Inside The Mix: Colt Silvers With Fab Dupont

00:00:08
Good morning, children! Today, we are going to look inside the belly of a beast.

00:00:12
Without protection.

00:00:14
The name of the best is 'Two Hearts', a song by the Colt Silvers.

00:00:19
Where does the name come from? Good question! It comes from a TV series, an American TV series, in French it was called *lots of french-sounding stuff* or if you translate literally: 'The guy who falls just right' or, in English: 'The fall guy'.

00:00:35
Let's go! Because the beast is a beast, we're going to look at the mix from the actual record, so I have that, right here.

00:00:42
All the plug-ins are muted right now, but this is the mix, from the Colt Silvers record and we're gonna analyze that mix so you know why it sounds the way it does.

00:00:51
I mixed this minimally, because since I am in NY, and they're in Strasbourg..

00:00:56
look it up, nice place, especially if you like sausages, the communication was not gonna happen in real time.

00:01:01
I was gonna mix something, send it to them, and they were gonna send it back.

00:01:04
So, to keep things simple, all I did was: use Pro Tools, 16 channels of Convert-8 Dangerous Music converters..

00:01:13
a 2-Bus and my trusty 2192.

00:01:15
And no other hardware.

00:01:17
Let's listen to the track.

00:01:19
This is the final mix print, as you notice here on the right, my input monitoring is off, meaning: I am listening to the mix, the name of this mix is 'Two Hearts Fabmix 1.2'.

00:01:32
That means that I mixed it once, sent it to them, got feedback, implement the feedback, sent it to them, got more feedback, implemented the feedback and then everybody was happy.

00:01:41
Which is not bad, when you think about it for such monster across 6,000 miles or whatever it is from NY to Strasbourg again: look it up. Great sausages.

00:01:51
So, let's listen to the mix.

00:03:13
Pretty awesome, this is lower-East Brooklyn indie rock coming from Strasbourg. Repeat after me: [Strrrraaas-booouuurgh] there ya go.

00:03:20
Sidenote: I think it's valuable to mention that I did not just mix this record, I also co-produced it, with Christophe Pulon, in Strasbourg, and with the band members, The process here, the way they work, is..

00:03:32
the band members get together and they all take a part of the creative process. Agnan takes care of a lot of noises, he works in Fruity Loops on a laptop, Nicolas plays bass and writes a lot of lyrics and a lot of the music, Tristan writes also lyrics, he's the singer..

00:03:51
and then Julian plays drums and rocks like crazy beats and stuff like that.

00:03:56
And so, they all work together, organically.

00:03:58
When you work that way you can create a lot of interesting textures because you have 4 minds together as opposed to 1 mind.

00:04:04
Then, sometimes,after an year of doing that, you can loose perspective, that's when you need a producer to come in to actually make sure that the song is as good as it can be, that maybe, all the song on the record 3 different records from 3 different bands, which happens a lot..

00:04:22
So, the band members created the tones, vibes and songs, then Cristophe started tracking and making sure that the recording of those tones and the..

00:04:32
the further enhancements of it happened, and then they brought me at the end of the process, probably 75% into the process..

00:04:39
to make sure it's as good as it can be, because after a year of screwing around with the songs, you loose perspective.

00:04:46
And so, I met them up upstate, in Waterfront Studio, now defunct..in Hudson, NY..

00:04:52
while they were tracking the acoustic portion of their vision for the record.

00:04:57
And I was able to guide that and I was able to rationalize all the songs.

00:05:02
This song was actually the one that needed the least amount of work.

00:05:06
That's the one that they felt they brought the furthest because they knew it was gonna be a single, so they spent extra energy on it and extra time.

00:05:13
And Christophe already had done a very good-sounding mix and they were considering getting it mastered and leaving it as is. Then I heard it and I was like: 'could be better! It's great! But it could be better!' What we're gonna do in this video is, not only gonna look at my mix and stuff like we wanna geek out on, but! I like to also reference the original impetus, the original idea and original production to see what has changed and what now because I think it's a really awesome and fun thing to do.

00:05:45
But right now let's listen to the source mix.

00:07:27
Pretty awesome, right? The first thing I like to do is actually edit the source so that the length you know, cut out all the stuff that I cut out from the arrangement, that's the first thing I did with this song, was: 'ok, let's make sure that nobody ever falls asleep while listening and none looses attention.

00:07:44
On the original source mix, the chorus hits when the second verse hits on the final version, so let's edit that.

00:07:51
I'm just gonna cut the original source mix, so that all the parts line up post-butchery with the final mix, so when we do a comparison between what we're doing and what we used to do it's all on the same spot.. it's boring so I'm gonna do it in fast-forward! Here we go! All right, I cut about 800 bars from the intro and 4 bars at the end and now we have a song that's in the radio format without compromising the original impetus of it, I didn't really wanna hear that *sings* 16 times by itself before we hit the song. It's just didn't feel like it was worth it. I love the riff I just don't wanna exhaust it before we even get into the song.

00:08:35
So this is our reference.

00:08:37
We're gonna use this to compare how the arrangement has changed over time, but! We're really here to geek out on plug-ins, yo! So let's do that! I'm gonna go into input, right here..

00:08:49
and I'm gonna start looking at what I've done.

00:08:51
So, quick brush-up on what's going on here I have stems, everything in the record, is going through stems, so we have one electronic drum, you heard it, and then we also have an acoustic drum set coming in a little later, there it is! And as you may have noticed the acoustic drumset was cut with a knife to the electronic drumset.

00:09:15
Because the electronic drums came first and..

00:09:19
I really enjoyed that really stiff kinda *sings* *sings* a little bit like a..

00:09:24
like a Hall and Oates song, you know? *sings* Like, that kind of like..

