BossManEra x Boobie Rackz Record, Mix, and Master Debut Single

By A.Reese

Overview:

Last week, I had the privilege of recording two different singles with BossManEra and Boobie Rackz.  It was my first time working with both of them, so I had no idea what to expect.  Turns out, the delivery and preparation from both artists was absolutely incredible.  They both exhibited great confidence behind the mic and were able to nail their takes after two or three attempts.   After the recording session, they only focused on the mixing and mastering of the first single and were fine with putting the second on the back burner until completely finalizing their debut.  The overall recording, mixing, and mastering work I did for them was done over the span of 3 separate one hour studio sessions.

Production Details:

For both verses, he recorded several adlib and double tracks that were panned from left to right.  The chorus had around 2X the amount of double tracks than the verses so there were quite a few for me to play around with.  During the editing process, I decided it would be best to add more doubles for each chorus to slowly build up to the final section, which had the most doubles out of any other part in the song. 

For compression, I started by throwing the Waves CLA-2A on both of the main vocal tracks and decreased the threshold until there was around 5-6db of gain reduction.  After gaining those back up, I copied the compressors and pasted onto the double and adlib tracks.  For these, I slightly increased the gain reduction so the doubles/adlibs could be more easily heard at lower volumes.  

At Hilltop Studios, EQ is always very simple because our iso rooms do such a good job with capturing the natural tone of the instruments being recorded.  Just a simple LF cut below their fundamental frequencies + a subtle low mid cut around 200-300 Hz & HF boost around 10k was all that it needed.  For the doubles, I used the same EQ but cut essentially all frequencies below 400 Hz to make room for the main vocal.  After finishing EQ, I loaded my DeEsser’s, sent each track down to a vocal reverb, and was done with my vocal signal chain.  At that point, other than a few subtle changes, his mix was just about finalized.  I sent several different mixdowns for BossManEra and Boobie Rackz to choose from, and when they made their decision, I was able to move onto the mastering phase, which was done entirely in-the-box.  

I started by adding the Q1 to give the track more headroom.  Afterwards, I customized the settings with several different limiters, adding small amounts of gain reduction with each plugin.  The CLA-2a, L2, and L3 are some of my favorite plugins for mastering and definitely gave me more than enough tools to increase the volume to commercial levels without squashing the integrity of the mix.  To make sure, I loaded up “Both” by Gucci ft. Drake as a reference track and found that the overall volume levels were already sounding very consistent.  This gave me the green light to export and email the final master to BossManEra & Boobie Rackz, who are now finalizing publishing arrangements for their fresh new single.

Stay tuned for the new releases!  Streaming links will be provided soon.