Undeleted talkback

As things stand, the in-progress mix of "Them" ends with a barely-audible me saying the word "excellent".  This was, of course, me reacting to the drum take I'm using.  Normally, I would have already cut that off, but because the song will ultimately end in a fade-out, such editing is fairly pointless until all the instruments in that passage are mixed in.  That won't be the case until the 5-string bass guitar is recorded.

Mixing this drum performance wasn't so easy.  I didn't want the drums too prominent for most of the song, largely because of its length and bass-heavy nature, but the two taiko-style passages are another matter entirely, especially since the first of these opens the song with drums literally on their own.  I used a combination of two strategies to make this work.  Firstly, for those passages I faded up two extra ambient microphones that I normally don't use, giving a bit of extra resonance to the "main" drum track there.  Second, and more importantly, I superimposed two alternate takes of the passages, placing one at each end of the stereo picture, and added a large amount of reverb to these "extra" drums.  The effect is as thunderous as the intro to a song with 5-string bass needs to be!