Fab Dupont Deconstructing Moi
01h 43min
(43)
In 2017, Lolo Zouaï came bursting onto the pop music scene with single "High Highs to Low Lows," which has since gained millions of streams, Times Square billboard placements, and been received with critical acclaim by the world's most respected music publications.
After a brief meeting, Lolo, producer Stelios, and their team tagged award-winning producer and mixing engineer Fab Dupont to help shape the record into the smash hit it has become on the world stage.
In this pureMix exclusive tutorial, Fab breaks down how the record came to be, his input in the production stage, and how he approached mixing the album before deconstructing his entire mix, track by track, of the hit single "Moi."
Watch as Fab:
- Explains how he met Lolo Zouaï, her team and how the project came to be
- Plays the original demo he heard in the first meeting with the team
- Explains the song structure suggestions he made in the production phase
- Discusses how he had to organize the workflow with Lolo's team to work extremely quickly throughout the mixing of the full length record
- Breaks down his gain staging for the mix
- Describes his vision for the vocal sound of the track
- Explains every detail of Lolo's vocal chain, and why he made the tweaks he did.
- Gives the story of creating the 808 tone that carries the low end of the track
- Dissects his parallel processing with the drums and bass of the track to teach how he crafted a fat and punchy foundation for the track
- Goes through the synths, strings, and additional production for the rest of the track, showing how he molded each track to support the vocal performance
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:1 - Start
- 00:18 - Song Background
- 03:44 - The Original Demo
- 07:58 - Initial Feedback
- 10:13 - Session Delivery
- 13:31 - The Workflow
- 16:27 - Gain Stage Setup
- 23:23 - The Rough Mix With Changes
- 30:11 - Levels
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:1 - Vocals
- 00:50 - Lead Vocal
- 17:13 - Vocal Double
- 19:33 - Intro Vocals
- 25:19 - Vocal Chop
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:1 - Drums and Bass
- 11:18 - Drum and Bass Parallel Compression
- 14:56 - Snaps
- 18:45 - Timpani
- 21:58 - Synths
- 25:41 - Viola
- 28:27 - The 2 Bus
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
00:00:00
Good morning children!
Today we're going to talk about 'Moi',
not 'moi' (me) because
that's not very interesting
but we're going to talk about 'Moi',
the fabulous song by
the amazing singer Lolo Zouai.
00:00:09
Let's go.
00:00:17
First, a little bit of background
information in history.
00:00:21
I met the Lolo Zouai team
in August 2018.
00:00:25
They work out of this building.
00:00:27
The team is
Lolo singing and co-production,
Stelios Phili, co-production.
00:00:32
And Doug, the manager.
00:00:33
And it's really a team,
the manager is part of the team,
they're always together when
there's a session,
the manager is there working
in the back making the business happen
and also giving his opinion.
00:00:42
They are a very organic team
and they work
unbelievably well together,
it's a joy to watch.
00:00:48
Also, they work well with others,
so it was a pleasure
for me to work with them
because suggestions are welcomed,
opinions are welcomed, they may
not always be taken into action
but it's nice to be able to
have an opened dialogue with the team
to try to make the record
as good as possible.
00:01:03
And that spirit
informs how this record was made.
00:01:06
As I said, I met them in August,
outside on the street.
00:01:10
I bumped into Stelios,
I had seen his face in the building,
he said:
'Hey Fab, I'd like to introduce you
to Lolo, an artist I'm working with.'
'Hi Lolo'.
A couple weeks later
I get an email that says:
'Hey Fab, this is Stelios,
we met in the street,
I introduced you to Lolo,
can we come up and show you some music?'
'Absolutely,
come on up show me some music!'
So they came up
and they played me some demos.
00:01:33
And he said: 'Would you be
interested in working with us on this?'
And I said: 'Yes!'
I thought it was great.
00:01:39
And the thing that was
amazing at that moment
is that I offered
feedback.
00:01:44
Often, when you mix a record
you get the tracks, the producer
has been working on it for a year,
ten years, a year.
00:01:51
And you say:
'You know, are you sure that you
want your intro to me 8 minutes long?'
And they're like:
'What do you mean?'
There's no real open thing.
00:02:00
With this team,
they played me the stuff and I said:
'Wow, this is fabulous but,
what if...'
And they were like: 'Oh!'
'Let's think about that.'
They thought about it
and some of the feedback they implemented
and some of the feedback they
were not cool with so
they kept it the way it was.
00:02:17
That is a really great situation.
00:02:20
So, basically it
evolved from a relationship
of them feeding me songs
and me just making the
best of what they gave me,
which is very often the situation
with a mix job,
to being a little more involved
in the production cycle.
00:02:37
Not as a producer per
se but more as like a
conscious and as a
last bar before the desert,
meaning: 'Play me the song,
I'm gonna mix it tomorrow.
Are you sure this is as good as it can be?'
And then the discussion arises
and then maybe I'm gonna mix
the song the next week
while they record some vocals
or maybe some of the
ideas were interesting.
00:02:57
Maybe some executive producing
in the very ancient style of the term.
00:03:01
I didn't play anything,
I just offered feedback
and the song evolved over time.
00:03:07
And that informed how I mixed the record
which is why I'm sharing it with
you because working that way
has impact on what you
can do on the mixing stage.
00:03:17
During that first meeting they played me
their current version of 'Moi',
which was from 6318,
so June 3rd 18,
because this is America
and they put the month first.
00:03:24
And it was a V2, that's universal.
00:03:27
And the first time I listened to it
within 16 bars I was like:
'This is gonna be a hit'.
00:03:33
I knew it right away,
I knew this was gonna touch people.
00:03:36
And I thought it was awesome
and it seduced me.
00:03:41
I thought that song made me
wanna mix the record.
00:03:44
But I had reservations.
00:03:45
So, what I'm gonna do is play you
that song, that version
that they played me that day,
the same way I heard it.
00:03:52
Full disclosure,
I lowered it a little bit,
because it was loud as hell.
00:03:57
So, let's listen to the very original,
pre-anything
version of 'Moi', which they
probably had spent a lot of time on
but at that point, they felt:
'What if someone else came in,
and give us an opinion?'
And they asked me to give my opinion
and probably mix it.
00:04:16
And let's see where we started.
00:07:57
That was it.
00:07:59
So, for all intents and purposes,
they could have released this,
this is totally bad-ass,
Stelios did a bang job at mixing,
I thought it was great.
00:08:09
Of course, everybody has their own taste
and vision, I thought
I could maybe bring a little more bottom,
a little more 'oomph'
to the whole project.
00:08:19
My number one reservation was like:
'Guys,
this is amazing and the part
that's gonna make everybody
just sway is that vocal chop.
00:08:32
And I don't think that you
need to delay it so much.'
So I don't remember if I told them
that at that meeting,
probably,
because I tend to be pretty quick
but let's imagine I was listening
to this song for the first time
and I didn't know what the
final version came out to be.
00:08:45
The first two things
that would come to mind are:
A - I don't think the
Intro should be this long,
I think you should come
right away on her vocal.
00:08:53
Just like, no apologies,
just like, announce to the world
that this bad-ass singer is on this track
and you should pay attention
to the rest of the song.
00:09:01
That's what I would have said.
00:09:03
The second thing, I'm not wanting
to cut French out of anything
but that pre-Chorus, I felt,
the novelty of switching to French
on the Urban Pop
American track is awesome.
00:09:16
Stretching it for 8 bars,
or 4 depending on
how fast you counted it,
I don't know,
I felt that it would be more essential
if they just kept the first part of
the pre-Chorus, this part here.
00:09:46
The 'no no' thing felt
kind of like a Bridge towards...
00:09:49
Like, it didn't feel as
flawless, essential and inspired
as the rest
and I believe I told them:
'Maybe you don't need all that
in the pre-Chorus,
maybe you wanna give us that
that Chorus as fast as possible.'
For those of you who know
the final version of the song,
that's what happened, that second
half of the pre-Chorus was cut
and that very long Intro was cut
and she comes in right at the top.
00:10:13
I have here the rough
that they gave me
on February 6, 2019.
I mixed this song
for the first time on February 10th,
2019.
00:10:24
So, they basically tweaked
the production
up until a couple days
before I start mixing it
and then they sent me the stems.
00:10:30
By the way,
I got the stems in this format.
00:10:33
So, the way Stelios
delivers his records
is he works in Ableton Live, exclusively,
and he does everything in Ableton Live.
00:10:42
And then he uses the very sniffy
and super powerful
export function out of Ableton Live
and gives me a stem for every track.
00:10:50
The thing with Ableton,
you can also export
effects like reverbs and
whatever sends you have
and whatever receiving
of the sends you have.
00:10:58
So, you always can tell it's
an Ableton track if you have a
A dash and a B dash because
those are the default names
for the Aux receive,
just like you can tell it's a
Logic production if it says .bip.
00:11:12
When you see an A dash and a B dash
in the folder
that usually means
it's coming from Ableton.
00:11:19
So Stelios works in Ableton,
exports to track,
I take all this and
dump it into a session
and then I organize it my own way.
And then I mix it.
00:11:27
There are some
idiosyncrasies to Ableton Live,
it's an unbelievably
creative software package,
it's really fun to work in,
it's really fun to produce in it,
it's really hard to mix in it because of
the way the gain stage is organized.
00:11:42
And you'll notice that
some of these tracks,
this is the final mix,
I have it here because
we're gonna deconstruct today,
but you can notice
that some of the tracks
come really really low.
00:11:52
Like this,
this vocal chop right here.
00:11:56
This is the actual waveform,
I have to jack it up like crazy.
00:12:00
While if you look at the strings,
the strings are crazy too.
00:12:03
Check it out.
00:12:04
This is a string track,
you say it's empty.
00:12:06
It's not empty,
it's just really really small.
00:12:09
The reason for that is
the way the gain stage is in Ableton
tends to be very back heavy,
so you get a lot of gain
from the end of the chain.
00:12:18
That's the way they set it up.
00:12:20
Maybe because this is
primarily a live package
and so you wanna be able to
control everything from one spot.
