
Andrew Scheps Mixing Lifeboats
02h 39min
(84)
In 2015, the amazing Andrew Scheps opened the multitrack for Will Knox’s "Lifeboats" and took us all the way from hearing the song for the first time to a completed mix with his signature sound imprinted upon it. In addition to a fantastic sounding mix, Andrew delivers some of his most detailed explanations of his famous techniques to date.
In this Episode 4 of the Lifeboats Series, Andrew:
- Shows exactly how he sets up every mixing session to look familiar, including his template, groups, VCA’s, naming conventions, FX, busing and more.
- Gives an in-depth explanation of his famous rear bus technique
- Explains how he uses lo-fi to create unique distortion effects
- Breaks down his parallel processes such as the “Drums Dirt” bus
- Explains how he gets to know the song
- Defines “Your Job As The Mixing Engineer” and more...
Watch Andrew Scheps mix Lifeboats, only on puremix.net
Watch the rest of the Lifeboats Series here
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Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:38 - Session Setup
- 05:08 - Import Template
- 15:59 - Naming Scheme
- 18:40 - Assign Groups to VCA's
- 22:03 - Getting To Know The Song
- 24:03 - How To Use VCA's
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Which Instrument To Start With
- 01:32 - What A Session Should Look Like
- 05:39 - Kick
- 17:48 - Snare
- 20:52 - Hi-Hat
- 21:49 - Overheads
- 26:02 - The Tom And Room Mics
- 26:48 - The Drum Crush
- 31:21 - Drums Dirt
- 33:33 - Stereo Bus
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Bass
- 05:58 - Analyze Guitars and Keyboards
- 08:25 - Guitars
- 11:30 - Rear Bus
- 25:27 - Drums Dirt
- 29:40 - Percussion
- 32:32 - Keyboards
- 40:08 - Leave The Mix Playing
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Vocals
- 12:02 - Fix The Organ
- 18:52 - Back To The Vocal
- 21:20 - Katy's Vocal
- 24:53 - The Slippery Fader
- 26:37 - Refine The Mix
- 29:16 - Your Job As A Mixer
- 32:47 - Precise Adjustments
- 33:36 - More Refinements
- 36:04 - Go Bananas With Delay
- 38:33 - Toms
- 41:52 - The Next Step
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |
00:00:08
Hello Children, I'm Andrew Scheps
and I'm here at Flux for my first time,
in NYC, it's a pretty awesome place,
and I walked in the door this morning
and Fab handed me a song to mix.
00:00:19
And that's what we're
gonna do today.
00:00:21
It's by an artist called Will Knox
and the song is called Lifeboats.
00:00:25
I have heard about half of it once,
I've never looked at the session before.
00:00:29
And we're just gonna go through
the process of what I would do
if I was hired to mix this song.
00:00:35
So, here we go!
The very first thing that happens
has nothing to do with mixing,
it's all to do with visuals,
how the session looks, how it's laid out
because one of the main
things for me when I'm mixing
is I want everything to be familiar.
00:00:48
So, if I've produced the song,
it obviously starts life
the way I want it to look
and it goes that way all the
way through the process.
00:00:55
When I get something to mix,
one of the first things I do
is try and decipher what's there,
put tracks in an order that's
familiar to me, color code
and then I'm ready to bring in my
template and actually start mixing.
00:01:06
The first thing we're gonna do
is have a look at Fab's session
and see how he did on the colors
and call tell you right away that
we have some major problems here.
00:01:15
There are couple things with the right
color but most things are wrong.
00:01:18
The first thing we're gonna do
is go through and quickly
color code some stuff
because I don't know how
you can work like this
because drums are that color.
00:01:28
The good thing is, Fab actually
has tracks in the correct order.
00:01:32
I've seen people order tracks
in all different ways.
00:01:35
One of the concepts for me
is that audio is like water
and it flows downhill,
and it also goes left to right
across a traditional console,
or the Mixer window in Pro Tools
and I lay out my tracks in exact
the same way I would on a console
and the mix is at the bottom
and the things you record first
are at the top of the session
and that sort of thing.
00:01:56
So, we start off with drums
then we go to percussion.
00:01:59
This track order is impeccable
these colors are terrible.
00:02:02
We get bass here and we've got
two different basses
which I will check out later,
looks like we've got a traditional
bass guitar and then we got
a keyboard bass.
00:02:13
So, those are all basses.
00:02:15
Then we get down into guitars
and looks like we've
got three guitar parts
and each one is
on multiple tracks
so, guitars are obviously green
not this weird colors
that he's got going on.
00:02:27
But I will give him
different shades of green
so that at a glance I realize
what goes together
and what doesn't.
00:02:33
I already used that one and that one.
There we go.
00:02:37
Then we got some keyboards
and keyboards for me are usually
some version of purple.
00:02:43
But I tend to go
darker purple for
more organic instruments
and lighter purple for more synthy stuff.
00:02:50
And again, this is just so
that I can find things.
00:02:53
One of the sort of themes for
the next 20 minutes or so
is gonna be me making this session
look like every single mix session
I've ever worked on.
00:03:03
And that's what we're doing.
So, we got piano.
00:03:05
Since we don't have live strings or horns
which would normally get
into the dark red spectrum,
I'm actually gonna use the
darker red for piano.
00:03:14
Then we've got organ,
it looks like the B3 kind of thing,
through a Leslie, a B12.
00:03:20
So we've got a stereo top
and then a bottom.
00:03:24
So obviously we treat these
all as one instrument.
00:03:26
That's gonna be that color.
00:03:28
An RS09,
which stands for something.
00:03:32
That's gonna be that color.
00:03:35
Then piano bass,
it looks like we've got an Aux
with nothing going into it.
00:03:42
So we'll check that out in a bit.
00:03:44
That maybe have just been
some straight clean up.
00:03:46
Then we've got a lot of
Arp tracks here.
00:03:50
I'm just make them all the
same color for right now
and then we'll come back and
split them up if we need too.
00:03:54
But again, this is just so
that I can find things.
00:03:57
And then we got vocals,
he's very close on the vocal color.
00:04:00
I commend him for that
but it's not right yet.
00:04:03
Then the other thing is,
I'm noticing that on all my other
tracks the preferences are already set
to have the region color follow the
track color, which is important to me
because again, I just want to make
things easy to find visually.
00:04:15
On the vocal tracks it's not
and while I'm producing,
it's actually something that I often do
is I will have
the regions retain
the color from the original
track when recorded.
00:04:27
So if you have multiple takes of vocal
at a glance you can see
where the vocal came from
and figure out your comp and if
you wanna swap out a word you see
"Oh, I've got the red one and
that is take 7
so let me check out take 6 and take 8
because those are around the same time".
00:04:41
Whatever.
00:04:42
But at the point where I'm mixing,
I really don't care.
00:04:46
So I'm just gonna make this,
actually if I just make them default
they will go to my vocal color.
00:04:52
And then we have what
looks like a second lead,
Katy has sung on this as well
but I will make her the background color
which he's gotten correct,
that's amazing.
00:05:03
So we will now
make the regions to default.
00:05:07
Now that all of the tracks are
color-coded and in the right order
I'm gonna immediately import
everything from my template.
00:05:15
Before I import,
you have to go into the I-O Setup
and there's when very important
step before importing.
00:05:21
The way Pro Tools splits up
its internal busses
is if you have 128 or fewer
they go into one pop-up menu.
00:05:27
As soon as you have 129
up to the maximum of 256
it splits the busses
into two sub-menus,
the first being the first 128
and the second being whatever
you have above and beyond that.
00:05:38
What I like to do is to retain all of
the busses from the original session
just because if there are any
named busses that are being used,
I don't wanna get rid of that
and have to remake it.
00:05:48
So, what I like to do is
to keep 128 busses
from the original session
and then when I import my template,
that places my busses
starting at 129,
which puts them
into their own menu.
00:06:00
And you might say:
"Well, that's a very tweaky
dumb thing to do."
Which is maybe true but
having those busses show
up in a spot that is
physically the same on
every session that I mix
will save a ton of time over
the course of mixing a song
because every time I wanna
assign a send or an output
to one of the busses in my template
it always shows up starting
exactly at the top of the B menu
and they're always in the same order
and they are in the order
that they are in the session.
00:06:26
It takes a little bit of setup
to get you template right
but once it's right
this will save me hours
over the course of mixing
a whole album, let's say.
00:06:34
The first thing I do is just
come into the bus menu,
I see that there are 113 active busses.
00:06:39
I will just hit default for all busses.
00:06:40
What that will do first is
clear out any output busses
that aren't being used.
00:06:45
I'm now down to
just the stereo bus
because that's all we've
got going on here.
00:06:49
Then in Pro Tools 12
there are 24 busses, it's the default.
00:06:53
In Pro Tools 11 it was 128
which made this a
one step process.
00:06:57
But I now need to actually add
some more stereo busses,
so I believe it's 51 stereo
plus the sub paths
just to make thins nice and neat.
00:07:07
Create...
00:07:08
I'm at 126 so obviously
I was wrong.
00:07:12
And it was 52.
00:07:14
OK, so now I have 128 busses.
00:07:17
So that's good and what it means
is that the next bus created
will at the top of the
B menu of the buses
and I'll show you
that in a second.
00:07:23
I can get out of the I-O.
00:07:25
I don't care about
inputs or outputs,
I'm mixing completely
in the box,
I've got a stereo
output already.
00:07:29
If I go in here to the outputs,
and go to busses, you'll see I have
one pop-up menu that goes from Bus 1
all the way down to bus 128.
00:07:38
This particular session,
very very clean,
no internal busing,
so there's nothing named,
nothing out of order
and nothing weird.
00:07:44
So the next thing we're gonna do
is import session data.
00:07:47
And I happen to have a template.
00:07:52
And I've gonna through my template
before in some other videos
so I'm not gonna delve too much into the
specifics of what's in the template
until I actually start to
use some of the elements.
00:08:02
But basically, it's a ton of Auxes,
and then there are also
some Auxes at the bottom
which are just Color templates
for if somebody else is prepping
the session for me.
00:08:11
Now the first thing I notice,
before I opened up this dialog
is that the rough mix is
not actually in the section.
00:08:17
So I also have a track called
"Song Title"
and that's just a stereo audio track
for me to go ahead and put
rough mixes on to reference
and also where I'll print my mixes.
00:08:28
And the only reason
I'm gonna import this
is because it has its input
and output already assigned.
00:08:32
So, I'm just saving time.
00:08:34
Everything above "Song Title"
is an Aux that is either collecting
audio from elsewhere in the template
or it has plug-ins on it which
we'll talk about once we get in.
00:08:42
The only other thing that I'm
gonna import along with this
is my "Window configurations".
00:08:47
Again, I want every section
to look exactly the same.
00:08:51
I spent have an hour on one day
making one window configuration,
it's the only one I have,
the only one I use.
00:08:57
But this way,
when I hit OK,
it's gonna bring in a bunch of tracks,
of course it's gonna bring them in
the middle of the session
because I have a track selected
but that's OK.
00:09:07
Now, in record time,
all the tracks from
my template have come in.
00:09:11
And what's also come in is
a 'Window Configuration',
called 'Mixing'.
00:09:16
That's much better.
00:09:18
And the only other thing I'm noticing
is that these tracks are really bright.
00:09:22
So I'm just gonna go ahead and
turn that down
so that it looks the way
I'm used to having things look.
00:09:27
So, the 'window configuration' thing is
again, a little bit anal like having
our busses show up in the right place
but what it does
is now I have access to everything
I need to have access in the Edit Window.
00:09:39
I never work in the Mix Window.
00:09:41
The only time I'm
in the Mix Window
is to hunt down a delay
compensation problem
or to go through
and look at all of the plug-ins that
were in the session when I've got it
to figure out what they are,
it's the easiest place to see it.
00:09:52
Otherwise I'm in the
Edit Window 100% of the time.
00:09:55
So,
now, if we look at my outputs,
I go to the bus,
Bus 1 through Bus 128...
00:10:01
Oh look! It's all of my busses.
00:10:03
And a lot of them are already used
and they are in the order
that I want them to be in.
00:10:07
One little key to this,
if you created a template and try and
have the same sort of bus structure,
if you don't get it right
before you import,
and let's there were 126 busses
so now my mix-bus,
which is my important bus
is at the bottom of this
menu and I can't get to it,
if you go into the I-O setup now,
and create one new bus,
it will reorder all of your busses
because it will alphabetize them,
so try and get this right before you import
and them never look at
the I-O setup again.
00:10:35
That's the way to make sure everything
stays where it's supposed to be.
00:10:38
The next thing I'm gonna do,
normally these tracks would be
all the way at the bottom of the session
but they're not,
but I'm gonna distribute them,
what I like to do
is to put the tracks
below the things they
normally go with.
00:10:52
These are all parallel
processing for the drums,
there is one actual audio Aux
that passes audio directly
as opposed to be in a parallel process,
I will talk about
that if we use it.
00:11:04
My color coding is
I've used bright colors
that I don't use for
any of the audio tracks.
00:11:09
So, any light blue Aux is
something that I can send to.
00:11:13
These are all
generally used on drums
and it ends with a VCA for the Drums.
00:11:18
That's the way all of the little groups
of instruments are gonna work.
00:11:22
And then, we've got percussion,
and, then we've got bass...
00:11:30
And also, in my session,
I don't care if the guitars
are on top of the keys
or the keys are on
top of the guitars,
they just need to be between
the bass and the vocals,
that's the way that works.
00:11:39
You notice though that
there are no parallel tracks
going with these three VCAs.
00:11:44
For a while I had a 'Bass
Crush' that was in the template
and hadn't used it in a
year so I got rid of it.
00:11:49
My template is ever changing.
00:11:51
Any time I'm doing a
mix and I feel as though
there's something I don't
have available to me
and I create it and then I think
"Oh, that's kind of cool".
00:11:59
I will then import
that into my template
and then every once in a
while, when I remember,
I open up my template and go through
and basically cull the herd,
just get rid of all the stuff
I haven't used in a long time.
00:12:11
It keeps the template manageable
and it also keeps
me a little creative
because I'm getting rid of stuff
that I don't need.
00:12:17
So things aren't cluttered
and I'm more apt to create
something new in a session
that doesn't have a
million unused things.
00:12:23
It's just a psychological
trick for me.
00:12:25
So then, as we come down here,
the vocal set of tracks
from my template are
slightly complicated,
we'll talk about them when
we actually process the vocals
but it's the one time
where my track order
is a little weird,
so let me go ahead
and take the rest of these tracks,
put them at the bottom...
00:12:45
And then I'll bring the vocal
tracks back up where they go.
00:12:49
I noticed my "keys" is not
at the right place.
00:12:53
That goes down here.
00:12:54
So then,
just because of the way
some sessions come to me,
I'll often place all of the
vocal tracks from my template
in-between the lead and
the background vocals.
00:13:04
On this session,
there's no real reason to do it,
but if I have a session
where I got 60 tracks
of background vocals
I wanna be able to get to the processing
for those background vocals
without having to scroll
down pass 60 tracks.
00:13:17
It's just something
I've gotten used to
and now I'm used to the fact
that all of these tracks live in-between.
00:13:23
And then at the very bottom,
is the track called 'Song Title'.
00:13:26
We do not have a rough
mix in the session,
I happen to know that there is a
rough mix so I'm gonna go ahead
and drag in...
00:13:35
the rough mix.
00:13:36
Drop it on that track.
00:13:39
And then, if we are lucky,
it will spot to where we bounced it.
00:13:45
So now I've got the
rough mix in the session
and that is going to outputs 1-2
which is for me the
audition path in my template.
00:13:52
And if we look back at the
original tracks from the session
they're going to A1-2.
00:13:57
And let me just confirm
that A1-2 and 1-2 are
both going to the same place.
00:14:01
They are both going to my
audition path, this is in Pro Tools 12.
00:14:04
It's actually kind of a
nice shortcut to show me
that's going to the outputs
I have set at the audition path
which means I know without
opening up the setup
that both of these paths are actually
going to the exact same hardware output.
00:14:17
So what I can do,
using the right click
menu on the Output...
00:14:21
state plate,
I can select Assignments to A1-2.
00:14:24
This will select all of the tracks in
the session that are assigned to A1-2,
which in this case is every single track
that makes noise.
00:14:32
Because that's how the track
has been monitored before.
00:14:34
Then I can hold down Shift+Option
select any one of this
and now I can reassign all of the
selected tracks in one fell swoop.
