So, I’ll try and summarise what I did to turn a very rough and ready recording into something a bit more listenable.
After loading the audio files, and doing a pink noise mix to get a balance, I felt it was worth continuing so I started to get the individual tracks sounding better. The only track I had to give up on was the kick drum, which, from memory, had been recorded using a badly placed SM58 so sounded just awful! Somehow I’d managed to get a really clear recording of the ‘squeak’ the spring of the pedal made, but very little in the way of actual drum! I dealt with this by replacing the whole track with a sample triggered by the original kick drum track. This gave the whole song a completely different dynamic. Suddenly it was quite driven and with the rest of the drums treated with EQ and compression, the whole recording started to lift. The bass and guitar were already decent recordings, as they had been done using Sennheiser e 609s hanging over the front of the cab, and the guitar was going through an ABY pedal with a ‘guitar’ sounding track coming out of one channel and one which sounded a bit like a Hammond organ coming out of the other!
I think a real breakthrough came with the addition of a Zither sound playing a simple melody repeatedly over the top, as it started to give the song a bit of structure. this led me on to adding a variety of dubby sound effect noises, which created a really atmospheric effect overall.
I think the final stage of getting the mix right was the application of a tape delay via a bus on the snare track and the Zither track. I love the effect this makes, so had a to have a few passes, cutting down the number of occasions I used it each time, otherwise the entire song would have been tape delay!
Once I’d balanced all this, mastering was really a matter of EQ on the whole track, boosting the high and low end, compression and expanding and metering the sound level to get the LUFS at -14
Phil Wakely Audio 