Portfolio Write-Up

The purpose of this portfolio, for me, was to challenge myself with different types/genres of music. I have always stuck to a genre of music I am comfortable with and so experimenting like this has opened me up to different methods and techniques of mixing. In this project I have mixed acoustic songs, metal songs and sampled songs and so the completed portfolio is quite a diverse mix of sounds, but that gave me a lot of experience in producing, mixing and mastering. livia !errara " #allelujah $%over& 'ith this song livia and I both agreed that a more simplistic arrangement would suit the nature of the song better than throwing in a multitude of different instruments and effects and ultimately complicating and muddying the final result. 'e decided originally that we would simply have the guitar and double tracked vocals. 'e began by experimenting with different positions that we could have the condenser microphone on the guitar, settling for one around where the body meets the neck $we found that this gave a much more rounded sound, neither too high or low in terms of frequencies, and so gave me a more malleable sound to work with&. !ollowing this we laid down a few tracks of guitar and vocals, adding some different parts that weren(t in the original arrangement. I think we got some good )bones* for me to work with. nce I had some time alone with the track I decided to add some piano and a double bass into the mix. I worked out the notes $after a while, seeing as though neither piano nor double bass are instruments I am particularly capable playing& and recorded everything in. I thought it would make the guitar stand out more as well seeing as though I intended to cut the extra instruments out, later in the song. %hris also suggested that I add a brushed snare roll which I though was a brilliant idea and so recorded it in, dropping it out at the same point as the piano and double bass dropped out. I then set to work using +ellodyne to correct the vocals. This proved to be quite a challenge as I had double tracked, this means that I needed to get both sets of vocals as similar as possible is both pitch and timing. ccasionally, I found that livia had sung in a slightly different rhythm in one track in comparison to the other. This proved to be very difficult to correct and I am still not ,--. happy with it now. The pitching was also problematic. /ome of the notes she had attempted to sing were actually out of her vocal range and so there was nothing for me to work with, instead I later automated the instrumental side of the song to get marginally louder at this point to make it seem as though the instruments has drowned out the vocals. I think that this worked quite well. +y next task was to 01 the guitars and vocals. I find that when using 01 it is more beneficial for me to have a starting point $a set 01 that I would always apply to an acoustic guitar, for example& and then editing as is necessary for whatever I(m working with.

'ith the guitar tracks I tend to give a low cut around ,--#2, this is because the frequency range of an acoustic guitar doesn(t normally go bellow ,--#2 and so anything bellow this is just muddying the overall mix. I also give a high cut around ,3k#2 for the same reason as the low cut. I would also give a relatively shelf 01 boost to either high or low frequencies depending on how the guitar sounds. !or this song I found that the lower frequencies needed boosting $between ,--#2 and around 3--#2&. 01ing the vocals was slightly more challenging as there was some horrible frequencies, that made them sound squeaky and nasally in places, which I had to get rid of. I gave a similar high and low cut to the vocals as I did with the guitar, but I also gave a frequency boost of around 4.3d5 to ,.3k#2 to bring out some clarity in the words. livia !errara " 5ree2eblocks $6emix& I already had some ideas of how I wanted this song to sound and so we set to work straight away, getting down some solid recordings of the guitar and vocals. I decided this time not to double track as I wanted a clearer feel to the song. 7sing +ellodyne to correct the vocals was a lot simpler this time around, seeing as though I hadn(t double tracked. The problems I had were problems I couldn(t do much about unfortunately. /ome of the words were mumbled and weren(t clear enough for my liking, but I only realised this once the recording process had been completed. 8t least I know what to look out for next time9 'e had worked out some harmonies for the chorus of 5ree2eblocks and so correcting these was my only challenge vocally. nce happy I panned each track slightly differently to give each harmony a bit of space in the mix. +y favourite part in the song is the alternative drums that I made by hitting a guitar and adding a lot of reverb. %hris helped me with this seeing as though he is the drummer in the group. I also added some guiros very low in the mix and panned heavily left and right. In the first chorus there is also some 8frican 5ells that I wasn(t too sure of but I though gave a little bit more texture to the song. %ompressing the )guitar drums* was very important as there was quite a large dynamic range in the different strikes. I found that with a quite fast attack, relatively fast release and a middle to high compression threshold plus gain boosts sorted out this problem quite easily. The problems I had with this song were to do with the guitars and how where, in some parts of the song, they hold a chord for some time, you could occasionally hear the ticking of the metronome bleeding from the headphones. I really struggled with this, most notably at the end of the song. I ended up having to loop and cross fade a very small section of the chord, without the metronome in it to give the impression that the chord went on for a lot longer than it actually did. I was quite happy with the result but next time I might just turn the headphones down a little bit during recording9