00:09:29
'wants to be soulful, but it's not soulful' on the drums at least, kinda vibe, so I wanted that to be the most mechanical possible but then I wanted texture, 'cause I didn't want it to sound really laptop-y and so..

00:09:41
I kindly requested that they record new drums, live drums that Jules would play on top.

00:09:47
And the thing is that if you make pop music like this, and you want it to really groove, if you want to do electronic drums and acoustic at the same time, usually somebody's gonna suffer, in my world I like to make the electronic drums suffer, and I cut them to the live drums if the drummer has the pocket.

00:10:05
This drummer had the pocket but: the lead drums are really the electronic drums, so..

00:10:12
I sliced the hell out of Jules.

00:10:14
And he still probably hates me for it, to this day.

00:10:17
But it's a nice texture as you will see in a second.

00:10:19
So we have: electronic drums, all sort of acoustic drums, there's claps and toms and stuff like that, everything is sent to the stems.

00:10:31
So, we now hear, and the whole record gets summed here..

00:10:34
and as you can see every stem is sent to a discrete analog output.

00:10:38
9-10, 11-12, 13-14, 15-16.

00:10:42
Those discrete outputs correspond to the Convert-8, the A-range is the top Convert-8, 8 channels, hence the name: Convert-8.

00:10:50
C-range is the bottom Convert-8.

00:10:52
Still 8 channels, hence still called the Convert-8.

00:10:55
That goes in the 2-Bus, it's back in we talked about that in the beginning.

00:10:58
This is where the stems happen.

00:11:00
And on the stems I have limiters.

00:11:04
Those limiters, actually are not limiting anything, they're really minimal, and you may notice that they actually are at -3 on the input.

00:11:15
The reason for that is, I use the stems to kinda tame the input. This song was programmed on a laptop.

00:11:22
A lot of it in Fruity Loops.

00:11:24
By people who were trying to be creative, who are not exactly focusing or agonizing over gain stage, so I got the session, and it was like *noise* and to be able to track live stuff on that, and to make everything kinda gel together, into levels that are manageable that you can music with, is..

00:11:43
fun! So, to make things a little more manageable, and because I wanted to keep some of the balances from the original programming to keep true to their spirit, I padded the receiver stems.

00:11:55
Another way you can do this is creating masters for all the busses, but I got lazy, I guess, and so, I padded the input of the limiters, that is why..

00:12:04
that is this way. But this limiters don't limit much.

00:12:07
And then I have another Oxford Limiter on the final sum, this is the last bit of processing on this whole mix, and I use the input of that limiter, of course I'm gonna use it to gain a couple dBs of peak-over- average, if I can..

00:12:19
if I don't hear it, but..

00:12:22
considering the attack is wide open, it's not gonna do that much.

00:12:25
I'm using it mostly as a life insurance, I am not clipping my output stage..

00:12:30
and as an offset, remember: unless you're mixing a single..

00:12:34
you're trying to maintain your levels between songs, on a whole record.

00:12:39
The main reason for that is that when your client or the rest of your band listens to a song after the other, it's really elegant for all the songs to be more or less at the same level.

00:12:50
Because you may find that, if one of the songs is lower in average level than the other mixes, they won't like the mix as much, even if is as good or better a mix.

00:12:59
So it's good to make sure that all your levels are more or less the same, across the record.

00:13:06
Which means: you have to have enough headroom and one final point which - for me - is this fader, right here! So, there's 2dB of gain here, which means this song was probably a little softer than the rest of the songs of the record, when I was mixing it.

00:13:21
Makes sense? A'ight! So let's turn my 2-bus processing on, so that, all the decisions we make, I make through this chain.

00:13:29
That's usually the way it works, for me.

00:13:32
I set this up, up front.

00:13:34
Do I have a template? Mh...

00:13:36
No..yes? I kinda do the same thing every time because I know it works.

00:13:41
So I know I'm gonna like the Studer to soften the transients to get my tone, I don't like clink-y records.

00:13:46
Here, I remember having this moment of thinking: 'I used to mix everything through a Fatso', I even have one in my rack, and remembering: 'I really like the sound of those records..

00:13:56
then I moved away from the sound of the Fatso, fair enough..

00:13:59
but why don't I use a Fatso on this and see if the plug-in is as good as the hardware? It is! At least.. it did the trick for me on this record.

00:14:07
Then I have a 2-bus compressor, which I am using, as you can see..

00:14:11
almost nothing, I am using 14%.

00:14:14
Here I a have a Massenburg DesignWorks EQ, I love this EQ on 2-bus, Full disclosure: I designed this interface.

00:14:21
So that's also why I love it.

00:14:23
Then a BAX, 'cause that's usually what I have in hardware.

00:14:26
And then this is the UA Maximizer which I falled in love with, recently..

00:14:30
and so I have this turned on.

00:14:33
I know for a fact that this chain is on the whole record.

00:14:37
If I were mixing this song from scratch, I would zero the EQ, and zero both the BAX and the Massenburg EQs..

00:14:44
so that I start with a blank slate.

00:14:46
So that none of the correctional moves inherited from problems in different tracking sessions would be reflected in this tracking session.

00:14:54
That's the way I usually function.

00:14:55
Let's see what the drums sound like through this: And let's mute everything else in the stems..isn't that practical? Here we go! Let's just loop that.

00:15:13
If we listen to the original source mix my problem with the original source mix drum sounds is that they were neither here nor there.

00:15:25
Check it out! The hi-hat is trying to be like a plain hi-hat I think that's silly..

00:15:34
I told them: 'Remember that Duracell battery commercial, where there is a rabbit going *sings*' I said: 'I want something that silly!' I think that would give it a certain vibe, check it out: no accents, no subtle *sings* I think it's different and more naive, and has more of a vibe.

