Mix Analysis: Royal Artillery

Hey!

Two mix blogs in one week! How good.

So just over a month ago we recorded a two-piece punk/heavy rock band called Royal Artillery. It was an awesome experience getting in the studio and into different roles, and it was a totally live recording session which presented a challenge in itself; which was great!

The set up was the guitarist/vocalist going into a stack of 3 cabinets (lows-mids-highs), using an RE20 for vox. The amps were separated by a wall adjacent to the drummer, in which there were 12 mics on the drum-kit itself.

I’ve had the opportunity with the stems of the recording to give one of the tracks a mix and master! I’ll firstly put below a stream to the first version I did, then discuss some feedback I was given along with the some critical analysis of my own. After that I will go into detail what I’ve done to produce a much cleaner, punchier and present mix + master, followed by the new stream!

First version:

So one of the first bits of feedback from my facilitators were that whilst everything was quite balanced, the bass is too big which consequently stopped the kick from being able to punch through a lot of the time. The separation of those lower frequency instruments are also quite muddied and overall resulted in a duller, less exciting mix.

Another main factor I noticed was that in mono, the guitar gets pushed back a fair amount but more-so it loses a lot of energy and edge. In this track, the guitar is the hero of the song, so its presence and the overall presence and relationship between the drum elements also needs to be worked on.

So let’s dive into the session and run through my processes:

Guitar

Firstly here is the rack for my Guitar cab group (not including the bass cab):

The whole group consists of two channels of the mid cab which I doubled, and three for the top cab. My initial processes were to use the delay and panning to create a haas effect with multiple duplicated channels, however it did not play well when summed to mono. I replaced this technique with Ozone’s Imager, as I have greater control over what gets the stereo enhancement - and I was also able to couple it with some subtle tube excitement of the upper-mids to highs in order to apply some overall presence.

I removed the bass cab from the guitar group as I wanted to image it seperately, and not have it be affected by any group processing.

The first plugin in the chain is some sidechain-compression, which I set input to the Kick-In and enabled the reverb - narrowing what the sidechain hears to 100Hz. This works cleaner in the latest mix than in the first version as I now have gates on my kick elements (which I’ll show you in a little bit). Coupling Ableton’s Saturator on ‘Sinoid Fold’ and some glue compression really warmed the bass cab up and reinforced it with a lot of punch. Later on in the rack I’ve got some subtle imaging in order to seperate the bass from the kick’s space in the stereo field (being a mono source), and also glue to the mid guitar cabinet frequencies. Finally there’s another glue compressor to round off the edges and some of the harshness the bass cab produced (and that my previous processing amplified).

Drums

In the group rack of the drums, there’s some parallel glue compression followed by a low cut at 30Hz. I’ve done this same cut in both the Kick In and Kick Out channels, however what I find is by doing this - you’re cutting out necessary frequency information, but it also seems to beef up the frequencies to the right of the cut! So those fundamental low-end thumps from the kick, ends up having extra punch and energy. With the EQ I did some surgical work by removing some of the harsh/problem frequencies which were degrading the overall tone and energy of the kit. I also began scooping out some of the 300-500Hz, giving more space for the lower-mid guitar tones and accentuating the punch I’m after from the kicks. The ‘bass-punch’ preset of the glue compressor has quickly become one of my go-tos, as it gives some extra help to the transients of the drum or bass elements.

Onto the kick! With the Kick In I got rid of the bulk of the information around 300Hz, which was holding back that 50-90Hz low thump. One of my facilitators Conor demonstrated how much energy is restored into the kick when you simply just scoop out those low-mid frequencies that are in the way. You’ll see that I’ve coupled this with some minor boosting of the high-mids to regain some more presence; that with the Kick Out channel - I’ve definitely improved on the power behind this kick and it plays a stronger role in the mix.

For the overheads, I had to catch a lot of the peaks from the hi-hats as the attack on them were really quite sharp initially. This is the first example on the EQ where I start cutting frequencies on any channels which do not require low information, leaving as much room as possible for the kick and bass cabinet. I’ve carved out a lot of frequencies in the hats channel for example, by leaving a lot of the mids in there - I found it added a lot of harshness to the snare sounds, so with being a more aggressive high-pass, it serves as the primary channel in the kit to provide that brightness and shine at the top.

Another tip which Conor provided, was that checking the phase of the elements in your drum kit is one of the first things you should do, as spill will often be a factor in setting this off. He identified snare spill, and the kicks in your overhead mics as being common troublemakers. Easy way to tell whether the channel was out of phase, is enabling your phase inverter and identifying whether the sound is ‘tinny’ or ‘fat’ - does it sound better? worse? or possibly no change at all.

What received the most help from this technique, was the ribbon mics:

I noticed that you couldn’t even hear any audio from the right ribbon mic, it was all collapsed to one side and lacked energy. As soon as I put a phase inverter on the channel, it was like I revitalised the entire kit. Similarly with the snare channels, I used the same technique across the channels and suddenly there was a lot more body.

SM57 Snare rack:

451 Snare rack:

There’s also some gating being utilised across the snare channels. I realised how important the gate was in this live room situation, just by assessing the clarity against the first version of the mix. The snare whilst it has more body and presence, it lacked the brightness that would allow it to cut through and feel balanced between the kick. I decided to use Ableton’s operator to generate white noise throughout the entire track, however by using a gate which is sidechained to one of the main snare channels - it only passes audio through on a snare hit. I then automate the release times to give more decay to the snare at different sections of the arrangement. This ultimately acts as an underlying reinforcement to the snare, giving it that brightness and attack, and also creating a spectral balance in relation to the hats.

Another thing which cleaned up a lot of the mix and provided clarity, was removing the bulk of the audio from the tom channels. The drummer only hits them a few times throughout the track, and it was easy enough just to only have those required clips in place with fades on the top and tail.

Vocals

Attending Perry Horner’s vocal mixing masterclass last year I believe helped a bunch in regards to processing this vocal performance and getting it to sit well amongst the mix. Unfortunately at some stages during the chorus, the vocalist stepped away from the microphone before he finished his phrase which is why some words slip away in those busy sections.

First up, theres a low-cut at 130Hz on the EQ. As the vocalist’s register was relatively higher anyway, there was no need to go any lower. I usually go for 150Hz, however I found a happy medium where it didn’t feel too over-done and retained some warmth. I then have a 3dB boost at 12kHz to give it that presence in the highs to get it to shine above the mix. There’s not much else happening in the EQ as I wanted it as natural as possible. In the image on the rack, I ended up removing the gate in favour of separating the clips and using fades, as I preferred that level of control in this instance and the fact that I used automation for levels across the chorus sections. Finally there is a compressor with a ratio of 3:1.

So that’s basically it for the Ableton session! I’m glad I kept it all clean by grouping almost everything, even though it was really just guitar, drums, vox - there was a lot of channels and it felt very busy in such a loud, live recording. The loudest peak on the master channel during the busier sections was -7.66dB. A little bit hotter than I usually tend to try and reach, however with working in a 32-bit depth there is more leniency on the master levels at the pre-master stage.

I also put the track through Ozone and gave it a master:

Within Ozone, I did some final polishing with adding some presence through the exciter; and a final shape of the stereo width, with some extra separation & extension of the frequency bands.

After all of this, you probably want to hear something right? Here’s what the new mix version sounds like!

Let me know your thoughts on it! With not being familiar on mixing with this genre, it was a really great experience for me in terms of how I would incorporate my workflow brought over from electronic music production, and I believe I’ve done a solid job!

Cheers,

Lachy :)