Funk Mixing

For my funk 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 funk song. I mixed the other instruments according to my taste of how much each instrument should be presented.

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:

I used a lighter compression on this mix, as i felt it did not need very much compression, therefore, I softened the knee and lowered my ratio. I like to use a fast attack on my compression and a fairly fast release as this compresses my drums as soon as a beat hits, but lets go soon after to not compress for too long.

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, 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.

Finally, to complete my mix, i decided to add a bit of reverb onto the snare as I felt the snare did not have enough presence or depth. This is shown below:

Here you can see that I had a medium level of compression by having a mid range reverb time, slightly smaller room size, and a 22% mix. This means that my reverb is on the lighter side, and not mixed into the snare too much, this gives the snare a healthy amount of reverb that adds to its presence, but does not sound ridiculous.