Gone or Still Going by Dan Wade was recorded primarily on a home studio rig. The artist engineered the entire song with the exception of drums using Garageband with a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 into a Macbook. Drums were excellently recorded by Matt Holmes at The Echo Mill in Chicago Illinois.

The song was missing a little flair, so Dan enlisted the help of his former Treaty of Paris bandmate Michael Chorvat, who provided the backing vocals. Michael recorded these vocals on his own rig.

From a mix perspective, I was instructed to make it LOUD and to make the drums REAL LOUD. I went back to the early 90s to listen to some big loud snares, Nirvana circa 1991. It was hard to make the drums loud without overpowering the mix, as there is a lot going on in the song. I found a middle ground as the snare and kick pop but do not drown out the vocal. The kick and snare are stacked with two samples each, both birch samples as that is what the drummer was using at the time. The snare has a total of 4 tracks running before bussing including two separate sample tracks, the main overtop sm57 and a sm57 bottom. The kick is also four tracks, two sample tracks, and the inside and outside Beta 52a. What really ties the drums together is the room mic setup at Echo Mill, which includes a stereo room, and a basement room mic under the whole studio.

Guitars and bass were simple to layer in, as Dan is a skilled guitar player with excellent equipment. Minor EQ and delay was all that was needed aside from leveling. Bass was DI so I had to reamp in mix, but it came out sounding smooth.

We layered a ton of vocals into this song. The lead vocal is running a de-esser, two compressors and 3 EQs (a low shelf, a hi cut, and then a graphic). This was then bussed out to 4 separate tracks, one with a clean vocal, one delayed, one dirty tape saturation using the stock LoFi plugin and then a final track running a generic SansAmp all blended. Most of the backing vocals were sent to a stereo buss with similar setups and hard panned. The fluff tracks were all varied, some telephoned, some crushed through compression.

All in all, a pretty straight forward mix and I love how it came out.