00:14:41
And we like fell swoops
because now I assign them
to my mix-bus
which if we come down
to the bottom of my session,
I got an Aux called router
which gets whatever the mixbus is,
puts it into another Aux called 'Print',
'Print' hits my Print track
and that comes out of the outputs.
00:14:59
So, if I bypass
all of my plug-ins on the mix-bus.
00:15:04
If this bounce is the
session as I received it
this should be identical.
00:15:14
Et Voilà!
Everything I've done up to this point
has absolutely nothing to do with mixing.
00:15:22
This is to do with making me comfortable
So I feel like I can start mixing.
00:15:27
And a very important part of that process
aside from the color coding,
the track ordering, whatever,
is to have a reference
and have a reference not only in terms
of having a rough mix in the session
which is very important to me
because that's how I know
what the artist and the producer
were listening to,
why they decided that
it was ready to mix,
how they're panning things,
how the arrangement works for them
or possibly doesn't work,
which would involve a phone call
to ask if they noticed that
something was a little weird.
00:15:53
But what it also does
is it gives me a starting
point with the session
that matches as closely as possible
the actual session.
00:16:01
What I'm gonna do is do a 'Save as'
and my scheme for numbering things
is I put a two digit number
after the name of the song
and then I put a description
of what it is I'm doing.
00:16:12
So I'm mixing.
00:16:13
That's my starting point, so now
that I'm about to change things
I'm gonna immediately
change this to an 02.
00:16:20
There are a couple of reasons
for my naming scheme.
00:16:24
One is I like to have the
name of the session first
because then in the Finder is just
easy to look at a folder
full of mixes that all start
with the name of the session
because your brain very quick at
recognizing the fact that I can ignore that
then the numbers all line up,
they are two digit numbers
so they sort alphabetically.
00:16:43
So if I get up to pass revision 99
I'm probably gonna quit
or be fired.
00:16:48
So, 99 is a good number for me.
00:16:50
And then having the
description afterwards
means that I can see
what I was doing
then you might say:
"Why don't you just sort by date?"
If these session get
thrown out to and FTP site
and pulled back off,
quite often the dates can get erased,
they can get reset to whatever
date they were put on the server.
00:17:06
Then all of a sudden those dates
don't exist or they're gone
so I need to have a folder full
of session files
that sorts by name in the Finder,
newest session on the bottom
and they're in order,
it tells me that, first of all,
I was working on because
of the two digit number,
it tells me exactly what
I did for each section
and then, while I'm actually sending
mixes out to the client
there will be a session for every revision
that has the revision number
as part of the session name
and that session matches bit for bit
the mix they were sent.
00:17:37
So if someone sends me a comment
that says: "I really love
the tambourine in R5",
I can actually open up the session
from R5,
see exactly what I did to the tambourine,
prove that I haven't changed
the tambourine since them
and say: "Here we go, I put it back to R5".
Even though I didn't do anything.
00:17:55
Or, if I did do something,
and I didn't think I've done something,
I can actually go school myself in the fact
that I did something to the tambourine,
and then either import that data
or just write down what it was and
go back to my most recent session
and make the tambourine
exactly the same as R5.
00:18:10
I don't like ambiguity in mix notes,
I don't like ambiguity in my
own ability to recall a mix
and I definitely don't like ambiguity
in my own explanations of things.
00:18:22
So, if I get a mix note and I'm trying
to not actually do that mix note
because I think it will
be detrimental do the mix,
I have to have empirical evidence
and an actual history
of what was done to
the element in the mix
so I can backtrack and
back things afterwards
and also so I can try things quickly
and prove whether or not
it's better or worst for the mix.
00:18:41
The last thing I need to do
before we're ready to start mixing
is just assign groups to my VCAs.
00:18:47
My VCAs are big chunky VCAs.
00:18:50
I've got one for drums.
00:18:52
In this case there's one drum-kit.
00:18:53
That's fine, and there's probably already
a group in the session called Drums.
00:18:59
In the previous mixing video
that I did for this fine platform
I remember saying that I like
to reuse groups, if they exist,
like, why create things
that are already there?
I have decided that's a terrible idea.
00:19:11
And I always create new
groups for my VCAs now.
00:19:14
The reason is that's because
I will know they are my groups
and they have nothing to do with
the groups that were being used earlier on.
00:19:21
It usually doesn't come up,
it's not a big deal,
but this way I always have groups
that are mine and just mine.
00:19:27
So now I'm gonna go ahead and
select all of the drum tracks,
get the group dialog up,
call this 'All Drums',
I used the word 'All' in front of the
name of every single group I create,
they will be together at
the bottom of the group list.
00:19:40
They will also be disabled because
they're not gonna be Edit groups.
00:19:43
What they're for is to assign
to the VCAs from my template
so, my drums VCA
will now be assign to
the 'All Drums' group.
00:19:51
Et Voilà!
And I can turn this off
so that I don't accidentally
do a bunch of edits
because this is purely
for my VCA to have control
not so much over the volume
but as you'll see over the solo and
mute of that group of instruments.
00:20:05
So, come down and do the same
thing for percussion.
00:20:09
We might be fast forwarding now.
00:20:17
Now I'm gonna do something that
might seem a little odd here,
I'm actually gonna make groups
for not only the lead,
which has two lead vocal tracks,
but I'm also gonna make a group
for the background vocals,
there's one track of
background vocals.
00:20:34
You might say: "Why would you create
a group for that? That's stupid."
The reason is I need to
get control over to the VCA
because I don't wanna
remember at all times
that this song happens to have only
one track of background vocals.
00:20:46
If I wanna mute the backgrounds
I mute my VCA, they're muted.
00:20:49
And that's really important.
00:20:50
Even just selecting the one track
fortunately Pro Tools will allow you
to make a group of one track.
00:20:57
It seems dumb but there you go.
00:21:00
Now that I've made all my groups
and I've assigned them to the VCAs
I'm going to go ahead
and just disable them
because these groups are purely
to gain control over
the audio with my VCAs
and I don't wanna
accidentally do an edit.
00:21:13
You notice there are
some groups left on
and there are quite a
few groups in the session
and I'll sort of decide as I go
whether I wanna leave them on or not.
00:21:21
But what these groups
are doing are tying together
tracks that actually go together.
00:21:26
Like these guitars.
00:21:28
I wanna leave that group on because if
decide to edit that guitar for some reason
then I definitely wanna edit all
the tracks involved in that guitar
but the last thing in
the world that I wanna do
is have left all my guitar group on
and be zoomed in
to this guitar
and chop a bit out of it and all
of a sudden I've chopped all my guitars.
00:21:45
These groups are not for editing.
00:21:47
I could have just made them mix groups
but then I don't see them over here
and I might forget that I've made them
and it just freaks me out.
I wanna see them.
00:21:56
So I make them edit groups
and then I disable them.
00:21:58
Which seems a little counter-intuitive
but that's the way my brain works.
00:22:03
So now, what we're gonna
do is actually start mixing.
00:22:07
I'm going to let the song play
and I'm gonna solo up groups
and be muting VCAs and things like that
flipping back and forth to the rough mix
and kind of get a handle on things
and then we'll be right back
and start tackling the mix itself
And keep in mind,
I have not heard more than the first verse
and I believe the first
half of the first chorus
and then we skipped ahead
and listened to the bridge.
00:22:30
Other than that I have no idea
what's going on in this song
so there is a discover process
which is the same for anybody
mixing a song the first time
but it's really a matter of learning
not only the song
but the elements that go together
to make up the song.
00:22:44
And figuring out what's
important and what's not.
00:22:47
So that's what's gonna happen
as I randomly hit play.
00:22:50
And probably one of the things
I'll do very quickly
is get where are the vocals because we
already know those are super important
So, they're gonna away kind of quickly
and then I'll be skipping around.
00:24:04
Now children, you've just witnessed
the power of VCAs.
00:24:08
We get to the chorus, we get two basses.
00:24:10
I wanna hear what they're doing
individually, I can
just go ahead and solo them.
00:24:15
But if I wanna just deal with the basses
I can solo 'Bass VCA'.
00:24:20
This will basically soft mute
all of the tracks that are
not contained in that VCA
but it doesn't actually solo any tracks.
00:24:28
So, everything outside of that group,
which is everything else in the session,
will mute.
00:24:33
But then, while that is soloed,
I can go ahead and solo
one element of the groove
and that will then mute the
other parts of that group.
00:24:43
So, I can listen to both basses together
or very quickly hear one then the other
then both together
without having to drop in and out of solo
with the rest of the track.
00:24:57
Very very powerful.
00:24:59
The other thing is you can add
an element of another VCA
to what we are listening to
purely by soloing it outside of that VCA
and now we'll hear one element from
the guitars but all of the basses.
00:25:15
So, very intuitive but very intelligent.
00:25:18
It's a very quick way to be able
to hear absolutely everything.
00:25:21
Now that I've shown you
exactly how bad ass VCAs are
in terms of solo, muting, all of the
sort of audio flow,
I should point out that they
actually are in my template
almost by mistake in a way
and the reason I say that is because
it makes sense, especially
coming from mixing on a console
to mixing in the box,
to start thinking about
grouping stuff together with outputs
and it would have been a
very natural thing for me
to let's say, take all the drums,
and in my template,
have a stereo drum Aux fader.
00:25:55
So, an Aux fader passes audio from
an input to an output
and a lot of people will set up a template
where they will take their drums
route them into a stereo
Aux input on some bus
and you might call it drums,
or call them bus 17-18
if you're super lazy.
00:26:09
And then the output of
that will be the mixbus.
00:26:12
So, busses 127-128.
00:26:15
Or mixbus, or print.
00:26:16
Whatever you did inside
of your Pro Tools mixer.
00:26:19
Or if you're just mixing
to the physical outputs
you're gonna use bounce to disk later.
00:26:24
It could be the Output 1-2.
00:26:27
What's good about an Aux
is that it has a mute,
it has faders so you can ride your
drums up and down
because they've all been collected and
are going through this little pipeline.
00:26:36
And you can put Inserts on
and have Sends from there.
00:26:39
The only thing that isn't
quite as good about them
is the way the solo and mute logic works,
which I just showed you.
00:26:47
The VCAs is a little bit cooler for that.
00:26:50
The other thing is though,
when I started setting up my template,
I thought I would use Auxes
and collect everything
but a couple of things happened,
one of which is I ran into some
weird mixer bugs,
several versions of Pro Tools ago,
when you had very complicated mixers
with cascading Auxes,
and I just decided I didn't
wanna deal with it
so I thought: "Well, let me just put
everything to the Mixbus
and then if I need an Aux
along the way than I will
go ahead and create them".
00:27:17
And that's why I ended
up with a couple a long the way.
00:27:20
This 'Toms Aux' will generally
collect all of the toms.
00:27:23
Because if there are more than two
a usually wanna treat
them as one stereo thing
so I collect them together.
00:27:28
Percussion.
00:27:30
It has a Send to an Aphex on it
which we will talk in a bit
when I start using it.
00:27:35
I almost always wanna add a little
bit of Aphex to the percussion
to give it some of that grainy top and air
without adding a lot of EQ.
00:27:42
So it's easier to collect it into an AUX.
00:27:44
But for the most part,
I have all of my tracks going
straight to the mixbus
and then,
they are collected down at
the bottom of the session
to the Print track and then
they come out of the speakers.
00:27:56
The VCAs are what allow me to do
very big block
rides, muting and soloing and
sort of arrangement listening
without having to go through and like...
00:28:07
"OK, I'm muting all the
bass tracks or not."
Soloing all the guitars is very simple
to hear the arrangement together.
00:28:12
So that's kind of the genesis of my
template and why I still work this way,
every once in a while I wish everything
was going through separate Auxes
because it's just easier to treat
in some ways, but...
00:28:24
I find that I actually like having to
make a conscious decision to do that
because it allows me to have less
processing along the way,
it's so easy to slap a plug-in on the whole
drumkit if it's going through an Aux,
but in some ways that's
a bit of a lazier thing
than me actually sitting down
and figuring out
what I need to do to the drumkit
to make it do what I wanna do
but all of the parallel processes
have already gotten set up.
00:28:47
So I use the parallel processes
as big chunky ways to affect the sound.
00:28:51
As opposed to just having the
drumkit run through a plug-in
on it's way to the mix
and you'll see those
parallel processes
once I get down to working
on just the drums,
which maybe we should do right now.
00:00:00
People have lots of philosophies as
to what instrument to start with first.
00:00:04
If there are drums in something I'm mixing
I start with the Drums.
00:00:07
And the reason is, let's look at the vocal.
00:00:10
That's two tracks.
00:00:11
Let's look at the keys, 8 tracks
but there are lots of different parts.
00:00:16
Get up here to the drums, it's one part
and it's a lot of tracks and I don't feel
like counting them, let's say it's 11.
00:00:23
What I need to do very quickly
is to have all of these tracks
go together to be an instrument,
it should just be
a stereo drum-kit.
00:00:32
And really, the most of what would be
broken up in terms of how I listen to it
is kick drum, snare drum,
rest of the kit.
00:00:38
That's the way I think about drums,
that's the way the drums
will work for me in a mix.
00:00:43
Some mixes the kick and snare are
almost separate from the rest of the kit,
where the drum-kit starts to
almost act like programming
because kick and snare
have to poke through and
be part of the rhythmic
sort of push of what's going
on in the song rhythm wise
but the rest of the kit is all about
top end energy
with cymbals matching
guitars and vocals
so you can almost deal with
them separately in a way.
00:01:06
Or, on this song, it's a much more organic
picture of a drummer
playing drums.
00:01:10
So, that's the way this
kit will end up working.
00:01:13
And it's a very traditional recording,
we've got three kick tracks,
two snares, hat,
two toms, stereo overhead, stereo room
and a mono room.
00:01:23
So what I'm gonna do is
solo up my drums VCA,
so it's as nothing else exists.
00:01:29
And I'm going to go through the tracks
and just figure out what I've got.
00:01:33
Before I dive into the
specifics of the drum-kit
you may see that there're
quite a few edits here,
and obviously these are
for timing in some form,
whether it's for feel or
to put something on a grid
if they were
programming or whatever.
00:01:45
And this is sort of the normal
way a session would look,
when you're done recording,
you're done overdubbing,
you've tweaked your arrangement,
you've got things where they
kind of need to go.
00:01:55
And, if your project is one that has
a very definite mix phase,
which some project don't,
some projects you're mixing all the time,
but if it has a mix phase
this is a pretty standard
way for a session to look.
00:02:06
Session prep for a mixer is gonna
be different for every mixer.
00:02:10
And if you are a mixer and getting
sessions from other people,
then it behooves you to spend an afternoon
riding a mix preparation
guidelines document.
00:02:20
I have one,
it's turned into a four page litany
of things that I'm fine with,
things I'm not fine with,
and it has as much to do
with the approval process for mixes,
who gets mixes first,
who gets them second.
00:02:34
Are there any secret approvals?
Does the AR guy has to sign off
before the drummer is allowed to hear?
But there are also some very
specific technical things.
00:02:41
Because I am 'offert' with Pro Tools,
this is French,
you can ask Fab what that means,
I'm fine with getting a session
that has a bunch of edits.
00:02:51
I'm even fine with getting a session
that has a bunch of plug-ins
and even with a bunch of automation
because I completely understand
what that automation is doing
and would rather get a session
that sounds like
what everyone has been listening to
so that I actually have a
starting point and a reference
than to have everything striped out.
00:03:11
Occasionally you are in a situation
where the person who was producing
or engineering the
session before you got it
thought that they were mixing.
00:03:20
And it can be almost
an act of rebelliousness
to strip everything out...
00:03:25
"If that guy is mixing it than
he's gonna start from the raw tracks."
That's fine and conceptually
that's something that you
can have a conversation about,
my feeling though is that
in about 1985 people stopped
recording things the way the
were going to sound in a mix
and that happen
very slowly until now,
nobody records anything the way
it's going to actually sound in the mix.
00:03:51
They tend to record
through the purest
cleanest signal path
they can manage to find
and then all of the
processing will happen later.
00:03:59
So, a lot of the processing that's
done while working on a session
and just producing and doing overdubs,
I would not even
necessarily call it mixing.
00:04:09
It has the same technical
pieces as mixing
it's automation and plug-ins, and sends,
and balance, and pan,
but all your doing is making
the stuff sound like what
maybe you could have spend more
time making it sound like as you recorded.
00:04:22
I'm not saying this
session is like that at all
though it's very very clean.