00:12:25
The advantage of that is that
you don't get distortion
on the actual tracks
because there's so much
gain on the master bus
that all the tracks have to be brought
down to be able to not clip everywhere.
00:12:34
So that's nice.
The disadvantage of that
is that the gain stage
is all over the place.
00:12:38
Also, having those
folder tracks in Ableton
is really amazing,
the problem is,
if you have a folder track with
all the drums and you jack it up
but the bass is just one single track
then your bass solo track
is gonna have a level X
and all the individual drum tracks
are gonna be really quiet,
so when you drag that into Pro Tools
the mix is whack.
00:13:00
But I'm used to that and I know it,
and it's cool.
00:13:02
And
I also always ask for the Ableton session,
Stelios gives me a
session so I can go see:
'Oh, why is that?'
I can go see why.
00:13:09
Also, Stelios learned really quickly
how to manage his gain stage
once he saw
the effect of it in real-time,
sitting next to me and I said:
'Look, this is what it does."
He was like: 'Oh!'
So, the sessions got cleaner and cleaner
and more and more bad-ass
as they went on.
00:13:24
And it started pretty bad-ass and it
ended up being like a breeze to work with.
00:13:27
And specially because of the workflow
we adopted, which I'm gonna show you next.
00:13:31
Because the premise of the project
was that I would get
their tracks wherever they were
at moment X
and then mix it,
and then leave the door opened
for optimization or upgrade
or, you know, more editing,
I had to keep the mix
session super flowy.
00:13:49
Meaning, I had to make sure
it was super simple
and I had to be able to travel with it
because this project spanned I few months
and I travel
and
they are a very high velocity team,
meaning that
on Monday they are an unsigned band,
the next Monday they are signed to RCA
and they need these 5
songs for this and that.
00:14:08
So,
being responsive was super important.
00:14:10
The next thing
was that, beyond the travel,
I had to be able to, if you will,
travel within the session, let me explain.
00:14:19
In this particular case
I start with one bass drum,
I kept it in the session to show you.
00:14:24
It's called 'kick'.
00:14:25
And then I started with one 808.
00:14:28
I also kept it in the session,
although it's hidden right now,
I'm gonna bring it up.
00:14:32
It's somewhere in here.
00:14:33
If there's something called
'new 808'
that means there's something
called 'old 808' or '808'.
00:14:38
Just like New York,
there's and Old York and New York.
00:14:40
If this is the New York I wonder
what the Old York looks like.
00:14:43
That's my 808. So I started
with this kick and this 808.
00:14:46
But, over the course of the process
I couldn't get what I wanted out of them
so I called Stelios and said:
'Hey, is it conceivable you would give
me another 808 for this and this reason?'
And then he came up, listened and said:
'Yeah, sure.'
And then he probably
put his laptop right here,
opened it, opened Ableton
and made another 808
with his headphones on
while I was mixing the rest
and then 'Air dropped' me the new files
and drop them in.
00:15:13
This is why you can see here,
in the stems organization,
it says, 'Moi', if I go up one level,
it says 'STEMS' and then you see
'NEW STEMS',
in the 'NEW STEMS' you
see two 'new pre synths',
some 'ad lib' for 'I been in limbo'
'new 808'.
00:15:28
And then extra stems,
'timpani with less filter',
I'll show you that in a minute,
a new version of the snaps,
a synth with an older processing,
probably because
I like the way it sounded in the demo
more than what I did
and I asked him for that stem.
00:15:40
And then 'NEW BASS',
whatever that is, 'with mastering'.
00:15:42
And something called 'new'.
00:15:44
So, basically what happened is,
as you can tell from the dates
of the files
I got the stems on February 9th.
00:15:51
And then you can see my
first mix is February 12th.
00:15:54
And February 12th I already asked
for new stems saying:
'Hey, can I get this, can I get that?'
That is an amazing way to work.
00:16:01
Instead of fighting
with the files and the sounds
that sounded great on the demo,
for reasons I'll explain in a second,
but will not sound
great on the final record,
instead of fighting with that
and putting ten plug-ins on them
I had the option of calling
the producer and say:
'Hey,
what do you think of this and that?'
And because this team is
awesome they would be like:
'Yeah, let's do that.'
And give me the new files.
00:16:22
And that makes for a really good record.
00:16:24
Fun,
no fighting, I'll do that anytime.
00:16:27
To keep things ultra-simple
I did away with
my traditional stemming system.
00:16:33
Basically I usually work
through 8 to 10 busses, right?
And I have a processing on those busses
and then maybe I have
sub-busses and that goes to
another bus.
Or maybe I'll work in summing,
stuff like that.
And all that has lots of advantages.
00:16:48
In a situation where I may
change the bass drum at 'Mix 4',
or the structure might change,
or there may be new vocals,
or whatever,
it's not practical, because
it's a pain in the butt to look
for where the problem is, right?
So, if you have a really
complicated gain stage and setup,
if something is clipping because maybe
the new sound is 10 dB
louder than the previous
and it's setting a chain reaction in
your entire gain stage,
it's a pain in the butt
to go and find out why
and re-gain stage everything.
00:17:19
So, for this record, because of that
and the mobility issues
and the limited DSP
I would have on the road,
and all that stuff, I decided to go
old-school classic.
00:17:29
As if I were mixing on a console.
00:17:31
Everything is going to a stereo bus
called 'SUM'.
00:17:34
I have a sum master here,
so I can gain stage the entire session
with one fader
and then
I have my sum aux,
on which there are just a few plug-ins
to shape the sound of the thing,
and I kept that
the same across the whole album.
00:17:48
So that I could move from song to song,
sometimes we would
recall 5 songs in a day,
for little details.
00:17:54
You can't be going like,
this and that realm,
it's completely counterproductive.
00:17:58
And the...
00:17:59
the hindrance
the speed hindrance
actually,
in this kind of cases,
completely undermine
the benefits of being
able to use hardware
or having a more
malleable gain stage.
00:18:12
It's less malleable to
have a gain stage of
one receiving bus
with your 2-bus chain
than having 8 busses
that you can do things with.
00:18:21
You have more options, but more options
as you know in the candy store,
it's not necessarily good.
00:18:27
Sometimes one option is the best way
to not getting fat.
00:18:31
Let me run you through this
extra simple summing system.
00:18:35
One sum bus, the master,
going through a Bax, because you gotta,
an SSL compressor by UA.
00:18:43
Why SSL compressor?
Because for this music it's just right.
00:18:47
This kind of limiting quality of it
is a sound we have in our ear.
00:18:52
So instead of trying to reinvent the wheel
I thought I would use the existing wheel
and maybe add
some nice rims that make me happy.
00:19:00
Then I have the MDW,
which I'm clearly not using
for anything on this song.
00:19:04
And then the Pultec,
that's a classic thing that I do.
00:19:08
I like the sound of this plug-in so much.
00:19:10
And then Sugar,
I think this probably evolved over time
but I tend to have Sugar on my
mixbus now because it's bananas.
00:19:16
And then a limiter and this is my favorite
and has always been my favorite.
00:19:20
And it works great.
That's it, it's really really simple.
00:19:22
To the left, to the left,
all my drums.
00:19:25
This is gonna be an
interesting thing to show you
because this drums evolved a lot
over time.
00:19:32
This is the original kick,
which I'm no using,
I actually recycled it into a key,
I'm gonna label it as such,
so you know what it is.
00:19:38
And also, because I tell everybody
to label their auxes,
I should probably do that too.
00:19:44
Otherwise it's:
do as a say not as I do.
00:19:48
And I'm gonna save that so that
nobody will know it wasn't right.
00:19:51
Boom. So, the original kick,
I'll play it for you.
00:19:54
And then the
crazy kick
evolution that we went through
and then snaps, lots and lots of snaps,
going through an Aux,
but everything is going to the sum bus.
00:20:05
There's some parallel compression
there is a drum crush here,
and uncharacteristically,
which is very hard for me to say,
there is a drum and bass Crush.
00:20:17
Which I don't often
do but I do in this song
for the reason that
I'm gonna show you in a minute.
00:20:21
A bunch of sends.
00:20:23
Not that many.
00:20:24
A synth reverb.
00:20:26
And then the vocal chop, which is,
the song, basically.
00:20:29
And then
a bunch of vocal tracks,
some of which came from Stelios,
some of which I generated,
I'm gonna show you that,
in a second.
00:20:37
And then,
the Lolo style
amount of background vocals.
00:20:42
So Lolo is kind of a painter
with her vocals.
The way she functions
is very impressionistic.
00:20:47
It's awesome, it's fun to watch.
00:20:50
So, she has the main verses
and then she will
ad lib and riff like crazy, everywhere.
00:20:55
And it creates all this track.
This one is actually
pretty mild, there's some where
there's like 30 or 40 tracks of vocals.
00:21:01
And some of those tracks
only have one thing on them.
00:21:03
Just one little intervention.
And that intervention,
I consider it part of the production.
00:21:09
It's part of the arrangement,
if you remove it
the track is no longer the same track.
00:21:14
And she really has a knack
for finding the right
little riffs and everything.
00:21:18
So, singers love that,
singers love Lolo
because she's great at that.
00:21:23
I personally,
that's what usually bores me to tears
but in this particular case I love it.
00:21:28
I love it because these
tracks are very empty
and her vocal
arrangements and production,
and I'm sure Stelios has
something to do with it,
just bring the light in
in the right places.
00:21:38
It's really fun.
Not that much fun to mix
because you end up with like
so many tracks that do
so many different things
and sometimes, in the heat of the moment,
they would
give a track that has maybe something that
does one thing in the first verse
and something that does something
completely different
in another verse,
sounding completely different at different
level, recorded at a different decade.
00:21:58
So, it makes it a little
difficult for me coming later
and raveling this ball of yarn
to try and make it sense.
00:22:06
But because it makes
so much musical sense,
it's totally worth it.
00:22:10
One side-note:
You can see here, for example,
that this chunk right here
and this chunk right here
are not happening at the same time,
so why not getting that stuff
on one track?
