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5. Arranging and mixing

1

Let’s zoom out and take in everything we’ve done. Though it might seem like a bit of a mess at the moment, we now have all of the ingredients necessary for our darkwave masterpiece. We could, of course, add a proper chorus and or bridge, but we’ll leave that to you. 2

We want to arrange our tracks in the timeline to create the most impact. We like how the E-bowed guitar fades us in, so we’ll start with that. Let’s try soloing and muting tracks to experiment with different combinations. Here, we’ve moved our guitar FX 1 and FX 2 tracks to bars 15 and

11, respectively. 3

After a bit of experimentation, we think we’ve got a fairly good progression of parts, slowly building up tension until the vocals kick in, having a bit of a breath at bar 65, before bringing in our strings and E-bowed guitar again before the end. It’s moody, creepy and very dark! 4

Our volume levels are, of course, still pretty wonky. We need to get down to the business of mixing our song. One of the best ways to do this is to loop playback of the busiest bit, bringing all of our volume levels down to nil. It pays to walk away for a bit first to refresh your ears. 5

Some engineers like to mix tracks in relation to the vocals, while others start with the drums. We’re starting with the former. Be sure to leave plenty of headroom as you bring a track in, as the levels could build up quickly. Tweak the panning and adjust the compression settings as needed. 6

We’ll edit any audio anomalies we find along the way, nudging volumes as we go. Finally, we need to put those vocals into a space. For that, we’ll use an instance of Reverberate CM on an aux bus and send each vocal track through it. Don’t be afraid to slather it on thick!