00:04:27
So I would say that
this stuff is recorded
absolutely the way it is meant
to represent itself in the mix.
00:04:33
That's not to say that if
Fab was mixing the track
he wouldn't have 1000
plug-ins here by the end.
00:04:38
Because this is the starting
point but the starting point
but the starting point can be
very complicated
or it can be very messy
and I would say that this is
a very clean session
with some edits in it.
00:04:49
You know, I've gotten stuff from people
where all the audio is consolidated,
because, I don't know, maybe
they're embarrassed that it took 500 edits
to make the drums feel OK,
but it is what it is and I would actually
rather get the edits
so that if there
is a bad cross-fade
because there are 500 edits and
you didn't actually go through
and solo every drum track and make
sure that the cross-fades are OK,
I can just zoom in, fix the cross-fade
and be done with it
as opposed to having to call you up
and say: "Hey, there's a bad cross-fade
on the downbeat of Chorus 2."
And now I'm stuck waiting for new audio
that I have to import into my session.
00:05:25
So, I could go through and consolidate
audio if I wanna clean this up
or in some cases you can group audio
so it looks like it's been consolidated
but I'm absolutely fine to leave
this looking exactly like it does.
00:05:38
All of that said,
it's probably time for me to shut up
and let the drums do the talking.
00:06:06
So I'm gonna go through
and do what I would do on
pretty much every drum-kit,
the amount I'll do will be
slightly different
or something like that,
but I'm gonna ahead and look
at the drums individually
then the next thing I'm gonna do
is actually skip down to my mixbus
and I don't wanna forget to do it
which is why I'm saying it out loud.
00:06:25
My mixbus is how my console sounds.
00:06:29
When you're mixing on a Neve,
it sounds like a Neve,
which as it turns out
is actually quite clean
until you start
pushing it very hard
at which point you have
some crosstalks, some bleed
but you also have some amazing
harmonic distortion and
things like that
that happen to sort
of glue stuff together.
00:06:45
My console is a Pro Tools console
which is incredibly clean
so I've gone ahead and
put plug-ins in my Mixbus
and for me,
that's not something that
I do to the mix afterwards,
that's something I mix into.
00:06:57
So, I do put it on very
very early on the mix.
00:06:59
So, I'm gonna work on the drums
and now you guys are gonna remind me
to look at the mixbus as
soon as I'm done doing
some doing some individual
stuff on the drums.
00:07:07
So, first of all,
let's check out these three kick tracks
and see why we have three.
00:07:27
I would say 98% of the time
the third kick track, no matter what it is,
is absolutely useless.
00:07:34
This is the other percent of the time
when it's really cool
and so my job is gonna be to see
which one of these is gonna sort
of lead on the 'kick in'.
00:07:45
I have a feeling that
I'm just going to leave
the balance that's already going up
because the kick sounded pretty good
but now I actually
know what's happening.
00:07:54
One thing I noticed is this kick track
is sitting at +12
and I'm gonna very quickly
confirm there's no automation
on the drum tracks.
00:08:02
This is actually an issue
because what it means is that
I cannot do a drum ride
to bring up the drum-kit
without the balance of
the kick drum changing
because that fader is already up
as high as it can go.
00:08:13
So what I'm gonna very quickly do
is select all of these,
and using
Shift + Control and the up arrow
I'm gonna use clip-gain
to increase the gain
of this track by let's say 6 dB
and then I can turn the fader down 6 dB
and because there's no
processing at all at this point
I'll have exactly the same sound
to my kick drum.
00:08:35
I said 6.
00:08:37
And then we'll come in here,
use the command key to
get a clutch on my fader.
00:08:42
OK, so now I'm gonna go through
the individual kick tracks
and see what they need.
00:08:47
I'm first gonna see with that kick in
if I can get a little bit more point.
00:08:51
And see if it wants to
be distorted a little bit
because what kick drum doesn't?
Lo-fi comes free with Pro Tools
so you all have this plug-in if
you run Pro Tools.
00:09:11
There are a bunch of knobs on it,
pretend none of these exist
and just use this distortion knob.
00:09:15
Basically, it's a clipper.
00:09:17
There's a ton of gain behind it.
00:09:19
You actually gain I believe .9 dB
when you go from 0 to .1.
00:09:23
So obviously, louder is better
but it does also do clipping
and it has a really
interesting shape to it,
I've actually looked at it
on an Audio Precision,
don't ask me why, it doesn't matter.
00:09:35
I'm that kind of guy.
00:09:36
It has a very different
shape from most clippers.
00:09:40
You can think of it as a knee,
as you go from the original waveform
into the square wave portion,
that corner, and how it turns the corner,
is sort of the definition of the
type of distortion you're getting.
00:09:52
The sharper the corner,
the more high-frequency content there is
so more upper harmonics.
00:09:57
That's the rule of any waveform,
the faster it changes the shape, the more
high frequency content there is. Period.
00:10:03
So, if you take a sine-wave
and run it into this clipper
it turns into a square wave
but it doesn't have a sharp corner on it.
00:10:09
There are a lot of clippers
that have kind of a slow curve,
some that are much sharper
and this is sort of in-between shape.
00:10:15
I don't know I'd explain
it rather than that.
00:10:17
But it's like rounded corners
on a rectangle
sort of thing.
00:10:21
And it's a really pleasing sound to me.
00:10:23
And it gets the level up,
which I have no problem with,
I like really driving
a lot of level through
the mix processing
and you'll see with the way
I use master faders later on,
I can sort of back out of any problems
I've created with headroom
by using a Master Fader,
hooking into the mixer at
certain points along the way.
00:10:40
So I'm fine with having tons of level
all the time,
as you might know if you listened
to anything I've ever mixed.
00:10:47
Now that I've got a little
bit of extra hair on this kick.
00:10:51
Let's go ahead and use some
idiot's EQ plug-in
and see if we can add some air.
00:11:20
I like the 60 Hz bump,
but it's also getting a
little bit subby and messy
but the high-pass filter is making it weak.
00:11:29
So, I'm gonna ahead and leave
that little bump in,
make a mental note that it's there,
so, if later on I feel
like my kick is too big,
then I know where to go
to back out of that.
00:11:38
Now, I'm making decisions about the
kick drum completely in isolation
and there are two reasons for that.
00:11:43
One is because at some point
I have to listen to the kick drum
and that's where I start because
it's the top track in the session
while getting my drums together.
00:11:51
But the main reason
I feel like I can do this
is because I've mixed 1372 kick drums now.
00:11:59
I kind of know what
I want a kick drum to do
and what I want it to sound like
and I'm very much keeping the
original character of the kick drum,
I'm just trying to enhance
the parts of it I like
and if need be, to get rid of
somethings I don't like.
00:12:16
I like everything about this,
I'm just trying to make it a
little bit bigger.
00:12:19
That's all. So everything I do to
the kick drum is about making it
a little livelier and a little bit bigger,
I'm a fan of there being some
top-end point on the kick drum,
Not necessarily always a laa Metallica album
but definitely some point.
00:12:34
Only because I think what can happen is,
when you get into a busier section
and a louder section of the song,
just of the thump of the kick drum,
if it's faster, isn't enough
to kind of work with the snare
and create the rhythm
that's supposed to happen
with the interaction
between the kick and snare.
00:12:50
So by getting the kick up a little higher
you're actually start to interact more
and I feel like the groove is helped by it.
00:12:56
This is song is a little more laid back,
a little sparser,
this could be a bad idea,
I might get rid of this later on.
00:13:02
That's enough of my yacking
about that kick track,
let's yack about the next on.
00:13:06
'Kick out' is always an interesting one,
there's always some really
good low end going on
but there's also lots of bleed
from the rest of the kit.
00:13:14
This song doesn't
have a huge amount of cymbals
from the small bit
I've heard so far,
if we get into a spot and
he's riding on the crash cymbal
I may have to rethink this
but I think we can get away with
the use in the kick out
a lot more than I normally would.
00:13:29
It's also a good sounding snare mic.
00:13:31
So that's gonna add
some length to the snare.
00:13:36
But I'm not gonna bother
messing with it sonically,
it sounds fine it's just gonna
be adding to the other tracks.
00:13:42
So, here comes that kick out.
00:13:49
I'm assuming it's outside,
because it's got quite a bit of hi-hat.
00:13:58
But it's very well
aligned to the 'kick in'.
00:14:02
So, kudos to the tracking engineer
to make that work
because a lot of times you get a really
cool sound outside of the kick drum
but it just doesn't
work with the inside mic
because, obviously, you've got
time delay between the two.
00:14:15
The fundamental frequency is long enough
that it doesn't necessarily matter,
but another thing,
if you zoom in on lots of kick drum
waveforms from recordings
then you'll noticed
is the fundamental frequency of
the kick drum on the inside mic
is different than the fundamental
frequency on the outside mic.
00:14:30
Generally it's a higher frequency
but it's not an octave higher.
00:14:34
Drums are weird,
drums don't always have tuned harmonics
so the resonant frequency inside
the shell of the drum
isn't the same as the resonant frequency
of the size of the drum as
it propagates out into the room.
00:14:46
It doesn't really make a lot of sense to me
because I know just enough
about sound and physics
that I feel like it should
be the same but it isn't.
00:14:53
So, getting those to line up isn't
always something that you can do
but you just have to make sure that it
sounds better with both than without
and if while you're tracking
you find that you've got the
outside mic turned way down
they're probably not working together
and maybe just go fiddle
with the outside mic
and it doesn't necessarily have
to be a change in distance,
you can just move it alway
from the center of the head
more to the outside
and that will pick up
a different resonant frequency
coming off the head.
00:15:19
So, there are million ways
to fix problems
in terms of the correlation between
the inside and the outside
and in this case, an alternate kick mic,
but they should all be
explored while you're tracking
because it's very
difficult to do afterwards,
the only option you have afterwards
is a 180 polarity flip
or sliding the track
and then you're changing the time
relationship between the mics.
00:15:41
You'd think that it'd work great
to take that outside mic,
move it earlier so that it lines up
and then all of a sudden
everything is gonna be awesome,
it generally just sounds thick
and bad when you do that.
00:15:51
So, take the care while recording.
00:15:53
Like young Fab did.
00:16:17
OK, the top end on the kick drum
is a personal preference for me,
I like snare rattle,
I like the sound of the kit,
I'm not trying to get
things really separated.
00:16:25
So, I'm gonna go ahead
and leave that top end
and now we're gonna check out
a couple of the parallel processes.
00:16:34
Another thing is generally, when I work,
if there are a lot of plug-ins
in the session,
there are few on the keyboards,
I will leave those in the Inserts A-E slot
and then may will go after J.
00:16:46
Same with the Sends, existing Sends
I'll move over into the A to E slots
and after J will be me.
00:16:52
There aren't enough plug-ins
for me to worry about.
00:16:54
But, for the Sends,
I'm gonna hold down Shift+Option
and assign all my kick drums
to my 'Kick Snare Crush'
and let's see what that does.
00:17:04
This is an Aux right here,
with the dbx 160,
I've got both the UAD
and the Waves on here,
they're basically both very good models
of the same hardware
and they sound different.
00:17:17
So, let's start with the
Waves one, just for fun.
00:17:34
Obviously it adds a lot of level
but what it really does
is it changes the attacks
and it adds a lot of sustain
and movement
and once we get the snare in there as well
you'll see why I like the way this works
because the kick and snare
will really start to interact.
00:17:49
Alright, moving on to the snare drum.
00:17:51
One of the things is that the
snare is actually quite low
in the balance.
00:17:56
And I don't know if
that's on purpose or nor,
but it's how the rough was as well.
00:18:00
There's quite a bit of
snare in the kick mics.
00:18:02
So, if I listen to the kit as a whole,
the snare is not at bad level.
00:18:06
I'm not gonna worry to much about it
but I'm probably,
just because of the way
I like to hear drums,
I'm probably gonna bring
the snare a little bit forward
so I will use the snare
mics a little more.
00:18:18
One of the things about
the snare in this session is,
there is obviously a parallel process
going on with the snare
because there's just a
duplicate of the track.
00:18:26
I'm just gonna
make that inactive
and go with the
original snare recording
because if I do anything parallel
it will be on a Send and
it's already set up.
00:18:33
Let's check out our snare.
00:18:44
Lo-fi is gonna love this snare.
00:18:56
Who wouldn't want that
on their snare drum?
Alright.
00:19:01
Trusty plug-in.
00:19:34
Now I'm gonna add the dbx 160
and what you'll hear is,
some of the length
that was added to the kick drum
is now gonna go away.
00:19:41
This is the magic of shared
parallel compressors.
00:19:45
When the kick hits the transient
goes over the threshold
then it gets turned down
and because of the release time,
which isn't tweakable on dbx 160
but it's a little bit long,
it starts to come back up until
the next transient of the kick drum.
00:19:59
So the noise and the
sustain becomes very long
right up to the next kick drum.
00:20:04
By putting the snare in,
the snare usually hits
in-between the kick drum hits
and will take the compressor down again.
00:20:11
So now, the compressor actually
pumps with the kick and snare
as opposed to having a long kick
and a long snare
if you use 2 dbx 160.
00:20:19
So now, these are gonna
start to interact.
00:20:28
Whereas if you did it separately
it wouldn't sound hugely different
but what would happen is the snare would
start to get lost in the rumble of the kick
because it wouldn't be turning it down.
00:20:38
So this is just a way for the
kick and snare to mix each other.
00:20:41
And I like what they're doing inside
that 'Kick Snare Crush'.
00:20:45
Again, I've brighten up the snare,
I love how dead the snare is
and I wanna bring
out that kind of "bufffff"
that happens every time
it hits with the snares themselves.
00:20:54
The hat track is pretty loud
so I'm gonna check that out.
00:20:57
Normally,
I don't even bother
with the hat track
because there's so much
hi-hat bleed in the snare mic
and also in the overheads
that you don't need them
but obviously, with how quiet
this is played
the hi-hat is a big part of the drum part
and I wanna make sure that
this sounds OK
and isn't gonna mess with the snare.
00:21:20
OK, the next thing I'm gonna do
is actually listen to the overheads
and figure out if we're drummer perspective
or audience perspective
which of course assumes I know
which handed the drummer was.
00:21:29
I just wanna figure out
which side the hat was on
because I'm gonna pan that out
of the middle a bit
just to widen the kit.
00:21:38
It's on the right.
00:21:41
So, I'm gonna ahead and
pan the hat a little bit.
00:21:48
OK, now we're gonna listen
to our overheads.
00:21:54
I'm gonna go ahead and
bring those up to zero
because they are a little quiet
and may come back down again.
00:22:03
This is an instance where
just because I'm lazy
I'm actually gonna use an AUX.
00:22:08
It's a stereo thing, I don't wanna
have to group plug-ins
but I do wanna go ahead and put
some plug-ins on the overheads.
00:22:14
I'm gonna hold down Shift+Option
after selecting the two tracks
assign their outputs to a new track
which is a stereo Aux
and we will call it
'Overhead'.
00:22:26
And normally I would have set this up
so my default output is the mixbus.
00:22:31
But rather than go back into the I-O Setup
we will just leave it like that.
00:22:35
So now, that in one menu selection
has created an Aux, assigned the output
of the overheads to the Aux
and the Aux is now going
off into the mixbus.
00:22:45
So my audio path is exactly the same
in terms of sonics
but it's going through an Aux
so I can use a stereo plug-in here.
00:23:08
Just to be tricky,
I'm gonna go ahead and
EQ this in M/S mode.
00:23:12
There are lots of EQs that
do this and you might say:
"Why are you using a
plug-in with your name
at all the time?"
I'm using it because this is
what I actually use in sessions,
for a few reasons:
One, I love Neve style EQs,
they're very musical to me
when I'm adding frequencies,
these are the frequencies I know,
I'm a Neve kid, that's
what I grew up with.
00:23:30
There are API kids, there're Neve kids,
there're Calrec Kids,
there're Flickinger kids,
there're Pultec kids.
00:23:35
I'm a Neve kid.
00:23:36
These frequencies make sense,
they sound good, I know the 220
is the body on a snare,
I know 60 or 35 is the bottom
of the kick drum.
00:23:44
I know where the crack of the snare lives,
I know where the tone
on a guitar lives.
00:23:48
So this is what I use.
00:23:50
And this particular Neve plug-in
I spent months tweaking
so, why wouldn't I use it?
I use others sometimes because
they all have
different characters
but this is just one I know
and specially for drums,
it makes a lot of sense.