00:15:55
And so actually the whole set for me was to make it a little..

00:16:00
a little less..

00:16:01
intellectual, a little stupid-ier.

00:16:03
Original source mix: Like, given the bass drum is kind of fat I said: 'nah', let's just make it full on.

00:16:16
To do so, on the bass drum, the first thing I did was: enhance the cardboard.

00:16:21
The bass drum came this way, I hi-passed it, and made it a little rough-er.

00:16:31
Then I added the RBass thing..

00:16:35
because, we still want some 'cojones'.

00:16:38
Without the RBass: Not as cool! And then, probably later in the mix once everything was in place, especially the other bass drums, I added this EQ to compensate now that I knew where I was situated.

00:16:56
I didn't have enough bands left on this original EQ, to be able to do what I wanted.

00:17:00
And I didn't really want to mess with this.

00:17:02
You know sometimes you have something and you're like *aaah* 'let's not touch it.. it might turn funny.

00:17:07
So I just added this on top, with a different instance of the same EQ.

00:17:19
So the idea here is to cut around 100, which is pointy and enhance the bottom a little bit, so it does this thing. So that probably the bass drum can go under the other bass, we'll see that in a minute.

00:17:31
On the snare drum..

00:17:36
That's so bland, so I..

00:17:38
always resort to the trusty Decapitator, it's just more like: *aargh* And then, some serious fatness..

00:18:03
Why would you want that? Because, with the bass drum, if you don't have that extra EQ they're kinda disconnected.

00:18:21
Also moves the snare forward, which is what I wanted, and then there's the hi-hat.

00:18:26
I ruthlessly copied one hi-hat from somewhere..

00:18:29
just one..

00:18:31
and then I just copy-pasted it across the whole record.

00:18:34
No shame! Don't tell my mother! And then I added a Decapitator.

00:18:48
To make it sound even worse, and then I took these 3 instruments and then I set up a parallel compression scheme for them.

00:19:01
Threw a dbx 160, which brought everything to the fore, nice and manly.

00:19:25
We started from here..

00:19:40
Then I set up an ambience just for the electronic drums.

00:19:43
Because this feels dry.

00:19:47
It's fun, but, in the context of everything else it felt too dry, so I am sending just the hi-hat and the snare, this is the final result..

00:20:12
it's not exactly Enya-style reverb..

00:20:15
but it really does this, on the snare, and it helps when the other drums come in.

00:20:19
And I'm hi-passing what I am sending to the reverb.

00:20:21
So it doesn't take that much room. If I didn't have the hi-pass it would sound like this: So I get the results of what I want none of the garbage.

00:20:40
So with this established and pretty much running over the whole there's this part in the pre-chorus that sounds like this: Then, on the chorus there are some pretty cool claps that are also in the electronic drum stems, let's listen to them.

00:21:12
Love those claps! And.. I love them so much that I did nothing to them.

00:21:17
No effect, nothing.. they're fine as is.

00:21:19
Love 'em! Then there's this little enhance thing-ie, called *clush* which means 'bell'.

00:21:44
I don't remember where this came from, I just love it.

00:21:47
The rest of the electronic drums happen mostly on the bridge.

00:21:50
And those extra claps right here, check out those extra claps.

00:21:53
I wanna turn.. these were the original claps: little fat, so I thinned them out.

00:22:06
And then I actually did something unspeakable.

00:22:09
Because I may have been too lazy to set up a send I'm actually summing all these claps into this bus, right here, and I have the hi-pass on it, I am also sending the same buss to the input of a reverb, right here, it sounds like this.

00:22:33
Absolutely..

00:22:34
nothing fancy, it sounds great.

00:22:39
The other sounds of this bridge are this bass drum..

00:22:51
They sound great, there's no need to do anything.

00:22:53
However, in this particular case, I felt like it needed this.

00:22:58
So I used Boom, the built in Avid plug-in for bass drums and 808s and stuff like that.

00:23:04
And I doubled the pattern.

00:23:16
Because I felt it wasn't fat enough after all this fat-dom, of the whole song, going on the bridge and landing on something that sounds like this, felt kind of weird..

00:23:30
So I added a little: 'rrrrr..' And then, there's these claps: You can hear that resonance before opening the EQ, check it out: There's a little bit of that 'eeh' thing, right? That's what I'm getting rid of: 111..

00:23:58
and then now: I think that's it! That's all the electronic drums.

00:24:14
So, let's move on to the acoustic drums.

00:24:17
I wanna mute and I'm gonna mute the electronic bass drum, so now we can listen to only the real drumset, and the real bass drum, then we'll go back.

00:24:27
This is what sounds like, raw.

00:24:29
With no processing.

00:24:43
As I said before, this was recorded in Hudson, NY, in a studio called Waterfront, which is, no longer there. It was Henry Hirsch's studio and it had a Helios console and all sorts of exotic, old microphones and, more importantly, the place is ginormous.

00:24:58
It used to be a church so there were parts, somewhere around the altar, on the right, on the little..

00:25:03
elevated area.. and it was..

00:25:05
the weirdest thing: you had these drums being played savagely, by Jules, in this gigantic church..

00:25:13
but when you listen to the microphones they're bone dry.

00:25:16
And the reason for that is that they put the drums, I am not very religious so I don't know what they're called, but they had gobos around it, so you have, because you have no room, because it's gigantic, but you have the gobos, blocking enough reflections, that the drums sound dry and this is what we hear.

00:25:41
So let's look at the different microphones..

00:25:42
the inside microphone was a D12, it sounds to me like there was no backhead or a very small backhead, it's a shotgun mic.

00:25:53
That's a Henry Hirsch thing to do.. I've never seen that, before.

