Team members present: Mike, Lee and Bob
What was planned
Perform final mix and master of the 'Children' remix.
What was achieved
Mike pitch shifted the delayed outro guitars up an octave and created a new Cubase track. This was done to add interest and some additional variation to the final outro section.
We all thought that the cymbal crashes were too loud and were distracting from the mix at times. Lee re-edited the drum track in reason to remove many of the cymbal hits to thin out and reduce the overall level of the cymbals.
We then exported the drum track from Reason as a 24-bit WAV file. We exported the main Cubase project (minus drums) as a 24-bit WAV file. These files together with a synth track that was created by Bob at home in Cubase 6.5 as a wav file were imported into a new 'pre-master' project in cubase and was mixed down to a single 24-bit WAV file.
This WAV file was then imported into a 'Final Master' project where the following plugins were used:
We all thought that the cymbal crashes were too loud and were distracting from the mix at times. Lee re-edited the drum track in reason to remove many of the cymbal hits to thin out and reduce the overall level of the cymbals.
We then exported the drum track from Reason as a 24-bit WAV file. We exported the main Cubase project (minus drums) as a 24-bit WAV file. These files together with a synth track that was created by Bob at home in Cubase 6.5 as a wav file were imported into a new 'pre-master' project in cubase and was mixed down to a single 24-bit WAV file.
This WAV file was then imported into a 'Final Master' project where the following plugins were used:
- Multi-band compressor. A small amount of compression was used (ratio 2:1) and the low frequencies (under 100Hz) and high frequencies (over 10KHz) were attenuated slightly by 2 - 3 dB
- Studio Equaliser. The frequencies around 150 Hz were boosted by 3dB to give a better definition to the kick. The frequencies around 6KHz were also boosted by about 3dB to help clarify the lead guitar.
- Stereo Enhancer. A pre-set of 'Mastering - More Room' was used to widen the stereo field.
- Limiter. The limiter was used very sparingly and the threshold was set to only just prevent a few loud transients from clipping. Most of the time the limiter was not actual doing anything.
- UV22HR. This was used to provide a random dither to the least significant bit of the output when mixing down from 24-bit to a 16-bit 44.1KHz WAV file.
The output from this process is our completed 'Children' track at CD quality (i.e. 16-bit 44.1 KHz WAV file).
Next Steps
Complete 'Behind the Sun' Remix. Bob to produce technical video of what we did to create our 'Children' track.