00:24:02
One of the features it's got,
that a lot of the newer Waves
stereo process plug-ins have,
is the ability to work in stereo
so I have a left and a right
or mid/side so I have center and sides.
00:24:15
So it just pops an M/S matrix
before and after.
00:24:18
So it splits the signal into the mono
elements and the stereo elements,
gives and EQ for each
of those separately
and then recombines into left and right
on the way out.
00:24:28
Something that would have
been pretty complicated
with actual hardware,
obviously super simple
to do inside a plug-in.
00:24:35
I like the low end in the overheads
so I'm gonna add a
bit but I don't wanna
that going out on to the sides.
00:24:41
So I'm just gonna go ahead in the middle
and put in some low shelf.
00:25:02
Then I'm gonna add some high
frequencies to the sides
and actually hi-pass the sides
because I don't want that low end
out on the side messing stuff up.
00:25:10
There are some mixes
that don't go like this
but my frequency
spectrum generally looks
to me in my head like this.
00:25:16
Where the low end is
pretty much in the middle,
unless there's a very
specific thing on the outside,
and then it gets wider and wider
as you go up in frequency
and to me that builds an exciting mix,
that kind of works in bad
listening environments
as well as good ones, and also
works in mono, generally,
though I don't really care a whole lot,
and will work on even very small speakers
without it being an issue.
00:25:39
Because the kick, the bass
and then the vocal
which is in the center
will sort of work everywhere
and depending on where you're listening
you either get the effect of the
stereo top end or you won't.
00:25:49
But if you do, it really helps,
but you're not gonna be missing
the gist of the song if you don't get it.
00:26:03
So that's basically the kit,
I'm gonna just turn the toms on,
they only happen once in the song
and Fab has very nicely
cleaned them up for me.
00:26:11
They happen in a couple of spots
but not much.
00:26:14
So, I'll get to those later on,
as a detail,
but basically, what will happen is,
if we have to work on them
they'll go down into their own AUX,
maybe get a tiny bit of processing
and a little bit of reverb,
or they may not,
they may work fine,
just in the context of the kit.
00:26:31
I'm not gonna worry
about them now.
00:26:32
The room mics are off,
I'm gonna leave them off.
00:26:34
If later on I feel like the
kit isn't roomy enough
I'll come back to this
but everything I do with
the parallel processing
brings up the kind of
room feel of the kit
so I almost never have to go
use room mics
that weren't being used in the rough mix,
which is the case here.
00:26:49
Now the last thing we're gonna do
is select all of my drum tracks
but not these overhead tracks
because they go to this AUX.
00:26:58
And again, using Shift+Option,
you notice I left the
'Kick Snare Crush' on 'Send I',
that's because I knew I wanted
the last send for my Drum Crush.
00:27:10
So, my stereo 'Drum Crush'
I've got one called 'Drum Crush'
but I don't use that
very much anymore.
00:27:15
I've been using this
Fatso quite a bit.
00:27:17
Because I like it.
00:27:18
And that comes down here
to a track called Fatso.
00:27:22
And there is a Master Fader
on the Bus called Fatso.
00:27:27
What happens is, I have an internal Bus
in the Pro Tools mixer named Fatso.
00:27:31
It could be named Bus 167-168,
it doesn't matter, it's just
an internal stereo Bus.
00:27:37
I have a Send that's post fader
and it's at zero
and it follows the panning
of all of the individual tracks.
00:27:44
So, it's basically just
taking a copy of the drums
as they are going into the mixbus
and throws them into this
stereo bus called Fatso.
00:27:52
That works it's way through the mixer
comes down here and goes to the
input of this Aux fader,
where it says Fatso,
goes to whatever
processing is on this Aux
and out to the mixbus
so I can hear it.
00:28:04
So, this a parallel process.
00:28:07
All I have on here is the
UAD Fatso plug-in.
00:28:10
And this started life in my template
because I was mixing a song
and thought:
"Hey, what did I do in '99 problems'
for that crazy low end in the chorus?"
This is the only piece
of outboard gear I had
other an 1176 on the vocals.
00:28:24
So, I thought: "Well, let me try that."
And I spent 45 minutes tweaking it,
got some settings, and now this lives
in my template
and use it quite a bit.
00:28:31
So, like a lot of the parallel
processes in my template
there's an Aux that has
a named Bus going in.
00:28:36
But this one also has a
Master fader attached.
00:28:39
Now a Master fader in Pro Tools
is a very special animal.
00:28:42
It ties into basically what
you could think of as a knob
on the amplifier in the Pro Tools mixer
that's always there but it's not
hooked up to anything
until you create a Master fader.
00:28:53
What this allows me to do
is to change the level
on the stereo Bus called Fatso.
00:28:58
So what that means is any change
I make here on this master
is 'pre' the actual Aux fader.
00:29:06
It turns it down before
it gets to the Aux fader
which means it's turning down
before it gets to the plug-ins.
00:29:13
So this Master
is a very convenient place
for me to change how much of this
drum balance gets into the Fatso
without me having to
open up the plug-in,
make sure that my controls are linked
and mess with the input control.
00:29:27
I have the input control at some
arbitrary medium value
which generally works.
00:29:31
That I've got this Master fader
at an arbitrary value, bringing it down
around 6 dB because that usually works.
00:29:38
Then the return of the Fatso,
which is after the plug-in,
is blended in to the Mix,
down around 6 dB.
00:29:45
This is what generally works
but now I've got spots out here
where I don't have to
go to the mixer page,
I don't have to open up a plug-in
and I can affect both the input
and the output of the Fatso
and the blend with the uncompressed drums
all from the screen, while listening
without having to
think about it.
00:30:03
So that's what we're gonna do now.
00:30:21
You'll see that Fatso is not
actually compressing at all
but I'm hitting the 'Warmth' circuit
and the 'Transformer' circuit.
00:30:30
So, this is as much about harmonic
distortion as it is about compression.
00:30:34
There are lots of mixes though
where that really does start to compress.
00:30:38
So, don't be fooled,
but a lot of my
parallel compressors
aren't compressing a whole lot
because it's what it sounds like
when you combine it back in,
it's not what it sounds
like on its own.
00:30:48
It's irrelevant what it sounds like
on its own actually.
00:30:51
So, when you start creating your
own parallel compression chains
you really have to listen
to how it blends in.
00:30:56
You can listen to the
compressor on its own
just to get a starting point
Like: "Ah, I feel like I want
this thing to be crushed."
But then when you start blending it in
it might not sound as crushed
until you back it off.
00:31:07
So, a lot of my parallel compressors
are at low ratios
and at high thresholds.
00:31:13
And it's just because that's
what sounds good to me.
00:31:15
Basically, I'm building up a ton of level
and changing the character
but I'm not completely destroying it.
00:31:22
That's the Fatso, there's only
one other chain I wanna listen to.
00:31:25
We probably will not use it on this mix
and this is a 'Drums Dirt' chain.
00:31:30
This drums are very clean,
they're very well recorded
and I have a feeling that's
supposed to stay that way
but I wanna get an idea
of what it's gonna sound
like if it gets distorted
so I can keep that in
my head for later on.
00:31:40
So I'm gonna go ahead and play the chorus
and then I'm gonna select the same tracks
that are going to the Fatso
and assign them to 'Drums Dirt'
and I know that 'Send H' is opened.
00:31:54
So what this chain does is make
the drums sound like this.
00:32:05
So it's pretty dirty and now I'm gonna
turn it all the way down
and start blending it in and
then as I mute and unmute
you'll hear that it just adds a
little bit of weight to the drum-kit.
00:32:16
I'm probably not gonna use it
except possibly in the chorus.
00:32:20
In that very brief snippet
that I listened to before
I noticed that when we got to the chorus,
not a whole lot happens,
there are some keyboard parts that come in
and in terms of songwriting
it's absolutely a chorus
but sonically not a lot changes
so, this is something I'll keep
in my back pocket
to possibly turn on in the choruses.
00:32:55
It's a little bit of ringiness,
a little bit of length,
and one thing that I don't normally do
is I'm gonna actually turn down
the Send from the kick drum a little bit
because I like what it's doing
to the snare and the overheads
more than the kick drum.
00:33:09
So by just individually
going to these Sends.
00:33:13
Getting rid of a little
bit of that ultra low end.
00:33:25
I like it,
I'm gonna leave it muted for now,
to see if I can build the mix without,
I may come back and use it all the time,
I may not use it ever,
or I might bring it in and out.
00:33:34
Now, as promised, the next thing
I'm gonna do is go down to my 2-Bus chain
because right now, first of all,
I've got overs, like crazy,
coming out of Pro Tools
because I have nothing on the Bus
and I'm loud.
00:33:46
But also because like
I explained before,
this is the way my console sounds.
00:33:49
So, I'm gonna very quickly
just turn them all on
and tell you what they are
and that's kind of where my
starting point will be for mixing.
00:33:57
I start off with the compressor.
00:34:00
This is basically
because when I mixed
on my Neve consoles
I had a pair of 2264 in
the middle of the console
which are the halves of
this compressor circuit,
I do not use the Limiter,
I'm generally on the
fastest release time,
the auto release times
are very nice on this
but they are very different.
00:34:20
The 100 ms release time
has a very distinct flavor to it.
00:34:26
It really changes the feel
of what goes through it and
it's just something I like.
00:34:31
You'll also notice it's 1.5:1,
if we ever have more than
4 dB of compression on this
than the mix is way to loud
and I can adjust that later.
00:34:40
Then, as of today, on the chain,
we've got an UAD Fairchild.
00:34:47
I've also used the Puigchild
in the past for this.
00:34:50
This is just for color,
both the Puigchild and this UAD Fairchild
are abundant with
flavor and color.
00:34:59
I don't actually like the
compression on Fairchilds
unless you're doing
something very specific
with a very long release time,
like, on piano, long notes on pianos,
on cymbals where it sort
of turns them backwards.
00:35:09
That's a great effect.
00:35:10
I hate it as a compressor,
it's very slow,
you can never get the release
times the way you want it.
00:35:16
If you turn the threshold
all the way down,
counter-intuitively,
that takes out all of the compression
because this is actually a gain circuit
on the way to the detector.
00:35:25
It doesn't change the
amount of level you hear,
it changes the amount of
level the compressor hears
to decide how much to compress.
00:35:31
That's all the way down
so it doesn't compress.
00:35:33
I'm actually mixing it only 50% wet
because it's got so much color on
the way through, it's too much.
00:35:38
And that's basically it,
with no compression
and the rest of these controls
don't actually matter.
00:35:43
Next in the chain is
the braiworx BX1 and the BX2 combined,
this is the V2 I think they call it,
the digital V2.
00:35:53
Basically it's another M-S EQ.
00:35:56
I've got a tiny bit of high-shelf
but the main thing
we're using this for
is the stereo width control,
I love the stereo width,
and there are lot's of plug-ins that do it,
the Waves Center and the
Waves S1 do it in very different ways,
which are both awesome,
the Air stereo width
plug-in is great,
the problem with stereo width
is it's playing with the phase,
and what tends to happen is you can
build up distortion in the low mids.
00:36:20
I don't know what the correlation is
and why that happens
but this stereo width control
seems to be
the best at not completely
screwing up the low-mids.
00:36:30
The other thing is,
when I have it on from the beginning,
like I'm gonna have it on now,
it keeps me from doing
things in the low-mids
that then won't be
able to stand up later
when I find out how
wide the mix could go.
00:36:41
If I mix into it then I make my
decisions based on what's going on.
00:36:44
Next,
Pultec.
00:36:47
So this is the Puigtec,
I've also used the UAD.
00:36:50
Very broad strokes EQ,
when I mixed on the console
I always used a pair of Lang EQs
which are Pultec styles.
00:36:57
So it's a passive EQ with a tube amp
make-up gain.
00:37:02
The Lang is exactly the same
passive EQ topology
and it's laid out very much the same.
00:37:07
But it has solid state amplifiers
and for me I actually
like that better,
I find that tube amps,
when you're running tons
of signal through them,
they get a little messy,
they really don't follow everything around
and the low-end can start
to wobble a little bit
if that makes any sense.
00:37:24
Whereas the solid state
amplifier on the Langs
was a little bit tighter
and I liked that my kick drum
stayed tight going through
when adding a ton of low frequency.
00:37:34
No one has modeled the Langs yet
so until them I go back and
forth between these two Pultecs,
we'll just stick with
this one for now
so I'm adding some 100 Hz,
I'm adding some 10 kHz,
and it's wide enough that it
acts like a shelf, really.
00:37:47
Sometimes I move up to 12 kHz
but only if there's something
harsh happening at 10 kHz.
00:37:52
And this is some very broad happy face EQ,
I like mixes to have lots of low-end
and lots of top-end,
most people don't like lots
and lots of mid-range
and this is a way for me to do it
without individually EQing
tons and tons of tracks
and that's what I like to do,
you'll see as we get into the guitars
and the keyboards,
I will only EQ to bring out tone
but I don't wanna have to go through
and add top-end to everything
because now the
drums are bright,
"Oh!" Since the drums are bright
the guitars have to be brighter,
and now the keyboards
have to be brighter,
the Pultec takes care of that for me.
00:38:24
Then last in the chain, is a limiter,
because you have to keep
the red lights off.
00:38:28
At the moment I'm loving
the Oxford Limiter.
00:38:31
It is basically just their peak limiter
but then it has the Inflator built-in.
00:38:37
Just basically just one fader
control version of it
with the curve control, which I love.
00:38:42
I'll generally start with slowest
attack, fastest release,
so it is the least amount
of limiting you can get.
00:38:49
The 'Auto Gain' is something
you should have in
if you're a proper engineer
because it will do auto input gain
to the circuit
so that you're not killing everything,
it just sounds worst to me.
00:39:00
I like blasting levels,
so I turn 'Auto Gain' off
but I turn 'Safe Mode' on because
that way my red lights don't come on.
00:39:07
And the output level
is set at -0.03 dB,
because that is the threshold
at which the red lights turn on.
00:39:16
So, no red lights,
makes me look like I know what I'm doing.
00:39:19
And that's it.
00:39:22
Dither, I'm fine with some
dither down to 24 bit.
00:39:25
Lately I've been printing my mixes,
when it's time to go to mastering, 32 bit
because there's guys
mastering lots of my stuff,
Eric Boulanger is amazing,
who loves what he can do
with the 32 bit mix.
00:39:37
That's fine,
in that case I turn my dither off,
bounce it at 32 bit.
00:39:42
Whenever I'm bouncing stuff
for the band to listen to though
I just bounce it internally
in the session at 24 bit,
export a 44 kHz 16 bit wave file,
send it to the band and that's fine.
00:39:52
There's really nothing else to know.
00:39:54
I can mess with my input gain here
if I have to,
the way this chain is set up
and the way I have a master,
here's that Master fader again,
on the Mixbus Aux, which is before
all of these plug-ins,
I am basically setting the level
going into my Mixbus
chain by ears
and also by looking at the amount
of gain reduction
on the 33609.
00:40:17
If I'm sitting around 4 or if I'm higher
this has to come down.
00:40:22
Once I've done that,
the gain structure within that chain
has been tweaked over the
10 months I've been using it,
basically, or longer.
00:40:30
So that it just works.
00:40:32
So I generally don't have
to come down here
and mess with the individual
controls on these plug-ins
because once the right amount
of level is going though them
they all just do the job
they're supposed to do.
00:40:41
This Mixbus Master is at -0.2
because there are a couple of other
limiters here that I sometimes use.
00:40:47
If we get into them
then I'll talk about it more
but one of them
has a soft clip but it doesn't have
a ceiling control
so it soft clips at zero
which puts the red lights on,
which I don't like.
00:40:59
That's why that's at 0.2
so I don't forget.
00:41:01
I'm gonna ahead and put it up at zero.
00:41:02
So now when I hit play,
I'm already up at 4 dB of compression,
it's way too much
so my drums are already really loud,
I'm gonna bring them down
a little bit.
00:41:31
And really quickly, and I'm only gonna
do this once kids...
00:41:50
So really quickly,
before I move on from the drums,
I'm just gonna sort of confirm
that I like it.
00:41:54
The kick drum is a little bit blown up so,
like I said earlier,
I'm gonna get rid of a little bit
of this low-end.
00:42:00
I'm gonna turn it down a little bit
going into the 'Kick Snare Crush',
I'm going to take the kick out
mic out of the 'Kick Snare Crush'
because that's where a lot
of the low-end is.