00:25:56
The long shotgun that they put inside the bass drum..

00:26:04
I kinda dig it..it sounds distorted but I think what I am hearing is the pedal freaking out.

00:26:08
The two of them, together.

00:26:12
Well, that's my first problem.. they're out of phase, you heard that, right? Listen to the bottom of the shotgun..

00:26:23
the two of them..

00:26:27
All the bottom goes away. Just the D12.

00:26:32
Silliness. What I am gonna do..

00:26:34
what I did.. what I'm gonna do again..

00:26:37
is: adjust the phase between the two bass drum microphones so I can have some bottom left.

00:26:42
So this is without the adjustment.

00:26:56
We'll deal with the rest of the bass drum later. The snare sounds like this.

00:27:10
And then.. I probably duplicated it.

00:27:14
Unbelievable tom fill here, check it out! Those like.. vintage Gretsch sound kind of like the old James Brown records, where the toms are like.. they sound like..

00:27:27
they are singing. I love that stuff! There's a KM56, basically an overall microphone. There's an M7 and a U87 and then, there's a compressed, the whole set together, sounds like this.

00:28:09
Listening to this, with the electronic drums, now..

00:28:13
is gonna tell me the reason why I added processing. You notice that there's very little processing, here.

00:28:19
Because I felt probably that it was working fine, with the drums, except of course for the permanent culprit of hell: the bass drum.

00:28:35
I'm gonna mute the electronic drums, again, and let's listen to what I've done.

00:28:40
Let's listen to the snare drum.

00:28:46
It's an old Altec mic, if I remember well.

00:28:48
And what we're doing here is opening it up without the EQ.

00:28:54
Notice that it's everything snare, bass drum, hi-hat, there was no intention of separation, here.

00:29:11
And that's going into a gated reverb, made with the AMS UAD plug-in.

00:29:21
And I hi-passed the hell out of it, so that only the high end of the snare is in the gate reverb.

00:29:31
And I also have a Lexicon 224 which I am using for more of a space..

00:29:41
Isn't it fun? Putting gobos to remove the cathedral sound but then adding a cathedral-reverb. Just sayin'! And that's all the space we have on the whole drumset.

00:29:54
It's just on the snare, but since everything bleeds into it..

00:29:58
and then I doubled the snare..

00:29:59
the reason why the track is blue instead of green, it's to tell me that this is a duplicate of this track, and I put a 1176 on it, probably on stun, it's got all buttons in, and it's distorting and it's ugly as sin, but with it.. it's awesome.

00:30:23
Without the distortion: You maybe surprised to see a Decapitator, here.

00:30:39
It's just a special effect for one particular section right here, in the bridge.

00:30:50
Just a little bit of grit.

00:30:51
'Cause the whole bridge is kinda chaos-y.

00:30:53
And then, there's a Pultec! And a Pultec! Opens the high end around 10k and..

00:30:59
makes the whole drum shine.

00:31:01
Still no bass drum.

00:31:13
Again, I did not use a bus, I just sent all the instrument with this exact mix, except the bass drum to the drum crush, and it sounds like this.

00:31:28
The crush by itself sounds like this.

00:31:36
Sounds like a crush.

00:31:37
And I am also EQing it wide open.

00:31:47
With the rest of the drums: We have 4-5 plug-ins, we go from here..

00:32:16
let's mute the parallel processing on the electronic hat and snare, so we can hear just the bass drum..

00:32:23
don't forget that the parallel processing here was solo-safed..

00:32:26
The reason why I am muting the sends from the snare and the hi-hat into the electronic drums parallel processing is, I wanna be able to hear the electronic drums parallel processing when I add the electronic bass drum to compare with my acoustic bass drum.

00:32:40
The first thing I did here, is even though this bass drum's cool I made it bright as hell.

00:32:53
The reason for that is because it has to work with this.

00:33:01
And without my EQ it sounds like this.

00:33:08
So I am actually doing a little phase adjustment between the electronic drum and the acoustic drum by using the hi-pass at 30dB/octave, which is pretty steep, and is gonna make the phase rotate, I mean 44.9Hz means nothing other than that's where they gel'd well together.

00:33:25
That's it! And that worked.

00:33:32
Let's turn the electronic one off so I can show you the processing on the acoustic one, then I'll turn it back on.

00:33:38
The rest of the processing on the acoustic one, is an expander so I can get rid of that snare. Listen to it: Super fast attack, 'cause I wanted the punch and it's distorting a little bit, but I don't care.

00:33:57
Distortion is good for you, sometimes! Some compression! Faithful Transient Designer, which I am using to shorten the length. Check this out! Without.

00:34:14
Get that *wrooah* So I can get the punch, the distortion, the *grrr* but not the garbage. And then I remember, this was one of the first time I experimented with this plug-in, which was the Vitalizer..

00:34:33
It's another way to enhance the bottom, it's also an SPL model.. check it out. Without.

00:34:51
So you noticed that it removes some of the sub but adds a little bit of that grind in the low mids.

00:34:56
The reason why I use this instead of RBass is because I'm using RBass on the electronic bass drum and I remember having both being a bloody mess.

00:35:05
But here's the fun part. Remember how the Vitalizer didn't make that much of a difference, it was kinda subtle? Check it out in the context.

00:35:11
This is the two bass drums playing at the same time..

00:35:14
Vitalizer on and then off.

00:35:32
Phase is key! So this is a good tool.

00:35:35
Then what I'm doing with the bass drum is I am actually using a send to send it into those busses, so..

00:35:41
the bass drum is going to the kick stem, it's also going to the drum stem, into the drum crush.. and what's that doing is it's making.. a mess! Let's mute the electronic drums.

