Today I prepared “Wake Me” for mixing. Preparing tracks for mixing can take a long time – the vocals the longest ready, getting rid of noise between lines, pops and clicks from the phones on the mic stand and whatever. If you need to clean up the bleed on the drums then that can take forever! On this one the bass drum and rhythm guitars took the most work. And the vocals were pretty clean, requiring little work. Since we did Dylan’s guitars in his studio I have to add his later.
The overall drum sounds are really good, but I wasn’t too happy with the bass drum sound in the context of this song, so I supplemented it with a kick drum sample from my sample library that added some punch that was missing. We’ll see if the mixing engineer uses it in the final mix. There was an electrical hum on Brian’s guitar tracks that I had to get rid of. A niose gate did the trick, but I had to use two different settings, one part of the song had more noise than the rest. I automated the gate changes, and a fade out at the end of the guitar track and viola no more electrical hum. After clean up the tracks were bounced and ready to go.