Checking work from previous session
With pleasure I listened to the organ pieces that I mixed before - I love organ music! I found nothing to change in matter of sound. There was a couple of pauses in which noises from the audience went through. To eliminate them, I used Noise Gate. Threshold of -20 dB separated the noise from music. I set the attack to 5 ms so that the gate would open right at the beginning of the note. Hold was really long (630 ms) in order to omit short pauses. Release was long too (430 ms) to leave some time for reverb which might be below the threshold.
Noise Gate applied to mastered track
This seemed to work on both organ pieces. Automation was used to disable the gate for any other tracks.
Starting with other pieces - organ and piano
As no studio with good monitors was available, I decided to do some rough mixes for some new tracks. I started with piano and choir song 'Cantique de Jean Racine'. Using automation, I adjusted gain on reverb and piano so that they would jump up to 0 on the loudest part. As mentioned before, sound of the piano is quite bad. It has no attack and no bottom, and is out of tune a little. The only thing I could do with it was EQ - I used low cut below 94 Hz to cut out bass rumble, and a band filter at 510 Hz - down by 9 dB.
EQ on piano track
This apparently cut out most of the frequency content, so I had to raise the gain even more. At least it doesn't sound like on an old recording now that it has more bottom and top.
I managed to set the faders in a way that sounds OK on headphones, but this will have to be adjusted on proper monitors. That's it for this one.
Mixer settings for choir and piano track
Mixing Missa Brevis (choir, soloists, strings and organ)
This is the first track of this concert with soloists singing to their microphone, so I started with having a close listen to this channel. I was extremely happy with NTK performance - it got the tops crystal-clear, while maintaining balanced bass and middle bands.
As soloists never sing together with choir, I decided to cut the choir pick-up from the solo channel. This was quite a lot of work, because some parts of this piece are composed in a 'dialogue' between choir and soloists. However, if I wanted to keep the mix clear, I had to do it. To make the solo pieces appear without nasty digital 'click', I faded each region in and out very shortly.
Arrange window showing cut solo track
After cutting solo channel in pieces, I found the loudest part and adjusted gain plugin to raise the levels. I did the same thing with reverb and organ / strings channels - choir bus was apparently reaching 0 without any adjustment. Then, I tried to make a rough mix to get the proportions right. To make soloists stand out from the choir, I widened choir pan to +30 and -30.
I didn't apply any compression or EQ, but after setting the faders I realised that most of the choir channel is really quiet, with one or two loud peaks - I think that for this piece it would be OK to use compressor.
Mixer set-up for Missa Brevis
I finished with mixer looking like on the picture. Sound-wise, reverb is dominant (even though its fader is below choir's fader - for the reason described above) and instruments, choir and soloists 'float' in it.
