One Minute Hero - Action Piece - Multitrack & Midi
Added 2020-08-24 07:37:08 +0000 UTCIt's time to make things a little more demanding. Over the last couple of months I posted several multitrack sessions from my score for Pastry Party. As you might have noticed,the music was quite transparent and in spite of the added rhythm group, it is quite easy to get a decent sounding mix out of the tracks, also because the room very nicely supports the general feeling of that score.
However, I had some time left at the end of this session and brought a small fun piece to not let this session time be wasted. It is a short action cue called "One Minute Hero".
You can find the audio of the mix above and the score sheet and midi file at the bottom of this post.
Here's some footage from the session:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ5OkyQXyOg
This recording has one of the biggest challenges for mixing which is trying to make something that has been recorded in a small room sound "grand". Obviously, this piece is destined to be recorded in a larger studio than Smecky Studio where we recorded it. I have been preaching for years that adding reverb to a small space recording will not make it into a larger room. On this recording, you can explore this all by yourself. You will notice that you will have a lot of early reflections on the signal. Those are the first acoustic reflections at walls and ceiling of a space which sound like a brief "slap back" on short impulses (e.g. pay close attention to the snare drum at the beginning). Our brain uses these early reflections to estimate the size of a space, even more than its reverberance. And unfortunately, putting reverb on signals with prominent short early reflections will sound like these signals with reverb but not like recorded in a larger space.
This recording also very much shows all the pros and cons of recording tutti takes. You will notice a lot of bleeding of the loud instruments into the softer sections. For instance try listening to the close mics of the violas that at times have more trumpets on them than violas. This of course adds to the ensemble feeling of the recording but makes it trickier to control.
Another thing that I did on this cue is to double track the strings. You will find files that are named like:
01 Tree.01 L.05_02.wav
and
01 StrTree.01 L.01_02.wav
in the download. The first ones are the files that belong to the tutti take and all files that contain "Str" after the first number belong to the String overdub.
Mixing in the String overdub will help to balance them a bit better against the brass (even though there was a decent line-up of strings). But as I mentioned several times before, in a small space, loud instruments tend to dominate even more than in a larger space.
You will notice that the string overdub has a few unprecise timings so it would be better to only use it when needed and not all the way through.
Here's the multitrack download:
user: mixchallenge
password: mixchallenge
