and started sweeping for frequencies where I can mostly only hear the kick, which I think ended up at 120hz, then I did the same for snare, which was a bit higher, like 200hz or something. Then I just put the Slate Trigger after that on both channels and if excluding the parts where the drummer starts to play toms, it worked fabulously. Then with the overheads, first I highpassed the track at 1khz so I got rid of the drums, but it was still mono and just doing the Haas trick doesn't work. That was a problem. What I did was that I routed the mono track to a stereo bus, then put the Waves S-1 stereowidener there, then a stereo delay with like 10% mix and 25ms and 30ms delays with 20% and 30% feedback a bit of "overhead" style stereo image smudge followed by a light chorus again with very low 10% mix just so that the "overheads" wouldn't sound so static. After that I just put a reverb there because there was no room mic, and since the band wanted to sound like 80's glam rock, I went a bit overboard with the reverb, like they did back then because it was a new thing
So, this is what I ended up with; The samples I used in the clip don't really matter, they are just for show that "it can be done", but the end result will still sound like shit and I think John will get really high or drunk after he has mixed the EP.
The band did record the whole thing live, but still: the playing is REALLY horrible, the bass player stops playing at some points because he fucks up and judging from the short clip I heard, the stuff sounds like the instruments and singing are out of tune. BUT, the cry for help came when he said that the main problem was that there was no stereo overheads. And no kick, no toms, no hihat. Just one overhead for the whole drums. And the drum track (note singular form, not plural) sounded like this. And the band wants to sound like 80s glam rock or something. So I was like, wtf do you do with just one overhead mic?
First I thought, well at least putting the playing on grid without phase problems should be easy, with just one track I mean
Then what I did was that I tried to at least salvage the kick, snare and overheads from there, or at least try if it's possible. What I did was that I took the track and duplicated it three times, named the tracks BD, SN and OH. Then on the BD track I used the AIR Kill EQ that comes stock with Pro Tools 8 and turned on only the low band and started sweeping for frequencies where I can mostly only hear the kick, which I think ended up at 120hz, then I did the same for snare, which was a bit higher, like 200hz or something. Then I just put the Slate Trigger after that on both channels and if excluding the parts where the drummer starts to play toms, it worked fabulously. Then with the overheads, first I highpassed the track at 1khz so I got rid of the drums, but it was still mono and just doing the Haas trick doesn't work. That was a problem. What I did was that I routed the mono track to a stereo bus, then put the Waves S-1 stereowidener there, then a stereo delay with like 10% mix and 25ms and 30ms delays with 20% and 30% feedback a bit of "overhead" style stereo image smudge followed by a light chorus again with very low 10% mix just so that the "overheads" wouldn't sound so static. After that I just put a reverb there because there was no room mic, and since the band wanted to sound like 80's glam rock, I went a bit overboard with the reverb, like they did back then because it was a new thing
So, this is what I ended up with; The samples I used in the clip don't really matter, they are just for show that "it can be done", but the end result will still sound like shit and I think John will get really high or drunk after he has mixed the EP.
