(or the tribulations of mixing prog-rock.)

So here’s the thing.  This prog stuff is complicated.

I am right now struggling with getting a mix I like of Children of a forgotten Sun (and along the way deciding that one of the key changes didn’t work without another 36 bars of new music to make it sound like it was not contrived! – but that is another story, for another day.)

In the traditional rock song, you get an intro, a verse or two, a chorus or two, maybe a guitar solo, an outro and a fade. Instruments come in, vocals come in, and that’s about it. And come mix time there are some tried and tested rules that work well in getting things to balance, things to blend well, things to cut through, things to sit in the front, things to sit in the back.

Children is a rather different beast.  There is a longish ambient start with a solo Dave Gilmore-esque guitar over washy synths.  This leads into the slow intro part, replete with harmony vocals building into an instrumental section which introduces one of the major motifs of the song, before giving way to another vocal section, echoing the intro, and then kicking up the tempo into a big full-on instrumental section.  With me so far? This instrumental leads into what feels like a second movement.  Different key, different tempo, different time signature (and this is where the new music was needed to make sense of the transition, by echoing the previous section in the new key before launching into the main ‘children’ anthem). Finally the key changes again and the final section echos the main pre-anthem motif before breaking down into the outro section which reprises the ambient start.  Phew!

Everything I learned about mixing seems to fail on this song. Balance the vocals for one section and they sound buried in another, EQ the guitars to cut through in another section and they are completely overpowering in yet another, etc, etc.  So I’m going to have to seriously automate the mix.  Break down the sections, make them sound ok in their own right and move on to the next.  treat  each section as a mini-song in its own right and take it from there.

Wish me luck!