To challenge myself a little bit I decided to regularly start mixing genres I’m not so familiar with. One of these is jazz and blues performed by a big band. Although, I love big bands and already listened to Glenn Miller when I was a little boy, I’ve never mixed a big band recording myself up to now. So I headed over to Mike Senior’s great Mixing Secrets Multitrack-Library and found the multitrack of “The Abletones Big Band” performing “Corina, Corina” for a Telefunken recording session. Great stuff.

I decided I wanted to try and mix the song with an authentic 1940s vibe but with a little bit of enhancement to make it suit to todays listening habits. Furthermore, I decided I wanted to try the Al Schmitt route and use as little EQ as possible for the whole mix. For those of you who don’t know Al Schmitt he’s one of the greatest engineers on the planet know for using no EQ at all on the recordings he did himself. Just working with microphone choice and placement and riding the volume faders. I’m going to talk about his latest book I just read, in one of my next posts.

Anyway, the recordings of the mentioned multitrack did sound really good to me, so mixing was a joy. Here’s how it finally came out:

In case you want to mix the song for yourself, the multitracks can be downloaded at Mike Senior’s Mixing Secrets Site. If you do, it would be great to hear your version, so I encourage you to link it down in the comments section. In any case I would love to hear what you’re thinking of my mix. So chime in and tell me your thoughts. I am very much looking forward to this.

Thanks,
Markus