On May 17th, Scotty O’Toole and I spent about 11 hours editing and mixing Jamboree. Disclaimer – I did my best to document the experience as accurately as possible, but in the intervening time between mixdown and writing my journal absconded, leaving me only my memory to reconstruct the day.  There really are two stories to tell here – one of signal routing, out of the box effects and in the box effects.

I mentioned in the notes about the sessions that we decided to record the fundamental components of each track live, which impacted the mixing stage in a few ways. When you record a loud band live, there is inevitably a certain amount of bleed between the microphones on each instrument. So when we turned up the guitar microphone, you could faintly hear the drum track in the background. It’s actually exactly what I wanted for the session – that bleed is actually one of the things that gives recordings from the 60′s a certain flavor – but it does add a level of economy to the mixing process. You can’t really go back and make small fixes in the controlled studio environment. If you were to edit in a part recorded without the rest of the band, that track’s tone would change where the piece was inserted because the resulting bleed from the other instruments would disappear. So Pro Tools for us became less of an editing environment and more of a dumb recorder, which, for this project, was completely appropriate.

We began the mixing process by arranging the individual Pro Tools tracks into several stereo submixes (or stems). We had separate submixes for the drums, guitars, bass, vocals, organ, keyboards, and any other random things that would pop up in songs. These submixes were sent through the beautiful vintage API console in Studio C to give them a little analog warmth. At the console we used several processing effects:

• One of the engineers at Omega had a rack of GML boxes which we were very privileged to use on vocals (GML is the namesake of George Massenburg, the inventor of parametric EQ). We used a Model 8900 GML dynamic range controller (basically, a compressor) and Mod8200 EQ.
• For much of the reverb on the album we used an EMT 140-ST Plate Reverb, a 4′ x 8′ sheet of sheet metal that echos when a transducer vibrates it. It was so large it was held on another floor of the studio, so we had to dial in the settings in a different room.

Within Pro Tools, there were some subtle compression added to some of the drum tracks (mostly the kick), Several of the vocal tracks had a lot of abrupt dynamic shifts which we were able to smooth out with some automation (automation allows you to change the level of a track automatically, so you don’t have to always man a fader) – the rest of the level issues were smoothed out with the vocal compression (compression variably compresses the level of an input track, making the loud material quieter and the quieter material louder). We also added a bit of light vocal harmonizing on The Trucker, and a subtle slapback echo on The Performer. But – and this is very important – at no point in the mixing or processing was any AutoTune used.

With the automation done and the processing in place, we then rode the faders slightly and dumped the master stereo mixes onto 1/2″ analog tape. The tape tended to soften the edges out a bit, and gives the whole album a round, late 60′s sound. Between the API and the tape machine we used a Drawmer 1968 Mercenary Edition stereo bus compressor – this was set pretty lightly and was more used to get the appropriate level to tape. After we took everything from Pro Tools, went through the console and the outboard processing gear, and bounced the resulting mix onto analog tape, we took the resulting tape mix, bounced it back to a master Pro Tools session, and pronounced it done.

As we were going through the process, I found it helped to think of the mixes as existing in a three dimensional space. In addition to the left/right panning position of each track, there’s a kind of depth to each track as well. This depth can be controlled by volume, compression, reverb, and other effects, and changes with the relative levels of each track during the song – it’s quite a dance, and I was lucky to work with someone as talented as Scotty. Everything ended up sounding wonderful.

So – a fascinating process, and way less stressful than the tracking. Next step – mastering.