Darrell Thorp Mixing Foster The People
02h 33min
(36)
Darrell Thorp has been trusted to record and mix studio albums for artists like Radiohead, The Foo Fighters, Beck and dozens more in some of the best rooms in the world. So when Foster The People needed someone to record a live performance for them, they knew who to call.
As the demand increases for bands to produce more content in the streaming age, so does the need for recording and mixing engineers to rise up to the challenge of capturing an electrifying real-time performance and delivering it to the world.
In this two and a half hour long tutorial, Darrell shows you how he overcame the challenges associated with mixing a live performance video for the indie rock band, Foster The People.
See how Darrell:
- Compensates for a boomy acoustic venue
- Identifies and corrects polarity and phase issues
- Levels out inconsistent drums
- Mixes the bands triggered samples with live acoustic drums
- Befriends the bleed in the vocal and stage microphones
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 01:30 - Session Layout
- 06:20 - Kick
- 13:31 - Snare
- 20:39 - Mono Overheads
- 23:34 - Drum Distortion
- 25:44 - Drum Samples
- 31:05 - Hi Hats
- 32:50 - Parallel Drum Compression
- 38:00 - Bass
- 48:04 - Toms
- 53:27 - Stereo Overheads
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Guitars
- 06:06 - Vocals
- 29:17 - Background Vocals
- 34:18 - Mix Bus Compression
- 39:48 - Background Vocal Spread
- 44:38 - Piano
- 48:42 - Percussion
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Keys
- 04:40 - Using Save As
- 06:01 - Limiting the Mix
- 08:56 - Synth
- 11:18 - FX
- 15:43 - EQ the Stereo Bus
- 19:15 - Automation
- 31:03 - Print The Mix
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
00:00:07
Hi! I'm Darrell Thorp.
00:00:08
Thanks for joining me today.
00:00:10
I'm about to show a great tutorial
for a band called Foster The People,
and the song is called 'Best Friend'.
00:00:17
Foster, they called me,
this was done about a year and a half ago
when their album was about to be released.
00:00:23
They needed some live video
and audio footage of them
for a Spotify release, for promo.
00:00:31
So,
I was lucky enough to get
the phone call from them
and we
recorded at The Village.
00:00:38
It was a great situation
because there's like
a Masonic temple, I believe,
or Masonic room is what they call it,
where the band was set up,
and then we were able to run tie lines
down to Studio B,
where I recorded all the instruments
on a Neve 88R.
00:00:53
And the cool thing about this tutorial
is you can go online
and you can find the video,
it's still around on YouTube,
and you can see, like,
the micing techniques
and the placements that were used.
00:01:04
For the most part, though,
I pretty much just used their live setup
and implemented it
into my recording
and mixing techniques,
so it's really
just a great blend
of both a live situation
and a controlled environment.
00:01:21
They had their own monitor engineer,
they were using in-ears.
00:01:25
I believe I just added a couple extra mics
for extra support here and there.
00:01:31
So you can see here
I have my setup already going.
00:01:34
It's not a terribly large session.
00:01:37
The interesting thing, though,
before I go on,
the visual of the recording
looked really good,
but the temple itself was boomy,
so I had a lot of issues
with the recording
and trying to get out
some of the mud,
and then, also I'm going to try
and demonstrate to you
trying to get rid of some of that mud
in the tracks themselves
because it definitely translated
in the recording.
00:01:56
I thought I kind of had a handle on it
when I was doing it at the studio
with my static mix,
but as I moved over to my studio
in my familiar location,
my listening environment,
I really realized, "Okay, I got to scoop
some more mud out of this stuff,"
so that should be, hopefully,
an interesting tutorial for you
because that's a very common
factor about recording
in an untreated environment,
which happens a lot these days.
00:02:23
At the top,
I'm using my master fader.
00:02:26
Below that
is my limited send ('L27 SND'),
and then I usually do
my unprocessed stereo print track.
00:02:34
And then the master fader
is then feeding my first input track,
which is this guy right here.
00:02:40
'MIX', as you can see,
and then another bus
which feeds a limiter track
so I can process,
make the mix louder,
because in this situation
they weren't going to pay
for mastering for it,
so I kind of had to do
as best job as I could.
00:02:58
I'm not a mastering engineer,
I kind of know how it's done,
but I usually prefer
somebody else
with magic ears and magic fingers
to pimp up my tracks another 10, 15%.
00:03:10
And I'm just going to go and put
one of my favorite limiters on here,
which is the Massey L2007.
00:03:16
I'm going to put that guy on right now.
00:03:19
You can see I have my two tracks here,
and the first one is my unlimited track
which I've named 'Best Friend FTP TK 4'
so the video guys know
which audio track I'm editing,
and it was pass four ('ps 4'),
which is my mix nomenclature.
00:03:33
I use pass 1 as the first mix, 2, 3, 4.
00:03:36
It keeps my organizational skills
as organized as best as I can.
00:03:40
And then, below it,
I'm going to go to
the 'Best Friend FTP TK 4 ps 4'
with the 'L27',
so I know that file is the limited file.
00:03:52
That way, if I do export a file,
I can see that that is a limited track
and that's usually the track
that I do not want to send to mastering
if this particular project
was getting mastered,
so,
a good way to keep things separated.
00:04:07
And the genius part
about doing these tracks at the both time
is because
I print a mix
unmastered.
00:04:15
If somebody says,
"Darrell, that was great. No Changes,"
bam! I can export that guy
and just send it right off to mastering.
00:04:22
And then I usually start
with vocal effects,
which I'm about to start adding here
as we start mixing.
00:04:28
And then I do my lead vocal,
my background vocals,
and then I get to my drums.
00:04:35
After my drums, I'll do percussion
or additional triggers,
and then I get into my bass.
00:04:45
And then, after bass are usually guitars,
then keys,
and then,
at the bottom I usually leave
effects or strings.
00:04:55
That's my layout.
00:04:56
This way I can generally find
something really quickly.
00:05:01
If I'm mixing along
and I've messed with the bass,
and then I move on to the lead vocal,
but then I hear something in the bass,
I can kind of just know
if I scroll down a little bit
my bass is going to be
just right after my drums.
00:05:14
The same thing with my effects,
I know effects or strings
are going to be at the bottom
of the session,
so I can just hit the End button
and go all the way down.
00:05:23
Same example of,
I've started putting some stereo bus
compression on the stereo bus,
but I can hear it pumping
a little bit too much.
00:05:31
I go to the Home, I'm back to the top,
and I'm able to adjust
anything that I want to adjust.
00:05:36
And the other trick I like to do...
00:05:38
I don't know if it's a trick or not,
the master fader,
I click on the stereo bus fader
and I leave it in the top
left-hand corner here,
and I don't know if you guys
know this great trick:
if you turn this little red button off,
that way, if you click on something else,
that master fader always stays there
and it stays in that position.
00:06:00
It's really handy
if you have a cool little setup
where you have more space
and you have another screen to do that,
so that way, the master fader
always stays there.
00:06:08
It's really handy because I know
there are meters up here,
but they're too small for me.
00:06:11
I want to see a little bit
more resolution.
00:06:15
So, I'm going to start mixing.
00:06:18
First things first.
00:06:19
I usually like to start with my drums,
so I think I'm going to
open up the kick in
and just give it a listen.
00:06:42
I'm sure you guys can hear it there,
it's definitely a live track
with the bass bleeding in there
and the guitar amp bleeding in there,
which just is kind of fun.
00:06:50
I had the pleasure
of recording this stuff,
so I've done a little bit of processing
going to Pro Tools
as we were recording.
00:06:58
So I've done a little bit
of work in there,
but it probably still needs
a little bit more love.
00:07:04
One of my favorites,
a go-to,
especially on drums,
is the UAD SSL E Channel.
00:07:20
I'm just hearing right now
that it needs a little bit more attack,
so,
I'm just going to go up
and grab the shelf EQ at 8 kHz
and start from there and give it like a...
00:07:29
like a 6 dB bump.
00:07:30
It's going to need it.
00:07:40
That's sounding really good,
so the next thing I'm going to do
is add just a little bit of compression.
00:07:45
I'm looking for, like, a 3 dB reduction,
so I'm just going to play the track
and play with the threshold a little bit
until I get to that reduction
that I'm looking for.
00:08:04
All of a sudden
the kick is getting tighter,
I'm getting more attack out of it
with the compression.
00:08:09
It's also bringing out
a little bit more of that mud,
so I'm just going to scoop
starting around in the 250 range.
00:08:16
That's probably where it's living.
00:08:24
To my ear, I'm hearing it right there,
somewhere 260-ish,
and I'm just going to back off a little.
00:08:40
Something that always happens
with the SSL channel strip,
as soon as you start
adding compression and EQ
the I/O starts to peak a little bit.
00:08:49
That's very
standard operating procedure
on any actual SSL channel strip,
so,
the thing to do is just to bump down
the output gain just a little bit
so you don't see that peaking.
00:09:08
So here's a little...
00:09:10
before.
00:09:28
So a little bit of level discrepancy
because when I engaged the plug-in,
I've turned it down 3 or 4 dB
just for the gain makeup,
so I hope you heard that at home.
00:09:39
Kick out.
00:09:52
If memory serves me,
the kick in was a Beta 52,
which they had for their live setup.
00:10:00
And then the kick out, I added a 47 FET,
and I think I put it around the hole,
the air hole
where you can get
the microphone inside the kick,
just, like, as a little backup.
00:10:26
It's kind of a cool tone.
00:10:27
A lot attack to it, which is good for me.
00:10:29
Although I'm missing a little
low end, I think, out of it.
00:10:35
First trick of trick
is the good old Jonathan's
Little Labs VOG,
which is a lifesaver of a plug-in.
00:10:43
And also, PlugAndMix
makes a bass synthesizer plug-in
that's also really cool,
so there are great options out there
for various price points, too.
00:10:52
It's just, for some reason
I keep always going back
to the Little Labs VOG.
00:10:56
I really, really like it.
00:10:58
So I'm going to bypass.
00:11:13
I mean, it already sounds really good,
I hope you've cranked your subwoofer up
for this little demo here
just so you can hear
the massive amounts of low end
that's going on
already, immediately,
which I'm going to use to my advantage.
00:11:26
And then,
shortly after that too,
I want to go back to my favorite SSL.
00:11:32
I'm going to listen real quick.
00:11:41
I really like the attack
and I like the low end going on,
I think I'm just going to add
a little compression
just to tighten it up a smidge.
00:11:47
A little Ratio, around 3:1.
00:11:49
I'll keep my Release...
00:11:51
maybe a little faster.
00:12:06
Once again,
containing it,
controlling it really well,
and giving me a little bit more attack.
00:12:12
Tightening up that low end
that I just added on the Little Labs, too.