Why have background vocal 7
and background vocal 8?
That's a waste of a lot of space.
00:22:26
The reason why is very practical.
00:22:28
If this changes
if I have a problem with it,
I gotta call Stelios
or Lolo and say:
'Hey, that vocal..."
You know, maybe it's distorting or maybe
it's the wrong lyric. Whatever.
00:22:39
I have to be able to
communicate with them.
00:22:41
So I say, in the second pre-Chorus
background vocal 7,
is that what you meant?
If I start ganging up tracks
then I lose my
communication skill with them.
00:22:50
I can't say, you know,
'that track that says
"old background vocals
that did not overlap".'
They don't have that track.
They have 'background vocals 7'.
00:22:57
And so I have to keep my names tight,
otherwise it makes a mess
and slows the process down
and it becomes frustrating.
00:23:04
So,
first let me play you the rough
from February 6th, 2019,
and then I will show
you what I have done.
00:23:10
We're gonna analyze this mix
as opposed to start from scratch
because there's no reasonable
way to start from scratch
because this mix started with a certain
type of tracks,
and over a few days evolved.
00:23:23
So, here's the rough.
00:25:02
You notice that
the intro starts right on the top,
which is cool,
and that the pre-chorus
had been shorten
into half of what it used to be,
this the final arrangement,
if you will, of the track
and it's fierce, it works that way.
00:25:14
They also added...
So there's the Bridge.
00:25:16
And then it gets back into this.
00:25:20
And then they added this thing
here which I think is awesome.
00:25:28
By the way, she plays live,
so, just here, on stage,
with the
TV track that I generated from here.
00:25:36
When that moment in the song happens
the whole crowd bounces,
you think, like,
you are in a bouncy castle,
the crowd erupts every single time,
it's really awesome.
00:25:46
And then they did this,
remember the original
version that I played you
a few minutes ago. Check this out.
Then there's the end,
it used to end here.
00:26:14
They had this idea, they extended this
and they basically snipped that out
and made another song out of it
called 'Look at us', which is one
of my favorite songs on the record,
even though it's less of a
song in the classic sense of
songwriting term but
I just love how it feels,
it's my 11-year-old daughter
favorite song on the record.
00:26:32
I went:
'Why?'
She said: 'I don't know I just like it.'
Just the spirit makes people react,
I just love seeing that.
00:26:39
So, that's the rough.
00:26:42
Now, besides our discussions,
between the original
here,
which sounded like this,
which I had to jack down,
a couple dBs, 3 dBs.
00:26:57
Let's go on the Chorus.
00:27:08
That was the rough.
00:27:09
Notice how different they are.
00:27:10
This is classic.
00:27:12
These guys are bad-ass,
they really know what they are doing.
00:27:15
But most production teams
have this issue, is that
in heat of the battle,
when you're being inspired
and coming up with
the best possible parts
and just rocking,
and specially in Ableton Live
because of its really touchy
gain staging way of doing things.
00:27:32
This comes from the same session.
00:27:33
This.
00:27:36
And this...
00:27:39
It's the same session.
00:27:40
I wasn't involved at all
at that point except just
to chatting about song structure,
and parts.
00:27:45
So what happens?
What happens is this:
There's a lot of
urgency in the writing session,
in the production session.
00:27:54
And the last thing you wanna do is:
'Am I clipping my master bus?'
That's just not the vibe.
00:28:00
The vibe is:
'We need another bass drum'.
00:28:02
Boom.
00:28:03
Or: 'Let's redo a vocal quickly'.
00:28:05
And then your vocal mic is up
from last time.
00:28:08
Maybe there was another session
in that room yesterday,
you just show up
and the microphone is still connected
and the preamp is still
what whatever
the previous producer left it on
and you just record.
00:28:19
And if the vibe is good
and the part is great, just record.
00:28:21
And so the end of result of that
is that the gain stage
and everything is whack and it
keeps getting whacker and whacker.
00:28:28
And it happens with everyone,
it happens with me
when I'm producing records
and I'm OCD,
I feel bad
I get chills of disgust in my body
when I see bad gain stage,
it's just a professional illness.
00:28:41
But when I produce a track,
when I'm
with artists and we're
trying to be creative
the last thing I'm doing is putting trims
on my, you know, sum busses.
00:28:51
Screw that!
So, what happens is at the
end of a six months of that
the session gets louder and louder
so there's all these issues that compound
and make it so that
even somebody with the level of
imagination and control
and clear musical
vision as Stelios and Lolo,
they end up with
a production ref that songs like this.
00:29:14
Where it's like,
you can see what they wanna do
but the bass is not speaking,
the vocal is crispy as hell
and it happens all the time
to the best people in the world.
00:29:24
And so, the thing that's
amazing with this team is I say:
'Hey guys, can we just like
start from scratch?'
'Can I not match the
level of your roughs?'
And Stelios said:
'I'll just give you lower roughs.'
So he just went and did
the work to lower the roughs,
which is why he's rough mix is actually
lower than he's original mix.
00:29:47
Maybe it doesn't have the same vibe
but I least I didn't
have to go and beat that.
00:29:51
Which allowed me
to function and make a
real record as opposed
to have my entire creative process
limited by the fact
that I can't put the 808 that loud
because if I put the 808 that loud
then I can't make my
mix as loud as the rough
and if it's not as loud as the rough
it's pretty much guaranteed
that the team is not gonna like it.
00:30:11
Let's take a quick look at
the actual level of this record.
00:30:14
So, this is 'Decibel'.
00:30:16
It's not out at the time of this shooting
but I know it's gonna be out
in some way by the time this is
edited so I feel
like I can show you.
00:30:25
This is the process,
it's not the final look of it,
it's gonna look better than that,
especially the logo,
look how pathetic this logo looks.
00:30:32
This is what plug-ins look like
before you see them.
00:30:36
But this is our
vision of what a true
useful meter should be like.
00:30:42
If I look at this mix.
00:30:57
I'm about at -15 LUFS on the Chorus
and there's about 14 or 15 dBs of
true dynamic range.
00:31:05
OK, that's really healthy,
if I listen to the original.
00:31:14
Let me lower it so that
we don't get a nosebleed.
00:31:34
I adjusted the clip gain so we
get about the same LUFS level
but you notice that the 'Truedyn',
the true dynamic range is down to 9 dBs.
00:31:41
And that's the dynamic range of a,
currently,
decent sounding
urban pop record
done by somebody who
really thought about that.
00:31:51
So, his production rough
is basically at the
level of a finished record
which is natural because
Stelios does his mix
and he has to deliver it at a level that
when Doug, the manager,
goes to play it for,
I don't know, brands or A&Rs,
or whomever,
or put it on Instagram for teasers,
it's gonna go against
the Ariana Grande record
or the Jay-Z record or whatever.
00:32:14
So he can't have
something that sounds small,
it's just silly.
And softer always sounds smaller.
00:32:19
If you start matching levels
you can tell the difference
in quality of sounds
but in the purely
marketing
sharing
branding sense of the term,
which I know sounds callous
when you're talking about music
but really,
it's important to know what's
going on so that you can
be successful
and make another record after this one,
Stelios does not have a choice
but to make a loud production rough
that has about the same
dynamic range as a finished record.
00:32:45
The problem with that is that,
as I explained earlier
you can't do that while you're producing
and have also
the right bottom,
it's really really difficult to do,
very few people can do that.
00:32:54
Now that we have both,
the original and the rough more or less
at the same level...
00:33:12
So, between the original and the rough
I can hear what I wanted.
00:33:15
I see what he wants to do
with the 808,
he wants that 808 to be kind of like
a wash, like this big kind of wide
slow moving kind of scary thing
going like this.
00:33:27
And then the bass drum is the punch.
00:33:30
In this particular record,
when I listen to the rough I'm like:
'Oh, I see what he wants to do.
He can't do it at this level.
00:33:35
But I can do that.'
And then the vocal
really front and center.
00:00:00
The way he placed the vocals...
00:00:10
I'm not a fan of that.
00:00:12
It's well done but I felt that
I wanted her
coming from this huge vocal chop,
the first thing I felt,
I remember that feeling, I said:
'Oh, I'm gonna make this dry as fuck!'
Because I wanted to come
from this huge thing and go...
00:00:28
And I wanted it to feel that way.
00:00:30
Let's switch to my mix,
I'm going on 'Input' here.
00:00:32
And this is the actual mix
from the actual session.
00:00:35
Before mastering.
And it sounds like this.
00:00:49
Let's look at the vocal.
00:00:51
There are 4 main vocal tracks, leads,
this is more like a little intervention.
00:00:56
They are in red,
the blue one I made myself,
I'll show you,
it's a special FX.
00:00:59
And there's all that stuff I mentioned
before with all the little interventions.
00:01:02
But the main vocal focus, the song,
is broken up in a Verse part,
a pre-Chorus part,
the Chorus is that chop
and then there's a little intervention
in the middle there and then the Bridge.
00:01:14
Which apparently, the Bridge used
to be the Intro.
00:01:16
It says Intro vocals on it.
00:01:19
I did some editing here on the vocal,
I move her a little bit and used clip gain
to change the gain, because maybe
some of the editing was done
from different takes
done on different days
but the vocal chain here
is a little different
from what I usually do
because I had a different
sound in my head.
00:01:36
I wanna something really
kind of like a block of sound,
dense and in your face
and really kind of like
super
steady
and forward and in your face.
00:01:49
And so I couldn't be
metro-sexual about it,
I had to be like, for real.
00:01:54
So I knew
from experience that,
you know, an 1176A would give me
a little bit of distortion
but I also knew that
it would give me that slap,
which is why I have it
wide open
on the attack,
to let the transients through
and very fast on the release,
to not, you know
bring it down.
00:02:13
But I also knew that we
need some leveling behind that
and the two-compressor approach
works good to get that sound
so I also have an LA-3.
00:02:21
Why an LA-3? I don't know,
that felt like
an LA-2
would be
too much color,
maybe.
00:02:28
These things are very...