00:36:01
You get the presence.. check it out. Without: All the details of the drums, the crash cymbals are live crash cymbals, copy-pasted.

00:36:34
But they're live cymbals, that we recorded at the Waterfront.

00:36:37
There's a snare, here.

00:36:39
In the bridge.

00:36:46
There's Jules torturing the snare.

00:36:48
It has to go with the claps, remember the claps? And the processing on that is pretty brutish.

00:36:52
First, a reverb: D-Verb plate.

00:37:00
That's probably because that's what they had at the studio because the computer..

00:37:04
and the Pro Tools system at Waterfront was pretty vintage.

00:37:08
And so, they didn't have many reverbs, so that's why D-Verb ended up on everything and then that's when you rediscover that D-Verb is perfectly fine and sounds good.

00:37:16
A little bit of a nudge in the middle, listen to this, again: It feels brighter, I am just removing some energy probably to not clash with the claps.

00:37:29
And then, this guy.

00:37:42
Usually works.

00:37:43
So this, with the claps, sounds like this.

00:38:00
And then we have toms, because it's Colt Silvers and Colt Silvers has a tom fetish.

00:38:08
These toms were deemed to be weird.

00:38:15
I'm adding a little bit of bottom on these toms, but importantly: Devil-Loc to the rescue! And then of course: D-Verb, which is fed the same sub as the tom sub.

00:38:55
I forgot to mention, when I showed the cymbals, that I have an actual EMT 140 inserted on the cymbal bus, just like that, this is what you call: 'brutish mixing'.

00:39:15
All right! So that's all the drums we got! ..for this crazy song. I can turn these two parallel processing back on. Check out the pre-chorus: It was fun to play with parts of the song where the drums, the live drums sound real and add that real quality and then parts of the song like the pre-chorus where I just took one bass drum and looped it and made it sound super sampled, even though it's the same bass drum, from the same tracks, as the drums that are supposed to sound real, 8 bars later.

00:00:00
Let's talk about bass, baby! I'm gonna mute all the other stems.

00:00:05
And turn the bass back on.

00:00:14
Chorus.

00:00:25
The part used to be like this.

00:00:37
I was like 'nah!, I need more action!' And then Nicholas killed it, because he's a good player.

00:00:54
So, that's the raw take.

00:00:56
This is the actual thing I did to it.

00:00:59
First thing I did is put a Marshall amp on the DI..

00:01:10
It's a guitar amp. And so what!? Then we had the duplicate of that DI that I used to keep those notes and 'klink-iness', with..

00:01:29
just the distorted DI without the clean DI.

00:01:38
With.

00:01:46
And then there was a microphone.

00:01:58
All of it was recorded with distortion on it, just for entertainment.

00:02:01
This is the 3 tracks, together.

00:02:14
I like bass sounds, like..

00:02:16
you know, all Rickenbacker and stuff like that..

00:02:18
that remind you that a bass is a very thick piece of metal string there is some wood involved but really it's a lot of metal.

00:02:26
I like those sounds but this is a little clanky so what I did is I used the Studer to do this, so this is without.

00:02:47
I also wanted to endorse the distortion.

00:02:49
There is distortion, right? It's fuzzy, the raw recording is fuzzy so I might as well go in that direction, so I pushed into the Studer by raising the input and lowering the output so that A/B is at the same level..

00:03:00
lowered the HF sync and repro EQs..

00:03:04
and this is where we're at right now. Then I compressed it and basically whenever he plays he gets compressed and centered and that allows for more of a leveling vibe especially since the attack is pretty slow.

00:03:24
Then obviously we want some fat.

00:03:35
200 helps the raunchiness, this is without the 200.

00:03:51
Since the Pultec has transformer emulation and it sounds fat and all that stuff, and it's great.. but it's a bit of a sledgehammer so then I had to bring an EQ, an Oxford, to remove some of those resonances.

00:04:14
And set those nicely and then, you know, you can't have too much distortion.

00:04:25
TapeHead rocks and this is what it sounds like, in context.

00:04:43
I'm gonna play the old mix, listen to the..

00:04:46
focus on the bottom.

00:05:12
Now, second verse.

00:05:21
I just removed everything and I removed the bass.

00:05:23
I remember that, in the original version, I wanted it to be more empty so at the beginning of the *french sounds* I removed everything including the bass.

00:05:53
Let's turn the vocal on, now that we have the important parts of the record, which is drums and bass because everything else is a decoration.

00:05:59
Except maybe the vocal. So let's do that.

00:06:01
This is what it sounds like, raw.

00:06:14
Sounds really thick and, in the context, it's a problem.

00:06:23
I did it on purpose, though. Because I wanted to be able to have the phat-dom when I wanted it so, first thing I did, is raise the shine of the high end. I didn't use an EQ I used a HF playback in the Studer A800, check it out. This is without: Listen 'cause I wake' I can't really do that with an EQ. It's pretty cool.

00:07:04
Then I went full on Attila on his vocal.

00:07:07
So..

00:07:08
5k is great to open a vocal without hurting your eyes.

00:07:12
A very gentle, very low-reaching shelf at 2k all the way up to infinity.

00:07:19
And then a super-ridiculously -absurd hi-pass and it sounds like this.

00:07:29
Obviously, that is not a hi-fi vocal sound.

00:07:32
But nobody here wanted a hi-fi vocal sound. If you listen to the demo, it's kinda like crunchy and everything and..

00:07:46
the whole attitude of the whole record was not about making a hi-fi record. To make stuff dirty like this, you know, we don't have to adhere to the canons of 'this is a beautiful recording' so, I just hi-passed the hell out of it.

00:07:59
And then here's a compressor.

00:08:11
Distortion.

00:08:18
And then, obviously, when you start doing all that stuff, a little bit of de-essing is in value.

