An E.P. project blog
When you record and mix an artist’s track, sometimes you can’t help but feel like you should look at some other tracks that are in the same genre but are a little more well known. This is important for one reason, self-growth. As stated by a group called World Minded Team; self-growth is, “the process of understanding and developing oneself in order to achieve one’s fullest potential” (2018). As anyone who has a profession wants; self-growth and improvement of one’s skills is important for you to hone your craft and get better. One way of doing this when relating to mixing a track, is to look at an industry professionally recorded, mixed and mastered track and see the similarities and differences. For this, I am pitting a track that I recorded with a crew of engineers and mixed myself against an Ed Sheeran track know as Perfect.
Perfect by Ed Sheeran
This track starts off with nice quiet fingerpicked guitars with a moderate amount of Reverb in the back right and left. The Vocals hit next with clear, warm and district vocals that sound great. These vocals have a crazy reverb that sounds quite nice. The back-up vocals hit next with some heavily reverberated ‘OOO’s’ and general harmonised vocals in the chorus and subsequent verses. The ‘crack’ of some reverberated percussion sticks comes in next, soon a piano and another guitar and ukulele kicks in. Lastly is the drum kit that brings the track to a nice climax.
Strangers Grown Apart by MTEA
This track starts off with twangy guitar chords which slowly increase in reverberation over time. The vocals hit next with clarity and preciseness, who’s light reverb also eases in. The body of the guitar kicks in on the second phrase of the first verse, adding warmth. The chorus hits next with a lightly reverbed electric guitar coming in, adding to the mix. Back-up vocals kick in with about the same reverb as the lead vocals. These back-ups add flavour to the mix as the electric guitar cuts out until the next chorus. The second chorus hits as the apparent climax with all instruments taking part. The bridge sees the warmth of the electric guitar come in, adding extra warmth to that section alone. The outro section see’s the removal of all instruments except the acoustic guitar and lead vocals.
The Comparison
In terms of guitar tone, Ed has it all down. His guitar is very warm and crisp sounding with a nice reverb. Whereas the guitars used in MTEA’s track is very tinny and heavily reverberated. Interestingly enough, the delays and reverbs on both the vocals and guitars have about half the pre-delay that I had for my vocals and guitars. Ed’s guitar(s) don’t change in tone throughout the song which does make them consistent in tone which is a good thing. However, it can make them a little boring to listen to as there is little to no variation to the chord structure that Ed plays. This is remedied with one or more other guitars that come in later in the track. The reason for Ed’s great guitar sound would be mostly due to the recording space, microphones and the guitar itself sounding very nice to start with. Something I have always been a fan of is the idea that you do great recordings, and improve it with minimal mixing as opposed to doing an okay recording and fixing it in post-production. I’ll let you guess what happened with MTEA’s track… The guitar we recorded MTEA with was a very cheap guitar with little about it that sounded very nice. I found that upon mixing it myself that bringing up those mids muddied the guitar tone because these mids were bad sounding to start with. I can only speculate, but from personal experience, if a guitar sounds great to start with, it can only sound better with EQ’ing 9which is what Ed had I think).
The Vocals in Ed Sheeren’s Perfect, are fantastic. These vocals were recorded with a great mic, in a great space. Interestingly enough, they don’t sound much better than MTEA’s vocals in Strangers Grown Apart. I think that this might have been the case as both Ed and MTEA’s vocals were recorded with similar microphones. His reverbs are I interesting as they seem to have a very short pre-delay time as opposed to MTEA’s vocals. In terms of back-up Vocals, I do believe they were touched up and mixed far better than with MTEA’s, as her back-ups didn’t seem to have the warmth that Ed’s does. I find that Ed’s reverbs sound far better than mine as they add to the crisp warmth of his vocals. I think this is due to a combination of outboard gear (reverbs and EQ’s) and a better grasp on equalising the reverbs themselves (something I’m still getting the hang of).
Obviously these two tracks have vastly differing structures, but interestingly the idea is very similar. The pattern these two tracks share is that they are building to a climax point. For Ed, this occurs at the end of his track, whereas MTEA’s track happens to hit the climax at the second chorus section. A significant difference to these tracks also is the number of instruments that are present in the track. For MTEA we have vocals, back-up vocals, acoustic guitar and electric guitar, whereas Ed has upward of three guitars, a ukulele, piano, many layers of harmonised vocals and maybe even a synthesiser. The perks of being famous and having lots of money is you get the best equipment and the producers who know how to utilise them. Curiously though, this track is still remarkably simple, and do you know why? Panning.
Perfect is recorded with very little automation and most instruments that get introduced are sitting dead-stick in the sections of stereo-field that they are introduced in. From what I can tell, the first acoustic guitar and lead vocals are panned dead centre and don’t move. The Back-up vocals appear to also sit in the centre as well as well as the percussive sticks. Its only in mid-point of the song where stuff seems to pan out with the guitars and back-up vocals sitting at a left and right stereo (very close to the centre still). When the 2/3 point hits all the instruments are there filling the stereo-field nicely. Interestingly, every instrument seems to be fed through the same reverb unit that feeds out a stereo signal to the hard left and right; making for some kinda lazy mixing if I do say so myself. The running trend that I keep coming back to is that there is nothing interesting to catch my eye or ears in this case at the beginning of this track, but the void of space slowly get filled by instruments as the song progresses. Something I think is interesting form the big budget, well produced track.
When mixing Strangers Grown Apart, I found that because I had limited instruments I had to make the most of what I had. So, I went ham on the automation with volume and panning. For the start of the track, the acoustic guitars start in the centre, but go to a nice left to centre with the vocals coming in a t right to centre pan. By the second phrase of the first verse, the warm guitar comes in the right to centre pan, with the vocals moving to centre (adding additional warmth, keeping the listener interested). The acoustic guitars move over to the left only in the chorus and bridge section whereas all other times (1st, 2nd verse and outro) they are automated to pan a stereo left and right around the vocals. The Back-up vocals are panned left and right to the centre lead vocals, with their accompanying mono reverbs panned and hard left and right to their appropriate stereo-field direction. The only time this changes is in the second chorus where the lead vocals go slightly left-centre and the sing back-up vocals goes right-centre. The Electric guitar is the last instrument as is reserved for the choruses and bridge, to add a little kick. Doe to the nature of the recording, this acoustic guitar can sound a little tinny until the bridge where it is cranked up full with the rest of the instruments. This instrument accompanies the right-hand side pan and does not move.
I conclude this comparison of tracks and techniques with the obviously superior track of Perfect, with its great guitar tones, vocals tones and incorporation of instruments that really fills out the track, however it doesn’t seem to try a lot outside of the box as it’s panning volume is mostly static and doesn’t move, unlike Strangers Grown Apart with lots of panning and volume automation so as to really squeeze what I had out of the instruments. There is a lot I have learned from analysing this track and I hope to implement this into the next track or E.P. I record, until then.
Ciao
Wyatt Nicholls
Novice Recording Engineer
Student at SAE
References:
worldminded. ( n.d ). Why is personal growth so important. Accessed ta http://worldminded.com/why-is-personal-growth-so-imortant/
[Video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vDIzVuDzT
[Audio] https://soundcloud.com/user-915504660/mtea-strangersgrownapart-mastered/s-csiA
[Image] https://www.theodysseyonline.com/radio-who
[Image] https://www.capitalfm.com/artists/ed-sheeran/photos/song-lyrics/the-parting-glass/
[Image] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_record#78_rpm_disc_developments
[Image] http://www.rickmeyersmusic.com/media.html
Wyatt Nicholls 