Mixing Sessions, Mix 2: The Royal Artillery

After having our session with Dylan, recording his band, we sat in with our other lecturer, Adrian Carroll, to learn from his professional workflow and methods in the studio. Adrian’s band, The Royal Artillery, consisted of two members, lead guitarist and vocals by Zed Charles and Steve Tyssen on the drums. They describe themselves as a heavy rocking blues band which is also another genre I'm not completely familiar with and so I had to do some background research on what their previous tracks sounds like and what kind of feel they were going for.

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The way the room was set up was with the drummer in the back right of the live room separated with a baffle in the middle for the guitarist’s amp stack which was placed on the back left. Each of the three amps was recorded with their own microphone as a well as a main vocal mic which placed in front of the drums and amps. Even with the baffle separating the drum mics and amp mics, the main vocal/room mic picked up a lot of bleed from both the drums and guitar.

During the mixing phase, I used the track, Pony Ride by Royal Artillery as the reference track. Even though the overall feel of the track is way tamer and relaxed compared to the track we recorded, I wanted to use it as an overall balance and benchmark for what the track should sound like after professional mixing and mastering. The main issue was trying to replicate the vocal effects from Pony Ride, into this track as the vocal track was very rough and the inconsistencies in levels and coherence of what the artist was saying were tough to understand.

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After getting deeper into the mix the track, the track began to drift away from the sound of the reference track so I decided to just work with the feel of this particular track and try making it something new but also respecting the genre and the artist for their feel and sound they were going for. As always I began with EQing the drums, minimising bleed and checking the phase between different elements of the kit then adding some light compression. ​​

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Next I moved onto giving the snare some more decay and pop which i achieved through some EQ and light reverb. As seen above, all the drum elements were then bussed into an aux for some parallel compression to add some more punch to the drums.

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After this, I moved onto vocal and guitar processing. As seen above, I used some EQing to minimise bleed and bring out more of the body and some air of the vocals, however the processing affecting the vocals also affected the bleed of the guitar therefore it had to be carefully balanced and processed as this had to be match with the processing of the main guitar amp channels. initially there were three mics, top, mid and bottom cab which I completely removed as the bottom cab mic had picked up a lot of floor vibration and it couldn't be fixed with gating or EQ. to compensate for the lost bottom cab which was giving more low-end to guitar, I used a Chorus and Reverb, EQed to emphasise the lows in the guitar.

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Finally, To minimise as much rumble and bleed as possible, I used automation to bring in and take out all the drum track when the drums were not being played. Here is a visual example.

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Here are the pre and post feedback versions