Cleaning Up the Mess

After eight weeks of ideation, composition, and production involving nuanced tweaks, rewrites, and late night tinkering, I have finally come to mixing. I will admit, this is not my strongest skill, but I know enough to be dangerous, and plan to hand this off to Joe (mixing is his strong suit) shortly. But last night I spent some good focused time cleaning up the mess of my former self.

In those moments of hasty composition, I did a few things to get the piece in a good place compositionally that might not make a ton of sense while mixing. Track grouping, panning, a reverb bus, and EQ are all essential, but I found myself undoing some things last night and getting really focused with my listening.

I focused on the strings primarily, with a guiding principle of being a listener in a concert hall hearing the orchestra. I stripped everything out and from there I asked questions of myself like: Where would the first violin be panned in my stereo perception? How close am I to the orchestra? What’s the timbre of the room? How much should these string reverberate? What frequencies are fighting one another? What qualities are missing?

From there I began adding FX layers back in to get the strings into a spot of deep resonance, with the moving quality of a live orchestra but nestled into the digital soundscape for this composition.

Still a long way to go, but we’re making progress.