Skiffle Mixing

For my skiffle 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 skiffle 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:

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 guitar, banjo, mandolin, and ukulele. Here is an example of an EQ in action below:

As you can see, I used a high pass filter to filter out the bottom end frequencies of the instruments. This gives me a brighter tone to the instrument, leaving the mix sounding upbeat. Skiffle really handed itself really well to EQ as skiffle is an upbeat bright sounding genre in general.

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