Category Archives: mixing

Free vocal altering plugin from SoundToys

I got given this referral code from the folks over at SoundToys – it’s for their Little AlterBoy plugin, which does some pretty cool things.

It’s only available for the rest of today so get it while it’s hot.

Of course, it also does some exceptionally un-cool things like that Cher megaquantized pitch correction, but you can also use it to do Fever Ray style female-to-male morphing, Kid-A style craziness, and complete melody restructuring of an existing line.

Note that you will need iLok licensing software, and an account on the iLok website, but that stuff is all available for free… as is this plugin. Enjoy :-)

https://www.soundtoys.com/sxsw2015/&rc=283-1389-061

Interesting article – working on Alt-J’s “An Awesome “Wave”

The folks at Universal Audio send us through links to artists using their kit occasionally – I know they function as self-serving promotional material, but some of the non-gear related stuff in here is interesting, particularly related to preproduction and song structure.

Anyway, jump on over here to have a read.

P.

Tell No Foxx “Boulevard”

Very very proud to to be able to point y’all at the first tune from Tell No Foxx’s upcoming EP; the song’s called “Boulevard”, recording work was done on it here in the Bay, mixed at my place in Dublin. They really are an incredibly talented band, it’s great to work with people that know exactly what they want, and are also open to experimentation. There’s such a lovely vibe to the EP, there was a very strong vision for where it should end up and I think we got there.  Really looking forward to hearing the rest of the EP masters :-)

Anyway here’s the video:

 

Last song with Fiach

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Working on that difficult final track for Fiach’s album tomorrow – once that is done it is time to get mixing this baby, really looking forward to attacking the mixes. I’ve learned a lot from the past couple of months mixing the new North Atlantic Oscillation album, the upcoming Tell No Foxx E.P. and the upcoming Hawklion E.P.; In particular the versatility of the UAD plugins for compression and adding saturation has been a revelation.

This final song has gone through many incarnations, looking forward to finding its proper home!

So – lots of new music coming soon, will set up a sound cloud account so snippets of all this stuff can be heard in advance, so watch this space…

In the meantime, here’s us getting started way back in 2013.

Treat me right…

Delighted with the effect of our room treatments, stereo imaging is top notch now, diffusers at the rear of the room (not shown) really cleaning things up too. Couple of bass traps and we are done. New Nick Cave album and some Death Cab for testing purposes :)

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EMT 140 Plate reverb

Just installed the EMT 140 for our Apollo – gorgeous, gorgeous reverb. They actually have one of the real things sitting in the corridor outside Studio 1 in Windmill Lane, be interesting to compare em sometime :-)

Mixing mixing mixing

The last few days I’ve been mixing new music by Ground, some crazy noisy beautiful unpredictable loveliness from Scotland. As well as getting to work with some amazing and interesting material, I also had the opportunity to use Sonar – Cakewalks’ DAW. Bit of a learning curve but it is nice to use (apart from how it handles automation – Logic still unbeaten there).
It comes with compression, EQ and tube saturation as standard for every channel. This would be great for those starting off on the mix engineer path as the controls and parameters are well labeled, you get to try FET and VCA compression flavours (mimicking an 1176 and the master bus of an SSL desk respectively) and three differ EQ ‘flavours’ – all very useful and nice and musical.
Anyway, here is what Sam (from Ground) and I were looking at for the last few days. Note the ironing board.

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