Glad you liked it so much Dave.......In fact I'll probably call it done if you're enjoying that version so much and move on to something else.
These are the broad brushstrokes of what I did:-
Overall - I set up a buss in Sonar for Drums / Bass / Keys / Vocals / Guitars and and early reflections reverb from Waves Rverb on one send and PSP Lexicon84 Delay on the other with a 16th note style delay. I sent various amounts of instuments to each effect, and used a hi-pass filter on the stereo fx returns to stop it clogging the low mids.
I used the busses I'd set up so I could do broad balance changes and mute whole sections easily whilst working.
Drums - I had trouble because it was a stereo file so I cheated by using the free demo version of Drumagog - the two free drum sounds matched the original quite well so I overlayed these onto the stereo tracks which I'd compressed, enhanced and put through Waves trans-x ( transient enhancer ) for more definition without eq - balanced the three elements and I put Waves L1 on the Drum buss with maximum threshold to catch any overs. I later decided the cymbals weren't sounding so great - a bit piercing - so I pulled them back with a notch filter eq.
Bass - I fiddled with the bass a while, then eventually found a patch on Guitar Rig 2's bass section I liked - it seemed to bring the mid sound of the bass out more , made it brighter. I used a hi-pass filter at about 55hz to take out any subsonic stuff that my smallish monitors may not reveal and some overall gentle compression to even it out level wise.
Guitars - The guitars for me were probably the thing I struggled the most with. I tried several things to get them sitting, but not too bright or dull or obscuring the vocals and bass which they tended to do. In the end i took off most of what I'd done originally and tried PSP vintage warmer - there's a preset called something like ' Vintage Guitar ' which basically rolls off alot of the top end, boosts the low end and compresses the hell out of the signal...well it was a bit OTT so I used it as a starting point, added back about half of the top end, backed off the compression about 50% and too some of the bass boost off. That seemed to work quite well so I left it at that.
Vocals - I didn't really do that much to the vocals, just a bit of overall eq on the lead - sent it to the delay send and put a short plate sound on it. The backing vocals I did similar but used a stereo widener too.
Keys - I spent a fair bit of time eq'ing and sorting levels out on the keys. I put the Hammond through a rotary speaker sim to give it width and movement and took some of the low mid frequencies out. Then I sent all the keys to their own buss which had another Vintage Warmer but a less obvious one that just emulates tape saturation and again some delay and reverb to help them sit and some extra width from the widener plugin.
For the mixdown, I did some fader rides where I recorded the automation in Sonar and used my control surface. I did the Drums in one pass - to give the impression of when a real drummer will play harder in the choruses , the bass - again dropped a little for the verses and upped a little for the choruses and sections of the lead break. Then the lead vocals, same idea really. Once I had a mixdown I was happy with , I used harbal to check for any rogue frequency anomolies, which tend to be down to working in a small room ( it's about 8x8 ft, hence my mixes that tend towards bass lite I think ) then used Waves Multiband Compressor and L3 Limiter to process the bounced down wave file get more volume.
And that was it ! Well there were all sorts of other little things I did, undid, re-did, but that's the overall gist of it.
CosmicDolphin
