After giving the ears a break it was time to load up the project to have a listen and set the mix.There wasn't actually much to do aside from just fine tuning the levels as we had been balancing it out as we went along and had been adding effects as we went.
      On the Sonar console there were 2 effects busses so a reverb was inserted on the first buss and a chorus on the second,this allowed us to patch in sends on the individual channel strips and send just the amount of signal we wanted to get the sound we were after,it also helps to lighten the load on the cpu doing it this way rather than inserting an individual effect on each channel.
      The kick drum,snare and toms were given just a small amount of reverb to liven the sound a bit and that was all.Similarly the main and backing vocals were treated to just a hint of reverb  which is hardly noticable but gives them a little bit of space.The acoustic guitar tracks were treated with Sonar's VC-64 plug-in with a 'strum acoustic' preset which gave them a nice light sound and seemed perfect for the song,a little reverb was added to one and a little chorus to the other,then one was panned left and one panned right.
       For the rythmn guitar track we inserted the  Twang combo from the Guitar Combos bundle from Native Instruments  and a little tweaking of the eq in the plug-in interface and that was it.For the solo guitar we used the AC30 combo plug-in again from NI,went through a couple of presets and didn't take long to find a sound we liked.A compressor plug-in on the bass track just to get a tighter sound,a final tweak to the balance and it's done.
      The stereo mixdown file was imported into Wavelab Lite and we used the T-racks mastering plug-in suite to give it a final lift and polish,mostly it was presets from the individual components that got the job done.
      It was a great feeling to have finished this song as it has been quite a while since we have had the opportunity to get together and work on the music and now it seems a more settled period for us (although life has a habit of throwing you a wobbly now and then),hope you enjoy it and for us it's on to the next one and it feels great


  Steve

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