In terms of the mix for this project, there wasn’t too much that we needed in terms of processing. We had to decide an approach to take for this, whether that be realistic, hyper-realistic or unrealistic. We decided to take a realistic approach as the performance we captured was of a high quality and we didn’t want to mess with this too much but decided we could have a play about with automation on the 5.1 panning.
We didn’t add any reverb to the tracks as the room we recorded in had a natural reverb that complemented the voices nicely. We did add top and tail EQ onto each track to remove any bleed from the others and also as a safeguard against any phase issues. We didn’t have any but wanted this in place just in case. For the Alto track, we used bell EQ around 1kHz and reduced by 1db because there was a voice in this track that was very prominent and stood out too much so by reducing this slightly it helped control this.
Using 5.1 panning, LCR (Left, Centre and Right), LS (Left Surround) and RS (Right Surround) were moved to their respective speakers. All of the vocal parts (Soprano 1&2, Alto and Baritone) were placed how they were when we recorded and then OL (Omni Left) and OR (Omni Right) were placed just before LS and RS. We also used front and rear divergence on LS and RS as when listening we felt there was a gap in between these 2 speakers so we bleed some from each channel to fill this space.
We decided to use some automated panning near the end as a creative touch. The ending of the song has the choir singing some staccato hits before a long note that ends the song. For each of the staccato hits we automated the 1st to the Left speaker, 2nd to be split between LS and RS, 3rd all automated to the Right speaker and then the 4th back to how the 2nd was. We then automated the last long note to the direct centre before slowly returning to their original positions.
We then had to down mix to stereo, in order to do this we bounced all 11 tracks to a 5.1 bounce which then imported back into ProTools as 5 channels. We then used the DownMixer plugin which has a pre-set to decode 5.1 to stereo.
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