Mixing down the best of 40 tracks for Blue Christmas was a three day affair made better and worse by the DAW software

Sonar Sonar X1 ProChannel, easy to use, powerful track and channel processing

Part seven of the Blue Christmas Diaries.

They say pioneers get all the arrows, in the back.  The last three days of mixing down our rough recorded tracks of Blue Christmas has been like that but we’re still alive.

Update – Sonar X1b now ready for prime time

Since drums and bass are the foundation, I started sifting through bass player Tom LeClair’s takes for the best one on Sunday.

They say don’t sweat the details which would be good advice to take. Actually most of what Tom recorded could have been THE take so I obsessed over the little stuff.

Studio Economik sent me a K+H O800 sub-woofer that arrived on Friday so that was part of Sunday- hooking it up and balancing the room. What a difference that made. I tried some of my older mixes and could spot the bass weakness in the mix right away. I’ll miss that when it goes back in a few weeks.

Most of Sunday was spent playing with the bass track and the two track rhythm section, Bunnie’s hi-hat and snare.  Timing seemed to be off a notch which turned out to be the internal latency when you play backing tracks and then record live. It’s about a beat and a bit off.

Using the Nudge feature in Sonar X1, Ronnie MacLean and I agreed on where the beat should land Monday afternoon. 

I picked my favourite Denis Larocque guitar track just in time for Tom, Bunnie and Denis to arrive for a “mix review” Monday night.

Those meetings are a weird affair. No one wants to tell anyone that certain parts don’t cut the mustard. Everyone was very political and nice about it. In our hearts, we were all saying “I could do that again and better the next time.” Five or six takes isn’t that much but we want to get the song out for Christmas. Timing is everything. Besides we just want to have fun.

Sonar X1 ProChannel

Applying effects with ProChannel

Darren Gallop of Marcato Digital in Sydney had agreed to master the song on Tuesday night so the heat was on Tuesday to finish.

Right off the bat on Tuesday morning, Sonar X1 started to fail. The compressor and equalizer plug-ins were dragging the software down. You can tell things are going wrong by the number of dropouts that occur. The playback was sputtering and popping all day.

Sonar comes with some cool plug-ins that are software versions of rack equipment that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Most of them work great.

At 1 pm I decided to switch to the new ProChannel tools in Sonar X1. ProChannel is included in the package. It emulates the mixing board compressors and EQ on an SSL board. The early reviews were enthusiastic.

Without reading a help screen I was able to compress, EQ and add some tube warmth to tracks with ease. ProChannel saved the day

Lost in a Grand Canyon echo

At the point of adding reverb to the vocal, everything ground to a halt. ProChannel doesn’t have reverb so I had to turn back to Sonitus. It killed my computer at 4:30 pm on Tuesday.

If I took the Sonitus reverb off the track, it would playback. Put it on and the system would die.

I was stymied. Then I remembered I had the UAD-2 plug-ins but didn’t install them yet. At 4:50 pm RealVerb Pro was running like a clock. It only took half and hour to pick the right reverb for my voice and the song.

We auditioned the tracks over and over, changing the fader levels.

Here is where the Mackie MCU Pro shines. By turning on automation read, it remembers where the track and channel faders are placed through the song. Move one guitar in and out of the mix, bring in the drums mid-way in the first verse, bring up the guitar lead, up for guitars at the end – it was all automated. Very cool and a big time saver over using the mouse track by track.

The last thing to do was mix down a two-track, stereo wav file for Darren and ship it off.

The first mix-down had only voice. Forgot to turn off the solo vocal track button. Things like that happen all the time.

At about 6:30 pm the track was done and on its way electronically to Sydney.

It’s 9:32 AM Wednesday morning. I’d better get back to Katzass Studio and finish this project. Cheers.