AFIII New Song. Tracked Guitars, Bass, and Vocals through the Axe-Fx 3

zedeloc

zedeloc

Inspired
Guitars and bass were obviously tracked through the axe fx, but the most surprising result were the vocals. We used a U87 clone made from a micparts kit, into a Neve style preamp. From there into the fractal's 1176 then the optical compressor. It really feels great to track with outboard compressors, and the axe fx fills a ton of gaps for someone who can't afford a bunch of nice hardware units. Love this thing. Try it on more stuff.
 
Though it's not my style of music, I listened through - impressive tones and production! I haven't tried vocals though the III, need to try that.
 
The mastering stage ended up being a bit extensive. I used a mixture of tools, and a big reason for the amount and variety of plugins I used was due to my own errors in the mixing stage, since I didn't use references to A/B my mix. Just a disclaimer before telling you a mountain of plugins. As far as a general mastering suite, Ozone.

#1 I used references of genre-specific, full sounding mixes to give me perspective.
  • REAPER for the DAW.
  • Eventide's Split EQ to fix weakness in the lows of the bass drum (transient mode) and low mids (sustain) due to mixing in a room with a bass buildup (I cut too much bass/low mids to compensate)
  • Fabfilter's Saturn 2 to add parallel distortion only in the low mids, due to the same issues I used Split EQ for.
  • I used Sir Standard Clip to only take off the highest peaks (1-2 db) before hitting the master compressor (to transparently squeeze out a little more volume)
  • Elysia Alpha 2 compressor by Brainworx in mid/side mode to provide glue and automate the mid signal up or down during certain passages (more or less guitar solo).
  • A pultec style eq, adding a little 100hz and 20k
  • UAD's ATR-102 tape machine plugin, automating the gain to saturate and provide more sustain at certain moments (think big toms).
  • Finally, iZotope's Ozone for its Clarity module, Imager (to automate width in certain sections), and Limiter/Maximizer.
A lot of this should have been fixed in the mix. But I had to do it in the master due to not having access to the multi-track session for various reasons.

I could talk about this sort of thing forever, and have probably already said too much. So I'll stop there. Hopefully that's helpful and not too boring.
 
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