00:02:30
how do you say?
Superstition based.
00:02:32
An LA-3 would be a little cleaner
compared to what I have in my hardware,
everything is UAD because
I like the way they sound
plus they are friends
but when you start compressing
that much on the vocal
you start having lots of
other problems, I'm gonna show you that.
00:02:46
I'm gonna solo the vocal on the Chorus,
so you can hear,
I would never do this in solo
but to show you and to really understand
what's going on I have to solo it.
00:02:54
And this is what it sounds like,
just her.
00:02:56
Oh, see? 'I been in Limbo'.
00:02:58
Remember I told you in the stems?
They sent me another track
that just says: 'I been in Limbo'.
00:03:04
That's probably because, once the
song was mixed, if I remember well
she said: 'I don't like that first phrase.'
So they went and re-recorded
that first phrase and
then they gave it to me.
00:03:13
And I had to jack it up
6.9 dB because it didn't match the level,
if I put it at its regular level,
check it out, it's way quieter than the rest.
00:03:20
So, I had to jack it up
6.9 dB for it to match
the rest of the record.
00:03:24
So, this is the vocal soloed.
00:03:34
Let me mute everything,
I'm gonna get rid of the
reverbs and mute every plug-in.
00:03:57
I listen to this
I know it's an Atlantis because
they were working out of
Eugene's room in the basement
and I knew he bought an Atlantis.
00:04:03
So,
I know exactly how it behaves,
I know they are very close to the mic,
I hear the San Francisco,
I know I'm gonna have 'S' problems.
00:04:11
And I know that I'm not getting
the in-you-face stuff,
it's a little dark for the purpose.
00:04:17
So I think what would be interesting to do
is first do the gain.
00:04:20
I know it's counterproductive
but I showed you a second ago
what I wanted to do.
This is what it's like with the 1176.
00:04:36
Quite a bit of reduction,
not a lot of reduction for
an Urban Pop vocal.
00:04:41
I tend to be a little more gentle
but it's a quite a bit for me,
and then the LA3 after that.
00:04:53
Basically, it's no moving anymore
it's just stuck there.
00:04:57
Now you hearing that here
we have lots of problems.
00:05:01
The 'Ss' are literally a mile ahead
of the rest of the vocal
as far as placement goes.
00:05:05
So, when I have that problem,
which I tend to have in
those kinds of records
I use two de-essers.
00:05:10
I use the trusty Pro-DS because
it's totally bad-ass
and super simple to use.
00:05:16
Side note: when you use the Pro-DS
make sure you pay
attention to the audition thing,
you can click on audition and hear
where the Ss are.
00:05:26
And they give you a heat map here.
00:05:28
The Ss are not always
all the way up there,
often you have to bring the audition down
to find where the Ss are.
In this case this worked.
00:05:38
And now that you know where it is
you can choose how much to remove.
00:05:44
But that's not enough.
00:05:47
Right? So there's this other de-esser
made by Eiosis, which is fantastic.
00:05:52
And it's doing it in a different
way than the Pro-DS does
and it lets you EQ the 'S' itself.
00:05:59
So you can actually hear just
the sibilance.
00:06:05
And you can EQ just the sibilance.
00:06:07
So, that allows you to just change
the tone so it sounds more natural.
00:06:11
Now, if I listen to this...
00:06:15
Solo, makes no sense.
00:06:17
Let's listen to it in
the context of the track.
00:06:19
And I have here
a fader that's at zero, the trim fader.
00:06:32
So I had to raise the vocal a little bit,
it's too quiet
for the current state
of affairs in the track.
00:06:45
I'm listening to this against
the finished rest of the track, right?
Because we're listening to the final mix.
00:06:51
But it's a good way to
see what happens.
00:06:55
If I were to just listen to the vocal...
00:07:05
It's a little dark for the vibe
but, you know, it's not
muddy or anything.
00:07:10
But in the track it just doesn't
lean over the rest of the music.
00:07:15
So, several ways of doing that are...
00:07:17
You can make it brighter,
that's one way, I tend to
try and avoid do that.
I'd rather remove the stuff
that conflicts with the rest of the track.
00:07:26
So, there's here,
several ways I'm doing that.
00:07:28
There's this Pro Q2
that I'm using to remove this stuff.
00:07:36
It sounds like this.
00:07:39
It came from here.
00:07:42
Here that 'mmm' thing?
In the track.
00:07:55
I did not add any high-end.
00:07:57
This allowed the vocal to
speak and I did not raise it further.
00:08:00
It's actually back down to unity.
00:08:02
It allows the vocal to basically be placed
above the rest of the
track and not fight so hard.
00:08:06
The other thing I've been
doing a lot lately
is adding Sugar and adding 'Drive'.
00:08:11
Check this out, this is without.
00:08:28
Sugar is 'tha bomb'.
00:08:29
So, on Sugar I'm using 32 points of drive,
don't be worried about
adding distortion to,
at least not this distortion,
to vocals.
00:08:38
I tuned this distortion
in this plug-in
to make absolutely sure
it could be used on
vocals to give that edge
and shine without sounding
like a Marshall amp.
00:08:46
If you want the Marshall amp go 'Crush'.
00:08:48
We do that
elsewhere in the track,
maybe not with 'Sugar' maybe with 'Saturn'
You can do that,
but what these 35 points of 'Drive'
on a well recorded vocal gives you,
it's money.
00:08:59
Another thing I do a lot
is Pultec.
00:09:02
Here I'm adding a little bit of 10 kHz.
00:09:04
That probably happened
at the end of the mix.
00:09:06
I probably was happy with everything
and I heard something like this.
00:09:17
And I decided I needed a little bit
of a push
against the rest of the track
and I would add the Pultec.
And I usually do that, a little bit of 10 kHz.
00:09:24
A little bit of 5 kHz.
00:09:26
And to compensate,
a little bit of 100 Hz and 200 Hz.
00:09:57
It does the trick.
00:09:58
Something else I like to point out
is when vocals at this
kind of like real sounding...
00:10:11
It doesn't have that gloss,
kind of finished record quality.
00:10:14
It's great, sounds good,
it's recorded very close.
00:10:18
It's not a pristine
Joni Mitchel kind of recording,
but that's not the vibe for this.
00:10:24
This is supposed to grab you.
00:10:26
But it still has a little bit
of that spitty thing.
00:10:28
One of the great ways to
get rid of that is this dude.
00:10:32
This dude is 'tha bomb'.
00:10:34
Especially
30 IPS, 250.
250 is the type of tape
that they stopped making circa 1912.
00:10:40
Check it out, this is without.
00:10:57
Notice how much smoother it is?
You don't have as much
of that 'krkrrkr' thing going.
00:11:01
I'll do it again, check it out.
Without.
00:11:03
Pay attention to
'since I left San Francisco'.
00:11:24
It helps the second
de-esser by already,
kind of controlling the
transients a little bit.
00:11:28
You can play with the 'Repro' EQ.
00:11:30
I softened the transients further
and added a little bit of bottom
but not that kind of bottom
you'd add with and EQ,
more like a density thing.
00:11:37
It's great and it's not
changing the levels,
but it makes the vocal feel more present.
00:11:41
Which is great.
Don't forget to turn the noise off
because noise was really not by design.
00:11:45
They just couldn't
turn it off at the time.
00:11:47
Now we can.
00:11:48
One more thing I have
here is the Pro-MB.
00:11:50
Sometimes I use this, and actually,
I start doing this then,
and now I do it more and more
for this kind of music.
00:11:56
I have a multi-band on the vocal
just to make it more even.
00:11:59
Check it out, this is without.
00:12:03
Listen to 'I have been in limbo'.
00:12:08
The end of 'been'
and the beginning of 'in'.
00:12:10
'Been', 'In'.
00:12:19
'On', 'On'. Hear the little grabby thing?
Check it out again.
00:12:29
Now with the Pro-MB.
00:12:38
So, that peak right here is dynamically
controlled by the Pro-MB.
00:12:42
If I did that with a straight EQ
it would sound thin.
00:12:46
But this only does it as much as I want
because of the settings which are these,
since we're nerds
let's look at the settings.
00:12:52
I wanna play it again so
you can see what it does.
00:13:02
That's it.
00:13:04
This does the last
little bit of sweetening
so that the vocal is basically
an anchor,
doesn't do this,
doesn't do this weird thing it does,
and it's just in your face
but not loud.
00:13:14
It's loud but it's not too loud,
I'm able to
put it on the same plane
as the 808 and the bass drum
and
I hear it, I feel it
and on small systems it sounds
really present and beautiful.
00:13:25
So that's it for plug-ins as far as
processing and then
I have a little bit of sauce.
00:13:29
So the sauce here
I also wanted to keep that ultra-simple,
I only have two sends.
00:13:35
I have this guy.
00:13:41
Stelios loves the Valhalla stuff
and I do too
so I did that.
At the beginning I had just
the Valhalla,
no other processing,
it sounded like this.
00:13:52
Let me make it crazy loud
so you understand what's going on.
00:13:56
This is too loud, we know that.
00:14:07
Classic hall, it sounds great.
00:14:09
And then I added the Microshift on it.
00:14:20
Hear how much smoother it is?
You don't hear the reverb as discretely
because it is basically
blurred by the Soundtoys Microshift.
00:14:29
This is without Microshift.
00:14:47
At the actual level on the track.
00:14:57
In the context.
00:15:06
Compared to the rough.
00:15:15
It's quite a bit dryer than the rough,
it's also fatter,
so we're making progress.
00:15:19
And I really like the way it feels.
For the rest of the vocals,
as you can see
I just copied/pasted it.
00:15:25
Opt + drag, Opt + drag, Opt + drag.
00:15:27
The basic stuff.
00:15:28
The first was not,
I only have one de-esser,
but basically all the
settings are the same.
00:15:34
What I'm doing is I'm adapting
the settings to the session.
00:15:37
So, for example, in the pre-Chorus,
let's bring out the pre-Chorus.
00:15:42
It's this vocal.
00:15:45
Gotta listen to the actual mix,
not the rough.