00:12:16
So I'll give you a little bit
before and after.
00:12:35
I'm going to look real quick.
00:12:36
I'm going to do a little cheating.
00:12:40
If you guys can see,
our kick is going up and down.
00:12:44
That means I'm in relative phase,
which is a good thing.
00:12:47
I want that waveform to go up,
I want the speaker to push,
that's part of the thing.
00:12:53
A lot of times I just look and,
hey, it's the nature of the beast.
00:12:58
Harnesses are wired wrong,
it's just a polarity switch.
00:13:01
Sometimes you don't have
the ability to check your...
00:13:03
"polarity",
your phase,
so,
I usually, when I'm looking,
I'm looking for that waveform to go up
because the speaker ultimately pushes air
and that's what I want it to do.
00:13:15
If the polarity was reversed
the speaker would suck air,
so you're losing attack,
you're losing low end.
00:13:22
I'm looking for little itty-bitty ways
to gain more attack,
more low end,
and this is one of the big ways.
00:13:29
And I already can tell,
if I zoom in on my snare drum,
I messed up,
because I'm the one who recorded this.
00:13:36
My snare top and bottom
were out of polarity.
00:13:39
Let's look at those right now.
00:13:40
I'm going to flip those.
00:13:41
I'm going to show you,
I'm going to zoom in really tight.
00:13:45
There we go.
00:13:47
So you can see
the polarity of the snare
is backwards.
00:13:52
The quick fix for that, for me,
is a good old Trim plug-in
which has a
phase button on it,
which flips my polarity.
00:14:02
So I'm just going to play
just the snare real quick
with inverted polarity.
00:14:17
Here is the phase switch flipped,
so that will invert my polarity
to the proper way.
00:14:32
It's a subtle difference,
but the snare does get a little thicker,
the attack of the snare
comes out a little bit more.
00:14:40
You're just gaining
a little bit more,
like a 15%, 20% gain out of it
just by checking
your polarity or phase
and flipping a switch.
00:14:51
It's such a great magical thing.
00:14:54
So now that I've done that,
I'm just going to work
on the snare sound itself.
00:15:05
When I'm listening back to the snare top,
I can tell I was adding
a ton of top to it,
which is why the snare sounds so bright,
but as you start adding
things to the track
it's probably going to be
in a good place.
00:15:22
The only thing I think
I need to do to this
is add a little compression to it.
00:15:26
Pontius is a great drummer,
but his snare hit is just...
00:15:29
the velocity is a little bit timid
in each other hit,
so I'm going to try
and smooth that out a little bit.
00:15:37
One my favorite new ways to do that
is this great program by Sound Radix
called Drum Leveler.
00:15:44
The cool thing about Drum Leveler
is if you pretty much just open it up,
the stock setting will give you
a good starting point,
but you have this great Target Level
and you also have this
Low Threshold level.
00:15:56
The Target Level takes the transient
and brings it up to that target level
every time.
00:16:02
The Low Threshold level
actually takes ambient noise
and pushes it down.
00:16:07
A perfect example:
hi-hat bleed in the snare top mic.
00:16:11
You can take the snare itself
and make it the same velocity every hit,
and also take the hi-hat bleed
and push it down to nothing,
to zero, or to infinite in this case,
or use it to your advantage.
00:16:28
There might not be a hi-hat mic
on the drum set that you're mixing
so you still need a little bit
of that bleed in there
to keep those subdivision notes.
00:16:37
I'm going to mess
with the Target Level first.
00:16:57
I think you can hear
it's really helping make each snare hit
sound the same velocity every time.
00:17:03
Let me just bypass it real quick.
00:17:18
I'm going to take the Low Threshold
and push it up a bit.
00:17:20
I don't want it to grab
some of those hi-hats.
00:17:47
And it's cool because this is
kind of a compression knob,
it's like 50%,
all the way to 100%,
which is pretty much stun.
00:17:58
That will make it...
00:18:00
every hit is the same velocity.
00:18:02
Absolutely perfect
for a pop track that you're working on.
00:18:06
I don't really think Foster The People
needs that sort of aggressive nature,
so I'm going to go somewhere in the middle
where I'm just sort of giving him
a little bit of love on every hit.
00:18:15
Smoothing out each velocity hit.
00:18:26
That's feeling really good to me.
00:18:27
I'm just going to take a look
at the snare bottom,
which, once again, when I zoom in on it,
I know that my polarity is wrong.
00:18:36
I should fire the guy that recorded this.
00:18:40
So let me just solo these guys up together
and check my phase between the two.
00:19:03
The snare level, that's not going to be
my mix in the track,
I'm just using the volume
being sort of similar
from the snare top mic
and the snare bottom mic
just to check my phase between the two,
and I can definitely tell by my ear
that it is out of phase.
00:19:19
I'll play it one more time.
00:19:20
So this is the polarity
or phase unswitched
on the snare bottom mic,
which is smaller-sounding,
and if I flip the polarity
on the snare bottom mic...
00:19:43
I get more low end.
00:19:45
So, that's what I'm going to do.
00:19:47
I'm just going to go back
to my kick in and out
and just get a static balance going
between the two of these.
00:20:37
So far we're just hearing
kick in and out,
snare top and bottom.
00:20:41
Let me look at my mono overhead.
00:20:43
The mono overhead is a 47 tube,
and I'm pretty sure I was using
an LA-2A compressing it,
and that is not part of their live setup,
this is another mic that I added
for my own pleasure.
00:20:58
I'll just solo it up real quick.
00:21:23
And
I'm compressing it pretty hard,
as you can tell on the soloed track,
but when you balance it in,
it adds a great little texture to it.
00:21:32
The only thing that I was
going to do real quick
was just check my...
00:21:35
Ah, my polarity seems to be
intact.
00:21:39
The interesting thing
that I am hearing, though,
in the mono overhead,
is some of that mud,
that low end buildup
is definitely apparent in that microphone,
so I'm going to scoop
a little bit of that out.
00:21:51
A great one
is the FabFilter stuff.
00:22:02
The genius thing about this plug-in,
obviously, use your ears too,
but it does help you giving you
a little bit of visual reference.
00:22:09
I'll play it for you real quick,
but I can see that
right in this area,
right around the 200 Hz area,
it's showing me a lot of buildup.
00:22:26
I'll just go in here and scoop
some of that low mid out.
00:22:28
I think it's somewhere around
the 250 Hz range.
00:22:50
That's helping a lot,
it's cleaning up a lot of that mud,
so let me just unsolo
and add the mono overhead in the track.
00:23:16
Sounds good there,
I'm just going to get
to where the B section is.
00:23:32
Yeah, that's feeling good to me
right in that balance area.
00:23:35
You'll see this track
called the Distorted Pedal track.
00:23:38
You can take a mult
off of the mono overhead,
or sometimes I do like a 451
or a 57 or something like that
and I stick it...
00:23:47
It's kind of interesting.
00:23:49
If this is the top
of the kick drum,
and this way is facing the drummer,
this would be the front head
and this would be the back head,
I'll take a mic and shove it right here,
and then feed that
into a distortion pedal,
a guitar pedal.
00:24:06
That's basically what this is,
it's the MXR Bass Distortion.
00:24:20
So the theory is
it's just to add a little dirt in there.
00:24:23
Not so much so loud where it's noticeable,
but just a little bit
to add a little character to it.
00:24:43
It's a little noisy.
00:24:46
I should check my polarity.
00:24:48
Who knows what I was doing.
00:24:51
I think I was sleeping
when I was recording it.
00:25:07
My phase seems to be good,
so we're just going to add that in
for a little bit of texture.
00:25:14
I'm just going to go
to the B section again
because it's a little more standard beat
instead of, like, four-on-the-floor.
00:25:20
So here's with the pedal off.
00:25:37
It's just a little character.
It doesn't need much.
00:25:40
It's really cool.
00:25:42
I'm going to move these tracks
just so I can find them a little easier.
00:25:46
I kind of forgot,
the Foster guys, they like to do triggers
as part of their live sound,
so there's actually a little trigger pad
off of Pontius' kick drum and snare drum
for electronic triggers.
00:26:16
It sounds really good to me.
00:26:17
I'm just going to add
a little compression to it.
00:26:19
It's a little on the flabby side of life,
I kind of want to control it
a little bit more.
00:26:23
I've always found
that four-on-the-floor can be
extremely difficult
because there's so much information per...
00:26:31
...hit, especially at the tempo
they're doing,
so every transient
that I can make tight,
controlled, and responsive
gives me
more clarity and definition in the beat.
00:26:43
I'm going to go to
an oldie but a goodie,
the old tried-and-true dbx 160.
00:26:51
I love this thing.
00:27:08
I usually do the 4:1 ratio,
and I'm looking for about
3 to 4 dB of reduction,
and I'm going to do a couple dB.
00:27:16
It's probably like 5 dB
of makeup gain.
00:27:33
Once again, tighten it up,
get a little bit more attack out of it.
00:27:36
It also gives it
a little bit more character
so it doesn't sound so much like an 808.
00:27:41
I wonder if it's fighting
with the real drums.
00:27:44
I'm going to scroll in on that guy.
00:27:46
Oh! Polarity.
00:27:48
Once again, I missed it,
so let's check it out.
00:28:06
Definitely giving it more attack,
more low end
with the phase inverted,
so that's sounding good.
00:28:14
Let's put it in the mix.
00:28:29
I think in this case
I really want it just to support
Pontius' kick drum.
00:28:33
I don't want it to be
overshadowed by the kick.
00:28:37
I want to feature the actual kick drum
more than the 808,
so,
I'm just going to find a nice balance
where it is supporting it.
00:29:03
That's feeling good right there.
00:29:05
Let's look at the snare trigger.
00:29:07
Same thing, it's an actual trigger unit
on his snare drum
that's feeding a little brain.
00:29:21
Cool tone!
Let's go with the old SSL.
00:29:33
Top end is cool.
00:29:51
Oh yeah, I forgot,
this is a combination of the snare
and the clapping here,
which is a big part
of the drum part.
00:30:11
I'm going to brighten
that up a little bit,
so I'm going to add a little EQ.
00:30:15
I'll just go up here to 10 kHz
and do a little...
00:30:18
a couple dB at 10 kHz with a shelf.
00:30:31
So I'm peaking a little bit
on my snare trigger track,
I'm just going to turn
the output gain down a little bit.
00:30:47
Then, if I zoom in,
polarity is good.
I caught it there.
00:30:50
Yay me!
So I'm just going to leave that as is.
00:31:07
Hi-hat.
00:31:08
Not that it's much of a...
00:31:10
hi-hat.
00:31:11
I don't know, it's important,
but sometimes it's not needed
in a recording,
but in this situation
I think it is a little bit needed
because of those disco beats he's doing.
