Now, I realise that this production is supposed to sound a bit shonky and lo-fi, in keeping with the DIY indie-pop aesthetic, but I’m not convinced it needs to sound quite as boxy as this either. To be fair, I think there are a few different contributing factors here. Lifting the sub-80Hz low end and the 1-2kHz midrange, for example, feels like it strikes a slightly better balance against the 300-400Hz boxiness in the first instance. Here’s a before/after comparison:
Beyond that, though, it gets a bit tricky to address the boxiness with simple master-buss EQ. The snare drum, for example, has a strong 330Hz resonant peak that I think would benefit from some cutting, but I wouldn’t also want to hollow out the rest of the instruments in that range, so ideally I would have dealt with that on the snare channel at mixdown. To demonstrate what I’m talking about, though, here’s an example where I’ve used dynamic EQ on the stereo file to simulate this kind of mix change:
In a similar vein, if the upper-spectrum percussion transients and vocal noise consonants had been better controlled dynamically, the whole mix could have been been given a slightly brighter overall tonality, again reducing the sense of boxiness. Here’s another before/after comparison where I’ve used high-frequency multiband compression on the stereo file to implement that kind of mix change:
- With EQ and Dynamic EQ: play_arrow | get_app
- With EQ, Dynamic EQ, and Multiband Compression: play_arrow | get_app
Leaving the tonal profile to one side, though, I do like Todd’s stunt of generating ear-catching fills by triggering a breakbeat running at a different tempo. There are a couple of instances (at 0:47 and 2:00), and although they initially feel almost arythmic, they do nonetheless share a couple of important connections with the main groove that help avoid them getting too jarring. Firstly, the fills don’t disrupt the overarching metric structure of the song – in other words, if you had a metronome running at the song’s tempo, it would maintain sync with the groove both before and after each fill. And, secondly, the breakbeat shares broadly the same underlying quarter-note pulse as the main drum part, even though it subdivides that pulse into straight triplet eights rather than the song’s generally prevailing swung sixteenths.