00:15:47
This is when you get a heart attack,
you press play, you listen to the rough
and you're like:
'What I have been doing?'
So, here there's the addition of this.
00:16:00
Without the Echoboy
the pre-Chorus sounds like this.
00:16:08
A lot more present.
00:16:10
With the Echoboy.
00:16:30
I'm also adding a little bit
of the same delay that I used
to create space on the vocal chop.
00:16:35
The reason for that
is so that when we go from the Verse
to the pre-Chorus
we get and emotional change
so we know we landed elsewhere.
Check it out.
00:16:43
I'm gonna mute the other effects.
00:16:57
It's a little more epic,
it's a little more romantic
because it has this kind of tail to it.
00:17:02
And
I felt I wanted the change
so I just added a little delay here
to push it back and added
a little bit of that other delay
I had set up for the other track
to give it a different space.
00:17:12
One thing I did
is I
duplicated the track,
did not copy the playlist,
I copied all the plug-ins
and it made this 'lead vox3.dup1
because my favorite line
in the whole record is this...
00:17:28
While she says 'gual' too.
00:17:32
I love that.
00:17:33
That's such a good line,
great writing, she's so smart.
00:17:36
So, I was like:
'I want this to be enhanced'.
00:17:39
This is my favorite track,
I'm mixing,
I have the mouse,
I decide, so I'm gonna make this big.
00:17:45
So what I did is I created this.
00:17:50
Just to support
the transition to the pre-Chorus.
00:17:55
Check it out, with and without.
This is without.
00:18:08
On headphones you get this wide thing,
it's awesome.
00:18:11
What did I do here?
This is what I did.
00:18:14
I basically just copied this
and brought it down to a track
that has the exact same plug-ins going to
the same sum Bus with the same reverbs.
00:18:20
But, I changed the first two plug-ins,
instead of having the
Pro-DS and the Studer,
I put Alterboy
and a mod delay.
00:18:28
I'm gonna remove those two plug-ins,
everything else is the same.
00:18:34
It's clearly sent into a throw.
00:18:39
Or maybe it's this Echoboy right here,
to create a smoother transition.
00:18:49
Where the real difference is
I used Little Alterboy to do this.
00:18:54
Without.
00:18:59
So, I'm distorting the shit out of it
and then I'm lowering the formant,
it makes this weird kind of like
alien voice.
And then, I'm using the Mod Delay
to create a stereo thing.
00:19:13
And it sounds like this.
00:19:19
It's small but it's fun,
it makes a little bit of a difference.
00:19:22
For the rest of the vocals, basically,
it's all...
00:19:25
They're just all the same.
The Intro vocal,
just with little variations to
create interest by having different
vibes in different sections.
00:19:33
The Intro vocals...
00:19:42
The Filter Freak is off, I don't know why.
00:19:45
Let's make sure that
I'm not ruining this.
I might be turning it on and off.
00:19:50
No, it's just, I had the idea and then
didn't use it, so I'm gonna bypass it.
00:19:56
Like this.
So, it started like this.
00:20:14
I'm making it as thin as possible
but still sound a little Amy.
00:20:17
That's clearly directly
copied from the other one.
00:20:20
Lazy, lazy dude.
00:20:21
And then
a little Decapitator never hurt anyone.
00:20:31
It's starting to get a little aggressive,
then Devil-Loc, which does the trick.
00:20:42
A little Echoboy.
00:20:54
And then I experimented
with this for that.
00:21:05
It's cool,
this cool plug-in gives you a nice
kind of like surface noise
and also kind of like
that mediumy
punch of going through the computer,
or the stylus, it's nice.
00:21:27
And you notice that some of the reverbs,
as you can see, these are auxes,
but some of them are printed.
00:21:33
'B- Little Plate'.
So, that's a Soundtoys plug-in
that Stelios has,
and he printed it for me.
00:21:44
And since I liked it,
instead of trying to recreate it
I kept it in and then
added a little bit of mine.
00:21:49
I don't care.
00:21:50
If the reverb is nice
that he has and he has printed it,
and I can use it without making a mess
because there's like 5 things in it,
I'll use it.
00:21:57
It sounds great.
00:21:58
And that's he's vision,
I'm not trying to
rewrite his vision,
I'm trying to enhance his vision.
00:22:02
So I use it.
00:22:03
I use his reverbs all the time.
00:22:05
Sometimes it's a pain because
the lead vocal goes in it
and then the snare.
00:22:10
And then that's a pain in the butt.
00:22:11
So, in those cases, I don't use them.
00:22:13
But if it's discrete reverbs
for certain instruments
that has the vibe that he felt was great
and she felt was great, I'll use it.
00:22:20
So that's the vocals,
the rest of the vocals are basically,
get rid of the low-mids because
it was so close to the mic
and either enhance the top,
or not depending on what I need.
00:22:30
One thing you need to know which is
and interesting thing that
you can do in Pro Tools now is,
as I mentioned way back
at the beginning of this video,
sometimes, on the same track,
there's stuff that has nothing to do
with the rest of the track
so for example, let's look at this one.
00:22:44
This one does this.
00:22:47
And then this one does this.
00:22:51
That's on the same track.
00:22:53
I'm gonna change them because
they are on the same track.
00:22:55
So when I'm stuck with
something like this where
two completely different
elements are on the same track
and I have a
placement problem,
one of those elements,
I can't just put where I want
with just level,
then I use this stuff.
00:23:11
I will do
EQing of this one
segment
using the clip EQ from Pro Tools.
00:23:17
So, this is sounding like this
without the clip EQ.
00:23:27
Then I did this.
00:23:32
Probably because I needed it
to go over the rest.
00:23:43
That's also Alterboy making that FX,
I just did not EQ it.
00:23:50
So you're able to actually
fine-tune, within the same track,
little moments
It's very useful for example,
say if you have
one note of the whole verse,
one note
is resonating or something,
you can just go...
00:24:03
Just for this one note.
00:24:04
Without having to automate an EQ.
00:24:07
It's leaner
and also the EQ will not fight you
when you try to move that frequency
later if you change your mind.
00:24:12
So, it's nice to do it this way.
That was worth a note.
00:24:14
For the rest of the vocals
that's about it.
00:24:17
Everyone is treated separately,
I think it would be a treat
to hear
just the vocal arrangement,
because they are so good at that.
00:24:25
I don't know what's playing when,
but I'm gonna solo all the vocals
and just play the track like that.
00:25:06
It's nice.
00:25:07
So, all going to basically two reverbs,
or using his reverbs,
or using the same processing more or less.
00:25:12
Just tweaked
to create
distance by having a
little more high-end or less high-end,
a little louder or softer,
distortion, no distortion.
00:25:19
Something that's really
interesting is the chop.
00:25:22
This chop rocks.
00:25:24
Let's just listen to the chop.
00:25:37
I spent a lot of time on that chop
because it took me
forever to get it to a point where
they were satisfied with
the tone of it and I was too.
00:25:46
They wanted to keep that
in-your-face
super modern vibe
which I think
is the right way to go
but I wanted to be able to play the
track on stun
and it doesn't hurt your eyes.
00:25:57
And the combo of the two proved
to be more difficult than I though.
00:26:00
When sound is processed that much
through so many plug-ins,
there probably was like 5, 6, 7
plug-ins
on Ableton to make this
happen and sound this special,
a lot of the transient
become really aggressive
and it's difficult to control stuff.
00:26:13
I started with this,
let's get rid of the delay.
00:26:17
Hear that 'sui'?
And that 'ah ah'?
There's that like 'ahn'.
00:26:27
So, I tried many things,
the winner was soothe.
00:26:31
Soothe is 'tha bomb' for these
kinds of problems.
00:26:33
It's a frequency conscious
narrow multi-band better maker.
00:26:38
Sorry for being so technical.
00:26:40
This is without.
00:26:48
See what it does?
Then I have a de-esser.
00:26:56
So that's a bit much but I
don't care if it sounds unnatural.
00:26:58
I kind of dig that it sounds unnatural.
00:27:00
I probably copied the Pro-MB.
Yes, same Pro-MB.
00:27:11
See that now?
It's no longer hurting your feelings.
00:27:14
Then, a little of the Pultec,
probably I tried
to do things and then I went back.
00:27:19
I'm actually lowering
the high-end a little bit.
00:27:21
That kind of stuff is inconsequence.
00:27:24
But I am getting the
tone of the transformer.
00:27:27
It's further compressing
or shaving those transients.
00:27:30
Without.
00:27:42
And then
a compressor.
00:27:51
Mostly I'm using this
for the warmth.
00:27:53
This is basically
a simpler slightly
different sounding version
of 'Inflator' by Sonnox,
inside their compressor.
00:28:00
And I really like the way it sounds,
I use it a lot.
00:28:02
This is without.
00:28:11
It's a little louder, it is what it is,
I can't change the level now to match,
otherwise we're gonna lose our mix.
00:28:17
And this is a very
fragile kind of a puzzle.
00:28:19
And then, a delay.
00:28:25
In context.
00:28:41
I think that's it for the vocals.
00:28:42
It's a lot of time spent on vocals
but this track is
bass drum, 808 and vocals basically.
00:00:00
Let's talk about drums.
00:00:01
I'm going to solo drum and bass
because they are a unit
then I'll focus on the drums.
00:00:06
But you gotta hear the concept
of the drum and bass together
to understand what I did.
00:00:19
That's the Chorus,
on the Verse it's a little more sparse.
00:00:27
First verse, there's no hat.
00:00:37
Something really important
to note is the Outro.
00:00:45
You can see it's a
completely different kick
completely different everything,
it's a separate set of tracks.
00:00:55
Chorus.
00:01:02
Right, let's look at that.
00:01:03
This is not the way we started.
The way we started,
the original intent from
Stelios' rough was this,
let's go into the Verse.
00:01:17
So clearly
the bass drum is
really bouncy and elastic
and then the 808
is supposed to be under it.
00:01:23
But with that bass drum
it proved to be very difficult to do.
Let me play it for you.
