La Bête Blooms Notable Mixing Techniques

The approach to mixing both of La Bête Blooms's tracks is especially important to consider. I firstly felt that in order to give the mixes context it would be beneficial to select reference tracks in which I could refer to to gain inspiration to influence my approaches to this.

I have chosen to refer to tracks below by the artists My Bloody Valentine and Nirvana. Particularly 

• (My Bloody Valentine - You Made Me Realise, 2012)
• (My Bloody Valentine- Soon, 2012)  
• (Nirvana - Come as You Are, 2009)
• (Nirvana - Lithium, 2009)

As I previously stated at the beginning of the blog, La Bête Blooms stated that they wished for the guitars to act as the main focus and wished for a wall of sound style guitar technique similar to that displayed in both My Bloody Valentine tracks. This provided somewhat of a challenge in the mixing process, as during the recording stage several different layers of guitars were recorded, each with varying effects and varying levels of distortion. I had not originally anticipated the amount of tracks that I ended up having to mix due to multi layering in different sections of the songs (most notably in Low Hummer) and it proved reasonably difficult to mix. I began to research various EQ methods for electric guitar. 

Both Benediktsson (2016) and Anderton (2016)   informed my basic approaches to mixing the guitars for each track, I found myself having to cut the low end on almost every guitar part recorded as sections were very dense, lacking clarity. Cutting the low end allowed elements previously buried in the mix to punch through more effectively for example the bass guitar and the kick drum. More drastic measures had to be taken when EQ the bridge section in Low Hummer, as each layer of guitars occupied a slightly varying frequency range. Cuts were made to highlight this, for example, extreme high end cuts were made for guitars that occupied low-mid frequencies, whereas extreme low end cuts were made to give clarity to guitar parts that occupied high-mid range frequencies. This approach to equalisation brought clarity and separation to each element that previously wasn't apparent.