00:31:20
Processing-wise,
I'm just going to leave it alone.
00:31:23
It kind of sounds good to me as it is.
00:31:25
I'm just going to blend it in.
00:31:31
But I'm going to go to the...
00:31:33
I believe there's a chorus where he is
doing the up-tempo.
00:31:59
And I missed it.
00:32:00
That mic is out of phase.
00:32:02
So here's
the polarity I recorded it at.
00:32:20
And if you notice,
with the polarity not flipped,
the center image got weird
and the hi-hat sounded
like it was all smeary
and pushed in the back.
00:32:28
And then, when I flipped it,
it became immediately more concentrated
on the left-hand side,
which is where I want it to be.
00:32:35
I'm a big hard-panner guy,
so...
00:32:38
For drums,
especially drums,
I love to parallel compress,
so I'm at a good point
to where I've kind of got the majority
of my kit together
to where it's a good point
to bring in
some parallel compression,
but I'm going to add it
to all my drum tracks.
00:32:56
As you can see,
I haven't put my toms in yet,
and I haven't put
the stereo overheads in yet.
00:33:02
A fair way to do that is just
on a send
of the master tracks.
00:33:08
New Track,
and I want a Stereo Aux track,
and then I usually type,
I call it 'drum sub'.
00:33:15
Just a name I picked up
in my many, many days of assisting.
00:33:22
And Pro Tools
automatically creates a new track
with all of these guys feeding.
00:33:29
The one thing, though,
that I want to do
is
Follow Master Pan,
so if I look at
all of my sends
as I'm panning across,
for example, my hat,
and then, my toms are panned
rack tom, hard left,
floor tom, right,
the send fader
follows that pan.
00:33:55
In this case, I just put them to zero.
00:33:57
I very rarely mess
with the levels of that.
00:34:01
A good way in Pro Tools
to make your send faders snap to zero
is if you highlight the tracks
that you want to control
and then Shift+Option,
and then click on a send.
00:34:11
If you noticed,
they all popped to zero there.
00:34:14
Shift+Option in Pro Tools is like a...
00:34:16
it's a soft group.
00:34:18
Really, really handy.
00:34:20
So, I've just created
my 'drum sub' Auxiliary track,
and
the first thing I need to do is,
like I said before,
I'm using an internal bus
to mix with,
which I've labeled 'MIX',
so I got to take this new track
and I got to assign it
to the 'MIX' output.
00:34:39
That way,
it feeds my master fader
and my record track.
00:34:44
So,
I'm now going to add
one of my favorite
drum sub plug-ins,
which is the UAD Fatso Jr.
00:34:57
I've tried other things
and I don't know why
I always end up coming back to this guy.
00:35:02
It always just works for me.
00:35:04
First thing I usually do
is crank up the Warmth.
00:35:07
I want that
harmonic distortion that it adds,
and then I'm going to play the track,
but just,
I'm going to crank the Input a little bit
so I'm going to get it
to where it's compressing
somewhere in the 7-10 dB range,
which just seems to be...
00:35:23
It's actually hitting it
a little harder than that,
which is kind of nice,
so I might turn it back down a little bit.
00:35:28
I'm just going to turn down
my output, too.
00:35:30
And mind you, this is me playing it
without listening to it.
00:35:33
I'm sort of just getting the compressor
to do what I want it to do,
and then I'm going to blend it
into my unprocessed drum tracks
as a back bus.
00:35:45
So let's see what it sounds like,
together.
00:36:11
So let me just play it for you.
00:36:13
These are the raw drum tracks,
no parallel compression.
00:36:34
Boom!
All of a sudden my drums became
much more exciting.
00:36:39
A little pumping and breathing
going on in there,
which I like,
which is going to sound really nice
when I start adding things.
00:36:46
My concept and my focus for mixing
is always...
00:36:51
I'm trying to get the most...
00:36:54
...clarity,
presence,
attack,
tonality
out of each individual instrument
with the
mics that make up
an instrument like the drums
to make it this huge thing.
00:37:09
The bigger I get it,
the better my track will sit.
00:37:13
The more dynamics
that I can add in there,
especially between the kick and the snare
is going to be the foundation of my mix.
00:37:20
The bigger I can make
the kick and the snare,
the easier time I'm going to have
when I start adding my bass
and my vocal on top.
00:37:26
It just becomes this,
like, building block puzzle.
00:37:30
I always think of it
as cooking,
and also,
Legos,
audio Legos.
00:37:38
Mixing can be
a little bit of a video game,
especially with a DAW!
So I've got my drums going,
but my drums are only making up
the kick,
the snare,
the mono overhead,
the distortion pedal,
and then my kick trigger
and my snare trigger.
00:37:58
While I've got
this basic foundation going,
I'm going to roll down
to my bass real quick.
00:38:04
There's
two mics here on the bass:
there's the 'BASS MIC',
and then there's the 'BASS FX' channel,
and then there was a 'BASS CLEAN',
but I don't think there was anything
we used on that track,
so I can probably just...
00:38:19
I'll mute that track,
but let's just solo up this 'BASS MIC'.
00:38:23
I want to get the drums
and the bass sitting together
real quick.
00:38:41
So that's the bass amp.
00:38:42
You can hear the mic,
you can hear the drums bleeding in there,
and a little bit of the guitar as well.
00:38:48
Kind of sexy,
and he does have a...
00:38:51
like a spring reverb effect on there.
00:38:54
That's not me,
that's the actual track itself
that's coming out of the amplifier.
00:38:58
A part of the thing. Really cool.
00:39:01
The first thing is
it does sound a little on the muddy side,
so I think I can go in,
add a little EQ and just clean that up.
00:39:09
I can hear compression.
00:39:11
I did compress the track
going to Pro Tools
when we were tracking it.
00:39:17
My go-to is a Blackface 1176.
00:39:22
I'm not going to need
any compression over here,
I'm just going to go
in the realm of like 200, 250 Hz,
and try it there.
00:39:43
Yeah, that's helping a lot already.
00:39:45
I like the top end.
00:39:47
So, here it is
unprocessed.
00:40:02
I got a really good tone
out if this bass mic
when we were tracking it,
so it sounds really good to me.
00:40:07
I'm just going to play the whole track
and then add the bass mic into it,
and then I'll go in
and look at this 'BASS FX' too,
to see what that is.
00:40:35
And then, adding the bass in there,
I've got a good balance on it right now.
00:40:38
I think the bass should be good
sitting in front of the mix,
I think it should really drive the track.
00:40:43
It's a cool riff,
but I'm noticing when I
push it up a little bit
it's starting to fight with the kick drum,
but it doesn't sound
like it's an EQ thing to me,
it just sounds like I need to adjust
my kick level a little bit
with the bass in the track.
00:40:55
And that does happen a lot,
you get something,
you get the drums sounding really good,
you add the bass in there,
and...
00:41:02
the snare still feels good
but then the kick got a little lost,
and sometimes that could be an EQ thing,
sometimes that could be
just a sure level thing,
but mostly what I'm missing for
is adding the bass
and I feel like I'm losing
a little bit of attack
on the kick drum, and I want that to be
really a focal point as well.
00:41:31
See? That did it right there.
00:41:32
I just turned the kick in up like 1.5 dB
and the kick out about 2 or 2.5 dB,
and that feels better already.
00:41:44
And I'm sure you can see
that my mix bus level,
or my headroom,
is a little bit out of control!
Doesn't shock me there.
00:41:55
I'm going to turn it down a little bit.
00:41:59
Usually a good way to do this is
just make a group,
and just select the tracks
that you would want to turn down
if you needed to adjust
your overall headroom volume.
00:42:13
So, as you can see,
I don't want to select the 'drum sub',
because if I turn the drum tracks down
I want the sub to stay
at the same output level,
but it's going to affect the compression,
which is fine.
00:42:26
I can adjust it.
00:42:28
So I'm going to turn my groups on,
and I'm just going to go down
4 dB.
00:42:35
There we go!
As you can see,
that 4 dB adjustment
puts me in a better area of my headroom,
so I'll turn my 'MIX' group off,
and I'm going to keep listening.
00:42:56
I'll solo up this 'BASS FX'.
00:43:12
It's almost like they have a DI
and a mic going on,
like there's two different tones,
like the amp is putting out
a lot of low end
with the reverb,
and then the 'BASS FX' track
has
some top end distortion on it.
00:43:32
But it also has a reverb on it.
00:43:34
It sounds kind of cool on its own.
00:43:39
Let me just check.
00:43:46
I'm going to solo these two up,
the two bass mics.
00:43:49
I'll check the polarity.
00:44:06
My phase is wrong.
00:44:25
The 'BASS FX' track,
it just sounds good on its own
so I'm just going to balance it in.
00:44:30
I don't think it needs any processing.
00:44:32
Once again, I'm pretty sure
I did a little EQ and compression
on both the 'BASS FX' and the 'BASS MIC'
going to Pro Tools while recording it.
00:45:24
I'm just listening to the bass
and drums together,
and I realized the snare
was getting a little quiet
so I turned the snare up a few dB.
00:45:32
And
the snare is feeling a little thin to me.
00:45:38
I'll add a little low into it,
just to help it thicken up a little bit.
00:45:42
Favorite snare drum arsenal EQ,
the good old API 550,
can't go wrong.
00:45:48
I grew up with 550s
at Ocean Way, Studio B,
where I spent the majority
of my time there.
00:45:55
We had 32 channels of 550As
sitting on the inserts of the console
all the time,
so it was just a big thing to,
"[Sound], channel one.
00:46:02
[Sound], snare top.
00:46:03
[Sound], tom.
00:46:04
Blah, blah, blah",
so I got really acclimated to the tonality
and the sound of what an API can do.
00:46:10
And it has just always been
one of my favorites.
00:46:14
So we'll just add a couple dB at 100,
see what that does to the snare top.
00:46:31
I'm kind of liking that.
00:46:32
I'm doing 4 dB at 100
on a bell.
00:46:35
They're on both of them.
00:46:36
Also, just a little bit
with 2 dB at 10 kHz,
on a bell as well.
00:46:39
You can see the switches at the bottom,
those engage
the high frequency and the low frequency
to be a shelf EQ.
00:46:46
So we'll just play that bypassed.
00:46:49
This is the snare top EQ.
00:47:10
I like it.
00:47:11
I like it a lot.
00:47:12
I'm also hearing I want
a little bit more attack out of the kick,
so I'm just going to add
a couple more dB at 8 kHz
on the kick drum.
00:47:31
Yeah, there we go,
just a little more poke on that kick.
00:48:07
I'm going to look at these toms
real quick.
00:48:23
I can tell...
00:48:24
I zoomed in on them,
boys and girls at home,
and they are definitely out of polarity.
