Mixing & Mastering of Wooden, a band that really packs a punch

An atypical process, a nice result! At the beginning of May, I finished mixing/mastering the EP by Wooden, a promising Parisian band! The opportunity to share this experience with you!

After seeing the band live in Paris at the OPA, I was hooked by their fresh, natural, original rock.

The band is made up of 5 members: Audrey on vocals, Quentin and Guillaume on guitar, Arthur on bass, and Alexis on drums.

THE EP

Arthur did most of the MIDI on the drums, recorded the bass at home, and the vocals in a studio in Paris, while the guitarists made their guitars from home. The joys of home studio and re-recording! Suffice it to say that while the playing is good, the work involved in harmonizing it all was substantial.

So what better way to read the rest of the article than to listen?

An atypical process

For a good month, Arthur sent me versions of the tracks as they progressed. We met up in Orleans to fine-tune the drums and run them through a good virtual drum plugin (EP oblige, no possibility for them to record real drums), then he sent me the multitracks and their revisions as soon as possible for each track. I proceeded to a premix, then some big editing sessions, before starting the final mix, then mastering, again in Arthur's presence, and all this in my home-studio in Orléans, 100% "in the box".

Editing, the joys of ProTools

Well, we won't go into too much detail on the subject, which is nothing new! Here, Arthur had already done a good job of cleaning up the tracks, just as he should, with a few "parasitic" noises at the beginning and end of takes, which gave the mix a bit of life and which I gladly left alone. The main part of the job was to adjust a few bass notes and, above all, a good part of the guitars. Let's face it, while the guitarists' talent is undeniable, the latter were recorded a bit on the fly, and I couldn't do anything about the fact that the guitars had to be tuned 10 years earlier, or about the various snags. The voice, which I found totally seductive, did take a little trip into autotune on some tracks, in manual 100% mode, so as to choose the rise time and correction on each note concerned. Used sparingly, it nevertheless helps to compensate for the inevitably imperfect recording.

Mixing: a balance to find, difficulties to overcome

It was clear from the very first listen that this was a song with rich music. The challenge was to bring it all together. The vocals had to be prominent, without reaching the volume of French pop, and the music had to be rock. The sound had to remain as natural as possible, while still delivering the goods.

1. The virtual drum kit... Well, we can't give it the life of a real drum kit, but we can play around with reverbs and spatialization to try and make you forget it's a plug-in. As luck would have it, there's a mutlitrack on this plugin, and even overheads and a room, enough to have a bit of fun. There are numerous passages where I've played with the width of the overheads, the amount of room, etc. As the drum sound is basically very dull, I had to play around with it to get the clarity it deserved. I also used small left/right delays to bring out the toms.
2. The guitars! Unfortunately, the guitarists - who have the merit of having recorded themselves - clearly don't know how the mixing can go, and as a result, the takes are hardly usable. Cheap amp simulators and compressors, reverbs and Chinese consoles... Brrrrrrrr! Peaks of 12dB between 4 and 8Khz, enormous bass... I'm not even going to mention the filtering required to make it listenable, or even pleasant to listen to! Luckily, the compo and games are good and very good. However, I didn't have any guitar doubles to try and give more width or volume to certain parts, and I was only allowed one track per guitar except for "Let it out". So I had to make do without and use numerous volume automations. I did run some of them through good amp simulators, though, so the result was decent for an EP.
3. Bass: No surprises here, a good Jazz Bass and Rickenbacker in DI with a few effects, a bit of amp sim, compression, almost no EQ, a small duplicated track for the attack, and there you have it, presence is practically made by the playing, very little volume automation needed.
4. Vocals: Quality takes, with good emotion, a singer who's still a little shy, which I like. Good takes, a few backing vocals and doubles, even some hot ones, more than enough to do the job! A voice that lends itself well to a little distortion, to add punch and make it transcend the mix. A little volume to bring it forward or back on certain passages. The only difficulty here is that the high frequencies are very high when picked up, which makes the sibilants stand out at the slightest compression, so I had to abuse the de-esser a little. The rest is simply spatialization, delays and reverbs, and that's it.

On all the mixes, I had a small compressor on the master, with a slow attack and a fast release, compressing between 1 and 3dB. I'm becoming more and more adept at this way of working, as it makes it easier to glue the mix together.

I had a bit of fun with the mix. In particular, I didn't hesitate to add the dose of bass that should -in my opinion- be the norm. Rock with sub, incredible!

Interesting and/or amusing details include :

• Make it Better: On the intro, the dominant room on drums, and the reverse reverb that heralds the start of the song. On the bridge, the octave on the bass, the dominant room on the drums, the voice with a long reverb.
• Favorite Wine: A slightly vintage sound, the slap delay on the vocals, tighter drums on the verses and wider drums on the choruses, the octave on the bass in the verses, the voice further away at around 1m30, the cut at 2m43 just before the guitar solo.
• Let it out: Audrey's little cough on the intro just before she sings (you have to listen carefully). The play of delays on the vocals, bass and kick, the delay on the guitar, the big reverb on the snare, the little tambourine I added on the chorus, the distortion and octave on parts of the bass in the chorus. The guitars with a big room, to give a slightly "garage" sound, and on the chorus, a double voice with disto/chorus on top, give a particularly interesting sound for my taste.
• Pressure: The somewhat "live" and natural rendering of the track's spatialization, due in part to the roomy feel of the drums and guitars and the short delay on the vocals in the verses. There's always the greater width of the drums on the choruses. The reverse reverb sweep announcing the 2nd chorus at 2m29, and finally, the cluttered sound we like in context at the end of the track.

Mastering

Mastering isn't my specialty, but it's interesting when done with hindsight and a second ear as a witness. This is exactly what we did, for the final fine-tuning, the harmonization of the mixes, and finally to achieve the desired volume. We avoided making a twix, i.e. a waveform without any dynamics, except perhaps on the chorus of Let it out where the instrumentation and mix lent themselves to it. RMS levels of between -12 and -8dB are reached on all tracks. A light compressor, EQ, a bit of multiband and a limiter with intersample analysis, then export, cuts and fades, conversions into various formats, and "it's in the box"!

As always, I hope you've enjoyed listening to me, and that you've benefited from getting to know the way I work! If you have any comments and/or questions, please don't hesitate to contact me!