MIX BREAKDOWN

INVISIBLE STEMS

Shawn Everett’s final mix session of Pain contains a fairly moderate 68 tracks, many of which are marked as stems. Hidden within each, explained Everett, is a whole world of outboard and other treatments: “I used a lot of outboard, particularly when I was in the process of mixing into the tape machine. I kept printing outboard gear as we went, then we’d continue to work with the stems. A lot of invisible processing went into those stems. What looks like a simple stereo track, could be a distillation of many tracks and a deep web of insanity! One guitar stem could initially have consisted of 15 tracks of material from several microphones, then I’d figure out a tone I liked and blend them into one stem. I just kept whittling it down to a point where I could