00:42:12
And basically,
if I mute the 'Kick Snare Crush',
And I mute the Fatso,
you remember the 'Drums Dirt'
is already muted,
then all I need to do is
take off this plug-ins
and we're back to the drum-kit
as it was delivered.
00:42:36
Then here, I'll just put all
my insert processing back on.
00:42:40
So this is basically still just the
microphones balance
but with my 'Lo-fi 1073' Chain.
00:42:52
Just brighter EQed,
sounds a little bit like a mix.
00:42:55
And now I'm gonna turn the
'Drum Crush' and the Fatso back on.
00:43:05
OK, I like it.
00:43:06
Not so sure about the kick drum yet
but let's hear it in context
because from what I remember,
the bass is playing a very sparse part
other than the chorus where the
keyboard bass is sustaining
so it could be that there is enough room
for the drums to be that big.
00:00:00
I'm gonna go through
so I don't have to solo everything
I'm just gonna start muting
the groups I don't wanna hear
which with my VCA's is very quick.
00:00:09
And now it's time to
check out the bass on its own
very quickly and then
we'll check it out with the drums.
00:00:29
You can find out almost immediately
that this top bass amp track
is the sound. If I take that out...
00:00:46
What I'm gonna do is take
advantage of that fact
and just build a little
something out of the DI
that I may or may not use.
00:00:53
I'm gonna turn up the DI,
solo it up.
00:00:57
And I'm gonna put a Sansamp on it.
00:01:00
Because Sansamps are awesome.
00:01:12
Just to give it a little more girth,
a little more like and amp track.
00:01:16
The other thing you may have noticed
is now, all of a sudden,
it takes a while to get
through that processing chain
on the 2-Mix.
00:01:24
So, I turn a knob and I have
to wait a second to hear it,
that's one of the drags of mixing with
this complicated 2-Bus chain,
so, just to counteract that
I'm gonna see if I can
get away with a shorter
buffer size.
00:01:37
If I get errors I'll come
back and make it bigger
but that is a quick way I now halved
the delay through that chain.
00:01:49
Obviously a ton of level but it's
also got a little more sustain,
a little more air.
00:01:54
So, let's hear it in context.
00:02:05
Nice.
00:02:06
You may say:
"How can I listen to this out
of context and know I need to do it?"
I know I need to do it
because I always need to do it
because I've always
made the drums too big.
00:02:14
That's how I know.
00:02:15
It's just from experience.
00:02:17
I know it's good to have
something like this laying around
and once I get the track built,
if the bass doesn't feel right,
in my head I know, "Hey, you build
that Sansamp track off the DI."
So that's where you should go check,
get rid of that and see
if the original bass tone
is a better fit for the song.
00:02:33
I'm changing the tone enough
that I feel that I am
gonna need it.
00:02:36
So I'm pretty sure that's
gonna stick around.
00:02:38
OK, now our friend,
the Juno Bass.
00:02:42
Let's what's that's all about.
00:02:50
Three things.
00:02:51
It sustains,
it doesn't have a
huge amount of low-end
and it's panned off to the left.
00:02:55
So, I'm going to assume
that it is counter
balancing a keyboard
that is on the right.
00:03:01
I'm gonna leave the
panning alone as is.
00:03:04
All I'm gonna do right now is,
I really like the growl.
00:03:07
So, I'm gonna add some mid-range EQ
with the Helios.
00:03:13
This is a great EQ for mid-range,
The low-end is very cool as well
and we can listen to it.
00:03:18
When you just pop the circuit in
you hear a low-end bump.
00:03:21
Even without touching the gain
but this mid-range
is just a very cool flavor of mid-range EQ.
00:03:28
I don't know exactly what it is,
I don't if it's a variable Q,
like on the API 560
where the more you boost
the tighter the Q gets.
00:03:35
Or whether is just got
some resonance in it
that other things don't have
but I just like the way it sounds.
00:03:55
Except in this case I don't
like the way it sounds.
00:03:57
So let's try a 560.
00:04:18
It's the growl that refuses to be EQed
so we're not gonna EQ it
and we're just gonna Lo-fi instead.
00:04:30
So until we know how that's
working with the keyboards
I'm just gonna leave it alone
because it's apparently the track that
I don't understand yet.
00:04:37
And that's fun.
00:04:38
So now, let's listen to some
drums and bass
and just make sure they
live in the same world.
00:05:03
OK,
I'm gonna try the same Helios
on the bass amp track and see if get
a little more of that finger noise
because it's really cool,
it's a really well recorded bass
and there's a lot of really nice present
mid-range to it,
I just wanna enhance that a little bit.
00:05:55
So now it's time to move on
to what I like to call
everything else.
00:06:00
Which, in this case is
guitars, keys and vocals.
00:06:03
I'm saving the vocals for last.
00:06:05
Just because I can.
00:06:07
So, looking at the guitars
I always like to get a
sense of why are there
multiple guitars and
what are they doing.
00:06:14
So it looks as though that
there's basically the idea
of a single guitar player
on this song.
00:06:21
But there are Intro parts,
Verse parts and Chorus parts.
00:06:25
Probably the sound changes,
things like that,
now the one thing I'm noticing though
is that the Intro and Verse parts
are panned right in the center
and then the Chorus part
is panned off to left.
00:06:35
I'm assuming
that's to do with the way
the arrangement is built
with the guitars and keyboards.
00:06:42
So, for just a second I'm actually gonna
listen to the guitars and keys together
and just spot check them in
a few different sections
because my personal initial
response to this would be,
I like the guitar player
to stay in the same place
so I would move those Verse
and Intro guitars off to the left
a little bit but I don't know
if that works.
00:07:04
So I'm just gonna
have a quick listen
to how everything is working together.
00:07:44
The Chorus arrangement
is complicated in that
there are a lot of elements
and it seems to be very well balanced
so I don't really wanna mess with that.
00:07:54
The piano is sort of ghosting the guitar
in the Verses or in the Intro
and there's just a little
Pad in the B sections.
00:08:02
In the first half of each verse
all you have is that guitar
in the first Verse and then you've
got a little bit of keyboard
coming in
trailing over from
the Chorus over here
on this Organ part.
00:08:14
But basically you just got the guitar.
00:08:16
So, having it in the center makes sense.
00:08:19
I'm not averse to having that guitar
live a little bit
out of the center, it will leave
a little more room for the vocal.
00:08:25
I'm gonna check out these guitars,
see what all of the individual tracks are,
see if I'm gonna pan them
all over a little bit
as a group or whether I'm gonna leave
some in the middle
because this Chorus
guitar, you will notice,
the amp track is panned hard left.
00:08:38
And there's a second track
left to right in the middle
which is gonna give it
some apparent
position between center and left
depending on the balance
of those two tracks.
00:08:48
And it looks as though it's actually
gonna be balanced towards the center
because this bottom
track is up quite a bit.
00:08:53
And they are basically the same level.
00:08:55
So I'm gonna see
if I can move these guitars
out of the center a little bit.
00:09:12
And then this guitar,
I think it's on separate tracks
just because it overlaps
when it was being recorded
because the part is the same,
the sound is the same.
00:09:20
I'm just gonna go ahead
and pan it the same.
00:09:23
I don't think there's any reason not to.
00:09:26
Though I may find out that I'm wrong
and find out why
I shouldn't do that later on.
00:09:42
Now one thing this does immediately
is the piano sticks out a lot more.
00:09:47
The piano is very much just ghosting
the guitar when it's in the middle.
00:09:50
So, I'll actually,
let me zero out the pan
and you can hear that.
00:10:03
It acts sort of like reverb for the guitar
and I have just used
undo three times
to move the pan back
over to the left.
00:10:19
Which is very different
but I have an idea.
00:10:22
This is a stereo piano.
00:10:29
And because the part is played
in one of the upper registers
it's actually leaning to
the right a little bit.
00:10:34
I'm gonna reverse
the pan on the piano
so it stays stereo but now
it's weighted a little bit to the left
with the guitar and let's just see
if that helps them blend back together.
00:10:50
Et Voilà! It worked, it might
have not worked at all
in which case I would have
to think very seriously
about moving that
guitar out of the center
because the guitar piano
relationship is beautiful.
00:10:59
And if I mess that up
then the piano part
sticks out to the point
where it has to be a complete
part and work on it's own
and I don't think that's where
the arrangement was built.
00:11:09
It's like building a reverb
for the guitar out of the piano
And I love the way that was working.
00:11:15
One thing I'm gonna do right now
is I'm gonna take all of
the keyboards and the piano...
00:11:21
and...
00:11:22
guitars.
00:11:23
Select all of these
and now I know Send J is
opened on all of these tracks,
so using Shift + Option again
I'm gonna assign all of these
to something called the 'Rear Bus'.
00:11:33
The 'Rear Bus' is a relic
naming wise from my console.
00:11:40
The Neve console is a quad mix-bus
and I explained it many time in
other mixing videos
so I'm not gonna go into too much
but basically there was a front
bus, which is the stereo bus
and that's what you listen to
out of the speakers.
00:11:52
And then it was built to mix in quad
so there's a Rear Bus
for two speakers sitting behind you.
00:11:56
I'm not mixing in quad
but what it gave me
was a stereo Bus that's
very easy to access,
it would be an exact copy of what
was being sent to the speakers
on any instrument that I engage those
busses in.
00:12:09
And then I can process that
Bus with an Stereo compressor
and blend it back into the mix
and I had a very quick way
to add tons of instruments
to a stereo compressor
being used parallel
that would exactly mimic the panning
and the level
that I had going in my actual balance
I was listening to on the speakers.
00:12:29
If tried to do it with sends I would
have to look and match the panning,
if I use multitrack busses
there's a separate pan
circuit for multitrack busses.
00:12:37
So...
00:12:38
It's basically this idea of a pan
defaulting to
following the main pan.
00:12:43
And the level defaulting
to zero but on a console.
00:12:47
So I called it the 'Rear Bus'
because that's what it was
and it was always a Bus
that had everything except
Drums and Bass in it.
00:12:54
Period.
00:12:55
So, I'm gonna ahead and
assign this to the Rear Bus
and if we come down and look
the 'Rear Bus' is an Aux down here.
00:13:02
And it has exactly one plug-in on it.
00:13:04
It is an UAD 1176.
00:13:07
In hardware I used blackface 1176s,
I've got a pair of very old crusty ones.
00:13:12
This is just the plug-in that
sounded the most like that.
00:13:15
This is one of the plug-in chains
that is trying to mimic the hardware
that I used to use on the console
because it just works so well.
00:13:22
It's actually the ratio of 2:1,
this the only 1176 that has a ratio of 2:1,
very slow attack, sort of a medium release.
00:13:32
A decent amount of gain going in
but tons of gain coming out.
00:13:35
It's gonna feel as though
things are just getting louder
but it isn't just gain.
00:13:39
Even if this needle isn't deflecting,
things start to interact
and the guitar will mix the
piano, will mix the organ,
will mix the piano, will mix the guitar.
00:13:47
And this is the sort of circular fact
that whenever something is loud
in these compressors it turns
everything down
and it just helps there get
a lot of life and
movement in the mix
without me having to do anything.
00:14:01
The other important part about this chain,
as with hardware 1176s,
this is a multi-mono setup,
that means there's a left 1176
and a right 1176.
00:14:12
This button here connects the controls
so if I change the output control
on the left and then go look on the right
the right knob will have moved as well
but that's like having two pieces
of hardware
and putting a rubber
band on the two knobs
so when you turn on
it moves the other.
00:14:27
The audio circuit is completely independent
so I've two mono compressors,
a left and a right.
00:14:32
So if something loud happens on the left,
like with that guitar I've moved,
it will turn the piano down a little bit
because that's also on the left.
00:14:40
But it won't touch the keyboards
that are on the right.
00:14:43
And to me that's a very
important distinction to make.
00:14:46
I don't want the whole mix to pump
because there's something
loud on the left.
00:14:50
I want the left side to interact
and the right to interact
and obviously something
that's in the center
will be in both compressors
and so it will interact with
everything in the mix.
00:14:58
So, it's a dual mono compressor,
very little compression
and it gets everything
except the drums and bass.
00:15:06
We've got the keyboards
soloed up along with the guitars,
I'm gonna go to the Chorus
and I'll just mute it and
you'll hear what happens.
00:15:12
It's kind of magic.
00:15:26
Obviously there's a
little level drop.
00:15:28
But I think specially you
can hear in the attack of the guitar,
everything just clears out,
every time he strums that guitar,
and it just makes
everything much more lively.
00:15:40
It keeps me from having to EQ,
it keeps me to have to
compress individually,
everything interacts and mixes itself,
and I think will find when I drop this
stuff in with the drums and bass,
we're gonna be very close
because the balance was
great in the rough mix,
I've made the drums a lot louder,
I've made the bass a lot louder,
the Rear Mix makes this a lot louder
but rather than just having a louder
version of the rough mix
we're gonna have this crazy
interacting version of the mix.
00:16:04
And all I've done is assign a Send.
00:16:07
Let's prove that point.
00:16:35
Now very quickly I'm gonna
take out the Rear Bus,
so that's on all of the guitars and
all of the keyboards,
I'm gonna mute my DI that
I put the Sansamp on,
because that's what brought up
the level on the bass
and then I'll mute the Fatso and
the 'Kick Snare Crush'.
00:16:50
So, I still have some individual
plug-ins on drum tracks
but basically that's what I was doing.
00:17:07
And back in with everything.
00:17:09
Now, that's a really nice natural sound
and I may be going passed it.
00:17:12
I might have too
much going on here.
00:17:30
Or I might not.
00:17:32
There's always gonna be something lost
once you start compressing,
whether it's parallel,
or directly on an insert,
and it's that natural open sound,
things will start to take up more room
and the frequencies will start
to build up in certain places.
00:17:46
This is just part of mixing,
if you go back and listen to old
Steely Dan records and
Fletwood Mac records
there's not a whole
lot of compression,
there's a lot of limiting actually
on those mixes,
to tie everything together
but the individual elements
are left practically
microphone, mic pre through a
pan pot and that's your mix.
00:18:07
With some very beautiful placement
of the microphone
and choices and stuff along the way.
00:18:12
There's not a huge amount of processing.
00:18:14
That's a great sound
but if I go back and listen to
those records
and try and make a record
sound like that now
I think it feels a little out of place.
00:18:23
Having that record exist then
worked within that ecosystem
and I feel as though
my job as a mixer is to make
things sound like a record
and that is a record in the
context of what's going on now.
00:18:34
So, I'm loose a little bit of that
natural air around each instrument
but I'm gaining a lot of energy
which is what modern records have,
they have a lot of energy.
00:18:45
Not just in the bad hyped
loudness war way
but just in a things are louder
and there's a lot more
compression going on.
00:18:55
I'm kind of OK with what's happening here.
00:19:25
OK, a very interesting thing has happened.
00:19:27
I'm gonna play you the
transition into the Chorus
of the rough mix.
00:19:47
OK, obviously the vocals are
very loud and dry
which on rough mix they usually are.
00:19:51
They are one of the last things
to be recorded so they are loud.
00:19:53
You don't put a lot of
effects on the rough mix
because it's a rough mix as opposed
to a 'pre-mix'
or whatever you'd call
a more complicated mix.
00:20:01
But if you listen back into the track
we get to the chorus and we
add a lot of elements which
the arrangement is impeccable
in terms of adding elements
and it gets wider with the stereo
and that's part of that guitar
being in the center, that's cool.
00:20:16
But it doesn't really lift a whole lot,
it gets there but there's still work to do.
00:20:20
I have done nothing to
the guitars and keyboards
except pan the verse guitar
a little to the left
so I haven't touched the chorus guitar.
00:20:28
And I've put them in the Rear Bus
and now I feel like I get to the chorus and
all of a sudden the energy really picks up.
00:20:34
So what we're doing is proving that
the arrangement is awesome
and that part selection and
sound selection is great.
00:20:41
And that left alone,
it will work.
00:20:44
I don't have to go through and EQ
and do a bunch of
rides to have it work.
00:21:12
So where I would say to actually
really try and hone in and listen
if you're not hearing the
difference,
because it's a little tough
with the vocals,
right at the downbeat of the Chorus
you get that first two note... 'Don Din'
on the keyboards, which is a great lift.
00:21:26
And then you've got the guitar chunk
that cuts it off so it gets
'Don Din, chhk'
In the rough mix it's...
00:21:35
It sort of the same energy as the verse
whereas now, all of the sudden,
because the guitar cuts off the keyboard,
the guitar sounds like it's really leaning
forward to cut it off
so just gonna play that spot one more time.
