My mixing process for the ABBA cover project began before drums were recorded, because the recording phase consisted of two sessions; getting Katee & Ross in to record vocals and guitars, and an additional session in which I performed and recorded drums with the help of my assistant Daniel. So to prepare for recording drums, I did a quick mix of Katee and Ross’ parts so I’d have a decent sound to play along with.
The first thing I’d like to note is that I committed the click track to an additional track in Pro Tools, and named it “Click Track Visual”, so that I could see the waveform of the click, and use that to double-check the alignment of the guitars and vocals. It was essential that the timing be as tight as possible before I perform the drum part, and I found the visual aid to be tremendously helpful. I will likely do this in most future projects. Naturally, the grid is also a present visual aid when aligning tracks, but it can be hard to gauge how zoomed in one is, when one uses the zoom to navigate the timeline as frequently as I do. The static duration of the click puts things into perspective.
I also put high-pass filters on everything, did compression & EQing, and added reverb auxiliaries. A room reverb was used for acoustic guitar and rhythm electric, and a plate reverb with a longer tail on vocals and the lead electric guitar riff (which is only present periodically).
I also added markers to the track to label the arrangement (intro, verse, etc).
I then bounced the mix of this, with the click track included, to upload to the Google Drive, so I could import it into a new Pro Tools session in the studio, and have very little clutter while recording drums. I only had to worry about the one reference track, and the rest of the space could be devoted to drums.
After drums were recorded, I kept the separate Pro Tools session for drums so I could do basic edits like gating, low/high-pass filtering, and Beat Detective. I did a separate “save as” for each stage of this process, so that it would be easy to go back if I needed to. I’d like to note that after gating and filtering, I committed the tracks so that Beat Detective would be able to find the beat more easily, because the microphone bleed was gone. This saved on the headaches that I’ve had with Beat Detective in the past, and I will remember to use this method in the future. Then I conformed everything, cross-faded, consolidated, and committed all the tracks again, into drum audio tracks that I could import into the Pro Tools session with Katee and Ross’ parts.
I had waited to do tone-shaping and compression until the drums were in with the rest of the mix, so I could see how they sit with the other instruments. I did some light compression and EQing, and then recorded my bass track in via the Behringer BDI21, with the track sounding pretty good. Having a good-sounding track when overdubbing is very important to me, because it makes the performance more enjoyable, which translates into a better performance. After bass was in, I revisited compression and tone-shaping on all the tracks with the reference tracks as guides. This is where the final mixing process got tricky.
My goal was to have my mix live somewhere in-between the Pop genre of the ABBA song being covered, and the country genre of the band I was recording, Katee Kross. So I aimed at having the vocals and acoustic guitar match the reference track Old Soul by Katee Kross, and the bass, drums, and electric guitar match the reference track Does Your Mother Know by ABBA. However, some of the instruments had to sit in-between the two tracks. In the ABBA song, a lot of the stereo width and driving rhythm of the track lives in the piano part, so the acoustic rhythm guitar had to take its place (along with, to some extent, the electric rhythm guitar). Because of this, I kept it a little bit brighter than the acoustic guitar in Old Soul, and a little more up-front than I would usually do with an acoustic rhythm part.
Another track of interest was the snare, which is famously tricky and my experience has been no exception. In mixing, I became very aware that my snare didn’t ring out for as long as ABBA’s, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. When we first started recording the drums, the snare rang out for entirely too long, so we used a cloth bag to bring that down, but we had over-compensated. But this was a good learning experience; in the future, I will bring moon gels, or just one thin cloth, or a variety of items for this. Reverb helps add an illusion of longer resonance, which brings me to the next topic: in the original ABBA tune, it sounds like every other snare hit in the intro has a longer reverb tail, so I set up two outputs to reverb channels, had one of them be a big accentuated plate reverb, and used automation to have it only send to that bus every other hit, and then cut out when the intro is over.
This is already getting to be long, so I’ll only cover one more track: Vocals. My signal flow for Vocals was a Highpass at 120 Hz (I identified the lowest sung frequency using Neutron), a fairly heavy compression, tone-shaping EQ and then a second milder compression, before going into the plate reverb. I don’t have Melodyne at home, but I did get the Waves equivalent, Waves Tune. I put it in after the second compression and had it scan the track, just to look at it. I was able to visually see that there weren’t any obvious wrong-notes, and Katee never got overly sharp or flat. I fiddled around with trying to tighten the melody up a little bit, but ultimately decided that my meddling could cause damage to an already great performance, and removed the Waves Tune plugin.
And that’s it! I got the levels to where they matched a middle ground between the reference tracks to the best of my ability, then waited 24 hours and gave it another listen with fresh ears, and bounced the mixes and stems. All that’s left for me to do now is try to navigate the rest of my life with this song stuck in my head.
Paul Busch Audio Productions 