[LAU] Music made with Linux: "Heavy Head"

[Jostein Chr. Andersen]

On Wednesday 01 June 2011 15.55.50 Roberto Suarez Soto wrote:
...
> 
>      Why am I posting this? To see if some merciful soul with more
> knowledge can do something with it. Take parts of it for your own
> projects, remix it, turn it upside down, whatever. It's yours to modify
> and tweak without end. Just tell me if you use it, so I can gloat over it
> :-)


I have finished the mix and have used a lot of editing beside the mixing. 
Kudos to Roberto for being brave and letting the audio file be available for 
(re)mixing. I have some criticism, nice words and mostly some dry talk when 
talking about this project. This is a rather long posting, hope you don't mind 
about that.

Let's start with the nice stuff: Heavy Head do have a lot of cool riffs, chops 
and melody lines that triggers my imagination and when I was listening to it 
and reading the posting, I could not resist take Roberto's offer and go for 
mixing. I don't know what you will do further with the song, but it's many 
good ideas there.

Now, some criticism - or should I say comments and explanations? - I promise 
you: -I have done the same mistakes that I'm going to talk about several 
times, and it took way to long time before that I realized that I had to stop 
with them if the final result shall be good: -In order to make a great 
recording and mix, it starts with the sources. It's very many playing mistakes 
here, from bad timing and missing notes in bass to a lot of mistakes on the 
guitar playing. My guess is that you are not used to play to a metronome or 
drum machine and that the recording situation is new for you? I hear a lot of 
talent in the guitar playing, so I believe you are much better than what I 
hear on the tracks. Please, don't stop playing, do more practicing to 
metronomes and you will rock! And I'm absolutely sure that you will deliver 
great results!

Here is the final result: (ogg/mp3/mixbus project file):

  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11909204/xouba-heavy_head/HeavyHead.ogg
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11909204/xouba-heavy_head/HeavyHead.mp3
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11909204/xouba-
heavy_head/Xouba%20-%20Heavy%20Head.ardour


Some of you may wonder why I upload the mixbus project file, but you can open 
it in any text editor and see exactly what I have been doing.


My intention with the mix war to try to be a loyal as possible to the original 
mix while doing a lot of editing in order to tighten up stuff. As I wrote on a 
posting, I had a plan on how to do this project and I sticked to it. Other 
people may have other methods, but this is the way I like it and here is the 
big picture of what I did:

-I opened everything in Ardour (Roberto's project i an Ardour project) and 
cleaned up every track a little bit and also imported the whole song (the MP3 
file) into the project in order to make sure that everything was in place). I 
then inserted a CD marker (range) in the project and exported every track.

-I decided to use Mixbus (this is the DAW I know and prefer) and made a new 
project. The drums was not recorded, only synced with the Hydrogen Drum 
Machine. When I mix, I allays make sure that every MIDI instrument are 
recorded as audio into the DAW, so the first thing I was planning to do was to 
record the drums into Ardour/Mixbus. Here I discovered the first real 
challenge, the drum kits HI-Hat did not have any mute groups (that means that 
an open hh don't stop to play when a closed one is hit, or even more 
correctly: when the pedal is going down), so I started to edit the drum kit. 
Finally, I could record kick, snare, hi-hat and cymbals into each own tracks 
in the DAW. After that, I imported the previous generated wavs into the 
project and could start mixing.

Mixing is all about making space for every instruments. The first thing I do 
is to use an HPF on the track I'm working on. A lot of things happens in the 
bass and lo mid area and it should generally only be the kick and bass that 
are doing something there, but even they get a dose of the HPF (generally at 
around 40-60 Hz with 12 dB).

The problem with the bass here was it it's very muddy, and I had to remove a 
lot of the lo mids in order to make it clearer. The bass recording do have 
lots of timing problems and some missing notes, so I made a new bass track and 
pasted good notes into it, but more or less sticked to the original playing. I 
could not do it to perfect, because then other timing problems became clearer. 

The guitars are often a challenge and in this case, it was 6 of them fighting 
in the same frequency area, that's quite normal, but it was another thing that 
made it more difficult: The guitars already had a lot of echoes and reverbs, 
so i decided to not ad any of them here - everything you hear is from the 
recording. In general, I did an HPF cut at around 260-300Hz, then, the bass 
automatically became clearer. Then I found the frequencies I liked best for 
every guitar and accentuated them (or lowering the other frequencies). Also 
here, I was copying and pasting in order to cover recording mistakes. I also 
used a deesser for reducing som load finger glitches.

I used compression very little, only on the kick and snare in order tight yp 
the sound and limiting the bass on order to thame it. Finally, the master bus 
got som minor limiting in order to control the levels. The final stereo file 
got some treatment from the TAP scaling limiter and then normalized it. I 
could have done much more with this, but hey, I got a life too! :-)

A final note: I believe it's allways best to export a full length flac file 
for every track in a project, then one can open it in any DAW.

I have a lot of more stuff to talk about here, but just ask if you wonder of 
something. I hope that this is useful to someone.

Roberto: Thanks for being so generous and uploading this, I think you are 
brave and I'm looking forward to hear a lot of great music from you in the 
future. 

Jostein