00:48:30
Yay!
I don't know if you guys know this,
but you can copy a plug-in
by holding Option,
clicking on the one plug-in,
and dragging it down to another.
00:48:39
It's a pretty handy thing.
00:48:50
The tom is a little on the
sad-sounding side of life,
it's kind of flat.
00:48:55
It needs a lot of top and attack to it
so it will cut through the mix,
so,
I'll probably start with a little bit
of 10 kHz on the EQ.
00:49:08
And a good frequency for toms
is, like, 4 kHz,
just to get more attack.
00:49:18
A smidge of compression here
just to control it a little bit.
00:49:35
That's the low tom.
00:49:48
The rack tom sounds a little better to me,
but I do want
a little bit more attack out of it.
00:50:05
I'm going to go somewhere
where he plays the rack
and the floor together
so I can check the level.
00:50:22
As usual,
the rack sounds like it needs
to be a little louder to me.
00:50:34
I'm into gating my toms
as of recently.
00:50:39
I used to go through
and edit out the audio,
but,
I've kind of found
that just doing a little gating,
which is noise gating on them,
helps a lot.
00:50:52
The FabFilter seems to work
really well on this.
00:50:55
I know for a fact
that my Threshold is going to be
somewhere in this area,
and I'm going to want to put
my Release time...
00:51:05
...pretty long,
and the Hold up, a couple of milliseconds.
00:51:09
So that way, when the gate hits,
it'll stay open and slowly close.
00:51:18
I need to adjust my Threshold
a little bit.
00:51:29
I'm still getting a little bit
of ambient noise,
so I'm going to turn my Threshold up
a little bit more.
00:51:38
And I have to say
that was a darn good guess.
00:51:45
The Release seems really nice and natural.
00:51:51
I don't want my gate to close too fast
where it's going "dum psst.
00:51:54
psst",
that clamping sound.
00:51:58
I want it to just
sort of decay out naturally.
00:52:02
Since I've got a good starting place,
I can copy
over to my floor tom real quick.
00:52:19
And my Release time
and my Hold time
are in such a length that
he's doing these
"du du dun, du du dun"
pattern on the floor tom,
so when I go here
towards the end of this section...
00:52:38
...the gate is going to close
in a nice, natural way,
and it stays open
because this tom part
is a really important pattern
in the drum part.
00:52:48
Let's just unsolo my toms
in the whole mix.
00:53:07
It's feeling good.
00:53:08
I might just turn...
00:53:09
...the low tom down just a smidge,
like 1 dB,
and I'm going to listen
to that rack tom more.
00:53:22
That feels good!
I'm a big "toms loud!" guy.
00:53:28
Toms can never be loud enough.
00:53:31
Let's look at the overheads.
00:53:32
These are stereo overheads.
00:53:35
I don't remember what the mics were
because these were part of the mics
for their live setup.
00:53:53
Definitely a lot of the bleed
of the room in there,
it's so cool,
but I can hear the cymbals are...
00:53:59
Let's just put them in the mix.
00:54:24
Once again, I messed up on my phase,
so the overheads are out of phase.
00:54:28
Let me just play it for you
in the track,
so here is how I recorded it.
00:54:53
The snare got a little thicker there,
that's what it wants.
00:54:57
By flipping the polarity
the snare comes out a little bit more,
it gets a little more beef out of it,
which is a good thing.
00:55:04
The more, the merrier.
00:55:12
And I'm pretty sure
that for the ride mic,
it was miced, but,
Pontius is on the hi-hat,
or he's playing the floor tom
the whole time.
00:55:21
I really don't need this mic at all,
so I'm just going to mute it
just so I don't, by accident,
turn it on in the mix.
00:55:53
I'm still hearing a lot
of low mid and rumble,
and I think it's coming from the bass.
00:55:58
Let me tame that down a little bit more,
I'm going to just move my
EQ point over, lower.
00:56:06
Let's see what this does.
00:56:39
I mentioned earlier that the room,
we recorded this at The Village,
the Masonic temple
I believe is the
name for the room,
it has a lot of low end rumble in it
and I'm hearing it in the drums.
00:56:52
I think it's kind of coming
from accumulating together,
and then,
the Fatso is...
00:56:59
...compiling that low end rumble,
so I'm going to put
a little bit of EQ, post-Fatso,
on my 'drum sub'
or parallel compression side,
and just knock a little low mid out of it
and see if that sort of tames it down.
00:57:47
So, just keeping out a little bit
of low mid on this is helping a lot.
00:57:51
For some reason, the track
is a little on the dark side to me.
00:57:53
I'm going to add a little...
00:57:55
...top
to the 'drum sub' as well.
00:57:58
Let's hear what this sounds like.
00:58:20
That sounded pretty good.
00:58:22
Let me show you this,
I'll give you an A/B of this.
00:58:24
Here's the FabFilter EQ
on the drum parallel bus.
00:58:29
Still with the low mid out,
taking out a couple dB at 200 Hz.
00:58:43
And now I'm going to engage the top end,
I'm adding a shelf at...
00:58:47
almost 4 dB at 11 kHz.
00:59:02
That's feeling nice to me.
00:59:04
It's just giving me a little bit more...
00:59:07
a little more air.
00:59:09
I just copied a Trim plug-in
from my sample kick
up to my drum sub,
and apparently,
my drum sub is at -6.
00:59:17
I'm going to apply that
to the Trim,
so I'm going to go down 6
and I'm going to put my fader at zero.
00:59:23
The reason for doing that is that way...
00:59:25
I've got a level that I really like,
and pretty much any adjustment you make
on the 'drum sub' at this point
is going to change the entire balance.
00:59:33
So,
just in case so I don't whack
or touch that fader by mistake.
00:59:38
It's sounding good
at the -6 fader level,
so I'm going to put it at zero.
00:59:44
That way, I won't mess
with it by accident.
00:59:47
It's just part of my workflow.
01:00:33
I'm really having a hard time
hearing the attack of the kick drum,
so I'm going to my kick out,
which is my 47 FET mic,
and,
while the track was playing,
I added a lot of dB
at 8 kHz,
and I'll play it for you.
01:00:50
I'm just looking for
more of the beater head
to poke through the mix.
01:01:21
That's feeling better to me.
00:00:00
We have some guitars.
00:00:01
Let's look at these.
00:00:02
Sean is the guitarist in the band,
he's got two amps going on,
and
all of his effects,
the pedal chain is all stereo,
so, let me just solo it up.
00:00:13
And you see there's the DI,
which didn't get used at all.
00:00:17
I still recorded it.
00:00:19
It was just easier to capture.
00:00:21
Good point. A lot of times
when I'm recording,
if I have 24 channels
and I've got 24 mics up,
even though I might be using
just half of them,
or, like, 16 tracks,
I'll still record every channel.
00:00:36
A good reason is
sometimes just a happy accident
where a mic becomes a...
00:00:41
a guitar mic
that's for an acoustic guitar overdub
becomes a really cool room mic,
or the artist
or band
is in the middle of the take
and they said they wanted to play piano,
but then, in the middle of the take
they switched to organ
and since the organ mic is already there,
they can just start playing,
and then lo and behold,
"Oh, the piano doesn't feel good,
the organ feels better,"
but,
at least they were able to
switch in an intimate environment
and in almost like a demo environment
really easy,
but things are still getting captured
and they still have headphones
and cans to listen to each other.
00:01:19
So let's check out Sean's amp.
00:01:20
Now, if you notice,
I've already panned him left and right.
00:01:31
Yeah, so he's got some stereo reverb
going on in there
in the back.
00:01:37
I'm going to check polarity
between the left and the right,
or phase.
00:01:46
Definitely in phase!
Good to know.
00:01:49
I just wanted to check.
00:01:51
I'm going to unsolo it
and listen to it in the track.
00:02:16
I like the tone I got.
00:02:18
I can hear that I was compressing
again on the record side.
00:02:25
I think it just needs a little bit of EQ.
00:02:28
I'm just going to add
a 550 on both tracks.
00:02:33
So I'm going to do
a little bit of 10 kHz on both sides
and see.
00:02:41
The guitar is a little thin to me.
00:02:42
Kind of cool
as far as cutting through the track,
but,
I want it to take up
a little bit more space.
00:02:48
It's a little small-sounding.
00:02:50
Guitars kind of live in the
250,
300, 350 Hz range,
that's kind of where
the thickness of a guitar lives,
so, if you add a...
00:03:00
like an API,
or a Neve EQ,
add a couple dB of 200,
and go dangerous and use a shelf,
it'll thicken up the guitar really quick.
00:03:10
So here, let me copy that
over to both sides
and I'll play it soloed up.
00:03:34
They're sounding pretty good
with the EQ,
although I think I might have gone
a little bit too much with the low end.
00:03:39
I'm just going to back off a dB.
00:04:03
That's feeling pretty good to me.
00:04:05
As you can see, I added
a little bit more top end,
so I went 4 dB at 10 kHz
with a shelf,
both left and right.
00:04:29
I'm feeling okay.
00:04:30
I'm on the cusp of this
getting a little harsh,
but it's not
terrible.
00:04:34
I'm going to use that
to my advantage right now.
00:04:36
I feel that once I put it in the track
with the drums and the bass,
some of that harshness
is going to get chewed up
by the snare and the bass,
so it's going to go away.
00:04:46
And if I still feel like it's a problem,
I might notch out
a little 3 kHz out of it to see,
so,
once again, I'm going to play the track.
00:04:54
I'm just going to turn it down
and kind of get a balance going.
00:06:06
It's kind of like a good time for me
to add a little vocal in there.
00:06:09
I've got my foundation going really well.
00:06:11
All I've added so far is the drums,
the bass, that guitar,
there's still
some piano
and percussion-y things
to add in there as well,
but the mix is feeling like a good point
to get my vocal sound going.
00:06:24
The reason being is,
to me, the vocal is the hardest part
in a mix to settle.
00:06:30
It's really hard to sit it in the mix,
so if I get it going
in the mix fairly early,
even if it's not the final sound
that I'm going for
or the final level I'm going for,
at least my ear
acclimates to it.
00:06:45
I find it's much easier
to get the vocal started off at a point
with the foundation,
and then start wrapping things around it
where...
00:06:55
that way I'm not losing anything.
00:06:56
I used to do a long time ago, like,
"Oh, let me get the mix
or the instruments going really well
and get that very powerful,
and then put the vocal on top."
It doesn't seem to work.
00:07:06
Either my vocal was too quiet
or I pushed it up too much,
because I was trying to layer
a vocal on top of a track that...
00:07:14
or a foundation
that was already solidified,
whereas this way
I'm building the foundation
and then putting like a pillar on top,
and then trying to wrap
the sides of the building
around it, so to speak.