00:01:28
Gotta get rid of everything,
listen to just the bass drum.
00:01:31
That now is being used as a kick key.
00:01:33
This is the original bass drum.
00:01:40
Cool kick, punchy.
00:01:42
I have a problem with the
'kah ah', check it out.
00:01:48
The tail is a little behind.
00:01:51
But the main problem was
that I had to do something
so that it hangs with this kick.
00:02:01
Much more powerful and tighter.
00:02:03
The other problem was
that this is the 808 I got,
let me mute all processing.
00:02:08
His first 808 from his
original session was this.
00:02:15
And it was supposed
to get married with this.
00:02:28
It's problematic.
And then,
I started to try and
get tone out of that 808.
00:02:35
The first thing I did is
high-pass it.
00:02:37
Because that's one sure fire way to
make things fatter.
00:02:43
You don't need 20 and below,
unless you wanna brake
the doors of your Escalade,
which is a laudable activity
but not in this case.
00:02:50
A little bit of compression.
00:02:54
It's coming.
00:02:55
I knew I could use a little bit
of the the shine from the 1176.
00:03:02
And then,
a lot of this music
is mixed on SSLs
and so I thought:
'Hey, maybe I could try to
get some of that tone.'
The only thing that's on,
on the SSL channel, is the compressor
but I found
I never mixed...
00:03:24
I did a couple mix on
the SSL but it's not my thing,
I didn't grow up with boards,
I grew up with computers.
00:03:29
But I found, once the plug-ins came out
or when I was in a SSL room,
making records later,
that this compressor,
the reason why people
love this compressor
is it's a great way to make things punchy,
quickly,
get the click through.
Check it out, this is without the SSL.
00:03:48
See how the point comes out,
there's no EQ here.
00:03:50
It's just literally turning
the compressor on,
no expander, nothing,
and playing with the threshold.
00:03:55
You can really get that
initial transient through.
00:03:58
That's what I see a lot of
people use this thing for.
00:04:00
And it's a great way to do that.
00:04:02
You could use a transient designer,
but this has a certain sound that we know.
00:04:05
And we heard it on SSLs for years.
00:04:07
So we might as well use it.
00:04:08
Then, you know, Sugar.
00:04:15
Now I'm starting to hear the note,
that's great.
00:04:17
Some Pultec to reestablish
some of the bottom.
00:04:28
But that still wasn't cutting it.
00:04:30
I see here I had a
thickener back in the day.
00:04:32
It just didn't work for me.
00:04:33
The whole thing was not working.
00:04:35
Specially cut with the kick.
00:04:48
Obviously it's better
but I felt like,
considering how bad-ass the track was,
I wasn't really doing it full justice.
00:04:56
That's when I asked
Stelios and said:
'Hey, give me another 808.'
So he sent me
this thing.
00:05:03
I'm gonna mute the processing on it.
00:05:08
Now we are talking.
00:05:10
To that 808
I removed a little bit
of that 'mmmm' thing.
00:05:16
I did some Sugar, this saturation
helps the note read better.
00:05:26
I'm gonna leave this plug-in
for in a few minutes.
00:05:28
So, I'm gonna disable this.
00:05:31
So with this new
bass he also sent me,
if you remember,
when you look in the folder,
this 'New Bass with mastering',
whatever that is,
probably with his
2-Bus processing, sounds like this.
00:05:45
I love that.
And the combo of the two.
00:05:56
When I heard that I was like:
'Oh, I love that'.
00:05:59
Let's just go further,
and I put the trusty
Avid compressor
and I used the kick key,
remember, the original kick sound,
and I put a Send on it,
I made that the key so that now
both 808s are keyed from the kick.
00:06:20
Then, because the bass drum
is gonna be huge in the middle,
that really raspy new bass,
I made it stereo using
the Mod Delay trick.
00:06:36
That sounds bananas.
00:06:37
So, what did I do with that kick?
Well, what I did with the kick
is I took the original track
and duplicated it.
00:06:43
And then I went to the back of the song
and I exported that kick that I like.
00:06:49
The end kick.
00:06:50
And then I used ApTrigga
and 'bridge_outro kick_01',
that's the thing I exported
and then I just used that.
00:06:57
I literally
went and
replaced
Stelios' original kick
with his
end of song kick.
00:07:09
Then I did some processing on it.
00:07:11
'Sample',
that's the original with ApTrigga on it,
and it's being sampled,
then I'm EQing it.
00:07:16
And because
in the body of the song
I need a little more
punch and a slightly
different color than the last kick
I'm going through
a bus because I also added my own kick.
00:07:29
And I have an EQ here
and the reason why I have
a second EQ on the actual
sum is because now I'm gonna
EQ the sum of the two kicks
and then a little bit of this
'Smack Attack' from Waves,
which is an amazing transient designer.
00:07:43
It's my favorite Waves plug-in,
that and R-Bass.
00:07:45
So, check it out.
00:07:47
Here's the chronology how this came to be.
00:07:50
Beginning of the mix, original tracks,
I played with the kick,
tried and tried,
I'm not getting,
it's fine but I'm not
getting the record I want.
00:07:59
So what did I do?
I duplicated the track
and added my own sample.
00:08:03
My own sample sounds like this.
00:08:09
So you see what it does,
it gives that personality.
00:08:11
And it was supposed
to be melding with this.
00:08:22
So it adds a little bit of
that presence with the 808,
the old 808,
it kind of worked-ish.
00:08:28
Sort of.
00:08:29
And then, as I decided to replace
his kick by his kick but
the other 'his kick',
the sample stayed, I was like,
might as well try it, right?
And it sounds like this.
00:08:45
Without my sample.
00:08:54
So clearly it does
what it's supposed to do,
specially if you mix it with the 808s.
00:09:05
Now,
that's the process.
00:09:08
Original kick,
add a sample,
good enough for Rock'n Roll
but not for this.
00:09:14
Then go fetch the other sample,
kill the original kick.
00:09:18
My sample plus his sample,
not bad.
00:09:24
But the 808 is not cutting it.
00:09:26
Can I have another 808?
Sure.
00:09:27
His new 808.
Oh, OK.
00:09:29
Well, I'm gonna have to enhance this
because now the 808
is fat and this is a little weak.
00:09:34
So, it was great, it's a game of,
you know, climbing, if you will.
00:09:40
The processing on my kick is irrelevant.
00:09:41
It's basically playing with stuff,
there's an SSL E channel,
so that tells you
that I was using sort of the same
processing used on the old 808,
trying to do the same thing.
00:09:51
I have an IBP, which means
'in-between phase' from Little Labs, UA.
00:09:55
The reason for that is,
not all drum samples
are necessarily in phase
and if they're not in phase
you lose a lot of the energy.
Check it out, this is with.
00:10:08
See how it becomes...
00:10:10
Again, without.
00:10:15
I get that 'ahn' thing,
that real tight attack.
00:10:18
So, that's that for that on my sample.
00:10:22
The real star, the bottom,
is his sample.
00:10:25
And then,
I don't know why I have two compressors.
00:10:28
Probably because I made a mistake
and then removing one made a mess
and it was easier for me to
just let it be.
00:10:34
And then I have R-Bass.
00:10:35
R-Bass is dope.
00:10:37
R-Bass,
in this case,
gives the sound of the 'Moi' kick.
00:10:40
Check it out, without R-Bass.
00:10:51
And then this is,
I'm removing a little bit at 500.
00:10:54
If you want your bass to feel like this,
by now your bass drum feels like this,
and you want it to do this.
00:11:00
Very often
ducking a little bit at 500
lets you get the bass drum,
the top of the bass drum and transients,
out of the way of the vocal
and just fill under,
like, literally, the vocal is
sitting on top of it. Try it.
00:11:14
You might like it.
00:11:15
So, that happened.
And then,
there's parallel compression.
00:11:20
Not a lot.
00:11:21
There's the traditional
dbx 160, that I do on everything.
00:11:28
And then there's a very
unusual thing I do.
00:11:31
I'm sending all the drums
and the bass to another
parallel compression
in a 33609.
00:11:38
And
to get that movement of the bass drum
the drums and the bass,
to have this kind of like
pumping thing,
and all works together as opposed to
kind of like separate instruments.
00:11:48
I don't usually do this
but in this case that's the way I found
to make that thing pump together.
00:11:54
Check it out.
00:11:54
So, if I,
everybody,
we'll talk about the clap in a second,
and the hi-hats.
00:12:01
And listen to the whole rhythm section.
00:12:04
Let's go to the Chorus.
00:12:19
So, notice something,
on this Chorus
the Neve does very little.
00:12:33
Listen to the bottom of the bass drum.
00:12:45
It's fatter.
00:12:46
Then, at the end,
it goes nuts.
00:12:57
So, this allows me to push the end beat,
make it sound really exciting,
not explode my levels
and still feel like it's lifting
even though this track
has been pretty thick,
and loud as hell all the way.
00:13:09
So this is basically kind of like
a push back against my stuff.
The louder I get into it
the thicker it gets
because of the way the 33609 sounds.
00:13:18
So that's something
that's rather unusual for me.
00:13:22
I see Vance do this all the time though.
00:13:24
He uses this on drums
and drum and bass.
Andrew does that too,
I saw it on couple videos we did.
00:13:30
But I don't usually do
that because I don't usually need that.
00:13:33
In this case I needed so I just did that.
00:13:36
Something else that's
interesting to look at
is the hi-hat
because we hear a lot of this hats.
00:13:42
And this is what the hi-hat sounds like.
00:13:45
This is what it sounded
like before it came to me.
00:13:52
And then I use this
insane thing to do this.
00:14:02
This is basically
Attila
for transients.
00:14:05
It's the Vulf compressor.
00:14:06
It imitates the 303,
like a little Roland 303
sampler compressor,
it's preposterously
broken and just over
the top and I love it.
00:14:14
And I've been using it on trap hats,
or any kind of hats like this
because we
hear them so much
and
I think I was looking for something
to make them sound a little different
not that tiny thing
and I stumbled upon this.
00:14:27
Make sure you don't use the noise.
