Blues Mixing

For my blues mixing I used the faders to get an idea of how I wanted my mix to sound, I brought up the drums to carry the song, brought the guitars to a focus as this is usually the case with a blues song. I mixed the other instruments according to my taste of how much each instrument should be presented. Finally, I brought the vocals to the front of the mix, as they are the main focus of any song.

After placing my faders in the correct places based on my own judgment, I then started to 'treat' the track. To begin with I used some compression on the drum kit. I use compression to tame the peaks of the track, and bring the rest of the volume up the even out the drums, however, keeping the peaks still louder than the rest. It also helps me take control of the sustain, attack, and release of a drum kit. Below is an example of the compression I did to the drum kit in this mix:

After setting my drum compression, I decided to move on to equalising my guitars. From studying Jeff Lynne, I discovered I like how he uses EQ to bring out a bright tone to guitars and pianos, therefore, I tried out the same and it went well. Below is a picture of what I did to one of the guitars:

As you can see, I used a high pass filter to filter out the bottom end frequencies of the guitar, I did the same for the piano. This gives me a brighter tone to the instrument, leaving the mix sounding upbeat. I would not do this for a genre such as rock which is a lot heavier and muddier sounding.

Whilst mixing, I noticed that one of the overheads had interference. the sound was a high pitched scratch. This was due to somebody changing the gain control in the studio whilst recording. To fix this, I used panning tools. Since this scratch only happened on one side of the overheads, I used pan and volume automation. On the left overhead i automated the volume down for this one section, on the right overhead I automated that the pan moved from right pan, into the centre to cover up. This worked out really well, however, I would've really liked to have recorded this again. A screenshot of what I did is below:

Finally, to end this mix I brought the volume up via automation for the trumpet solo. Since solos are meant to come into focus when they play, I automated a volume increase so the trumpet would come to the front of the mix for the duration of the solo. This is shown below: