When it came to post production, I knew I wanted to keep the mixing and mastering to a minimum to keep close to the original sound. I didn’t want to overprocess the original recordings. As I recorded with my effects pedals, I didn’t want to add any effects to the mix. I only had one track to work with for each piece so most of the work I did was done in order to tidy up any sounds that needed attenuating.
The main technique I did was subtractive EQing to sort any frequencies that stick out.
Generally, there were a lot of honks around 300-500Hz in all tracks. I found that I had to increase the gain a lot on all the tracks. Due to the unpredictable nature of the recording, I didn’t set the gain too high as I thought I would need room for headroom. As there was a build up of layers, it was easy for the audio to start clipping if the gain was set too high. All of them had a light low pass filter on them to sound warmer because the mic was picking up the plucks from the mic too harshly. I created a bus so that I could choose to use for each track with a gentle expander, an exciter to add high-end clarity and sparkle lost when I had to reduce high end frequencies and light clip distortion for saturation. I also added some compression to stop any sounds from sticking out too much and to even out the dynamics of each track. My last plugin in the mastering chain was a limiter to increase the overall volume without the tracks clipping.
Here are some adjustments I made to each track:
Track 1 - Periwinkle:
Too much resonance on the low mids, around 105Hz was a harsh frequency so I used a notch filter to attenuate it
I increased the mids to hear all the percussive sounds
Fade in/out with the volume so listeners are entering a dream
Track 2 - Introspection:
There was quite a lot of hissing noise/white noise potentially from the initial recording so I had to work around this
Lots of high end EQ was used to get rid of hiss. I also used a noise gate to try and reduce it as much as I could but I had to be careful not to use it too much otherwise my recording would sound less natural
I used some light compression to take away the harshness of my string plucks as it is a slow and ambient chordal track
Track 3 - Daydreams
There were some prominent low end frequencies in this track so I used a high end filter to attenuate them
I also increased the mids to hear all the percussive sounds like my first track
Fade in/out with the volume to create a smooth transition with the loop
I was going to have another track in my EP but there was a lot of high pitched hissing sound that I only noticed when increasing the gain post production. It was hard to fix without compromising the sound quality of the track. Due to time constraints and the complicated setup of my recording, it was difficult to record backup tracks. The post production element of this project proved to be challenging as I am very new to working with music tech. However, I am proud of myself for giving it a go and hope it will give me a good starting point for the next time I mix and master.
Thank you to George Charway and Alfons Russell for helping me with the mixing and mastering.
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