This last week has not been as balanced work wise as I would have liked. I know that I have always struggled to find a happy medium between workaholic me and procrastinator me. My lifestyle has changed over the last six months due to foreseen and unforeseen events. Therefore, I haven’t done all the research I had intended to do last week.
Instead in the last week I have made progress on improving my mixing and the work for A Quiet Place II trailer. I will start with the mixing as I did that at the beginning of the week. I did a one hour mix of a Justin Myles track (which you can hear above, I focused on the first 3 minutes). For me one hour mixes have simultaneously felt too long and too short. It’s way too long for a monitor mix but it is way too short for a recording mix. I approach these types of mixes slightly differently to a normal recording mix; I ignore cleaning up the recordings. Normally I clean up the drums for spill and get rid of noise on the vocal tracks. This would have been beneficially for a longer mix session as the Toms had a large amount of spill, but I would have spent a longer amount of time on them. I did try to gate them, but the snare was strong in the recordings, so it was pointless. I instead balanced them to be present but not overpowering. I them listened to the Kick and the Bass and EQ’d them to have their own frequency areas and scooped out where the other sat. This allowed them to stand out without too much extra work. I then went to the vocals as it was important to make them prominent. I did a basic EQ and then compressed the Lead VOX to glue it together more. This helped as vocals have the tendency to have too much dynamic range. I also did simple EQ to the Backing VOX channels. I sent all the VOX channels to the last stereo bus (which is how I always set up my VOX Reverb) and made a stereo AUX with this input. This became my reverb which I settled on something that was okay but not brilliant. It added enough room to an otherwise lifeless VOX recording. The guitars are where I did the most. I started with EQ this allowed me to separate them in frequency bands allowing for space between them. I then placed a compressor on the Acoustic Guitar channels to even out the playing. With the Electric Guitar 2 channel which was playing lead I sent out a send that I used to sidechain compress the other guitar channels for added clarity. I also used polyphonic elastic audio to tune a few notes to be in tune. I then sent all my guitar channels to a different stereo AUX track which I placed a slight non-linear delay. This made the mix a bit more forgiving in the final sound.
For A Quiet Place II I spent time trying to find a musical story and editing SFX sounds. I spent most of my time when working on the music doubling up songs and time stretching using polyphonic. With a few places it seemed a little sudden with the change in music however, once I placed a rough cut in my SFX session to get a better feel for the final piece it made sense. With the SFX sounds it was a large amount of Varispeed to manipulate the sound and Polyphonic to retain clarity and pitch shift. This allowed me to get the bass sound I wanted. I also layered sounds to help accentuate parts.
I have also spent a Foley session with Reuben recording footsteps, potential monster sounds, material sounds and a few other pieces that we wanted. This session started with an interesting beginning as the microphone we wanted was booked out and the backup we planned (Rode NTG4) had no clip. We instead grabbed a Sony clip which ended up not fitting the mic or the stand. In stubbornness and not wanting to waste more time I taped the mic to the clip and then the clip to the stand with electrical tape which I almost always carry.
This meant we could still adjust the angle of the mic and it was on a stand. The rest of the session went much smoother with us not freaking out outsiders with our beam falling sounds, getting the main footsteps sounds and attempting to create a trip wire sound with a combination of two belts and a broken hair tie. The hair tie which only broke when Reuben was experimenting with it. That then made him realise how much hair ties hurt when they snap. Which was arguably my favourite part of the session besides hearing the use of a single glass bottle sound for the alarm system. This was overall helpful as I am hoping that over the next week, I can edit these together and have a better idea of whether I need to record anything else and if yes what.
Although this seems productive it didn’t feel it with the fact that I failed to do research into Foley explosion sounds and into mediative music for my next project. I also still need to research further into binaural mixing and recordings so that when that comes up, I feel confident in my skills. Despite these setbacks in my scheduling I still feel on track to finish my work (maybe at a slightly unhealthier sleep schedule than I would like) as I still have time to research for my major project.
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