I was approached last week by German composer Gregor Narholz and Sonoton Music, the worlds leading production music company . They are working on a large scale orchestral/Choir/Rock CD they wanted me to mix. As I opened the session they prepared for me, I found myself looking at over 200 tracks of material that had to be mixed down to stereo…. after I took a breath, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work in a genre I know well. I must say it took me about 4 hours designing the work-flow. I up-sampled to 96 immediately, then split the session into both ProTools rigs. I put the live orchestra and choir on one rig and all the perc, synths and band on the other.
How does one start with such a mountain of tracks? Top left hand corner I always say. To me the orchestra was first. At times it had to be broad in scope, other sections tight, compressed and punchy. Then the choir huge and forceful, followed by mixing the percussion as aggressivly as humanly possible, then lastly the rock elements delivering maximum impact. After all engines are firing I start to build the dynamics, depth, and the illusive front to back dimension. With that many frequencies involved one has to look at the piece in a 3 dimensional picture at all times. Throwing elements side to side, top to bottom, front to back. It is the only way to get the impact a track like this requires.
In the end we were very happy with the results.
Give a look!
