Previous mix
I had another listen to Wesley track and I liked it a lot. Valve track, as usual, was warmer and 'closer' than unprocessed mix. Solos sounded a bit 'spaced out', but not much can be done about it since the soloist was away from the microphones and a lot of reverb was picked up. In previous mix I managed to adjust the base of the organ so that it now sound deep. It is also quite wide, as reverb microphones picked up a lot of it, but that's very good because even though it's loud it still doesn't interfere with the choir, which sits on the middle of the mix.
Mixing organ solos
I started off with adjusting pan on reverb bus. As you remember, the organ was placed on the right side of the altar, so on reverb microphones it was significantly moved to the right. To compensate it, I changed the pan to 15 left.
Next, I searched for the loudest bit in both tracks and adjusted gain plugin so that both reverb and organ channels were jumping right up to 0. Then, I tried to search for the best proportions between organ microphone and reverb: I must say that the reverb channel sounded great just on its own. When I added the organ channel though, it filled up a kind of empty space on the middle, and added some detailed sounds of keys. I ended up with blindly done setting with both channels set to 0, which I sent to valves.
Mixer window for organ tracks
Valves
After setting up levels (I always find it very difficult to adjust the gain on both strips to that mono signal is received at the same level at left and right channels), I compressed the sound a little - as usual in this project, to act only on the loudest bits.
Valve compressor
EQ goes as follows:
- Low cut at around 40Hz
- Top cut at almost 25kHz
- Low shelf up significantly around 250Hz
- Low band pass down a lot around 400Hz (some very resonant sound there)
- High shelf down a bit from about 6kHz (to reduce hiss present in the recording and raised by compression, plus to smooth the mix a little).
Low- and high-cuts and low shelf of the valve EQ
Middle band pass, high band pass, top shelf and master volume knob of valve EQ
Output and input levels during bounce
Spectrograms of output and input during bounce
During bounce I realised that the choir track was not switched off, but it was so quiet that when I listened to the difference it makes in the mix afterwards, I couldn't tell the difference.
DREADFUL PEAK
There we go - I was setting the levels up on what I thought to be the loudest part of both pieces. Well, apparently there was one a bit louder part in another track, which I discovered when it was already being bounced down. The audio interface clipped it in most nasty way possible, so I was really close to going through the whole work with setting levels up again, but at first I decided to try to remove it.
Nasty clip
I located 2 clipped peaks on Logic's sample editor and... used pencil to smooth it up! I had a listen and I could not believe my ears - the nasty clip was not only smooth now, but also it was completely inaudible.
Fixed clip
Having everything else recorded correctly and with good levels, I decided to keep it this way.
