Good evening @all
This is my take on this nice 70ies style song.
DAW used: Cubase 10.5 Pro
I started bringing all the files into the project and sorting them to my likings. Then I went on routing every channel to it's own stereo buss and from there again to another sub group. For instance Kick -> Kick Group --> Drum buss --> Master buss. Same goes for every part of the drumset. Did that with other instruments too except for the bass guitar. Bass D.I. was used only for the low end and was sidechained to the kick drum. All three bass channels got some compression and then fed into a buss with further eqing. For the guitars I ended up only using the D.I. channels. Found some nice sounds within bx_rockrack and added some flanging and a spring type reverb. bx_SSL G-Channel and a limiter (Loudmax) to keep the peaks under control. Both guitars were routed into their own buss for further eqing and adding a little room reverb.
Back to drums....I started eqing with a pultec style eq, adding some enhancement with Cubases own Multiband Envelope Shaper and Snare Buzz, a plugin that emulates a bottom mic of a snare drum with the help of white noise. This helped to further define the attack and at the same time masking the mic bleed from cymbals. I used that same plugin on the snare drum too to simulate the missing bottom mic. Gullfoss and Soothe 2 helped a lot to tame the high frequencies on the hihat, cymbals, shakers and the tambourine. (and a lot of other instruments too). I set up an fx buss just for some room ambience on kick and snare and also the percussion. For the room mics I wanted some dark crushy tones which I achieved by using DevilLoc by Soundtoys. I also wanted the room mics to be more mono.
As I was demoing the new Mixroom plugin I found some use for it on the Rhodes and the piano. I added some tremolo fx by Melda and TAL Chorus to the Rhodes to give it that early 70ies sound and some compression too. Audio Things Type B came in handy to define some more of the attack. On the piano I used Gullfoss and some LA-2A Compression, a stereo enhancer to make the piano more mono and again Type B for the attack.
On the Sax I first let Gullfoss do it's job, then I ran it through an Focusrite Channel Strip (Plugin Alliance) with some slight harmonic distortion and some fairy dust by Type A. Valhalla Delay for some Slapback Delay added too.
Each Vocal track had some Gullfoss and I used Waves Vocal Rider to ride the levels. Two tracks needed some help from a Declicker (Acon Digital). In the 3 vocal busses I added some LA-2A compression as well as an fx channel with Valhalla Delay with a short doubling /slapback. Each vocal buss had Verberate 2 as an insert fx with different settings for verse, chorus and backing voc.
During mixing I found that the timing and intonation issues in a lot of the tracks had to be fixed. I did my best to not quantize the hell out of it, but to keep an natural feel. Same goes for the intonation. I used Melodyne for this task, but only to give some notes a little kick in the right direction.
On the master buss I added an instance of Shadowhill compressor to give it some glue (1 dB max), a gain plugin to push the output just because my mix was waaay to low
and again a little Gullfoss to tame some frequency peaks/harshness.
I might not have mentioned all of the plugins I used, but most of them. If you have questions, just ask
Wav
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ckejbt4t1pwtr ... a.wav?dl=0
pics
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zinhcjhzg7lnl57/pic1.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pam0eu1umdh1ewk/pic2.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/uly3h35q1on98y4/pic3.png?dl=0
Edit
Oh dear...just checked my upload and seems like dropbox has messed up my file. There'a a little hickup right at the beginning of the guitar solo that is definitely not in my mix!
Would that be ok if I try to upload it again later or would this disqualify me?
Edit 2
checked in with the staff - file is without errors - post was only edited to update documentation