00:08:28
That's it. Space-wise..

00:08:31
I have a short delay, I wanna un-bypass there you go..

00:08:41
I always use EchoBoy for stuff like this because you can make it do crazy things, like distort the returns, you have different models, you can hi-pass, lo-pass, this is 1/8th note, on the actual beat of the song.

00:08:57
I also have a spread.

00:09:05
I'll exaggerate so you understand what is going on.

00:09:11
But this is how much of it I just put in.

00:09:25
It's nice, but I probably used the spread a lot more on the other tracks, of course, and stuff.

00:09:29
And then there's a space, which is a trusty EMT 140.

00:09:39
The 3 of them, together.

00:09:50
Not clean.

00:09:52
Then, there's a double. So, the double was actually a real double. It was not put together from outtakes, it was put together as he sang a double to himself.

00:10:07
And I thus copied all the settings and you'll notice that the settings are the same because it's a copy-paste because I am lazy! And it is all the same.

00:10:17
The only thing that's different is probably the amount of distortion.

00:10:21
There's more distortion on the double.

00:10:23
I remember doing that, so that the double sounds more awful than the lead and also you'll notice a super high cut on the double.

00:10:30
And a very bright tone of the double. So, the double with all the processing, sounds like this.

00:10:39
The lead sounds like this.

00:10:46
The 2 of them together sound like this.

00:10:57
And I did not use any effects on the double because I didn't wanna make a mess and there's plenty of effects on the lead vocal and the double is just there to make the lead vocal dirty.

00:11:07
And it's doing that very well! And then there's the chorus! What I did there was soften everybody with the same A800 and then, this one, remember? And then..

00:11:59
Added..

00:12:01
a gentler EQ, because I needed more presence, here.

00:12:04
I wanted the chorus to lift.

00:12:06
If you remember, in the demo, the chorus doesn't really lift..

00:12:08
as much as it should.

00:12:17
It's kind of a rhythm of sound..

00:12:19
Here I really wanted to come up in energy.

00:12:21
So to do so, I made the vocals a little fatter so I needed a little more 'oompf'.

00:12:27
So to help the chorus lift in my version I let the vocals on the bridge be fatter.

00:12:39
Of course, de-essing, it never hurt anyone.

00:12:49
Then, this guy, gives you a little bit of a bite.

00:13:00
Adds some of the original distortion-like character of this particular box and also is pumping.

00:13:07
I'm making it pump on purpose.

00:13:17
To create a vibe, then I crushed it with a little bit of Decapitator, because you can't have too much of it.

00:13:32
Let's listen to it, in context.

00:13:43
It still felt too fat. Listen.

00:13:53
This may seem counter-intuitive. Why not just lower the energy in the bottom, right here. In the source track.

00:13:59
Because A) it wouldn't pump the same second, I probably came up with this later.

00:14:03
I did this sound by itself, or with the drums sounding a certain way and then as I added more stuff, it was too fat and so I made it thinner.

00:14:12
And then I made it more aggressive with a little bit of distortion. So this is the thinner part.

00:14:39
It just sits more forward, it's good.

00:14:41
And then, a little bit of that Sonnox saturation.

00:14:56
Then, a Microshift.

00:15:21
Does a cool glistening kind of thing, love it! And then, the same 3 effects as on the lead, probably with more spread.

00:15:36
Let me coalesce the trim automation so we can look at the actual values.

00:15:41
We're gonna have trim, this is how much spread there is on it.

00:15:44
This is how much Lead Space there is on it.

00:15:46
And this is how much Short Delay there is on it.

00:15:59
Check it out without the spread.

00:16:16
Glisten on the transients, which means that the lead vocals are gonna pop up in the chorus without them being too loud, so you can keep the energy of the drums and keep that *tch-tch* coming in, it's not aggressive, doesn't hurt your eyes, it's forward and it's not loud.

00:16:29
It's paradise! We'll do the background vocals, later.

00:16:48
So now let's go back and listen to guitars and stuff.

00:16:51
So, guitars.

00:16:54
If you remember, the original demo..

00:17:02
It's nice and 'creative', as far as tuning goes.

00:17:06
Because sometimes, when you're in the heat of session writing a song, tuning doesn't seem that important.

00:17:11
But then the morning after, of course, life sucks.

00:17:14
So, here what I did is I probably cut whichever one I liked the best and then looped it.

00:17:26
So this guitar is very, very simple.

00:17:28
I removed some of the bottom because it's too much.

00:17:30
I'm gonna mute all guitars except that one, for now.

00:17:38
Hear how it fights with the lead vocal? So I am actually lowering the low-mids, so that there's room for the vocal.

00:17:51
And then a little bit of grit with the 1176.

00:18:00
And I'm using one reverb for all the guitars.

00:18:03
I let the EMT reverb stay fat.

00:18:05
That's why this hi-pass is not inactive, here.

00:18:14
Like this.

00:18:28
It's subtle right now, but with all guitars going to this one reverb, you'll notice the reverb in fat-dom, later, when we grow up.

00:18:35
These 2 guitars are going to something called 'riff sub', which is right here, I'm gonna move it, so it hangs with his brothers. There you go..

00:18:43
That's the riff and I have 2 of them.

00:18:46
And I sum them and sounds like this.

00:18:55
What's happening here is, these were recorded on stun, one of them is clean-er one of them is just chaotic.

00:19:06
And so I put these 2 together and tried to make a sum of it.

00:19:09
The first thing I did is distort the first one.

00:19:14
Then..

00:19:16
tame that obnoxious frequency that made everybody's eyes hurt.

00:19:23
And then compress it.

00:19:32
What I wanted to do there is get all that grain and nastiness from the guitar on the right.