00:07:26
So now, what I want to do
is start listening to the vocal
earlier in the mix stage
and actually start processing
the vocal a little bit too.
00:07:32
That way I can get it settled
and make sure that it's really
the focal point of the track,
and that everything else
is a great foundation to the vocal.
00:07:49
Now,
the joyous thing here,
live vocal, if you can't tell
by just the ambient noise around.
00:07:57
The drums are in there,
there's the guitar amp.
00:08:00
If you've watched the video,
he was kind of just...
00:08:03
the drums were here,
Sean was here,
I think Isom was playing
piano around here,
and then Mark was in the middle of the...
00:08:10
And it was more about...
00:08:11
it wasn't an audience shot,
an audience perspective shot,
it was more about camera angles
for the director.
00:08:17
The band was sort of
playing in their own
rehearsal space,
but there just happened to be
cameras there capturing the event.
00:08:24
They wanted to make it intimate like that,
and he's on a wireless handheld,
which I think was just like a 58,
handheld.
00:08:32
And I did a little bit of processing
while recording,
so, I need to do a little bit more to it.
00:08:48
The second thing to think about here is
that's a live vocal,
so there's all that bleed.
00:08:53
You kind of have to make
that bleed your friend.
00:08:55
You're not going to get rid of it.
00:08:57
It's going to make it
feel more like a live track.
00:08:59
I can hear right away
that I probably want to compress
a little bit more.
00:09:03
I know I'm compressing while recording,
I'm also adding a good amount of EQ.
00:09:07
The vocal feels bright to me,
which is good for the clarity.
00:09:12
I can tell that we need to de-ess as well.
00:09:16
My new favorite arsenal of de-esser
is the FabFilter de-esser.
00:09:43
That's working really good.
00:09:45
The FabFilter is great
because it's just set it and forget it.
00:09:50
I love that about it.
00:09:52
Part of his tone,
God bless him,
he gets a little on the
3 kHz bump in there,
which has a little kind of grate
into the air,
especially when you're trying
to push it up so hard.
00:10:03
A different story if we were
in a controlled environment
and he was singing on a big, beautiful
251 or a 47 tube
where I could smooth that out
just with a gorgeous
60 year-old tube mic,
but,
we can't really do that.
00:10:18
A great tool for that
is a multiband compressor,
and there's a couple of them
out on the market.
00:10:27
There's the FabFilter,
which I have on the screen here.
00:10:30
There's also the Waves C4 and C6.
00:10:32
Those are really good multibands.
00:10:36
I've just sort of gotten
acclimated to the FabFilter Pro-MB
because you can
solo it up.
00:10:43
So, if I play it real quick
and I just look at the graph...
00:10:48
Once again, I'm cheating with my eyes,
but I'm definitely going to listen to it.
00:10:53
I can hover around the nasty frequencies
which is usually around the 3 kHz area.
00:10:58
And then you click on it,
and it comes up
with the stock settings,
which I usually leave alone.
00:11:06
I like the fast Attack,
I want it to grab
those really harsh frequencies
really quickly
and then release them really quickly.
00:11:13
I just want it to do its job
and then get out of the way.
00:11:15
Do its job, get out of the way.
00:11:17
So I can usually tame down
or turn up my Threshold
so it's not going to touch it very much,
and then, also,
you have the Ratio,
which is 1:1, and then Infinity:1,
which is like brickwall limiting.
00:11:30
Hard Knee, and then Lookahead.
00:11:32
The FabFilter multiband
is super versatile.
00:11:36
It does a lot of stuff
and I barely tapped the surface.
00:11:39
So, let me just play the vocal.
00:11:57
There's these
slot bars
which show me where
the section of frequency
is going to compress.
00:12:04
So if I go down on the line
it just shows me that right now
I'm at 1.5 kHz
and I'm going all the way up to
almost
6.2 kHz.
00:12:13
Pretty wide band,
but it's...
00:12:16
quite honestly, it's sounding really good.
00:12:18
Let me play it for you again.
00:12:41
I'm not taking away the clarity,
which is what I want.
00:12:44
I need that clarity so that it will
pop through the track really well.
00:12:47
All I'm doing is removing
a lot of that harshness
that's in...
00:12:51
...the vocal and the mic,
that adds up,
so it's going to make the vocal
smoother in the track.
00:12:58
I want to do a little compression
to my lead vocal,
so, one of my favorite
tools in my
plug-in arsenal
is the lovely
Universal Audio 1176 Revision A.
00:13:13
Blue stripe.
00:13:15
I pretty much always use a 4:1 Ratio,
I go with a really slow Attack
and a really fast Release,
and then from there
I'm just going to adjust my Input
to be how much compression I want.
00:13:26
I don't want too much compression on this.
00:13:29
If it was an actual
studio recording,
I'd probably do a little bit
more compression
for control,
but because it's a live thing
and there's so much ambience
going on in the vocal mic,
I just want to do
a little bit of controlling
without sucking up too much
of the ambience.
00:13:47
So, let me play it.
00:14:10
That's sounding really good to me.
00:14:11
I'm just doing a couple dB of compression
just to help control him.
00:14:15
Now let me solo him up
and put him in the track.
00:14:43
The vocal is sounding good.
00:14:45
It's dry,
so,
let's do a little effect on it, shall we?
I kind of feel like it needs
a little slap delay
and a little reverb
at the same time.
00:14:55
So,
same thing,
I don't have any
reverb or delay settings
in my session at the moment,
so I'm going to add a few.
00:15:04
Let's do a new track,
a Stereo Aux,
and then I'm just going to...
00:15:10
let's say, 'lead vocal verb'.
00:15:15
And then,
the trick
where you hit Command
and the Solo becomes a solo isolate,
so that way,
when I solo up my lead vocal track,
I still hear my effects with it.
00:15:28
And
just about to put that track
in the 'MIX' bus as well.
00:15:33
Let's see what we've got here.
00:15:37
Valhalla,
if you guys are not aware out there,
Valhalla reverb,
he makes a couple of reverbs
and a couple of delays.
00:15:46
Really cool stuff,
especially for the price points.
00:15:50
I usually start with the Vintage Verb.
00:15:53
The reason being is because
in the Vintage Verb he's got
two Halls, a Plate, a Room, a Chamber,
Chorus Space,
Ambience, Sanctuary,
Dirty Hall, Plates,
and a Nonlin function,
which is the
Phil Collins's 'In The Air Tonight'
tom 'doo doo, doo doo',
that's an AMS RMX16 Nonlin setting.
00:16:15
I'm kind of feeling like a plate
will do me justice,
but I know I want it to be
a little bit on the short side of life,
so, let me just turn the return down.
00:16:50
The reason I picked a short plate
is because, first of all,
they're recording together
in a live room.
00:16:56
There is already a lot
of ambience going on
in the drum mics,
the bass mic,
as you've noticed
as I was soloing stuff up,
and there's a lot of bleed
in Mark's vocal as well,
but I need a little
ear candy in the background,
I need to give Mark
a little bit of his own space
and I can achieve that
with a little bit of reverb.
00:17:15
But I'm choosing a short one
because the ambience accumulation
is already quite a bit
because it is a live track,
so I need
sort of like a different
palette with Mark,
a little bit of a scene difference
between the two,
and that's why I'm kind of picking
a shorter plate
just to give him
a little bit sexier tonality.
00:17:38
If you just noticed,
I turned the send to my reverb,
to my plug-in up,
and I turned the return of the reverb,
the output of the reverb down
in the mix a little bit.
00:17:49
A couple of years ago
when we were dealing more
with analog reverbs
like plates, real plates, real chambers,
there was always a noise floor
that you had to be aware of.
00:17:57
You wanted to hit your reverb
as hard as you could,
without distortion,
and then turn your return down
so the reverb return feeding in the mix
wouldn't be as noisy.
00:18:11
And usually,
most reverbs,
no matter how good they were,
they were noisy.
00:18:16
Most plates, springs, they're noisy.
00:18:18
It's part of the thing,
it's part of the charm,
but some,
depending on the unit,
some units respond better
when you hit them harder.
00:18:25
A big thing was
EQ'ing the send into a reverb
to get your noise floor a greater level.
00:18:32
Kind of don't have to do that
with
plug-ins a lot of the time,
or they already have
EQs built into them
in some situations,
but,
if you're working on a track
and you find your reverb is just too dark
because you're using a vintage plate tone,
try putting an EQ in front of it
and adding some top end
to the input of the reverb.
00:18:52
It will really excite it.
00:19:12
I'm just listening to the vocal
in the track a little bit.
00:19:15
I want to add a little bit
of top end to it,
so,
I'm going to go for a Neve 1073.
00:19:20
The great part about the 1073, too,
is it has a high-pass filter.
00:19:25
In this case, I'm going to go to 80 Hz
and then high-pass
so I can get rid of a lot
of the low end rumble
of that room out of there,
and I'm going to add
just a couple dB of top.
00:19:36
I don't need much.
00:20:06
That's feeling really good.
00:20:07
Let me just
play the same
part there without the EQ.
00:20:51
That's feeling good to me.
00:20:52
I'm also going to
put a Trim plug-in on my insert
and then attenuate my Trim plug-in to -1.5
so I can snap my fader to zero.
00:21:02
A lot of the issues that were
in previous versions of Pro Tools,
i.e. Pro Tools 10
or later,
whenever you touched the fader
it would dither,
and I figured out a way
to get around that by using
Trim plug-ins all the time.
00:21:20
But now I find the Trim plug-in is great,
especially in the case
of where I know I'm going to automate
the lead vocal
and if I happen to be mixing
and I have automation on,
if I want to turn the vocal
up or down in the mix,
it's really easy for me
to grab this Trim plug-in
and adjust that level that way
without having to fight the automation,
so that's the big reason
why I kind of use the Trim plug-in really.
00:21:50
The vocal is sounding really good to me,
but I think it needs a little bit of
effect kind of trickery,
and one way to get around that
is a stereo spread plug-in
just to make the vocal
take up a little bit
more space in the back.
00:22:05
I'm going to create a Stereo Aux track
and I'm going to call it
'spread'.
00:22:13
And there's lots of plug-ins to do it.
00:22:17
The one that comes to mind quickly
is in SoundToys.
00:22:23
You can do
MicroShift,
and I'll just solo it up
with the effect pretty aggressive.
00:22:31
And I need to put this also
in my 'MIX' bus.
00:22:36
But the send is down,
so let me just turn it up.
00:22:53
It's a chorus basically,
a really tight chorus that allows
some stereo spread in there.
00:23:00
And that was the extreme measure of it,
so I'll turn that down a little bit
and I'm actually going to leave
the return at zero
and just turn the send down a little bit
because I'm also going to put this
on the backgrounds coming up
to give them a little bit more character.
00:23:28
So, I'm soloing up the lead vocal again.