00:14:29
Because...
No!
But for the rest it's pretty bad-ass.
00:14:37
And the 'crunch' is off the charts too...
00:14:43
Unnecessary here.
00:14:44
So that's the sound of
the hat in the context.
00:14:55
It works.
On the snaps
he sent me four different snaps
and the combo of those
four snaps made the sound.
00:15:01
I'm gonna remove my processing
and play you the original ones.
00:15:08
This is the first snap.
00:15:15
Second.
00:15:21
Super dry. Third.
00:15:27
That provides the spread.
00:15:28
And this is a waterdrop.
00:15:33
So let me build that.
00:15:35
I'll start with the first one
and then add the other ones one by one.
00:15:48
And then he has a reverb.
00:15:53
Which I kept.
And then I asked him to reprint
the second snap.
00:16:00
I don't know why,
maybe because of that 3 kHz thing.
00:16:03
And instead of replace
I used it in addition.
00:16:07
And there was no Sugar at the beginning.
00:16:14
I think I asked him to put his reverb
on the snap too, and I used both.
00:16:21
And then I added Sugar.
So mostly what I do to
the snaps is add that edge
that you heard on the Timbaland stuff
like the Mary J stuff,
where you had that clap,
that like...
00:16:31
'ahnn' thing, but this is a snap
so it's kind of like the baby
sister version of the clap.
00:16:37
So, I thought:
'OK, let's make this angry'.
00:16:40
So I added 50 points of drive
on that new one,
50 points of drive
on the 3,
I didn't do anything to the waterdrop.
00:16:47
A 22 points here, and 62 points here.
00:16:52
It's not mitigated.
00:16:53
All together with all the processing
just adding Sugar to everything,
without my little special FX
that I'll show you in a second,
it sounds like this.
00:17:02
With the reverb.
00:17:07
Sugar is dope.
00:17:09
And I also did this little thing here.
00:17:17
So, I duplicated it, it's not one.
00:17:20
And I put Sugar on it on stun.
00:17:23
And I put an all-wet
delay in it so it does this.
00:17:33
So, in the context of the song.
00:17:41
You hear better on the verses.
00:18:03
Sometimes you gotta have, you know,
please yourself, at least for me.
00:18:06
They liked it.
00:18:09
Peachy.
00:18:10
So that's what happened on the claps
and I also have Inflator
to add a little more edge.
00:18:14
The Inflator was probably
added at the very end
to get the claps or the snaps
over the edge of the rest of the track.
00:18:20
And you may notice
that I actually cut out,
when I copied the 'snap 1'
to the 'snap 1 duplicate'
to do that little delay thing.
00:18:28
It's every other, so I cut out the ones
so it creates some space
in the Verse and then on the Choruses
I left it completely going and then I made
some wholes here,
in the second pre-Chorus.
00:18:37
It's just like little ear-candy
that comes in and out.
00:18:40
For the nerds among us,
we listened that crap.
00:18:43
I don't think this made the song.
00:18:46
Check this out.
00:18:47
This song has a timpani on it.
00:18:48
Most people don't pay attention to it.
00:18:54
I love it.
00:18:55
It came to me this way.
00:19:00
I was like:
'Stelios, if you're gonna
have a timpani on your song
let's have a timpani
on your song for real!'
So I said:
'Send it to me with less filter.'
So he said:
'Timpani - less filter.'
Where is it?
'timpani - less filter'.
That's what he sent me
at 1:31 AM on the 12th of February.
00:19:19
I love what it does, check it out.
00:19:25
And the second timpanis,
brilliant, check it out.
00:19:33
I think the league for defense
of the timpanis would be offended,
but I dig it.
00:19:39
And I'm doing nothing to those sounds,
they are perfect as is,
specially since he recreated them for me.
00:19:44
I did, by the way,
forgot to tell you that on the Outro kick...
00:19:51
Hear that 'mmm' thing,
so I'm removing that,
hi-passing and removing
the 500 Hz.
00:19:59
Then adding a serious amount of 30.
00:20:07
That's that. The snare on the Outro,
just has Sugar on it.
00:20:21
Sugar does what it does and does it well.
00:20:23
So, that's cool.
00:20:24
And something else I forgot to tell you
is about the end 808 on the Outro.
00:20:33
It came to me this way.
00:20:39
I'm like: 'It's distorting.
Why stop here?'
Let's just make it out of control
and crazy loud and bright
and not 808 at all,
so I have 'distort',
61 points.
00:20:48
Before.
00:20:57
In context.
00:21:13
Not the same vibe.
00:21:14
So this was fun,
it had to be obnoxious.
00:21:17
So that's all the drums in a nutshell.
00:21:19
Quick summary.
00:21:21
I started with the
original kick and 808,
added a sample to the kick,
got to a solid B+ state,
since we were shooting for A+
I respectfully asked Stelios
to feed me new stuff
and I discretely went in
and fish for the kick
that was already in the
session that I liked, added it,
got the new 808s,
made that work
made them pump together
using the old
kick drum as the key
for the bass, the 808,
and then
'Sugared' the hell out of the snaps,
made sure that the trap hat
doesn't sound like a trap hat
and then I moved on to the synths.
00:21:59
This song is very lean synth wise.
00:22:02
It's pretty fat drum wise,
but pretty lean synth wise.
00:22:06
This is the song, basically.
00:22:15
And then I have the same synth
with no filter,
probably something I asked for.
00:22:27
Then there's another synth.
00:22:34
And it's awesome,
the three of them together sound like this.
00:22:44
And as you can see I'm doing nothing.
00:22:46
All I'm doing is sending
them to a reverb.
00:22:48
A little bit of space, an Oxford.
00:22:50
Without the reverb it sounds like this.
00:22:57
And I really dig that.
00:22:59
But I wanted the vocal to have that
thing, that presence in the front,
without being too dry.
00:23:05
For something to feel really
forward you have to have something
that contrast with it,
that feels like it's not so forward.
00:23:11
If I have the track like this
and everything was on the same plane,
I don't get the same space as if
the synth is pushed back using the reverb.
00:23:35
It's subtle but now the synth
feels like it's stepped back a little bit.
00:23:39
I'll play it again.
Without.
00:23:49
Also, on the Chorus...
00:24:11
I just used a very big size
on the reverb and a very short time.
00:24:17
So you get the height and
you get the feeling of distance
but you don't get the garbage tail
that makes a mess.
00:24:22
The Oxford does that very well.
00:24:24
I know it's subtle.
00:24:27
But I like it. And also,
it does do that front to back thing.
00:24:31
I get the question all the time:
'How is it possible to
make something feel like
it's in the back of the room?'
Well, if something is in the back of
the room, when it makes a sound,
it hits the walls at the back of the room,
so if you can try and
imitate that and put it in your mix,
your listener's brain is gonna think:
'Oh, that thing is
in the back of the room
because that reminds me
of the sound of something
that I heard when it was
in the back of the room.'
Makes sense?
So, that's the main synth.
00:24:56
I remember requesting
a couple extra synths for the
pre-Chorus to help me lift it.
00:25:01
I already did that special
FX on the 'bilingual'
and I requested extra synth
and then he sent me this stuff.
00:25:15
This is perfect, I'm not touching it.
00:25:23
This is what it was without.
00:25:29
Much better.
00:25:41
There's also a viola here.
00:25:48
Which is the part that was there first
on the pre-Chorus
and I felt it didn't have
the tone that I could
do what I needed to do with it.
00:25:56
Also, there was the old synth
with the original processing.
00:26:04
So, I basically assembled the
pre-Chorus from a different part,
plus,
requested additional parts.
And then there's a raw viola
but it seems to have
been completely muted.
00:26:13
Oh, no, I'm using it here on the Chorus,
I don't remember this.
00:26:22
The viola came to me like this.
00:26:30
There's a little bit of a mask,
I supposed I did,
low-mids.
00:26:33
Yo!
And then some compression
to bring it forward.
00:26:44
This is basically just gain,
then it's pumping, of course.
00:26:54
Using the kick key.
00:26:56
Sugar.
00:27:01
Bringing the bow out
and then I just
made it go directly through
an entire EMT.
00:27:25
If you remove it
the Chorus goes down, check it out.
00:27:48
If you remove
it sounds a lot
refined and less designed.
00:27:53
But you can really feel
a lot of music coming through this
super Urban Pop track.
00:27:58
You feel a lot of music coming
from the people who made it,
even though it's not
a showoff, it's just there's depth there
and that viola really
helps do that.
00:28:08
And I really dig it.
00:28:10
So that's about everything.
00:28:13
Isn't that amazing?
It's not that much stuff,
and all of it is very
architecturally into twines so that
one thing comes in
and one thing comes out
and anything that happens is a big deal
because there's not that
much stuff happening.
00:28:27
So let's look at the two bus
because, you know,
it's really important.
00:28:32
I'm going to open every plug-in
so you see what's going on.
00:28:36
The way I personally work
when I make a whole album,
and I have the privilege of mixing
every song on the record,
is I like the record
to have a family feel.
00:28:46
You know, not every song
comes from the same place
but at the very least,
when I put the record on
I like to get a feel of unity
and to do that,
one of the ways to do that,
is to have a similar 2-Bus
processing across the whole record.
00:28:59
There's a lot of records these days
that are made by a
lot of different people.
00:29:03
I do that too, I mix one song
and then somebody else mixes another song.
00:29:07
So, there's basically no
unity to the record.
00:29:09
And that's a fine,
it's a bunch of singles and that's cool.
00:29:12
This is more like of a body of work.
00:29:14
It's an art piece across all the songs
and I wanted it to have a certain feel,
but because it's been produced
over months and months
there's not twice the same bass drum,
the vocals are done in different rooms
so it's quite difficult.
00:29:28
One of the ways that helps
is having
the
consistent 2-Bus processing
so that the track
breathes and reacts the same.
00:29:36
To be able to do that though,
because the Ableton tracks
tend to vary widely,
depending on the processing,
they vary widely
level wise when they're fed to me.
