On The Sixth Day, I Mixed and Mastered

On the last “day” working on the track, I mixed and mastered it on the monitor speakers in Studio 1030A at The Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

I started by adding some reverb to the drums using the send on Bus 5 to the Small Hall reverb channel. In the process, I noticed that the toms weren’t alternating between speakers in the later MIDI regions because I hadn’t unmuted the alternate tom when I dispensed with the duplicate drum kit on Day 5. This was the music equivalent of a software bug, so I squashed it.

I also added some equalisation to the snare drum to boost the low frequencies and reveal more of the drum skin sound in addition to the metal snare.

To further emphasise the disorienting feel of the track, I added slow stereo tremolo on the electric guitar, so it also pans left/right 180 degrees out of phase from the shaker.

I wasn’t happy with the decay on the bass, so I automated a fade out on the bass track so the instrument rings at the end of the work while cutting off at the same time as the fading crash cymbal.

The electric guitar and synthesiser occupy the same frequency range, so to prevent them clashing and allow the guitar to dominate the foreground, I applied ducking to synthesiser. This technique uses equalisation to reduce frequency bands that the instruments have in common and allows the primary instrument to cut through the mix without being too loud. The ducked instrument effectively shifts into the background.

Here’s the electric guitar spectrum, which I used to confirm its frequency range:

This is the synthesiser eq without ducking:

The degree of ducking is only about -5 dB, since I didn’t want to change the sound of the synthesiser dramatically; just reduce its dominance in the mix. Frequencies outside the range where it clashes with the guitar are left unchanged, which is subtler than simply reducing the overall volume of the instrument moving into the background. I left the high frequencies alone to symbolise the unignorable sound of an infant crying in distress. This is the synthesiser eq with ducking:

I used automation so that the ducking is only enabled while both instruments are playing. Metaphorically this symbolises my infant response of submitting to my mother’s dominance by suppressing parts of my personality around her in order to survive. I added this to the volume automation I already had which fades the synthesiser out when the guitar has been playing for a while; another metaphor for my mother’s overbearing dominance gradually forcing me into submission during this phase of my life. Here are the synthesiser ducking and volume automation:

In the penultimate step , I added a mastering chain on the Stereo Out master channel, consisting of a compressor, equaliser and limiter with conservative settings. Here are the final mixer settings showing all the channels:

Finally, I checked for clipping in the signal chain and bounced the track out in real time to have a final listen on the monitor speakers. In the process, I noticed that one of the bass slides wasn’t working, so I fixed it by making the first two slides subtle and the final one epic. See if you can hear it:

I heard all that I had made, and it was very good.