00:23:31
Here's no spread.
00:23:52
This just makes the vocal feel less
centered,
like this narrow center point
because we're working
with a microphone that has...
00:24:03
It's not really rich,
it doesn't sound
really thick,
so,
I need to
use a little trickery
to fake that,
so to speak.
00:24:13
Once again, in a controlled
studio environment,
a really good-sounding 67,
or a Lauten,
or a 47 or something like that,
that is a really big,
beautiful, bold, rich mic.
00:24:24
That would probably sound
wider than it really is
in the stereo image,
but because we're dealing with
a live dynamic mic
that's a very narrow point,
it's sounding really small in the mix,
so I just want it to be
a little bit bigger
or perceived to be a little bit bigger
without using EQ
and taking up more actual
sort of frequency real estate.
00:24:51
It's sort of tricking the ear
a little bit here,
but it's doing what I want it to do.
00:25:43
While the vocal
was playing in the track,
I really liked the sound of it,
but I thought it was just
a little bit too loud,
so, once again,
my fader is still at zero,
but I turned my Trim plug-in down 1.5 dB,
so I'm
-3 right now with the vocal level.
00:25:57
That was feeling a little bit better
in the track.
00:26:00
Just to save myself
from an accident,
I'm going to put a Trim plug-in
on my vocal reverb as well,
to -8,
and snap my fader to zero,
that way I don't mess with the level
by complete accident.
00:26:17
I'm feeling like the vocal
needs a little bit of a slap,
a slap delay that is,
so,
I'm just going to call this
'slap' fader,
and assign my output to 'MIX'.
00:26:33
Just for my organization's sake,
I'm going to put my effects
above my lead vocal.
00:26:42
And
tons of delay plug-ins out there,
all of them are cool,
all of them do different things,
all of them sound different,
they react different,
but I'm kind of thinking
that the Valhalla Freq Echo
is a good place to start.
00:26:59
The band, because they're on tracks,
they're actually playing
to a click on this.
00:27:04
Beforehand, I figured out
the tempo was 114,
so I'm actually on the grid,
so in this case I can just go,
I want an 1/8th note from the delay
and I'm going to turn the Mix up to 100%,
and the Feedback, I'm going to guesstimate
like down to...
00:27:17
somewhere around 20%.
00:28:08
So I adjusted the slap during playback,
I went from an 1/8th note to 1/16th note
so it would be a little faster.
00:28:14
The Valhalla Freq Echo,
they call it Freq Echo
because it has a frequency pitch-shift
so every repeat
goes up
in pitch,
and it adds
a cool little texture.
00:28:27
And I'm only doing like 30%,
so it's sounding like...
00:28:29
Let me just solo it up.
00:28:31
But I forgot to solo isolate my slap.
00:28:45
Around 4 to 5 repeats after every note,
so that sounds really good to me.
00:28:49
It's a little bit too loud in the track,
so I am just going to grab a Trim plug-in
and copy it over and turn it down.
00:28:56
Let's see what 4 dB does.
00:28:57
I want it to be heard
but I don't want it to take over.
00:29:45
I just got a little impatient there
and just decided while
I was listening to the track
I just wanted to pop
the BVs in real quick.
00:29:51
There's these 2 BVs, which were the girls
that came in on the day of the shoot,
and then also, they have a track of BVs
because Mark Foster, the lead singer,
he just stacks...
00:30:02
in his recordings
he stacks a lot of BVs
and he does like a lot of different
tonalities for every stack
so it just sounds like this really crazy
gang going on.
00:30:13
If I solo it up real quick...
00:30:20
And you can hear in there too
he's pitching some of them up
and some of them down
so they sound really crazy,
but then, when you
put them in the track...
00:30:42
And already we got
a really cool background vocal texture.
00:30:46
I definitely need to do
a little processing
on these vocal tracks, so,
definitely a little compression.
00:30:50
I need the help
with the volume control,
get them to sit in their space
a little bit more,
so I'm kind of thinking of something
a little aggressive-sounding.
00:31:03
Tube-Tech CL 1B,
what a lovely box.
00:31:08
Just so you're aware,
I'm going to take the two girls
and the BV tracks
and combine them together as one group.
00:31:16
I'm already busing them,
as you can see, 'bv sub',
to an Aux
with solo isolate,
so, I want them to feel
like one big gang together.
00:31:26
That's how they're supposed to sound,
so I'm going to solo
those guys up together.
00:31:39
Love that tambourine in there.
00:31:56
The girls, if you can tell,
the ambience is coming
in and out of there.
00:32:00
I went through before
and I cleaned that up.
00:32:04
There was just too much ambience
with the girls' vocal mics,
so I thought it was better
if I just mute the regions
where they weren't seen
so I could keep
the ambient instruments down.
00:32:16
And you do have to be careful
about that when you do it,
especially on live tracks like this.
00:32:20
Sometimes it's a situation
where you just have to leave the mics on
and, once again, make
the ambience your friend,
but,
I'm kind of getting away with it here.
00:32:29
I want to go and add
all the BVs to the same group,
as in edit group.
00:32:40
I usually like to keep
my track numbers on.
00:32:43
That really helps when you're removing
or adding tracks to groups
to find them really quickly,
because sometimes the names are so...
00:32:53
'BV1dup1', '.dup2',
'.dup3', '4', '5', '6',
something, something, something, and...
00:33:00
trying to find that name in the group
and to remove it or add it
can be a little bit, like, overbearing.
00:33:51
The mix is going great,
it's sounding really good,
just my headroom is a little out of whack.
00:33:56
I want to turn it down a little bit,
so I'm just going to go down 3 dB.
00:33:59
So, once again, I'll turn
my MIX group on that I made earlier
where...
00:34:04
the tracks that I want to turn down
and not their subs,
so I'm just going to turn those down.
00:34:18
Much better on the headroom.
00:34:20
It's kind of time to start adding
a little mix bus compression.
00:34:27
The Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor
has been really floating my boat,
so to speak, lately.
00:34:33
It's been a lot of fun.
00:34:34
It takes a little bit
to figure out, though.
00:34:36
I will say that.
00:34:37
There's two parts to the compressor.
00:34:39
There's the Discrete part,
and then there's the Optical part.
00:34:42
I usually take the Optical part
out of the chain,
and then,
this Meter Select here
is default on the Optical,
and since I've taken the Optical
out of the chain,
I switch it over to the Discrete side,
and so now both left
and right meters
just show my gain reduction.
00:34:59
So anything I do on the left-hand side
affects both channels.
00:35:04
As you can see by the knob in the middle,
it says Dual Mono to the left
and Stereo to the right.
00:35:10
It can be your benefit
to play around with
both
ways of working
on the stereo bus,
whether you're in Dual Mono mode
or Stereo mode.
00:35:21
Just, when you're doing that,
in Dual Mono mode
you just have to make sure that you're
matching your settings properly.
00:35:27
But for today,
I'm just going to stick with Stereo mode.
00:35:35
So here I have the Ratio.
00:35:36
I'm just going to go to 1.5,
and I usually like my Attack to be
a little on the fast side
and my Release to be
a little slower,
so I'm going to play it
and slowly turn up my Threshold
until I get some meters dancing.
00:36:07
That's feeling pretty good to me,
the bus is getting
squeezed together a little bit more,
a little more control going on.
00:36:13
I'm kind of wondering
if it's a little bit too slow
on the Attack,
so I'm going to play
with the Attack and Release
while the track is playing.
00:36:48
When I was listening to the track back,
I was playing with the Attack time
on the compressor
and I felt like it needed to be faster.
00:36:56
The track itself
is a moderate tempo track,
but
it comes into play with that
live situation of the band
and the kind of tubby room
playing together
where I was looking
for more of a transient.
00:37:08
I wanted the compressor
to grab the transients quicker,
and that makes it feel tighter to me,
and also a little bit more exciting
to me in that instance,
but at the same token,
I left the Release at the same way,
and right now it's feeling really good.
00:37:22
It's starting to gel really well together.
00:37:24
Now I'm just checking my headroom.
00:37:26
So,
when the compressor is compressing,
I'm losing gain
and there is no auto makeup gain
on this particular plug-in,
so I have to make up the gain.
00:37:37
And
I usually want to play it for a little bit
to see how loud I can get
my dynamic range
within my print track
before going over.
00:37:53
So that's 8,
so I'm just going to crank it up to 9
and see how hard I can go without peaking.
00:38:09
That looks really good.
00:38:11
I'm going to start from there.
00:38:14
So let me play it a couple of bars with,
and a couple of bars without.
00:38:17
Let me just start without first.
00:38:19
Here we go.
00:38:45
So, the name of the game in this
is the compressor is doing
really what I want it to do,
I'm really hearing
a lot of
squeezing going on.
00:38:54
It's taking a lot of the
transients and things
that are sort of flapping around
in the stereo image
and really bringing them together
in a tight, tight way,
so it's making the speakers react
in a really good way,
and that, in turns,
creates excitement in your mix.
00:39:10
A big thing about...
00:39:11
especially with this track,
since it's a live thing,
all the parts in there
are sort of weaving in and out
of each other
in a frequency in a great way,
and I've made them big-sounding,
and now I'm using a little bit
of stereo bus compression
to sort of tame them down a little bit,
but it's working in a way to where
the whole track is becoming
tighter, more responsive
and exciting to my ear,
and that's what I want for the listener.
00:39:37
I want it to be like...
00:39:38
I want it to jump out of their speakers
and this is helping the cause.
00:39:50
I'm just going to go back
to these BV vocals.
00:39:52
I know for a fact I'm going to do
a little bit of a spread to them,
I want them to sound a little thicker
than they really are.
00:40:08
And
I'm going to play with the balance a bit
on these guys.
00:40:16
I'm
kind of feeling the real BVs
are a little bit too loud
and the pre-recorded BVs
need to be a little louder.
00:40:23
So if you see, I put Trim plug-ins
on the tracks.
00:40:26
'BV 1' is louder than 'BV 2',
so that's my balance.
00:40:31
And then, within the Trim plug-in
I basically turned the 'BV's TRAX'
up a little bit.
00:40:56
And at the same token,
I want a little reverb.
00:41:02
I'm going to make a reverb
just for the girls,
just for the BVs, should I say,
so I'm going to call it 'bv verb'.
00:41:09
And
I'll make sure I assign that output.
00:41:17
This plug-in never fails me.
00:41:19
D-Verb.
00:41:21
But, same thing,
stock Hall,
which is one of my favorite
settings on D-Verb,
but I'm just going to go pretty short.
00:41:35
That's really good,
it kind of puts them
in a separate space from Mark,
which is what I want.
00:41:41
So, once again,
I'm just going to put
my effect track above the lead vocals
for organization skills so I can find it.
