Recorded/Mixed/Mastered at Seven Page Productions. 

Alone (Heart Cover) by Rhonda Cooper

Recorded/Mixed at Seven Page Productions 7-15-11

Circles

A track in the works. Still much to do. Hope you enjoy!

She Shines Sample - Beautiful Station Demo Track

War - Beautiful Stations Demo Track

A straight up freestyle song. Literally. 1 take, 1 mic. zero prep except for the guitar line. Turned out pretty cool. 

The World Will End - Beautiful Stations Demo Track

Rough recording. Writing in the studio is fun. Much work to do on this one!

I'll Stay Where You Are - Beautiful Stations Demo Track

"Exposure" Beautiful Stations Original

Computer - PC (win7-64bit)
Daw - Pro Tools 9
Interface - M-Audio Profire 2626 
Hardware - Arl Pro VLA II (on mix bus)

Plugins: 
Digirack (Comp,Gate, EQ, De-ess.Time Adjuster, Reverb, Delay, Chorus)
Sans-Amp PSA-1
Eleven Free
Flux Stereo Tool

One Technical Restriction on my end - No Noise Cancelling Plug in.(guitar a bit noisy for my taste on intro) 

My Intentions on this track were to remain as true to the performance as possible and as transparent as I could be. No production influences at all on tone, except were necessary to sit in the mix. All groups were sub mixed in to main mix into Art VLA Comp.

Overall:
 I spent some time watching the videos to get a feeling for the "space" the room had with an audience. I wanted to re-create a feeling that was genuine to listening live, in front of the stage. I did not want to over crowd the mix with loads of verb to make it feel "live", rather wanted to keep it feeling more raw and "classic" feeling. 

Vocals:
I wanted to keep them as raw as possible. However, I could not make them sit well in the mix raw and many parts already felt too warm and over-compressed on the peaks already. I spent much time automating vocal levels trying to contain the peaks without compression coloring. This was the first time I have employed this technique and quite frankly, I was not too good at it. haha. There is also a brief phasing issue later in the song that I did not know how to fix. I assume it was a cross-fade of sort in the vocal stem. Parallel compression, reverb and delay were used on vocals. Vocal reverb set to "Duck" lead vocals, a Celine Dion inspired technique. : D

Guitar:
One guitar track always feels a bit empty to me nowadays. So I duplicated twice to a stereo track, EQ'ed very brown and spread very wide in the mix to create a "floor" for the guitar.  I used small amounts of chorus on the main guitar track to "fatten" it up a bit, while trying to maintain a transparent effect. and Panned on verses. I felt this gave the chorus a Fat guitar while leaving some down time in the verse. Good amount of ducking cued off of the vocals. 

Drum and Bass
Several stages of light compression throughout and panned out overheads. Very little processing done overall. EQ was my main friend in gluing the Bass guitar and Bass Drum. Using tight Q, I boosted kick about 6db@110hz and cut bass 6db@110hz. Made a lot of headroom for that kick to shine through. warmed up D.I. bass track through sans-amp plug and blended.

Stereo tracks were sent to some parallel reverb for a general ambiance and space as a whole. I wanted it to feel like everything was in the same room. 

I learned more from mixing this track than I have ever learned on a single track. And to be honest, I feel more confident as an engineer than I did when I started. I really wanted this to be a true interpretation of the song for the artists involved. I hope they enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed mixing it. 

OH!... and some alternating hard panning at end, because it's awesome...
Cheers!


