Andrew Scheps Mixing Lifeboats

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.

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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.

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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'.

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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.

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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.

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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!