00:41:58
I'm feeling like a little EQ
is needed on the BVs,
so,
I'll go to my 1073 again.
00:42:06
And I'm going to engage
an 80 Hz high-pass on them.
00:42:09
I want to play it in the track
and just add a little EQ,
probably just top is all I need.
00:42:30
Feeling good!
They're a little too loud.
00:42:33
That's about it.
00:42:34
The EQ, though, helped.
00:42:36
Let me just turn them down a smidge.
00:42:39
Once again, I just put my Trim plug-in on.
00:42:41
I snap my fader to zero
and I'll play that,
the BVs back just flat,
with just the compression,
the reverb and the spread.
00:43:11
With that top end,
I feel like they're just a little loud,
so I'm just going to go down 1 dB.
00:44:41
Down here, deep in the bowels
at the bottom of the session
is the old piano,
and it's a Stage Nord, I think,
so it's just DI.
00:45:00
It's already pretty bright.
00:45:03
It could use a little compression,
so let's use, like,
an old-school LA-2A on it.
00:45:25
That's helping a lot.
00:45:26
By compressing it a little bit,
the quieter notes are getting louder
and the louder notes
are getting a little quieter.
00:45:32
It's helping him smooth it out overall.
00:45:43
And,
the piano is...
00:45:45
it's a keyboard piano.
00:45:47
It is pretty bright as it is,
but,
I feel like it needs
a little bit more midrange as well.
00:45:54
But I'm going to add a little air to it
or top end to it,
just a smidge.
00:46:06
That'll help it sit in the track.
00:46:08
Let me just give you a little preview.
00:46:11
So, here's flat.
00:46:48
I'm just trying to slide
that guy into the mix.
00:47:26
Oh yeah, and I forgot,
I did a little piano slap.
00:47:45
Maybe turn it up a little bit.
00:47:46
It just makes the piano a little more
vintage-y sounding,
especially because it's a
Nord digital piano.
00:48:45
I can't remember,
I think there were rototoms.
00:48:50
Yeah.
00:48:53
They're already sounding
really good in the track.
00:48:56
I don't think I need to do
any processing to them,
I just need to kind of place them.
00:49:07
The one on the right is louder
than the one on the left,
so I'm going to turn
the left guy up a couple dB.
00:49:13
There we go.
00:49:19
But, in the track,
the one on the right
sounds really good
but the one on the left
I can't really hear.
00:49:27
There we go.
00:49:28
And the hits only happen twice.
00:49:35
It's little ear candy stuff like that
that I really try to pay attention to
and turn up really loud
because that's always great little moments
that happen, to me.
00:49:42
That's the reason I call them ear candy.
00:49:51
That's good.
00:49:52
So then there's a surdo,
which Isom is playing.
00:50:06
A surdo is a Brazilian
marching drum type of instrument
but it has a calfskin on it,
and usually,
the tonality is amazing
but recording them can be
a little bit of a challenge sometimes.
00:50:18
There's a little bit of trickery
you can do to them.
00:50:21
First and foremost,
there's the Transient Designer.
00:50:26
The good old SPL Transient Designer.
00:50:30
Let me solo it again for you,
just the surdo.
00:50:40
The low end of the drum is great,
there's just no attack to it,
so I'm going to
fabricate
some attack with the Transient Designer.
00:50:48
You can change
how much attack
or how little attack
you want out of something.
00:51:24
That's doing a really interesting thing.
00:51:26
All I need now is a little bit of EQ.
00:51:30
I'm kind of feeling
like I might have some good luck
with the old SSL here,
so, I just want to add
a little bit of air to it
so I can hear that mallet
hitting the skin.
00:51:44
Oh, what the heck!
I'm going to compress a little bit too.
00:51:57
It's sounding really good
to me right now,
I think I'm ready
to listen to it in the track.
00:52:01
If I was looking for a little bit
more attack out of it,
just for the future, guys,
I could just look for a little
4 kHz in there.
00:52:16
I was doing it as an example,
but when I heard it I kind of liked it,
so,
here's a little...
00:52:21
just with the Transient Designer.
00:52:34
I may have gone too crazy.
00:52:35
Let's see what it sounds like
in the track.
00:52:57
I didn't go too crazy!
The EQ goes to 12, 15 for a reason.
00:53:07
That's my motto.
00:53:19
Although it is a little too loud
in the track.
00:53:21
Let me just turn it down, like, 2 dB.
00:53:30
Isom,
the same guy who is playing piano,
he's the one doing
all the percussion stuff.
00:53:35
For this section he's playing it
a little louder.
00:53:38
I can just look at it by the waveform.
00:53:41
He's going for it,
so I'm just going to turn it down
volume-wise,
do a little automation move here.
00:54:12
Yeah, but like the second half
in the verse,
it's feeling really good,
the velocity he's playing it at.
00:54:17
The floor tom,
if you notice,
it's playing panned on the right,
and the surdo
is panned on the left.
00:54:25
Something to keep in mind
when you've got two instruments
that are basically doing the same thing.
00:54:29
Utilize that real estate, man.
00:54:31
That's why hard panning left and right
is such a big thing,
it really adds a nice effect,
especially if somebody
is listening on headphones,
which a lot of people do these days,
so,
it's a good thing
to take advantage of that.
00:00:00
Let's move on to something else.
00:00:01
These 'ISOM KEYS',
I think this is in the pre-chorus.
00:00:09
Oh yeah, so there is the 'SYNTH TRAX',
which is the horns.
00:00:15
And then this is the...
00:00:17
it sounds like a Vox organ type.
00:00:24
Tonally, it sounds really good.
00:00:25
Let me just put it in the mix
and see what it sounds like.
00:00:47
I like the tone.
00:00:50
I want a little compression.
00:00:53
Something sexy.
00:00:56
A little Fairchild vintage vibe on it.
00:01:33
Which isn't [inaudible], though,
listening in the track,
I think I do need a little bit of EQ.
00:01:41
A little Maag.
00:01:42
Just a little top really.
00:01:45
The Maag, it has this great Air feature.
00:01:48
Probably just a couple dB at...
00:01:50
let's solo it up at 10 kHz.
00:02:21
Just add a little sparkle
fairy dust on there,
that'll help it pop through the track
a little bit more.
00:02:39
That's sounding really good.
00:02:41
Let's work on this horn track.
00:02:52
Those are samples.
00:02:55
They sound nice on their own.
00:02:57
I'm just going to see
what they sound like in the track.
00:03:10
I kind of realized playing the horns
that the synth is a little bit too loud,
so I'll turn that down a little bit.
00:03:35
It sounded good where it was.
00:03:36
I just want to hear the horns
a little louder.
00:04:41
A big thing that I like to do
when I'm mixing
is I constantly Save As.
00:04:46
I don't like saving over
the same session over again,
and especially when tracking.
00:04:51
The reason being is because
I've had the instances where
a session file can get corrupted,
and if you Save As,
then at least you can go...
00:04:59
you can backtrack to something.
00:05:01
Also,
I like just the hierarchy of working
because
there's been a lot of times
where I've recorded something
or edited something,
and when I do a Save As,
and then I forgot to
duplicate the playlist,
or in a situation
where I can't get back to my old work,
well, at least I can import
my old session data.
00:05:21
And so, it's always a big thing,
but one of the things that I've done
on my system
and I would encourage you guys
to look into doing as well
is quick keys.
00:05:31
In this case,
Command+Shift+S is Save As for me,
I can just Save As, and boom!
instead of having to go up
to File.
00:05:40
Quite honestly,
I wish Pro Tools just implemented
Save As in there,
in their quick key format,
but they, for some reason, haven't.
00:05:47
A trick that I picked up on
not that long ago, actually.
00:05:50
I was like, "Oh gosh!"
This was like a lifesaver for me,
to figure that out,
so,
FYI,
Save As is safe.
00:05:59
Backup the whole nine yards.
00:06:02
I'm kind of at the point in my mix
where everything is sounding really good.
00:06:05
I'll kind of switch gears,
sort of, sonically.
00:06:08
I've been listening to
my standard mix
with just my stereo bus compression.
00:06:16
I kind of want to go to my 2-mix
limited mix
just to get a better option
of what it's going to sound like more
out in your car,
or in your stereo.
00:06:30
I'll open up my limiter here,
which, like I said before,
is the Massey L2007.
00:06:35
It's a really good one.
00:06:36
There's also... Waves makes one,
and FabFilter makes one.
00:06:40
UAD has their own Precision series one.
00:06:43
This has been always
one of my go-tos for years.
00:08:51
The track is feeling really good to me.
00:08:53
I'm kind of enjoying hearing it
really exciting like that.
00:08:57
The synth track.
00:09:08
This is more like an effect thing.
00:09:09
Let's just squeeze it in there.
00:10:03
The synth track going on,
I really like the level of it
in the first chorus here.
00:10:09
However, the end of the song
was just a little bit too loud,
so I'm just going to grab
the automation volume
and just turn it down a little bit
and see what it sounds like.
00:11:19
That's feeling really good to me.
00:11:20
Let's look at some of these FX tracks.
00:11:26
Yeah, some crazy
pre-recorded effects
that they got going on.
00:11:57
I'm just listening to my mix.
00:11:59
I'm feeling like I need
a little bit more low end,
mostly from just the kick and the bass,
so,
I'm going to go through
and turn my kick drum
and my bass up a little bit
while I'm playing the track.
00:13:24
And then,
by turning up my kick and my bass,
my stereo bus compressor
started to react a little bit more.
00:13:30
A little bit too much for my ears,
too much to my liking,
so, I decided to back off
one click on the Threshold.
00:13:41
So now,
I'm more in the 1 dB of compression range,
and because of that,
a little more output gain happened
so I had to turn my output gain
of my compressor down
just to keep my headroom under control.
00:13:53
The kick and bass adjustments
are feeling much better,
the track is feeling
a little bigger now to me.
00:15:19
Just listening to my mix there,
it was just a little bit...
00:15:22
I had a couple peaks in my stereo bus, so,
I went back to my stereo bus compressor
and just
one click down on the output gain,
and it seems like my headroom
is in a really good spot right now.
00:15:42
I'm going to experiment real quick.
00:15:44
I was just kind of wondering
if I add a little bit of top,
super sheen top end to this track
on the stereo bus.
00:15:53
Usually when I EQ on my stereo bus
I use the compressor first
and the EQ after it,
and I kind of didn't explain that before,
but that's using my
method of madness as well
for my signal path, always.
00:16:05
Usually, I'll de-ess, multiband,
or multiband, de-ess,
then compress, then EQ.
00:16:11
I have always been a big fan of that,
it always kind of works
for my ear.
