Mix of the Month

February's Mix of the Month challenge from the Home Studio Recording group on Facebook is an Irish folk song by Enda Reilly called "An Nasc Nua." It's a lovely song consisting of acoustic bass, a double-mic'ed acoustic guitar, four fiddle tracks, and vocals. The artist sang his own background vocals. The lead vocals were double-mic'ed, but I muted mic 2 as you can see above.

This song provides an excellent example of when less is more. There are few tracks, and even though I don't understand Irish, I thought the raw tracks were extremely moving. What I love most about them is the intimacy and the sweetness. I decided to preserve this in my mix.

Continuing my experiments with minimal gear, I chose again to mix for this challenge using GarageBand on my laptop. I used stock plugins plus IK Multimedia TRacks 5 plugins and Limiter No. 6 by Vladislav Goncharov. I did this mix with an old pair of Audio Technica ATH-M20 headphones. Nevermind that I have amazing Sennheiser HD600 headphones in the studio. I was simply curious and felt like experimenting. GarageBand does not allow me to create busses or sidechain connections. I think there's something to be gained by limiting the options.

The mix came out surprisingly well. I like the way it makes me feel. I listened on speakers for the first time the next morning. The chorus vocals needed to be a little quieter so I did a little modification and uploaded mix v3.

OK, this is cool. Somehow I've been able to make a solid mix for the past three challenges using only GarageBand. I'm having fun seeing how far I can push myself. If I have to do a pop or rock mix I'm sure I will want access to busses and sidechain compression so I'll probably mix those in my studio using Logic.

I'm listening to Enda Reilly's release right now, and it's quite different. To my ears it sounds more emotionally reserved. Interesting!