00:21:48
That's what I'm hearing.
00:21:49
It's always trying to put
stuff into words is difficult
but that's a very specific area
where I think it feels
totally different now.
00:22:11
So the sustain of the keyboard doesn't
change at all when the guitar comes
which is fine,
there's nothing wrong with that but,
that keyboard dipping a little bit
when the snare and the guitar happen
is what makes that Chorus
have more motion than the verse
which is important.
00:22:28
I'm also realizing that the Chorus guitar
has to come up a little bit.
00:22:31
So I'm gonna ahead, and using,
I believe this was actually cut to a click
so I'm just gonna go and very rough
Grid mode here,
and just select
the Chorus,
on the Guitar
and turn it up...
00:22:49
2 dB.
00:22:50
And let's assume that all Choruses
need to have that happen,
and the bridge and the Chorus out.
00:23:01
One of the reasons I'm
using clip gain here
to make this change,
rather than automation,
is that, first of all, with clip gain
it changes the look of the waveform
so I see the guitar getting louder,
which is good,
because I remember I've done that
and it's a change. The other thing is,
it means that if overall,
the guitar is too loud,
I can still just grab the fader and move it
because as soon as you add
an automation break point
you now have to change the automation
playlist.
00:23:28
So if I wanna move it all up or down
I either have to go into 'Trim Mode'
or I have to select all of it
and use the Trim Tool
and move it up and down.
00:23:35
This way if I want the guitar louder
I just move the fader up
and I've just made it 0.7 dB louder
and it's almost like using clip gain
as a second layer of automation.
00:23:45
One of the things that
you have to remember is,
clip gain, because it's actually working on
the recorded waveform, so to speak,
is pre all of your processing.
00:23:55
Your fader moves are post
all of you processing.
00:23:59
The way I'm using my parallel
processing with the Rear Bus,
that is post that fader
which means is post everything
so when I turn up clip gain
it affects everything.
00:24:10
You'll also notice, I haven't put
any inserts on anything.
00:24:14
If I do,
they're gone be EQs,
or color or something like that,
I'm probably not gonna put
a bunch of dynamics plug-ins
on individual tracks,
it's just not the way I work.
00:24:25
So to me it doesn't matter whether
it's pre or post,
pre or post gain on an EQ
is absolutely irrelevant
until you get the point where
you're clipping the EQ itself.
00:24:34
So, for me clip gain is a
great to keep the faders
where I can just move them
to do broad stroke balance changes
and it also gives me visual feedback
and I know in a session that doesn't have
a lot of clip gain
which changes were mine and which
were already there when I got it.
00:24:50
So, there're lots of
reasons to use clip gain
but those are my reasons and only thing
you've got to keep in mind
is that it will be pre
any of your inserts whereas
a fader move will not.
00:25:02
So there you go.
00:25:03
OK, so now that I've
turned that guitar up
let's just go ahead and
listen to the Chorus.
00:25:27
I like it.
00:25:28
I'm gonna keep it around,
another thing that I'm gonna try right now
is, if you remember, I talked about
this 'Drums Dirt'.
00:25:34
And I like what it did but it really
sort of filled up
the drum-kit
and I don't wanna do that
through the whole song
but I'm gonna try bringing that in
the Chorus and see what happens.
00:25:43
So, the easiest way to do that...
00:25:45
Something I actually hate using
in Pro Tools is mute automation
because I wanna see everything
that I'm hearing, period.
00:25:52
So, if I'm on an Audio Track
I will mute the region,
that way I know there's audio there
but I'm not gonna be hearing it.
00:25:59
That's not possible on an Aux
so I can either mute all of the Sends
or I can mute the Return,
it is much quicker to mute the Return.
00:26:09
A shortcut in Pro Tools is if
you hold down Control + Command,
and click on any control in Pro Tools,
whether it's inside of a plug-in
or it's on the mixer plates that are here,
or over here,
if it is automatable,
when you click on it
it will switch the display
to that automation.
00:26:29
So now I'm looking at the mute automation.
00:26:31
It's a very quick way to see that
and what I'll also do,
because on and Aux fader
I don't care about the volume
it's usually pretty much staying still,
is I will leave
this Aux fader showing the mute automation
and that way I know,
as soon as I glance at the track
there's some automation
on this track.
00:26:49
"What's it doing? Oh, it's the 'Drums Dirt',
it's coming in the Chorus." Easy!
So, again, in Grid Mode,
which could be a mistake,
I'm just gonna go ahead
and unmute
and then move over here
to the next Chorus
and do the same thing,
but it can go all over the end.
00:27:08
And now, let's hear going into the Chorus.
00:27:30
I'm a bar early
but I like what's doing
so I'm just gonna
go into nudge mode,
nudge by a bar,
select that mute automation
and move it later.
00:27:48
OK, I'm just gonna make sure
I've got my out.
00:27:52
No.
00:28:30
And now,
because it's mute automation
I can play with the level.
00:28:34
So can I can come here
and listen to the Chorus
and change that level,
I can go back any time
my mute automation will still be there.
00:28:50
Now,
this is obviously changing
the character of the song
and I just decided
I'm gonna make this
sound like a record.
00:28:58
We're really mixing this,
as compared to the rough mix that was sent.
00:29:02
I would have a conversation with
the artist and producer beforehand
to get and idea of how far they
would want me to go,
this sort of thing,
and it wouldn't be specific like:
"Hey, how much do I distort
the drums in the Choruses?"
but just, the rough mixes are very dry
and kind of old-school
and how of that
do you wanna keep
and how much do you really wanna
to sound like a produced record?
And I don't mean produced record
in terms of adding a bunch of keyboards
and reverb all over everything
but just sort of
processed as opposed to raw tracks,
and that's just creative
decision you make.
00:29:34
Because,
well, I'm the one on camera
I'm deciding that we're
just gonna mix a little more
because otherwise I would be doing less.
00:29:42
So, at this point I think we're almost
ready to listen do the vocal.
00:29:45
What I wanna do though is just
get the percussion in
and check out the bridge really quickly
to make sure I'm not missing anything
with the keyboards and the guitars.
00:30:06
Alright,
I'm gonna take our shakers,
which are labeled 'Banana 1' and
'Banana 2'.
00:30:12
And I'm going to assign them
to the percussion Aux.
00:30:17
So that's just gonna
route them through here.
00:30:19
And that just has a sent to the Aphex.
00:30:21
I know I want it
and I could have just added
that Send to all of the tracks
but I don't know how much I want.
00:30:27
This gives me one fader.
00:30:28
I am very lazy,
if I can do it in one place,
I will do it in one place.
00:30:33
It just makes life much easier.
00:30:51
So what the Aphex does is it
actually separates it from the hi-hat.
00:30:57
Which I think is a good thing,
because it wasn't given as much
of a lift in the rough mix
as I would have thought
you'd want out of that shaker.
00:31:03
But now it's a little bit loud.
00:31:05
So, I can turn it down in one of two places
because I have this Aux
but I also have a VCA.
00:31:10
And the only difference will be
where I'm deciding to do it.
00:31:15
Because basically,
if I turn down the VCA
it's gonna do the equivalent
of turning down the source tracks
which will give it a little less Aphex.
00:31:22
If I turn down the Aux
it will turn it down
pre the sends which will give
it a little bit less Aphex.
00:31:28
There's no sonic
difference between
turning it down in
on place or the other.
00:31:31
And in the sense of being OCD
I will leave all my VCAs at zero
and turn down the Aux.
00:31:37
By the way, this send,
which is the Aphex
is going off to a Waves Aphex.
00:31:43
It's called the vintage Aphex.
00:31:48
'Vintage Aural Exciter'.
00:31:49
There are different modes
but these are different mix modes
and you can put it in Exciter only mode
but I found for some reason
that seems a little bit phasier
than when you're just
in the regular mix mode
but then put all the mix
all the way to the Exciter.
00:32:02
Like with the reverb or delay
on a Send in the session.
00:32:05
We're only hearing the effect,
there's none of the original signal
coming back through this plug-in.
00:32:10
If I can crank this a lot
you will start to hear
it be a little bit phasy
and I think that's just
something inherent to the process,
there's some crossovers that
has some phase incoherence,
but the amount that I'm using it
you really don't hear it
and what you get is that
really nice grainy top end.
00:32:33
So now, I'm gonna very quickly
whip through the rest of the keyboards
to see what they are
and what they're doing.
00:32:38
Later on if I feel like I get in trouble
I'll be familiar with them.
00:32:41
But I'm not gonna be doing
a whole lot more to anything
before we get to the vocals.
00:32:58
There's indeed nothing
on the Piano Bass track
so I'm going to delete it.
00:33:30
So these plug-ins all
came in the session,
they're obviously
basically part of the tracking,
they are here to make the sound.
00:33:38
So, what I'm gonna do with these plug-ins
is something I've very lately
started to call black boxing
where basically they're part of the sound.
00:33:46
I'm not gonna assume
that I can go
and tweak them and make it better
and recreate the sound.
00:33:50
Why would I?
It sounds great already.
00:33:52
So I'm gonna pretend
that they're inside of a black-box
and that I don't
even know what they are,
that this is just the recorded sound.
00:33:59
And I find that it really helps me
think about the mix.
00:34:01
If I try to think about all the stuff
that somebody else did on the mix
in the same way I'm thinking
about the stuff that I did on the mix
then it gets very confusing in my head
because the stuff I'm doing
on the mix is very familiar,
adding the 'Rear Bus' to everything
that isn't drums and bass,
that kind of thing.
00:34:18
So, I can very quickly
hear what impact
my processing is having
on the sounds.
00:34:24
Then if I hear something
I don't like about a sound
I can easily just pretend,
well, the sound is what the sound is
and I just need to EQ it a little bit
or maybe a little
of insert compression
but usually not very much,
something like that.
00:34:38
Or, if I feel like
maybe the problem I'm hearing is
being created by the black-box
then I will open up the black-box,
look at the plug-ins
and see what's going on,
but for the most part,
no matter how complicated it is,
I treat that as though it's unknowable.
00:34:52
And coming out of this box
is the sound I've got
and that's the sound I'm mixing with.
00:34:57
Maybe I can end up spending a little bit
more time fixing a problem
there I might have been able
to fix at the source
but generally that's not the case.
00:35:06
Here we're look at,
there's a Melodyned tune,
there's a delay
to add some delay
and an Echoboy.
00:35:14
These are things that are part of
the inherent sound of the track,
there's no point in
even looking at them
and I'm not gonna play
them for you either
because as a mixer,
it's irrelevant.
00:35:23
The sound is the sound after those
plug-ins and that's what I'm mixing.
00:35:26
The only thing I'm
hearing is that,
I'm looking for a little bit more
of this mid-range presence
and I'm just gonna decide
whether it's the organ
or this RS09 track that
I wanna get it from
and try a little mid-range
EQ in the Chorus.
00:35:47
It's the Organ
and the Organ also has some
low-end that I wanna take care of.
00:35:52
The easiest way to do this is again,
select the three tracks,
put them into a new track,
call it Organ,
and I'm just gonna make a Stereo Aux
that again if I've taken the time
to set my default output
would already be going
to mix Mixbus.
00:36:05
This is something you need to
pay attention to, by the way,
if you create new tracks
while you're working on a mix,
if you haven't taken the time to set
the default output in your I-O Setup,
you got make sure they're not just
going straight to the speakers
otherwise you'll think you're awesome,
the stuff isn't going to the Mixbus
which means it isn't even going
though your mixbus plug-ins
but it also won't be there
when you bounce the mix.
00:36:27
That's a problem.
00:36:29
This is kind of a big deal.
00:36:31
Solo safe this and now I'm
gonna solo up the Organ,
do a little EQ.
00:36:52
And also, just because I can,
I'm gonna push it a little bit further
outside the speakers.
00:36:58
So, I'm gonna come down here
and get a Waves S1
and push it.
00:37:29
The only thing I'm chasing right now
is there's a little bit of a messiness
with the low-end when the kick and
the bass are happening together.
00:37:38
I'm just gonna start undoing things
I've done until it either goes away
or it's something that
was there to begin with
and I just hadn't addressed it
because I was listening
to everything on it's own.
00:38:04
So it's actually in the bass.
00:38:06
It sounds like it's the kick
but it's the bass
when the kick happens
but the kick is sounding really good to me
so I'm gonna start by getting rid
of that DI track that I cranked up.
00:38:16
We'll see what happens.
00:38:43
Now I'm just gonna listen to my
Chorus transition into the Bridge.
00:39:34
So, overall we're in really good shape,
a couple things I've heard,
one is that turning the guitar up
in the bridge was a terrible idea.
00:39:43
It's just obliterating everything
that's cool about the bridge.
00:39:46
So I'm gonna turn that back down
but leave the Choruses
how I had them because I like that
kind of RnB back-beat with the snare
and guitar happening at the same time.
00:39:55
And the other thing
I was hearing,
I've completely forgotten.
00:40:01
Because I started talking.
00:40:02
So, I'm sure I'll hear it again
and then we'll address it
but at the moment,
let's move on to vocals, shall we?
This happens to me all the time,
by the way, and it will happen to you.
00:40:11
There's sort of a trance state
that happens when you're mixing
and I find that, a process which is
very difficult to do in these videos
but is definitely a
big part of the process
is just playing the mix over and over
and you'll find yourself
just grabbing stuff,
jumping around all over the place,
whatever grabs your ear
work at it but leave the mix running.
00:40:31
And you can solo stuff up,
drop it back out of solo,
just leave it running, looping.
00:40:36
Then it also can help a lot
to just let the mix play at low volume,
over and over when you
think you're kind of done
because what will happen is,
as soon as you start thinking
about something else
whatever is still wrong in the mix
will jump out and grab your attention.
00:40:50
Those are very difficult things to hear
when you listen loud or
you're concentrating.
00:40:55
You have to kind of get some perspective
and not listen to the mix
and the mix will tell you what's wrong,
that happens a lot.
00:00:00
OK. So, vocal
My vocal processing is very
much like everything else I do,
there's a lot of
parallel stuff to it
but it's a little bit more complicated
because vocals are very special
and they're the most import
thing in a mix for the most part.
00:00:13
They go through some Auxes
and what I've got
as I've explained before
but I'll quickly go though it,
is I've got two Auxes that
act as parallel Auxes
that get all of the vocals
so select my lead vocals
and I put them into what's called the
'Lead Vocal Bus'.
00:00:33
Then I select my background vocals
and put them into
my Background Vocal Bus.
00:00:39
So what happens is,
those Buses,
show up on two Auxes each.
00:00:44
So let's look at the Lead Vocals first
because the Backgrounds are identical.
00:00:47
They're Stereo Auxes.
00:00:49
Vocal are generally mono
but I found
that a lot of
arrangements are
getting so complicated
that sometimes people wanna split
the Lead and the Double
in the Chorus a little bit,
like pan it 10 left and 10 right.
00:01:02
To be able honor that choice
while processing
to really decide whether or not
I think it's a good idea
I need to keep that stereo pan.
00:01:09
Even though we've got two mono
vocals going straight up the middle
I'm gonna keep this stereo chain.
00:01:15
The first is chain has very little on it,
it's a Phoenix
just because people
record vocals very cleanly
I very seldom have this be a problem.
00:01:25
Then there is an RVox with -0.7,
this is just leftover and it works.
00:01:31
This is a great one knob
compressor for vocals,
it works really well,
the attack and the release
work great on vocals.
00:01:37
It just helps level it out a little bit.
00:01:39
If I have a vocal
that's recorded with no
dynamics on the way in
and it really needs to just be put
in the package a little bit
this is a great place to come
and just turn this down a little bit.
00:01:50
Technically I guess in my template
this should be at zero
and if I ever get unlazy enough
I'll go back, open up a template session
and save it a zero
but it was at -0.7 so
we'll leave it there.
00:02:01
Now leave at .1,
it's fine.
00:02:03
And there's a L2 to keep the red lights off.
00:02:06
The L2 is sprinkled around all
over the place to keep them off.
00:02:10
Then, there's a parallel chain
which is actually a
lot more complicated
and this is a very specific sound.
00:02:15
So, this is a technique
from I believe like late 80s,
early 90s recording
but it may have been used back in the
70s because the gear used is very old.
00:02:24
It's a Pultec that goes into an LA2A
and then into another Pultec.
00:02:29
Basically it is a homemade
multiband compressor
with two of the bands bypassed.
00:02:35
What you do is you go
into the first Pultec,
you get rid of low-end.
