#buskerville

I spent a day in Buskerville's studio with an indie rock treasure of NYC- The Britanys. We were aiming for a live demo, so I that's what I would call this mix. It's 90% live with only vocals overdubbed. I did a little mixing with them in the room, came back for a few hours one night to tweak it up, and that's what you hear. I wanted to get back in to bring the level of the room mic down (maybe bring it up just for those 'ooh's) and to bring the bass up a bit, but I had to leave the city and they wanted to post a video: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=640931452631139 I'll guide you through my process and give you some recording and mixing tips, simultaneously opening myself up to receive pointers from someone more knowledgeable. Here we go! There's a little buildup in the mid-highs of the room mic, a little wash probably somewhere between 2-5k that is prevalent if you listen for it. It's mostly in the drums but also gets the guitar, since the recording is live. Fuck it to hell. It bothers me less on good speakers. I want to kill it with a fire. The track sounds really good anyway... but it makes it unfinished to me ;_;_;_;

I used three mics on the snare for this one, a technique which I'll talk about more in the future. I also created a few effect busses which come up at different parts in the song. In the choruses, you can hear a little gain from a logic amp-simulator plugin squash down the kick, snare and overheads, while another track has a short delay on the snare, which you can hear come in and out for certain parts. To achieve an effect like this, ideally I would run the desired tracks out of my DAW and through some really nice analog outboard gear, which would run back into a separate track in my DAW. Then I could either bring the level of the new track up during the part I want the effect on, or just ride the levels of my physical gear, and replace the original track with the re-amp'd track!  Lukas' vocals were fun to mix. He only took one take, and I had to ride some volume automation over it a few times to get the volume consistent throughout the mix. During his oohs, I have two reverb channels- one hard right, one hard left- that I automated the level of the 'verb effect on to rise and fall, left then right, throughout those sections. I don't mind using and abusing logic's space designer effect. I really love the fucking thing- there are great presets, and if you want to really get into it, it's basically unstoppable. Less is usually more with verb, which is why I will bus a vocal track to its own auxillary track where I can more discretely mix the level of the verb in. There's also a cool distortion effect that pops up for 'nothing's ever gonna change...' for a bit more of that classic vampire grunge ::))) Gear breakdown: The drum kit is a 1978 Ludwig antique Guitar & amp - 90's Gibson ES335 through an Ampeg J-12 Kick - Audix D6 (outside of the back skin- no opening in this kit) Snare top - SM57 Snare side - Avantone CK-1 Snare bottom - CAD CM217