So Dylan came over for a few minutes last night so that we can work on Sway. We brought the raw tracks into Pro Tools because Logic gives me a full-on headache.
First thing we addressed was the acoustic and classical guitars. They both had something really annoying everytime he'd go to the A minor. It didn't take long to figure out that 110Hz needed to be notched out. It was a pretty specific problem so we could use a narrow Q and not really affect the overall sound of the instruments. Otherwise for EQing we added about 3dB to a high shelf starting around 7-8K to both guitars and to the vocals too. With the vocals though we created a bit of a notch around 6K to keep the sibilance in control although it wasn't really that bad to begin with.
The next thing we did was set up the stereo field. I basically have 3 positions for this L, C and R. I haven't panned something in between those 3 positions in a long time. Some people might but it's not my thing. I panned the classical and acoustic guitars opposite each other, left the cello and the lead vocals in the center and panned the BG vox to the right (that was arbitrary, it could've easily been on the left or in the center.)
With that taken care of the next step was to go over a few compression basics. I took a second to go over the basics of a fixed threshold style compressor (a la 1176.) I showed him that the input basically drove the signal above the threshold and the ratio determined how much gain reduction we'd hear once we get over that threshold. The output is just make-up gain basically... and so forth. He got all that pretty quickly, so we spent to really exploring attack and release. He gets it now. He knows the difference between fast attack and slow attack. Release was a little more subtle but he heard that too. The only thing we added compression to was vocals. We went with the opto mode in Smack! which I particularily like on vocals if I'm staying in the box.
Next step was setting up a plate verb and a delay on aux busses. Up until this point Dylan had been using time based effects like reverb and delay as inserts. I explained to him the numerous reasons why most folks don't. He gets it now and from now on will do them as an aux send. I showed him the value of setting the pre-delay on the plate properly to get amount of separation desired and I showed him how to set up inserts on the aux channel after the plate (like EQ) to affect the sound of the effect getting back to the 2 Bus. We also used a very gentle delay to thicken up the vocals a bit and that was that for time based effects.
Interesting thing to note is that I didn't move any of the faders from zero. It was basically a broom handle mix, and that wasn't intentional necessarily. I will say though that the finishing touch on this will depend on a ride of the lead vocals and the cello. They sometimes fight each other for real estate in the center and a bit of automation would go a long way in that respect.
The end result of the mix is that it's clearer in the low end and the vocals are much more clear and present and the guitars are much more distinct.
Last thing he wanted was to make his mix "louder" so I did slapped Maxim on the 2 Bus. Nothing too crazy though... The Mixing Limiter preset is fairly effective in most cases.
I gave him a reference mix to see if he can duplicate the results in Logic. Once he has then we'll look into some automation for the lead vocals and cello.
This whole process probably took less than 10 minutes once I had all the tracks in Pro Tools. After seeing me work in Pro Tools I think Dylan wanted to give up on Logic.