00:02:40
You get rid of a lot of low-end
an attenuation of 4 at 100 Hz
is a lot.
00:02:45
Then you boost
a lot of 8 kHz.
00:02:50
So now you've made this
incredibly harsh vocal.
00:02:53
Great, what you're gonna
do with that vocal?
Well, you're gonna pop
it into a compressor.
00:02:57
And the LA2A
has this high frequency knob
and on the hardware it's on the back
but it's on every LA2A ever made.
00:03:05
This is a high-pass for
the detector circuit.
00:03:08
So, what it does is it was meant
to turn an LA2A into a de-esser,
you turn it up all the way
and now the LA2A is only
looking at high frequencies.
00:03:16
But when you accentuate
the mid-range going into it
it turns it into
a mid-range compressor.
00:03:22
Now it's mid-range and top
but that boost band,
that 8 kHz boost band,
is actually a bell, it isn't a shelf.
00:03:30
So, basically it turns this LA2A
into a 8kHz bell compressor.
00:03:35
Then, when you come out of the LA2A,
you go into another Pultec,
add back all of the low-end
you took out and even more
and you attenuate a
little bit of the 8 kHz,
you don't have to do this because
the 8 kHz has been crushed so much
but basically what you
get is the equivalent of
smashing up your mid-range
and leaving the very bottom and
the very top alone of your vocal.
00:03:58
On it's own this
sounds like the most compressed
pop vocal ever in
the whole world.
00:04:04
Blended in,
it just gives you a little bit
of this sort of pop sheen.
00:04:09
Now, on this song it might
be totally inappropriate
but it's so difficult to set up
that I have it in my template and
it comes up muted.
00:04:19
So, really quickly let me play you
a little bit of the lead vocal,
so I can just solo that VCA,
and I will just unmute and mute this
Pultec LA2A Pultec chain
which is mixed in very quietly,
it's at -17 but you'll
hear what it does.
00:04:43
So it gets a little more aggressive,
it gets a little more poppy
and it also gets a
little more bright.
00:04:48
It's a parallel compressor,
there's nothing incredibly
special about it
in terms of how it treats my vocals,
it's just that's the easiest place
to have it live in my template
so I can get to it quickly.
00:04:59
Then, we come out of those two Auxes
to what's called the
'Lead Vocal Combiner'.
00:05:04
It's only used by template,
I'll never assign something new to that.
00:05:08
That basically collects these two
and chucks them through this Aux.
00:05:12
This is just the Lead Vocal Aux.
00:05:15
By default there's a de-esser here,
waiting to be put in,
the FabFilter Pro De-ess,
which on its default setting
is an awesome de-esser.
00:05:23
And then there's another L2
just to keep the red lights off
if I've gained a ton of level.
00:05:28
So, from here, I'm sending
to a lot of traditional stuff,
If we start on the right you'll see
I'm sending to something called 'Slap'
which is a slap delay and
it defaults to be muted.
00:05:37
Sending to something called 'spread',
which is a micro-pitch slap,
I'll show you
the plug-ins involved.
Come down here, there's an Aux,
cryptically called 'Slap',
which has my Slap on it,
just and EQ to filter,
make it sound a little old,
and then at the moment I'm using this
Avid Bucket Brigade Delay plug-in
and then on the 'Spread',
I just have Dual 910,
old school Eventide pitch shift
and it has delay as well,
there's 37 and 58 ms,
this is pretty long delays.
00:06:10
This is a very audible delay time,
normally you would go from
maybe 10 and 20 ms,
the reason I leave them long
is because if I wanna a lot
of the spread
then I wanna be reminded
I need to think about the delay time.
00:06:24
And so I'll hear that it really separates
and I'm hearing the delays
and that will remind me like,
"Oh, hey, do I want this separate
or do I wanna
actually come in and turn
these delay times down.
00:06:34
If I don't do that what can happen is
in the throes of mixing and it's cranked up
I add the spread like:
"Oh yeah, that's awesome"
And then later on,
I've sent the mix
and I get back mix notes like,
"Hey, by the way,
what's that weird delay on the vocal?"
Because really,
for how much I'm using it,
it should be more of a 10 and 20 ms thing.
00:06:51
So, it makes me think about it,
that's why I leave it so long.
00:06:54
So, that's the Spread,
then I have a vocal verb Send,
which down here, is a vocal verb.
00:07:01
Again, it's another filter,
I'm using a different filter
because I can.
The McDSP filter is awesome
because you get this 'PEAK'
which is actually independent
of the slope.
00:07:13
Normally, as you have
a steeper slope with the filter
it gets more resonant at
it's resonant frequency.
00:07:21
Here you actually have control
over the resonance
independent of the slope, which I love.
00:07:27
In this particular implementation
there's no resonance, so that's fine.
00:07:32
Then I go into a Plate.
00:07:35
So, I just have a Plate lying around.
Again,
I know I need a tiny bit of reverb
but it's a good starting point.
00:07:41
If I really need to go
and find a vocal reverb
I have no idea whether
that would stay or not
that would change on every single mix.
00:07:48
Then next to that we've got the Aphex
which I showed you before,
that's that 'Vintage Aural Exciter'.
00:07:55
Same one is used by the
percussion,
it's shared, there's no reason
to have more than one.
00:07:59
Then I have the 'Rear Bus'
so that's the exact
same set of multi mono
1176s
that the guitars and keyboards get.
00:08:09
And again, that will make the vocal
mix the guitars and keyboards.
00:08:14
And then I've got a 'Stereo Vocal Crush'
and this is just another
parallel compressor
and it is...
00:08:21
1176
'all buttons in',
slowest attack, fastest release,
enough gain to make it compress.
00:08:29
This is something I used in hardware,
it's incredibly distorted and spitty
and I'll play it for you,
the same where we went through
the Pultec. I'm gonna mute the Pultec now.
00:08:39
And...
00:08:40
I'm gonna mute the Send.
00:08:55
So, it's level but it's also
aggressiveness and top end
and things like that.
00:09:00
Now also, one thing I've noticed,
listening,
is these vocals got bleed of the track
that sounds a little low,
It's been filtered out pretty well
but while I'm thinking of it,
I'm gonna go through
and see if I need
to put a high pass filter any higher.
00:09:14
I just want an EQ3,
because it's one of the most flexible
non-coloring EQs around.
00:09:33
This has been filtered to take
care of that exact problem
and he's not gone too high.
00:09:39
There's a little bit of bleed
that you're gonna hear in solo,
I'm sure in the track it
doesn't matter at all
but when you're in solo it's the time
to actually look at this things.
00:09:48
Now, I'm going to drop
the vocal into the track
because it's impossible assess
what the vocal should sound like
and I'm just gonna start randomly
turning sends on,
changing the balance between the regular
lead vocal and the Pultec,
maybe adding some effects
and we'll just see what happens and
I'm gonna let the track
play so I don't get too
zoned in to one line of the vocal
because you can fool yourself,
if you just work on the verse,
you could get a vocal sound
that's amazing for the verse
and doesn't work at all
on the chorus.
00:10:16
To me,
there should be sort
of a basic vocal sound
that will work through the song
and then within that
you might turn on one of these vocal
compressors in the Chorus
so I turned on the 'Drum Dirt'
but the basic vocal tone and shape
doesn't change, it just gets enhanced.
00:10:33
And to me that's important,
You could decide to have
totally different vocal sounds
in the verse and chorus
and that's fine.
00:10:40
There's no reason not to do it
but for me I wanna find a
basic sound that's gonna work.
00:12:01
Now, even though it's working on the vocal,
I find myself distracted by the Organ
which means there's something
I definitely need to address
and it's the way it
ends that little lick
right at the beginning
of the second verse.
00:12:11
So, I just wanna have a quick listen to it.
00:12:20
So, it's as played,
there isn't a technical problem
but it feels like it cuts off
so I wanna hear it
in the rough mix
and see if I'm just
hearing things.
00:12:34
No, it does exactly the same thing so,
I think what I'm gonna do is just
do a very quick edit on this
because it's gonna be
the easiest way
to fix it.
00:12:46
So, right before it cuts out...
00:12:56
I'm just gonna separate region
and I'm just gonna fade that out.
00:13:00
A little quicker.
00:13:01
It's not as played and this is not
the best way to fix it
but we're working fast.
00:13:27
Alright,
make this a little slower
and I think we can get away with it
and if not I'll come back to it.
00:13:37
OK, so that's much worse.
00:13:39
Undo all of that.
00:13:55
OK, this is one of the very few times I'm
gonna turn automation on early in the song
I need to do it because I've gotta figure
out how this is gonna work.
00:14:04
It answers the vocal
but it starts during the vocal
but it fills the hole between the vocal.
00:14:09
So, it's important but I can't let it be
so important that you hear the volume drop
and it's definitely there in the rough mix
and I'm finding that distracting.
00:14:17
I'm just gonna do a couple of rides
and see if I can make something that works.
00:14:41
Alright, I don't like that.
00:14:43
So, I think the way I'm gonna
try and fix this
is to send it off into a delay
that just sort of extend the chord
that's cutting off abruptly and
then it will fade out more naturally
and we'll be left with the chord
that's being played afterwards.
00:14:54
I have an AUX I already made for the Organ
so I'm just gonna make a new...
00:14:59
Send to a new track
and we'll call this just DDL
because I'm lazy,
right next to the Organ,
I think I can remember what's it for.
00:15:08
Assign it to the Mixbus.
00:15:10
I've also just realized that my Organ
is assigned to the Rear Bus
on the individual tracks
but not on the Aux that's collecting it
which has my little bit of EQ
and my widening.
00:15:22
So, I'm gonna go ahead and move
the 'Rear Bus' Send down here
instead, because that makes more sense,
that way it's after my processing.
00:15:29
This might mean that the Organ
is now a little bit too loud
I can address that, that's no big deal.
00:15:34
Then, what I wanna do,
is with this Send...
00:15:38
to my delay...
00:15:40
Just like I did with the
mute automation on the drums
I'm gonna hold down Ctrl+Command
and click on a fader
and that switches
the automation display to
be this Send's volume.
00:15:53
I'll make it medium here so
you can see 'Send J' level.
00:15:56
I'm gonna turn it
all the way down
then I'm gonna look
at this...
00:16:06
So what I wanna do
is fade the Send up
while that chord is sustaining
and then I wanna have it go away
before that chord cuts out
so we'll just do something like this,
I don't know if this is
gonna be right or not.
00:16:20
Then on the delay track
we're gonna put it a Mod Delay
because that's nice and easy
and does exactly what you tell it.
00:16:27
Link the controls,
250 ms might be fine
because we're sort of
using it like a reverb.
00:16:33
A little bit of feedback.
00:16:41
A little more feedback,
don't cut the Send off so early.
00:16:52
And get that the delay going
into the 'Rear Bus' as well.
00:17:02
And it's a little distracting
but I think what we're gonna do is
I'm gonna turn this up
so it's a little better.
00:17:08
And then I'm just gonna turn
the Organ down in that spot.
00:17:12
If something is not working the easiest
way to fix it is to turn it down, right?
That's starting to work,
it's kind of covering that up
but it's also sounding like
there's a lot of effect on it.
00:17:33
So, this is a little difficult
and I would spend a little more time on it
and try and find something that
works, perhaps...
00:17:41
I think a reverb would actually
stick out more than a delay
but it's a matter of finding
how long to send it to the delay,
what the delay time should be
and what the feedback should be
to give it a natural decay
that you really only hear
when the chord cuts out.
00:17:55
It would take me a lot longer than
it's worth bothering
to do on this video
but I think you guys got the concept.
00:18:11
And of course I say that
but I can't stop working on it.
00:18:14
Because it's terrible right now.
00:18:30
I promise I'm gonna
leave it that for now.
00:18:33
And let's get back to the vocal
which is sounding kind of good.
00:18:36
This is actually a very good
example of that sort of distraction
I was talking about.
00:18:40
I got so distracted by the Organ
that now, when I go back
and listen to the vocal,
it's fresh.
00:18:46
I don't have to go away
from the track and come back,
I just have by zooming in on the Organ.
00:19:19
When I went back to listen to the vocal
the Slap was too obvious to me
on those quiet lines
but I like it when he
starts singing louder
so we're really only talking about
the first half of each verse now
that I don't want the Slap.
00:19:32
I've got my Send to the slap right here,
I'm gonna hold down Ctrl+Command,
that brings up the automation dialog for it
and now I can go through and just add
some break points to mute that Send
for these 3 lines of the vocal.
00:19:47
And then again on the second verse.
00:19:51
And I'll find that,
if I do a mix this way,
I build it using clip gain
and automation on the returns
or the sends to the effects,
especially because so many of the effects
are sort of color building
and size building,
I sometimes will not
automate a single thing.
00:20:07
I'll get to the end and there's
no need to do a vocal ride
because it's been built
by the vocal performance itself
but then the combination of vocal
compressors that are coming in and out
and the effects that are coming in and out.
00:20:18
So, the biggest thing I like about it is
you're not saving stuff for later.
00:20:22
If you do automation very early on
in the mix process
you paint yourself
into a corner because
you can no longer grab that
fader and make big changes
but at the same time,
if you don't do it then all of a sudden
you've got things that bother you
every single time you listen to the mix.
00:20:35
So if you can fix them in
non invasive ways by changing
the amounts of parallel compression
or the effects or clip gain
as a fader ride then you
still have this kind of
static faders rough mix almost
and it's just turning itself into a mix
which is quite cool and it does
get to the point where in the end,
either you just do big rides on drums,
like every drum fill you turn it up,
or you do little rides on vocals for
words that just need a little bit of help
but you're not doing rides just
to make the song play itself.
00:21:08
Like the 'Rear Bus' made the Chorus happen.
00:21:10
I no longer have to rides on all of
the keyboards and all of the guitars
because the 'Rear Bus' is doing it for me
and the arrangement is doing it
for me within the 'Rear Bus'.
00:21:21
So I think we're ready to check out
our second Lead Vocal.
00:21:24
Which is Katy.
00:21:27
Very much the exact,
well very much, it is
exactly the same treatment,
they're just called background vocals.
00:21:34
So, it's assigned to the
background vocals bus
which goes to these two Auxes
with a little bit of Pultec on this guy
and the standard chain here
with our Phoenix,
our Renaissance Vox and our L2.
00:21:45
With the exact same Sends in
the exact same state
with everything muted except for
the 'Stereo Vocal Crush'
and the Aphex
and that's it. And it goes
straight to the mix.
00:21:56
So, they're exactly the same process
as I would be going through
with the Lead Vocal.
00:22:01
In this case it is a second
Lead Vocal.
00:22:04
If I decided I wanted to treat
it exactly the same way
I could even put it through the
Lead Vocal chain
but it's a different voice,
there's no point.
00:22:12
This is exactly the same chain
I would use though
if these were stacked
stereo background vocals,
much more of a Pop thing.
00:22:18
There could be 30 tracks of vocals
all going through here.
00:22:21
And then it gives me a very easy
place to perhaps filter, low pass filter
all the vocals to get rid
of thump and bleed
and wind noise and stuff like that,
instead of having to go through
and do it individually.
00:22:34
But in this case, dealing with
a secondary Lead Vocal,
I'm gonna mute our main Lead Vocal
and listen to Katy.
00:23:10
So, it's just a matter of finding
a space for this voice to live in
where it doesn't sound too dry
but it doesn't have obvious effects.
00:23:18
Very much like the Lead Vocal.
00:23:19
The Lead Vocal has a little more of
an obvious room around it
and I don't necessarily want that
for the background vocal.
00:23:25
But I won't know till
I hear them together.
00:23:27
The good thing is,
I can work with Katy's vocal
a little bit drier to begin with
because it will sort of take some of
the room from the Lead Vocal and own it.
00:23:38
Because there are two vocals,
they are in the same room.
00:23:40
So, rather than having to
make the secondary vocal wet,
which then could make it hard for it to sit
like a secondary Lead Vocal,
it would sit much more
like a background vocal,
I can leave it drier and let's see
how they blend together.
00:24:54
Another thing that I wanna do
is accentuate this choruses even more.
00:25:00
So, for a second I'm gonna drag
my Router track,
which is where my Master Fader is,
and I'm gonna drag it up
to where I did the mute automation
for the Drums Dirt just because
I don't wanna get this wrong.
00:25:12
I'm gonna turn up the whole mix
half a dB at the Chorus
so I'm gonna do that by
taking my Master Fader,
turning it down 0.5 dB
before I put the automation in
because I can't go up above zero
this is post Limiter at this point.