00:16:17
Some consoles out there
actually let you decide
where the EQ is in the chain,
like SSLs,
you have the ability to change
where the compression or the EQ is,
pre or post-EQ,
which is a
great benefit,
so,
I encourage you to experiment with that.
00:16:35
Put a compressor on,
play with it for a minute,
then stick your EQ on post-,
and then stick it on pre-.
00:16:41
See which one feels better.
00:16:43
You may surprise yourself.
00:16:45
For stereo bus EQ though,
I usually go as high as I can
frequency-wise.
00:16:52
A mastering engineer,
he sort of explained to me
that it becomes this air, almost,
almost like a sheen.
00:16:58
Things perceived to be wider
when you start messing with frequencies
up in that higher, higher spectrum.
00:17:05
I'm going to play the track.
00:17:50
Now let me just give you
a little reference
of what I was working on.
00:17:53
Here's the stereo bus
without EQ.
00:18:26
The track is feeling brighter now.
00:18:28
I'm not doing much to it.
00:18:30
It's funny how a little dab
will go a long way on the stereo track,
especially with the EQ.
00:18:36
It's pretty amazing.
00:18:38
So I'm just adding...
00:18:39
What? One click?
Two clicks at 21 kHz there.
00:18:42
It immediately opened up the track
a little bit more for me.
00:18:45
I'm having less trouble distinguishing
particular instruments
that are in the stereo field.
00:18:50
Everything is
a little clearer for me
and I'm finding where...
00:18:56
the placement of certain instruments,
especially across the left,
center and right image
is a little bit easier for me to pick out,
and I'm liking kind of like that...
00:19:05
that nice splash
that's going on there on the cymbals.
00:19:09
And also,
the vocal gets a little clearer as well,
so it's really
helping my cause here
and I'm liking it.
00:19:17
I'm feeling really good
about the track overall.
00:19:20
I think it's time to do some vocal rides.
00:19:22
The track itself,
it seems pretty linear.
00:19:25
All of the parts
and whatever compression that I'm doing
seems to help all the parts
sort of poke in and out
where they need to poke in and out,
so I'm really just hearing right now
it's just some vocal rides on Mark
and the BVs.
00:19:39
So, I like to start with the lead vocal,
and
one of my
favorite tools
is just this
PreSonus FaderPort.
00:19:48
A single channel.
00:19:50
Really inexpensive.
00:19:52
It works great.
00:19:53
It usually works really well.
00:19:56
The only time I have
problems with it, honestly,
is the USB port
on the back
starts to fail
after a little while.
00:20:04
I've killed a couple of them in my career.
00:20:07
They're really easy to set up
and you can just bank across
the particular faders,
and then, whatever fader
you've highlighted
is the one...
00:20:16
I'll demonstrate it for you,
is the one track
that the FaderPort is going to control,
so, I'll just do like a...
00:20:24
a crazy ride.
00:20:30
If I play that back...
00:20:36
the fader is going to dance around,
so, it's great,
and it's a super time-saver.
00:20:41
I used to do the
track Auto Touch
sitting here with a mouse,
click, and ride,
and, ugh!
It's so cumbersome,
and then,
I get a
hand cramp after a while.
00:20:53
A $150 dollar investment,
and it works,
and it doesn't take up
that much space either.
00:20:58
And quite honestly,
most of the time
I'm usually just automating
one thing at a time.
00:21:03
Very rarely am I doing
multiple tracks
or faders at a time.
00:21:09
It's usually when it's like a...
00:21:12
I just mixed a record
where it was a duet,
so it was a girl and a guy,
and that was where I found myself going,
"Okay, if I had a couple faders here,
it would be easy."
Push the guy up,
and then the girl,
and such and such,
but it wasn't really
that difficult to do.
00:21:27
So with the vocal rides
I'm just pretty much
just looking to keep Mark
sitting at a
constant point,
or constant level in the track,
and that's always relative.
00:21:37
If the track gets louder,
then I'm going to need
to push Mark up a little bit.
00:21:40
If the track gets quieter,
I'm probably going to bring
him down a little bit.
00:21:43
If he, like, tries to throw away a word
or something like that,
I'll probably try and push that up,
so I'm listening on the fly
to what he's singing.
00:21:50
So, let me just play it
so I can get my reference point in my ear.
00:21:59
That's kind of a
perfect example,
"You'll do everything,"
the "You'll do" is kind of thrown away
and then he goes, "everything you can,"
he makes it louder.
The "You'll do" is quieter.
00:22:18
So, just to give you
a quick reference point,
let me... I can easily turn
the automation off.
00:22:25
Here we go.
00:22:45
A quick example of that line right there,
all of a sudden
the little bit of automation I did,
the few words that are
mumbly or whatever,
they sort of poke out of the track
and you can understand them now,
so I'm pretty much just going to
apply that technique.
00:23:43
Let me give you
a little bit more of a view here
for the folks at home,
and then I'll give you my fader.
00:24:16
I missed that "You'll do."
Quick key, if you guys are familiar
with your Rewind
and Fast Forward keys
on the number pad
of your keyboard,
if you're playing
for example...
00:24:35
and I just type back.
00:24:37
'1', reverse,
it just goes back a couple of bars.
00:24:40
It's really handy to get in that mode
for when you're doing automation rides.
00:24:44
If you miss something, you can just
tap back a couple times
and press the space bar again
and keep going.
00:25:02
Cool!
So that's the lead.
00:25:05
Let's do those, let's work on those BVs.
00:25:10
And then,
once I do the BVs, I'll go back
and I'll kind of just
double check the volume rides
on both the lead vocal and the BV vocals.
00:26:12
I'm just going to go back
and listen to the lead vocal
and the BV vocals together,
and just do some minor adjustments
with the Trim volume automation,
which is a great feature in Pro Tools.
00:26:25
If you just want to affect
this amount
but you want to raise it up a dB,
what it does is it just makes
the volume automation that you've written
play a dB louder,
so it's really, really handy.
00:26:40
Especially for
just doing words or phrases
that you may have missed
in your automation ride,
so it's a great way to go back
and just kind of fine-tune things
a little bit.
00:26:58
A perfect example,
that "when your"
is kind of
just...
00:27:03
something about it
is thrown away a little bit,
so I'm going to turn it up
like 1.5 dB and see what that...
00:29:26
That concludes my...
00:29:28
my vocal rides.
00:29:29
I'm feeling good
about their levels.
00:29:33
The one trick I want to show you
is if you can see on the lead vocal
and the 'bv sub',
I've...
00:29:40
like I said, I've got all this
Volume Trim automation.
00:29:42
What I like to do afterwards
is go up to
Track, and it says
Coalesce Trim Automation.
00:29:49
It puts the automation that I've written
on the Volume Trim graph
and applies it to the Volume graph.
00:29:58
It's really helpful
if you've done some serious automation.
00:30:01
That's cleared out.
00:30:02
That way, if your client
comes back and says,
"Oh, it sounds great, but can you just
turn the first chorus up a little bit?"
then,
it's easy to grab that first chorus
and just trim it up a little bit
and you're not
dealing with the little
automation points that Pro Tools makes.
00:30:18
A great, handy tool.
00:30:20
The only thing I wanted to do is
I'm just kind of feeling
like I'm pushing my vocal
a little bit too loud.
00:30:25
I'm just going to go down 1 dB on it,
and then listen back real quick.
00:31:03
That's feeling better to me.
00:31:05
So,
I'm ready to print.
00:31:07
I'm going to print the mix,
and this would be the point where
I print a mix and upload it for a client,
and then send them an email and say,
"Hey! I got a mix for you guys to hear,"
and wait to hear back for notes.
00:31:19
I've already got my print tracks going.
00:31:21
I just need to make a new playlist
and label it as such.
00:31:25
So, in this case,
I'm going to call it 'Best Friend FTP',
I'm going to call it the 'Pure MIX',
and I'm going to label it 'M1',
as in mix 1.
00:31:35
And then I copy it,
and then I'm going to go down
to my limited print track
and do the same.
00:31:41
Paste it,
and then,
just do an 'L'
for limited track.
00:31:47
And I've already got
my
print region highlighted
for my old track, so,
I'm just going to drop
the tracks into Record.
00:31:57
I'm also going to do a Save As.
00:32:00
A '9',
and then I'm going to go...
00:32:05
...'M1'
so I know where
the hierarchies of my sessions are.
00:36:42
I had a great time showing you
some of the tricks
and things that I've learned
over the course of a few years,
and especially trying to apply it
to something that I recorded
and it's a live situation,
which is a unique
deal.
00:36:56
I think so many bands
and artists
need live material
for promotion pieces,
so there's a lot of work out there to do
a live recording like this,
or in a controlled
and an uncontrolled environment
for video and promo,
so,
I hope you learned a lot from it.
00:37:12
Thank you so much for joining me
and
have a good night!
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Software
- D-Verb
- FabFilter Pro DS
- FabFilter Pro G
- FabFilter Pro MB
- FabFilter Pro Q2
- Massey L2007
- Sound Radix Drum Leveler
- Soundtoys Micro Shift
- SSL E Series Channel Strip
- Trim
- UAD 1176 Rev A
- UAD API 550A
- UAD Dbx 160
- UAD EL7 Fatso Jr
- UAD Fairchild 660
- UAD Little Labs VOG
- UAD Maag EQ4
- UAD Millennia NSEQ-2
- UAD Neve 1073
- UAD Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor
- UAD SPL Transient Designer
- UAD Teletronix LA-2A
- UAD Tube-Tech CL 1B
- Valhalla Vintage Verb
- Valhalla Freq Echo
Darrell Thorp is a nine-time Grammy Award winning engineer. Darrell started as a guitar player before joining the navy for 4 years, then enrolled to the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences in Arizona. He finally stepped into the music world by working as an assistant in some of L.A.'s prestigious studios such as Track Record, Conway and Ocean Way studio.
Darell has worked with artists of great renown such as OutKast, Radiohead, Nigel Godrich, Paul McCartney, Foo Fighters, Beck, Ray Charles, Goo Goo Dolls, Switchfoot, Molotov and contributed to many multi-platinum records. Darrell now works at his own studio called 101 Recording in LA on an API 1604 console with a hybrid digital / analog setup.
You can watch Darrell's work on pureMix with indie artists like Foster the People and Future Elevators and see how he gets this modern rock sound you hear every day on the radio.
Beck
Radiohead
P!nk
Paul McCartney
Switchfoot
Nigel Godrich
Formed in Los Angeles in 2009 by multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter Mark Foster, indie rock trio Foster the People make melodic, atmospheric, dance-oriented pop.
Best Friend
CLICK_HEREMusic CreditsBest Friend
By Foster the People
Formed in Los Angeles in 2009 by multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter Mark Foster, indie rock trio Foster the People make melodic, atmospheric, dance-oriented pop.- Artist
- Foster the People
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