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Dobo, aka Ghostwheel, remixes The Knife Will Come
Written by Louise
How exciting! Our first very own re-mix…
The Knife Will Come (Ghostwheel mix) by AbubillaMusic
Hear all about it from the mix master himself:
For my first Abubilla project, I had the pleasure to re-mix The Knife Will Come, one of the highlights from Six Months of Saturdays. I thought the track was quite strong and especially liked the combination of a catchy melody with subtle dark nuances. The original mix had somewhat of a grassroots feel to it, so I set on to make the sound a bit more polished and radio-friendly.
As with any mixing project, I was given individual track prints with no effects or processing. The tracks loaded seamlessly with no issues whatsoever (phew!). They included, if I remember correctly, drums (kick, snare, cymbals, toms, overheads), bass, vocals (lead + 3 backing), guitars (a variety of electric and acoustic), Hammond organ, and brass (was it trumpet?).
As the conventional approach dictates, I started by building the song’s backbone — the drums and the bass. My philosophy is that if you get these two right, then you’ve finished 50% of the job and the rest just comes down to filling holes in the frequency spectrum. Starting with the kick, I applied a noise gate with a high-pass filter sidechain in order to eliminate the snare and cymbals leakage. I followed with some aggressive EQ (big Pultec boost at ~ 40-60Hz), compression, and envelope shaping resulting in a larger-than-life kick sound. Then I shifted my attention to the bass which I treated with some Fatso magic (a compressor/distortion/tape overdrive unit) bringing out the grittiness. To blend the kick and the bass (a critical step), I treated the latter with a compressor in duck mode. Finally, I glued the two together using the LA-3A limiter which works fantastically for this sort of purpose.
Next, onto the toms, which are one of the key elements of the song. The trick was to blend them with the kick which I managed to achieve with a combination of EQ and compression (LA-2A followed by a duck compressor). The snare proved to be one of the more difficult elements, but a 1176 compressor, followed by Fatso along with some brilliance added by Abbey Road’s fantastic presence boost units did the trick. I did not emphasise the overheads much as I was aiming for a cleaner drum sound. The cymbals were treated to 1176 and all of the above elements (sans kick and bass) were fed through a bus into another Fatso.
I spent quite a bit of time on the vocals. I went through and cleaned up all the vocal tracks, polishing intonation where necessary. Then I applied my usual vocal recipe consisting of some treble boosting (Abbey Roads again), tube compression (LA-2A), tape simulation (Vinatge Warmer), and Fatso. This produced a very aggressive in-your-face rock-ish vocal sound. All the vocals were then fed through a Roland D chorus unit for a ultra-suave, liquid sound.
At this point, things were happening quite quickly as the more difficult elements had been completed. On guitars, I left some of the tracks nearly unchanged, but for others I shaped the sound additionally though some further amp and cabinet simulation. I treated the rhythmic guitar parts (a wah-wah guitar track and an acoustic strumming track) to a VCA VU compressor which works great to squash the dynamics while bringing out the transients. I then took out the low end and sent these two parts to the drum bus as they served more of a rhythmic than a melodic function.
The send effects were a plate reverb unit (UAD 1040), a vintage oilcan delay which I absolutely love (Nomad Factory Blue Tubes Oilcan Delay) and some more Roland D chorus liquidity. The delay was accentuated during the choruses and for some key vocal phrases.
The final mix was the product of a two-stage, multi-bus compression exercise (the pioneer of this is Michael Brauer of Coldplay fame). The setup was: master = ((kick + bass) + (rest of drums + rhythmic guitars) + ((all other instruments + backing vocals) + (lead vocals))). The buses were mixed and glued using LA-2A.
Finally, the mastering consisted of Abbey Road brilliance, followed by Fatso in bus mode, finished off by a mastering limiter set to achieve moderate level of loudness.
The session took 8 hours on a Sunday afternoon/evening. Overall, I am quite happy with the result — I have had the song stuck in my head now, which is always a good sign! 🙂
Looking forward to the next track!
Dobo / Ghostwheel
Louise says:
As a reminder to you all, here is the original track:
The Knife Will Come by AbubillaMusic
And here’s that video what we made with Nataasha: