I'm A Blind Man  -  Post 3

FINISH

I was working with some talented, seasoned and professional musicians. They wanted to perform a cover of a classic track and it was my job as an engineer to translate the performance during post production. I decided to go about it the old school way: No edits what so ever. I had captured a fantastic live take and that was going to be it. No flex time, no auto tuning, no cutting up and switching in and out between takes… just as it was. Even the organ over dub was performed in one hit and then layered on top. I just wanted to convey real, unadulterated music that had a real human feel to it. A connectivity if you will. 

I had this fascination with roughly following the production methods the original 1970s recording might have been using. I can justify automating certain areas of the track (like the guitar solos) as an 1970s engineer would have used fader riding… same gist. Even my parallel compression on the kick and snare holds a bit of historical continuity (online sources date parallel compression back to the 1960s). 

When it came to mastering I took a modern tool and used it help enforce my “fascination” with dated characteristics. Using Ozone 7, I started by dipping my 100Hz low shelf a couple of decibels. This helped shape the frequency response and changed the contrast between the lows and the highs. I then used a dynamic EQ (one of two modern dynamic modules on my project) to hold the low end a little tighter with a 1.5:2 ratio, and setting the threshold so that during the guitar solo the drums and bass tracks didn’t hijack the performance. 

The 2nd modern module I used was the Ozone Exciter. This (after some trail and error - check tracks below) is what really defined my mix. I selected the high-mid frequency band, began inputing what is effectively harmonic distortion… and bam! Everything finally takes shape. The additional distortion has brought life into the track and the everything, down the subtle snare reverb, sounds crisp. The snare sound itself (that I had been struggling with in the mix) found itself a nice new slot in the mix with the exciter plugin and withdrew alot of the plosives in the drums. That might be against the rules of contemporary music production but I think it sounds great. You can still hear the modern recording in the track (from the U87 to the Neve 8801 channel strip to the TLAudio valve console to the focusright rednet A/D converters to Pro Tools)… but it has a classic warmth and human quality that a lot of contemporary music lacks.     

I used the vintage limiter plugin with the analog setting. This offers a tighter bass response which I wanted as the bass line holds a lot of the tracks melodic properties. I set my true peak ceiling to -1 to help prevent inter-sample peaks when/if the track is ever subject to data compression.

Final bounce is a -12LUFS, 24bit/44.1 WAV file.