00:25:26
So, in grid mode again
because that worked for the Dirt.
00:25:31
I'm just gonna select the exact same area
then I'm going to use my trim tool
with the Command key
to give it a break
and go up to zero
and then I'll do the exact same thing...
00:25:45
here...
00:25:48
And up to zero.
00:25:49
And this way I now have this huge
chunks of automation
which using the Trim tool,
if I wanted to be 0.8 dB
I can just pull this down another 0.3
and then I've got my thing
but once the break points are in
you can sort of make that dynamic
change whatever you want it to be
but defining the sections
is the first step with it.
00:26:07
And I may decide that the
Bridge should come down
so the last Chorus has
somewhere to go again.
00:26:11
And it could be that it doesn't come down
right in the downbeat,
it might get to the Bridge and
slowly come down 0.5 dB
so we can go back up.
00:26:18
This is basically the
very precise version of
what they used to call
the slippery fader.
00:26:22
And it was just taking the whole mix,
cranking it at the downbeat
of the chorus and then bring it back down.
00:26:27
It's slippery because it
wouldn't stay up there,
I found there's really no reason
for it to not stay up there
because that way we get a
little bit of extra contrast
when you come
back down to the verse.
00:26:36
The arrangement is already
doing a lot of it
but let's do even more.
00:26:40
At this moment I think it would behoove me
to play the song start to finish
so, I might jump around and change
some things as it goes
but I just wanna have one listen
to get things in context.
00:26:50
Normally, if I weren't talking
so much
I would have been listening all
the way through a bit more
and have a better idea of the arrangement
but I feel like I need to get some
perspective on the whole song now.
00:28:43
Small detail thing,
I just heard a bass lick that I like,
I'm gonna clip gain it up
because we should all hear it more.
00:29:13
Subtle things like this I
think really help make a mix.
00:29:17
I think your job as a mixer, first of all,
is to set up a sonic space
for the song to live in
and hopefully make appropriate choices.
00:29:24
I feel like maybe I've gone
a little too far
in the produced mix
direction on this
but, we're too late
to back out now.
00:29:30
But the size of the
arrangement is working,
we get to the Chorus
and it's more exciting
and it isn't in a distracting obvious way,
I feel like it just gets bigger.
00:29:39
But, one of the things you do
if you're just doing rides
is your finding interesting stuff,
and that's for the other part
of your job as a mixer,
is to make decisions
about what the listener
should pay attention to.
00:29:53
And you've got these very
broad choices to make,
like: "OK, we're gonna listen to the vocal
all the way through the song".
00:30:00
Well, that's a decision you make
on every mix
and it's your job to
make the vocal sound good
and to keep it up above whatever
else you do in the mix.
00:30:08
But then there are the
secondary choices like,
OK, once I know the song really well
what might they listen to and they're
not just listening to the vocal
and it's things like this.
00:30:17
You can do with automation
you can do with a ride
but what I've said before about not
having to automate
is because I will find these things
laying around on tracks
all throughout the session
and just clip gain
them up as I find them
so I don't have to remember,
"OK, I got ride the guitars and
something cool in the second verse".
00:30:33
It's: "Hey, there's something
cool in the second verse, turn it up".
00:30:36
And it's done forever.
00:30:37
And if I automate the guitars later on,
I'll hear it come up and then decide,
"Oh, it can come up even more."
Or, well that's perfect as it is.
00:30:46
I think it's good to find details
and bring them up,
there's nothing wrong with the level
of instruments changing as it goes
as long as you don't distract from
the main purpose which is:
"Listen to my song and listen to my vocal".
00:30:57
All these secondary choices
are what you can use to make Outros work,
solo sections work,
Intros work,
you sort of set up this block of music
and specially if it doesn't have a vocal,
if you go for 32 bars
in the Outro of a song
and all your doing is adding
an element every eight bars
that's cool, but if you also bring up
every little bass fill
or you bring up every drum fill
or you bring up this guitar squeak
on the strings
as he moves from one register to another
that gets exciting
and to the point where
it's the kind of thing
a real fan of the
song will point out
and will wait for and be excited about
every time it comes.
00:31:38
And you can see this with anybody
just listening to a song they love,
they play air drums, they play air guitar,
and it's usually not the parts,
it's usually the weird details
all the way from the drum fill
on Phil Collins' 'In the Air Tonight'
down to a tiny little bass fill in
the middle of the guitar solo
you'll see people digging into it
while they're listening
because it's something that
happens when the bass
player went up an octave.
00:32:01
It's not even about the bass then,
but if you don't turn it up
it sort of can be this accidental thing
that lives in the track,
make a feature out of it,
if it's only for
a couple of bars,
as long as it doesn't obliterate
whatever is more important than it,
it's a great way to make
your mix more interesting
and to have it have a
lot longer life I think.
00:32:20
And that's something that you
really are looking for as a mixer
is to make the song, first of all,
amazing,
but also have it bear repeated listening.
00:32:30
You want someone to listen
to the mix 100 times
and always discover something new
and not have them think they're
discovering something new about the mix
just they're discovering something
new about the artist.
00:32:40
So, anyway, there you go.
00:32:42
That's a long walk
on 2 dB of clip gain on the bass
but, there you go, that's the concept.
00:32:50
All of that said, you may have wondered:
"Wow, how did Andrew get the clip gain
to change so quickly
without grabbing the fader?"
I'm a huge fan of being precise
and you grab these faders
and specially if they're down
here at the bottom of the screen
they fly all over the place
so I move in 0.5 dB increments.
00:33:06
In the preferences...
00:33:08
In 'Editing',
there is a clip gain nudge value
and you can set that
to anything you want.
00:33:15
The default is 0.5 dB and I leave it there.
00:33:17
Then whatever audio you select,
if you hold down Shift+Control,
the up arrow goes up one nudge value
and the down arrow goes down
one nudge value.
00:33:27
And then I have macros to do
even more extreme versions of this.
00:33:31
So, let's say there is something
really cool here,
I've got a macro
that separates the region
and nudges it up 4 dB.
00:33:38
Alright, with all that talking,
I think now it's time to listen from
that awesome bass lick
out to the end, and we'll see
where we are at.
00:35:09
A couple quick things I'm gonna do,
I'm gonna mute the 'Drum Dirt'
in the Outro
because it definitely
should not be there.
00:35:22
That mute looks like it's a little bit late
but you'll hear the way
if I cut that off earlier than that
the last drum hit would sound very small
so it cuts out right where the
ride cymbal hits
which is what I was trying to do
and just got really lucky with the timing
but it does mute a little bit late
but I think that's OK.
00:36:01
OK, there's a little clean
up work I'll do at the end,
I'm just gonna try one
last thing because it's fun.
00:36:06
I'm gonna try
going 'bananas' in the Bridge,
I'm gonna add an extra
delay to the vocal,
I don't even know
where it's gonna be.
00:36:18
I'll call it 'Voc DL'
and it's only gonna be in the Bridge
so, I'm gonna mute it,
I'm gonna use my shortcut
to bring up the automation
for that Send and
I'm just gonna turn it on...
00:36:32
In the Bridge...
00:36:35
And, a good starting point for just
a really effecty delay for me,
once I assign it to the Mixbus,
is...
00:36:45
Fabfilter Timeless,
is just a great effecty delay.
00:36:52
Now, this might sound way too...
00:36:55
unnatural
but I feel like the way he's singing,
I wanna it to be in a bigger space
and this might be the way to do it.
00:37:03
And this the arm motion for space,
by the way,
when you do it with delays.
00:37:32
Oh yeah!
The other thing I'm hearing is,
I hate the Aphex on the shakers,
it's just making them stick out,
I'm gonna put that Aux back up to zero
and kill the Aphex and now this
will be the original balance.
00:38:32
It's not exactly right
but I'm gonna move on
just for a second
and I'm gonna do something
I said I was gonna do earlier
which is take the toms
and run them through this Aux
which is already made.
00:38:44
The reason is because it's
already got a little L2
to keep the red lights off
but it also just turns up the toms,
they always need to be louder.
00:38:52
It has a Send to this 'Tom Verb'
which is another filtered reverb,
I'm taking the top end off
because there's usually a lot of
cymbal bleed in the toms.
00:39:00
Then it goes into
this Revibe,
just an ambiance program
and then it has some
pitch shifting afterwards
which is a very sort of
90s way to mix toms
but with just a little bit of it in
it just makes them a little bit
bigger and a little more exciting.
00:39:16
And I feel like the toms should be
a little bigger and exciting
because I've brought up
everything else so much.
00:39:44
Really standard EQ
and I'm also gonna widen the pan.
00:39:48
So, I'm basically doing the opposite
of a lot of the stuff that was sent to me.
00:39:52
I'm widening the stereo field.
00:39:55
But, you know,
you can always undo these things
and I think that if that's the
way you hear it the first time
as long as it's not completely
against the conversation you had
before you started mixing it
you really should kind of try it
because it's impossible
to describe these things,
you can't send a dry narrow mix and say:
'I think it would be better if
it were a little wetter and wider
but, you know,
what do you think?"
Because, they have no reference
so I think you do it
and you can always back off if whoever is
approving the mix feels that it's too much.
00:40:23
So, let me just listen through midway
through that second Chorus
into the Bridge to make sure that
the effect isn't way too much.
00:41:20
I like the vocal effect,
it's a little much,
but at the moment I don't have
any ideas for what else might work better.
00:41:27
I like the toms being that loud.
00:41:29
It's crazy tom fill going into
that last Chorus
but why not?
He doesn't hit the toms that often
so let's make it an event.
00:41:37
And again, that might be something
that the artist or the producer decides
like: "What are you doing with the toms,
why are they so loud?"
But, they will never know what
it would sound like with them that loud
and they might say: "That's exciting,
we never thought of doing that."
Or, like:
"Oh yeah, that's exactly how we want it."
Or:
"Oh my god, what have you done, stop it!"
So, basically I would say
that this mix is at a point
where I would leave it
alone for a minute.
00:42:01
Now, with my mix process,
since I moved completely in the box,
I never work on one song at a time,
if I can help it.
00:42:07
If I only have one song
anyone is paying me to mix
then that's the only song I have to mix
but I really like to
work on batches of songs.
00:42:15
If possible,
three or more songs from the
same artist is fine,
if it's three songs from
different artists, that's OK.
00:42:22
If it's twelve songs at the time
because there's a time crunch,
that's OK but it's not my favorite.
00:42:27
But what it allows me to do
is to pretend like
I'm leaving the mix overnight
and coming back the next day
by switching to another song.
00:42:35
So, I immediately open another song
and am blasted by all of the things
I haven't done yet
which I didn't even hear
when I closed the song.
00:42:44
So, I get the song to the point where
I can listen all the way through,
I've done everything I'm hearing
but I know the mix isn't
quite finished yet.
00:42:52
Just close the session and
move on to something else.
00:42:54
If you don't have anything
else to move on to
then you need to just go
take a break and leave the room.
00:42:58
Go have lunch.
00:43:00
Another great way to reset
your ears is to have somebody else
come in and listen to the
mix if that's possible.
00:43:04
My wife listens to every mix I ever do.
00:43:07
And that adrenaline rush of
having someone else in the room
makes you be a listener
as opposed to a mixer
because my wife couldn't care less
what plug-in I'm using on the snare drum
but she'll tell me if she can't hear the
vocal because the snare drum is too loud.
00:43:20
So, these are the big picture
decisions you've got make sure of
and I also think coming back to the mix
the next time,
I would know in a second
what to do with that Bridge vocal effect
whether it's just
too much of something,
whether it should be something else
or it shouldn't be there at all.
00:43:36
So, I would want some fresh perspective
if possible I come back to
the song maybe two more times
and then I would have
something I'd be ready
to send to the artist
and the producer.
00:43:45
And I know that by the fact that
every time I open up the song
I know it's not done
and then sometimes I'm
really surprised like:
"Oh, wow, this is actually really close,
this sounds great!"
And then it's just some
couple of details, making sure I've done
cross-fades at the end
so that there aren't noises
and things like that.
00:44:03
That the beginning starts clean
and then it's time to send the mix
and get some feedback.
00:44:07
Because no matter how much
you mix on your own
unless you're the artist and the producer
there are other opinions involved
and there's no right answer
when you're mixing and
it's really important to
get your mix back to the people
who have some sort of creative control
and make sure it's living
in the world they like
and hopefully they will be pleasantly
surprised by your changes
but you can't take it personally
if they're not
and sometimes they have
to get used to something.
00:44:32
If you think you've
done something
that is really spectacular
in terms of helping the song
and the initial reaction is:
'What have you done,
go back to the way it was!"
I think it's OK to say:
"Hey, why don't you guys live with it until
tomorrow and just make sure?"
And here's why, it's fine to sort
of present your ideas in that way
but
the final decision rests with the
artist and the producer, it's their record.
00:44:57
It's not your record as the mixer
and you really have to respect that.
00:45:01
And there have been mixes where
I've gone in the completely wrong direction
and kind of had to start over.
00:45:05
And that's OK.
00:45:07
Now, looking at this mix
in particular you might say:
"Oh, hold on a second, you haven't really
EQed percussion or
guitars or keyboards
or well, almost anything."
"So, when are you gonna do that?"
And my answer to you would be: Never!
The balance is working,
the sounds were really
good when I got them,
I fixed the stuff I wanted to fix,
I've enhanced the drums which is always
something that I feel needs some work
just because of the nature
of them being multi miked
and having so many sources and you
wanna turn them into one thing.
00:45:36
And as you get everything
else to sound like a record
you don't wanna leave
the drums behind but,
I would say that this is mix probably
anywhere from 80 to 95% done.
00:45:45
And there might be 5% that needs
to be undone and redone
the next time I revisit it
but it's pretty much where
I would to in one sitting.
00:45:52
So hopefully this helps you out
and as they say here at Flux:
Et Voilà!
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Software
- Avid BBD Delay
- Avid EQ3 7 Band
- Avid Lo-Fi
- Avid MOD Delay III
- Avid Revibe II
- Eventide H910 Dual Harmonizer
- Fab Filter Pro-DS
- Fab Filter Timeless
- McDSP Filter Bank F202
- Sans Amp
- Sonnox Oxford Limiter
- Sound Toys Little Microshift
- UAD 1176 AE
- UAD EL7 Fatso Jr.
- UAD EMT 140
- UAD Fairchild 670
- UAD Neve 33609
- UAD Pultec
- UAD bx_digital v2
- Waves API 560
- Waves Aphex Vintage Exciter
- Waves CLA-2A
- Waves Kramer HLS
- Waves L2 Ultra Maximizer
- Waves Puigtec EQ
- Waves RVOX
- Waves Scheps 73
- Waves dbx 160

Andrew Scheps is a music producer, mixing engineer and record label owner based in the United Kingdom. He has received Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album for his work on Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium, Album Of The Year for Adele's 21, and also Best Reggae Album for Ziggy Marley's Fly Rasta.
Andrew started as a musician, but found that what he enjoyed most was working behind the scenes. This led him to study recording at the University of Miami. After graduating, he spent some time working for Synclavier, and then on the road with Stevie Wonder (as a keyboard tech) and Michael Jackson (mixing live sound). But he found his home in the studio, and he honed his craft working for producers such as Rob Cavallo, Don Was and Rick Rubin.
Andrew collaborated with Waves in order to create his own line of plug-ins which include the Scheps 73 EQ and the Scheps Parallel Particles.
Andrew is one of the best known mixing engineers in the world, well-known for his Rear Bus mixing techniques that he developed working on his 64 input Neve 8068 console and his love for distortion of any kind. If you are watching pureMix videos you will see that he managed to carry his analog sound signature over to a fully portable digital rig. These days, Andrew mixes completely In The Box as it allows him much greater flexibility and the ability to work on several project simultaneously.
Beyonce
Lana Del Rey
Red Hot Chili Peppers
U2
Michael Jackson
Green Day

Will Knox is an alt-folk troubadour from Hammersmith, London. Knox has supported artists such as Art Garfunkel, Pete Francis (of Dispatch), and Tyrone Wells. His visionary melodies, hooks, and intricate arrangements create a stunning world where songs may hold shadow and darkness, but there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.
Lifeboats
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By Will Knox
Will Knox is an alt-folk troubadour from Hammersmith, London. Knox has supported artists such as Art Garfunkel, Pete Francis (of Dispatch), and Tyrone Wells. His visionary melodies, hooks, and intricate arrangements create a stunning world where songs may hold shadow and darkness, but there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.- Artist
- Will Knox
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