00:19:37
And have the definition for the guitar on the left.

00:19:39
Don't forget that we're coming from here, on the verses.

00:19:54
It's a little bit like going from junior-high to high school.

00:19:57
Like, you know what you wanna be, but you really spread your wings in high school, that's when you do all the highly-regrettable stuff that will follow you for the rest of your life.

00:20:06
Then, after that, we have the tape.

00:20:14
Our eyes no longer hurt! Iz nice! So this will soften transients and then I add a little bit of RVerb, there's more, there's this guy..

00:20:36
that is a brilliant touch from those guys.

00:20:38
I heard this, soloed it and I was like 'yeah!', so this adds a melody on top of this riff to give it a little bit of texture.

00:20:49
The way I treated that, is, removed the ring, I'll play it again flat.

00:20:56
It hurts your eyes, again.

00:21:03
The 2 of them together.

00:21:12
Into RVerb just for entertainment.

00:21:14
And this is what it sounds like with all those guitars and the rest of the arrangement, there you go.

00:21:18
I'm gonna play the junior-high part and then we're going to the high school part.

00:21:43
That's good rhyming, these guys are awesome.

00:21:45
Next part is this part, right here.

00:21:48
Of pre-chorus.

00:21:57
Why this is called: 'guitar drone'? I am not sure. It's definitely a drone. Guitar? I don't know.

00:22:04
I got this as a stereo file from the Fruity Loops session.

00:22:08
And I said 'I love it, I like this thing'.

00:22:16
On the chorus.

00:22:25
To go with harmony and simplify everything..

00:22:27
I thought it was awesome. I decided to use Filterfreak to do some automation, I'll show you.

00:22:33
Filterfreak is by Soundtoys and it's a really good tool to have so what I did with the Filterfreak is: I kept the loop as it was on the pre-chorus on the chorus, I..

00:22:46
darkened it, so it has motion during the course of the chorus. The chorus sounds like this.

00:23:07
Gets brighter and brighter over the course of the chorus, which is pretty awesome.

00:23:11
I'm removing some of that and apparently I thought it was too bright, so let's see.

00:23:41
On the pre-chorus.

00:23:51
This is very bad manners: I used the compressor to get gain.

00:23:54
Bad! Bad! I'd fire myself if I were the boss. All right.

00:24:00
It's bad because I can't A/B at the same level before and after and it's bad manner, I tell everyone not to do it, and I do it, shame on my family for 7 generations! There you go! Next guitar! There's nothing special, here.

00:24:22
All I did is thin them out, because obviously if you play this with the rest: They don't really lead, all they made is a mess. So if you hi-pass them and give them a little peak at 1k 1k is awesome on those kind of guitars, because it sounds ugly by itself..

00:24:47
that's kind of like the sweet spot for making presence happen on distorted guitars.

00:24:52
I mean, it can be 1.2, it can be 800, depends on the key, weather, what you had for breakfast but: it works! They also show up at the end of the last chorus, check it out.

00:25:23
I discretely cut that up and put it there..

00:25:25
to see if anybody would complain. Nobody did so I left it in.

00:25:29
And then, there's this guy right here. This one's fun.

00:25:32
Check it out.

00:25:39
So that reverb is built in.

00:25:41
And I put a PanMan on it.

00:25:42
Which is an automatic panner.

00:25:50
And also, to make it feel like it was with the other guitars, I added RVerb on top.

00:26:00
So because now, the built-in reverb on the track travels..

00:26:03
but RVerb doesn't really travel as much, it gives more of a space and it sounds like this in context.

00:26:16
Get the fun in the way you can! Here is..

00:26:20
This is the leftover from the demo session, if I remember well.

00:26:27
It's a great pickup to the second chorus.

00:26:34
That may not change the course of modern music, but: I put an EMT on it, to make it even more obnoxious and RVerb for the same reason I just mentioned.

00:26:51
And there it is, in context.

00:27:01
You hear it on headphones if you really concentrate.

00:27:03
And then: the crazy solo at the end, check it out.

00:27:24
So what I did is, soften the transients again, in solo it sounds like this.

00:27:32
Too much, so: a little softening.

00:27:40
And then it's too fat in the sauce so I am lowering the low-mids and I am still taming a little bit of that 3k hi-cruncher.

00:27:52
Add some reverb.

00:27:58
And now it's gonna cut through! Let's turn the keyboards on and see what we did there, or also known as 'stuff'! We have: A riff, that sounds like this.

00:28:26
The guys were on a Chinese music thing, kinda kick, they've been touring China quite a bit.

00:28:30
And so they have influences.

00:28:38
That's a complement to the guitar part.

00:28:40
And I'm just lowering it a little bit of the bottom and compressing it quite a bit.

00:28:48
And adding some reverb, and goes with this, obviously.

00:28:58
Without the EQ, it would like this.

00:29:15
So it gets rid of that energy in the low-mids that unnecessary, since the guitar really gives it and it allows it not mud things, as much.

00:29:21
And this is used in the choruses.

00:29:26
And then on the choruses we have these two guys that come in: Rhodes, I have the settings for the reverb, right here, same exact thing as the guitar.. and then there's this guy: You want to listen to it along with the bass..

00:30:03
so what I did is to marry the two of them is: I got a little presence on top and removed the low-mids, that was an original part, pretty sure. Yeah.

00:30:25
Chinese rock! That's an original part.

00:30:27
Straight from the soft-synth. Love it.

00:30:30
Then we have some more Rhodes stuff just interventions on the 2nd verse.

00:30:38
So I put it on the other side as the Rhodes of the chorus, just because I can! Diversity, so things stay interesting and when you're listening on headphones they are stuff taking you to places.

00:30:58
There's this fantabulous Juno 60-like sound.

