Heavyweight

The more tracks a project has, the heavier the music becomes.

The learning curve increases and the level becomes more demanding. In my training as a sound engineer, the final tasks are becoming more and more challenging, as in this project of the band National Orchestra of the United Kingdom of Goats and the Song Vargorok.

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With over 60 tracks, this song was a real chunk and a big challenge for me.
Many guitar tracks, an orchestra, growling and booming bass. And all parts want their place in the mix. After more than six hours I came to a conclusion. But from the beginning:

I started with the drums, as I often do. It was important to me to have a kick and a snare that fit the genre. So the kick turned in a lot of high mids and made the snare nice and punchy. I rounded off the overheads and compressed them a lot, as well as the room tracks of the drums. Finally, the drum was compressed in parallel for the punch in your face.

I let the bass rumble in the low end to get a nice bottom. The track recording with a SM57 I liked very much and found a lot of space in the mix.

The guitars take up a lot of space in this song, temporally and also in the frequencies. So nicely distributed in the panorama, made room for the voice at 1-2 kHz and let scratch.

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The keyboard instruments already had a lot of effects on them, so I didn’t add reverb to them and just spread them out in the pan and frequency spectrum.

The lead voice as well as the backings were processed very strongly which I am not used to. Strong compression, strong equalization and many effects. So I tried to integrate the voice in the middle past the guitars and the cutting overheads.

I opened the orchestra in the treble and put it in a large reverberation chamber. I also compressed individual instruments of the orchestra and I actually didn’t get hit by lightning. I guess the shame of the editing alone is enough.

A very interesting project, far from my genre. As always: learned a lot, moved on.

A short Piece of Vargorok by National Orchestra Of United Kindom Of Goats