00:29:47
I have the sum master fader right here
and that allows me to adjust
the entire gain stage
of the whole session,
before I hit my mixbus.
00:29:55
Key.
00:29:56
So, for example, this song
clearly came a little loud.
00:29:58
That's why I have three dB down
on my sum master before
it hits this mess.
00:30:03
And then, I'm finished with this song,
I'm gonna open the next song,
'import session data',
a Pro Tools function that lets you import
all the plug-ins in whatever settings
you need, from a different session,
very easily, without having
to open the session and copy/paste.
00:30:16
And I import my mixbus
and then I feed everything into it
and then I do a basic
adjustment at the beginning.
00:30:22
I look at it, I'm like,
'Well, I probably would not start
a mix with 1.5 dB at 740 Hz
because I don't know what that
bass drum is gonna sound like.'
So maybe I would reset that
or rescind the settings a little bit.
00:30:34
Maybe I won't have 3 dB at 20 Hz on the
next song, maybe I'll bring that to 1.
00:30:38
Keep my smile shit going
but not be obnoxious about it.
00:30:41
I will definitely reset Sugar to zero
because I'm not sure I'm gonna need it,
I may or may not.
00:30:46
In this case I was really
infinitesimal on Sugar.
00:30:49
And then the limiter
tends to start at zero and zero.
00:30:52
And the attack is always wide open
because I don't want the limiter
to kill the attack,
unless I'm supposed to make
the loudest record on Earth
and then I have to lower the attack,
speed up the attack on the limiter,
but this is a smart team
so they didn't care about
making the loudest record on Earth
but the best record on Earth,
two very different things.
00:31:08
So, this is my mixbus,
let me play the track
so you can see
how things react and then we're gonna,
yes, we're gonna talk about
the SSL compressor settings.
00:31:39
You noticed that the limiter does
basically nothing, like maybe 1 dB.
00:31:42
Let's look at the level of this.
00:32:01
I am at -11, -10
on the Chorus, which is the loudest part,
with about 10 dB of Truedyn,
dynamic range.
00:32:10
That's 1 dB or 2 away from
a really loud record on Apple Music.
00:32:14
It's not as loud as a Billie Eilish
record which is like at
7 or 6,
but there's bass on this one
and there's not that much bass on
the Billie Eilish record
because that was not
the aesthetic they went for
and it's gonna feel fuller
and stronger than
most records in this vibe
without having to
compromise the fact that it's like,
it grabs you when you put it on.
00:32:34
So, I'm not mastering this,
the fact that it is at -10
is cool,
I can send it to the mastering engineer
and the track is basically ready for him
to do what he has to do without having to
resort to techniques that are
against the Geneva Convention.
00:32:47
So, I know that I'm at the right level.
00:32:50
Notice that there's not
a lot limiting going on,
that's because a lot of the gain control
and the density has been
done at the track level.
00:32:57
You do notice that
the SSL compressor is doing quite a bit.
00:33:19
It's louder because
I didn't level match, it's difficult
to level match, I'll show you why.
00:33:24
But what it does is it helps with density.
00:33:34
Here's more of that cruising feel.
00:33:36
Without.
00:33:50
Without the SSL
compressor it would be difficult
for the mastering
engineer to get that same
level and matching
of the rest of the record
and what's going on
in this realm right now,
in this trending sphere.
00:34:01
But actually it doesn't do as much
as you think it does because
I'm using it as a parallel processor
and I am high-passing the key, here.
00:34:11
Which is not
available on the regular
SSL compressor but is available
on the UA one.
00:34:17
If I went full-on compressor,
listen to the kick and bass relationship
if I use an SSL compressor
in a more traditional manner.
00:34:37
We knew that sound,
it's very controlled
but it doesn't live as much.
00:34:41
Now with the key high-passed
and a little bit of parallel compression,
backing off the wet signal
and adding some dry signal back in.
00:35:04
Listen to the snaps too.
00:35:12
The way I have it.
00:35:22
And you get the pump
more and it's more interesting.
00:35:24
So the settings are,
a wide opened attack,
so that bass drum goes through,
as much as possible,
as short release as possible
before it starts distorting
from being too fast and having
that inter-modulation thing going.
00:35:36
2:1 ratio because that's
about right for a Mix bus.
00:35:39
More is a bit over the top,
at least for my personal taste.
00:35:43
And then the make-up gain.
00:35:44
This one is a little harder to gain stage
then it should be
but it sounds so good
that I'm not angry at it.
00:35:50
And I'd have more compression
than I would if I were using it 100%.
00:35:54
Obviously,
4 dB of constant compression is basically
bringing the fader down,
that serves no purpose, right?
So it has to pump a little bit
to get that stuff going through
but then I back it up.
00:36:03
And that makes for a good sound.
00:36:05
I'm high-passing the side-chain
filter so that the bottom
of the 808 doesn't push
the whole track down.
00:36:10
So, basically the bottom
of the 808, when it hits,
doesn't send the SSL into:
'Wow, that's loud, le'ts compresse!"
The SSL compressor is not
hearing the bottom of the 808
because I'm high-passing the key
and thus it's not overacting to that.
00:36:23
And that's it, that's my 2-Bus.
00:36:26
And you'll see, as you see,
the limiter is basically
a safeguard, it doesn't do much,
I actually backed it up
0.5 dB, that means that either I'm doing
a trick on level
or
I was not happy with
how much limiting I had.
00:36:40
Let's go investigate.
00:36:42
Go back to my thing.
00:36:43
Aha, fancy this!
Look at that.
00:36:46
There is automation on
the input gain of the limiter.
00:36:50
Check it out, I'm gonna show you.
00:36:51
This is the oldest trick in
'le book'.
00:36:54
Look at the gain on the limiter.
00:37:00
For the Intro it goes down.
00:37:01
So that when you hit the Chorus...
00:37:10
You get that rush because
you get an extra 0.5 dB of
'oomph' across the whole track.
00:37:15
If we weren't doing this
it would be like this.
00:37:25
Which is fine
but this,
is better.
00:37:37
More exciting.
00:37:38
That's the trick that's
been used for ever.
00:37:40
There's a dude on the console
with the finger on the mixbus
and when you're printing you go...
00:37:44
when the Chorus happens and then...
when you go back to the second verse.
00:37:47
You could do that here too.
Let's see what would happen if I did that.
00:37:51
Don't tell Stelios.
00:37:53
Or Lolo, or Doug.
00:37:54
Don't tell anyone.
00:38:08
As opposed to.
00:38:18
Makes a difference.
Why didn't I do it?
Because I know
this is gonna get compressed in mastering
and you know that whatever I just did
will basically get
pushed back by the mastering compressor
so that he can do his job
and get to the level where
the artist and label,
and everybody is happy where it sits.
00:38:34
And so
if I did that in this particular session
with this level of density,
with this level
to start with I would
make his job harder.
00:38:44
Not something you would do to a friend.
00:38:45
By the way, this entire record
was made on laptops,
Apple laptops
using Ableton Live
for the production
and Pro Tools for the mix
all in-the-box,
all with Apollos
all in one building,
from start to finish.
00:39:03
Kind of in a Japanese
80s style.
00:39:06
I knew
at the very beginning, the first day,
that August,
when I heard this song,
I knew
it was gonna do something
and at the time of this writing
it's all over the radio in France
and it's growing here,
she's been touring like crazy
all indie.
00:39:25
When we started the record
it was an indie record
and so I was working directly with
Lolo, Stelios and Doug
and over the course
of the process between
October, November, January, February,
by the time it was mixed
they were signed to RCA
and RCA took over the amazing work
they already had done and enhanced it.
00:39:47
They are very hands-on
and they are doing
a lot of great work,
if you look Lolo Zouai on Youtube
you'll see a lot of really great content.
00:39:57
The 'Jade' video,
'Lose myself' videos
and every video done before
March 2019 was done 100% indie,
that includes
the Jade video, go check it out.
00:40:09
They found sponsors,
they harnessed their network,
they are doing the right thing.
00:40:14
And they are doing it well,
they have amazing taste,
they are super fast,
they work really really hard
and they are getting results.
00:40:23
Two laptops,
two Apollos,
a lot of talent
and
'Moi'.
00:40:30
Et Voilà.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Software
- apTrigga 3
- Dyn3 Compressor Limiter
- Eiosis E2 Deesser
- FabFilter Pro DS
- FabFilter Pro MB
- FabFilter Pro Q2
- Ghz Vulf Compressor 3
- ModDelay III
- Oxford Dynamics Compressor Limiter
- Oxford Limiter
- Oxford Reverb
- Process.Audio Decibel
- Process.Audio Sugar
- Soothe
- SoundToys Decapitator
- SoundToys Devil-Loc
- SoundToys Echoboy
- SoundToys Echoboy Jr
- SoundToys FilterFreak
- SoundToys Little AlterBoy
- SoundToys Microshift
- UAD 1176 Rev A
- UAD Dangerous BAX EQ
- UAD dbx 160
- UAD EMT 140
- UAD LA3A
- UAD Little Labs IBP
- UAD MDWEQ5-5B
- UAD Neve 33609
- UAD Pultec-Pro Legacy
- UAD SSL E Channel Strip
- UAD SSL G Bus Compressor
- UAD Studer A800
- Valhalla Vintage Verb
- Waves Abbey Road Vinyl
- Waves Rbass
- Waves Smack Attack
Fab Dupont is an award-winning NYC based record producer, mixing/mastering engineer and co-founder of pureMix.net.
Fab has been playing, writing, producing and mixing music both live and in studios all over the world. He's worked in cities like Paris, Boston, Brussels, Stockholm, London and New York just to name a few.
He has his own studio called FLUX Studios in the East Village of New York City.
Fab has received many accolades around the world, including wins at the Victoires de la Musique, South African Music awards, Pan African Music Awards, US independent music awards. He also has received Latin Grammy nominations and has worked on many Latin Grammy and Grammy-nominated albums.
David Crosby
Queen Latifah
Jennifer Lopez
Mark Ronson
Les Nubians
Toots And The Maytals
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