So, out of all the beats I've received so far, Fade's was by far the easiest to mix.
This is down to 3 main reasons...
1: the
sounds were all pretty clean and straight up; I didn't have to do any rescue work, free to process them as I want.
2:
sound selection; I probably could have just turned up the main sample, slapped an EQ, Compressor and Limiter on the Master and called it a wrap. Everything just fit together.
3:
It's Mister Motherfuckin' Fade
Okay, so first things first, noticed this was quite clearly a 'boom-bap' style, gritty 90s type Hip-Hop feel - so that was going to guide my approach; I'm not about to mix this like I would mix a pretty girl pop record.
That being said, one decision I made straight away (that I only just realised after pulling up the project), was to slap an
SSL 9000 J channel strip on every channel (lot of
Hip-Hop was probably mixed on 4000 E or G consoles, but I'm more of a 2000s guy so 9000, and would still keep the hip-hop feel.)
I didn't really do anything with the strips other than
drive them a little for the console tone.
View attachment 7061
Okay, if I'm totally honest, first thing I did was say to myself "this is so well fitting, what I even meant to do to this?"; which is an interesting point, a lot of time
you don't actually need to do much in a mix, (i first learnt this when I went completely legit and started with only stock and focussed on just getting levels right - if you have to do too much in a mix, recording/production process might be flawed)
I approached this mix with the idea that I want to 'bring it up to date' a *little* in and make it sound big and hard hitting, but, I did not want to turn this into a glossy pop-bap affair, I wanted to keep that grittiness --- in practise this means not making things overly bright or sparkly (example, don't high boost the snare, or keep in mind to keep it a little darker)
Clean Sounds
Clean in the sense they aren't drenched in verb, or buried in a drum mix or sample.
View attachment 7062
This gave me ultimate flexibility over processing them. And as you can see, the drum hits are very untainted - not compressed/saturated/clipped - I was free to fuck 'em up as much or as little as I want. (compared to some others where I may have to fight to claw back punch for example)
Sound Selection
As mentioned in previous sections - the sounds all just fit, I did not have to really do anything in terms of getting them to 'fit together', all EQ decisions were based on tone and whether I wanted more/less of something.
Drums
As I previously mentioned, I did'nt want to make these too hi-fi, but I initially brightened the snare a little, gave it more crack and sparkle, however, when I revisited this the other day after Fade said he was ready for me, I decided the snare felt too harsh and I ended up removing my eq boosts to it.
In the following is what my EQ moves were before my revision (the high mid was higher, I moved it down to where shown in photo, then removed it altogether. The low boost was also only added on my revision, I decided the kick needed more thump.
View attachment 7063
(drum bus)
The Sample
Fade was curious about what I did to the sample, and honestly, I don't think I did much other than turning it up...
View attachment 7066 --- my gain pots (LOL @ + 17.8dB)
The following is going to look crazy, but is mostly just some dynamic EQ ducking for the drums to cut through (probably not necessary, but I wanted to feel like I was doing something --- jokes aside, it likely did serve a small function)
View attachment 7064
Just a subtle bit of rebalancing the mids.
At the end of the mix, I added this to the 'music' bus just to bring it a bit more to life and a bit more upfront...
View attachment 7065
This was quite a half-happy-accident type occurence... I wanted to add a bit of movement to it so did some auto-panning, and also threw a delay on... and I think when I scrolled onto like a '1/4d' or one of those odd timings on the pan, it split it perfectly time wise. So I chopped the end part onto another track and made the delay come from that side. Something like that, but I 'heard it'(in my head) and then chased it.
It's Mister Motherfuckin' Fade
He told me I can only say nice things about his beat or he'll ban me jokes aside, Fade is an experienced beatmaker/kidnapper/musicmaking guy, and this is probably a big reason why; his sound selection was so on point, delivered well. That experience plays a massive part in naturally picking and playing sounds rhythms and melodies that just naturally are going to 'work' without too much conflict; I imagine it would be similar mixing a 2Good beat - the challenge here would be he uses a lot more instrumentation, so would naturally require more work to make everything 'fit'.
As for my master bus, I did not do too much, I added Tape saturation, to add to that 90s feel, and some mid-saturation just to add a bit more weight and presence. Then just typical limiting etc.
As I said, Fade's beat didn't feel like it needed too much, so a lot of it was just about '
enhancing' typically by adding '
tone' of vintage hardware emulations.
One of the most important things in mixing, is realising that (and when) you often don't really need to do anything.