8my +ock " 8lone $%over& and +y 8ngel $ riginal&

The songs with 8my +ock were recordings %hris and I were asked to do for the media students and we thought we(d kill two birds with one stone and use them in out portfolios as well. 8my gave us two quite low quality backing tracks to record her with and so we weren(t looking forward to sorting them out during post production. 'e found 8my to be a very accurate singer. Interestingly, looking at her vocals on +ellodyne, her modulation always fell exactly on the correct notes but the body of the note was always half way between two. !or her original song $:+y 8ngel(& we added some harmonies to give particular words more meaning in the song. This was a simple copy and paste of notes in the +ellodyne window. ;ext we 01ed the backing tracks. This was quite tricky to do seeing as though we could only alter all of the instruments and not each individually. I think this was out first look at mastering something with no other options available, and it was quite a daunting task. 'e found that a boost in the high frequencies was definitely needed on :8lone(. 'e also did some subtractive 01 and we found that an overall gain boost after all of these changes really brought out the song. In :+y 8ngel(, we found that the lower frequencies needed boosting and that the higher frequencies stood quite well on their own. 'e had to be careful boosting because the track was already quite flat in terms of dynamic range $brick wall&, so too much boosting caused distortion. The <ublicity +achine " !irefly $ riginal& 'e were given this band to record from the originals gig, again for the media students. The recording process took a long time as the drummer wanted a scratch track from the guitarist who was changing his strings, but we got there in the end with a reasonably pleasant sounding pre"mixed song. ur first job was the vocals. 'e had double tracked the vocals and needed to +ellodyne them so that both tracks had the same tune. The singer wasn(t as reliable vocally as we had hoped and so it took us a long time to sort everything out. 8lso the bass line wasn(t in the correct key of the song, fortunately we found that +ellodyne works extremely well with bass notes and after some fiddling %hris and I came up with a slightly different bass line that fitted the song better but that wasn(t too noticeably different to the original. 'e went a little cra2y with automation in this song. %hris created an effect with some amp noise we(d found and a tremolo, he added it to the start of the song because it resembled in some form the firefly(s wings fluttering. I then fiddled with an idea I had at the end of the song, automating the pitch down, reducing the rate of the tremolo, panning left and right in an interesting way and reducing the volume of the track $I thought it sounded like something powering down&. 5ecause we liked this sound so much we edited the effect at the start of the track to do the opposite, highering the pitch, increasing the rate of the tremolo etc. =on !romings " 0xplosive /amples $0xperimental&

This track was a massive challenge for me as I had never tried something quite like it. +y aim was to create a song/track only using the recording of one word. I chose the word )0xplosive*. I used the 0>/?4 /ampler to store all of my sounds. +ost of the sound I got were done by taking a small section of the word and, using the flex tool, slowing down $and also lowering the pitch& of said section, or speeding up $and also highering the pitch&. I drew, using the pencil tool, almost all of the track. I found that if you use any sound and draw a downward sloping line on the keyboard you come up with quite an interesting sound which can be used in lots of different ways. I used it three time in this track, at the start and end and reversed during the middle section. 8lso, any sample that has been increased in pitch greatly gives you a beeping sound that can be quite fun to play around with as I demonstrated in this track by recreating the ;okia ringtone, and adding some random riffs in the song which add an element of comedy to the track. 'ith the drum sounds I got, I found the point at which I said :p( in the word and added distortion, reverb, pitch shifted it down, 01ed it heavily in the lower frequencies and slowed it down using the flex tool, this was used to create the bass drum sound. The high" hat style sounds I got are of an obvious origin, the :ss( in the word and the :x( are good starting points to make any cymbal sounds. The )roaring* sound was just a ridiculously slowed down section of the word. I think I was looking for something like this to add something else that was unexpected in the track@ which sums up the feel of what I came up with in this experiment. The end result is simply a random amalgamation of sounds from one particular word with surprises around each section. The end result, although strange, shows just how effects can be used to make something that originally wasn(t musical at all, into something that holds some musical qualities.