00:31:03
Love the Juno 60.

00:31:12
What I wanna do is remove that thing.

00:31:16
Making it a lot mellower and give it a lot of reverb.

00:31:22
It sounds like this.

00:31:36
Then there's this part here, on the chorus.

00:31:46
I listen to it and..

00:31:49
I really didn't like it! But..

00:31:51
the boys really wanted it. So I was like 'ok', so I disguised the hell out of it. First..

00:31:56
I used a Microshift..

00:32:08
it just sounds so much like a plug-in.. that's just..aargh.

00:32:12
But they like having that shine on top of the melody so might as well use the sound that's there and try and make it less offensive to me.

00:32:25
So that makes it a little fuzzier and less precise than this guy.

00:32:35
Naughtier attack and a little bit of *grr*..

00:32:37
and then, I hi-passed the bottom.

00:32:45
Then a reverb.

00:32:53
We started here.

00:33:08
I cut it in the pre-chorus, I didn't like the pre-chorus part..

00:33:13
I thought it overshadowed the amazing guitar sound or 'guitar'-sound we had before.

00:33:21
So I just used this, on the intro it sounds like this.

00:33:30
Without.

00:33:37
You missed it? All right! And you know what they say: 'the fall guy is always right'.

00:33:50
So, that's it for stuff! Incredibly sober and restrained amount of stuff.

00:33:55
Compared to other tracks in this record.

00:33:57
Which I strongly urge you to listen to, because it's pretty awesome.

00:34:01
What we have left is the background vocals! They sound like this.

00:34:11
So you hear all that gunk, right? So first thing I did was: get rid of the gunk, by removing the low end and the low-mids an all 4.

00:34:26
Also, listen to the Ss.

00:34:31
Something that we recorded really quickly, apparently.

00:34:40
So, I am de-essing too much, I know! But it doesn't matter.

00:34:43
Because this is to be layered with these guys.

00:34:54
Plenty of Ss there already, so you don't need them..

00:34:56
as long as you don't hear the de-essing.

00:34:58
To further enhance the blending of the lead and the backgrounds over time, I decided that I wanted to make things thinner, and because this had this complicated thing here, I didn't want to do it on 4 different tracks, so I did it on the sub.

00:35:21
A little compression.

00:35:26
Just doing nothing, it's probably doing something on the chorus.

00:35:38
Just for those 2 notes on the pre-chorus and then a Microshift.

00:35:43
Hear that? Kind of like 'weird '80s thing' and then I have 3 different space effects in the backgrounds. I have the tail which is made a 250..

00:36:14
I have this thing where, if I use a 140 on the lead vocal I use a 250 on the background vocals.

00:36:19
Because, well, they have different colors.

00:36:22
Then I have a delay.

00:36:28
Like, on this, probably for different things.

00:36:30
Or I set it up and then I didn't like it.

00:36:32
Or I didn't want it.

00:36:33
And then there's this reverse thing, check it out.

00:36:43
UA RMX, nice and digital sounding.

00:36:51
In context, they sound like this.

00:37:01
It probably took me 20 minutes to automate all that stuff.

00:37:04
For something that nobody will ever hear.

00:37:06
And that's a warm fuzzy feeling. Let's see what else it is.

00:37:09
I'm gonna Ctrl+Cmd+Click on this.

00:37:14
Here, and then I can go to..

00:37:16
a pre-chorus track, and because I Ctrl+Cmd+Clicked on it.

00:37:20
I can see the automation automatically, that's pretty neat.

00:37:23
Let's see if we can actually hear it.

00:37:31
You can feel it.

00:37:33
These background vocals are going straight to the stem, here.

00:37:45
So cute! But there's no processing on them.

00:37:53
Because quite frankly, what're you gonna do? They don't need anything.

00:37:55
It's just a little shine.

00:37:57
And then, there's this awesome stuff.

00:37:59
Check it out.

00:38:00
On the bridge, they have this track.

00:38:08
So, I loved it, I just removed the low-mids.

00:38:14
And then the bulk in the middle was too much..

00:38:17
Added a lot of reverb on it.

00:38:22
In the context, it sounds like this.

00:38:47
You know what? Let's give credit where credit's due, check it out, here.

00:38:54
If you don't have it, it's not the same! Check it out! It was a good idea, I didn't waste that time.

00:39:11
So, how long did it take me originally to mix this? Probably a day..

00:39:15
plus, since it's a 1.2 probably another hour, maybe twice, half an hour or maybe an hour of each..

00:39:23
every time for the .1 and the .2.

00:39:26
It's a lot of stuff, there was some production, I did some cutting at the same time that I was mixing.

00:39:30
I added a Boom thing..

00:39:32
it takes time to do production on a mix, especially since, when you mix, trying to be inspired, regardless of gain staging and doing crazy stuff, is really difficult to do. So you have to switch brains, you mix, you make it sound good, you make sure that everybody's gonna be happy..

00:39:49
and also, at the same time, still be creative and be wild and if something is wacky but makes you feel good, let it be wacky as opposed to try and tame it to being a record right away. And that's a very difficult thing to do.

00:40:00
I'm still happy with this mix and it's been about a year, now.

00:40:04
And, I've been listening to the master. So when you're being used to listening to the master for a year and then you listen to the mix, usually it's like.. 'ugh, rough!'.

00:40:14
So, this is sitting in a good place.

00:40:16
Makes me happy and I get no chills of disgust in my lower back. So that's good! What's left to do is: listen to the whole thing, in one block as opposed to all the little instalments.

00:40:27
And also as the session goes by, remember all those details we just looked at.

00:40:32
Before we do that, I just wanna point out that processing-wise, in hardware, I have 3 clicks on the Paralimiter and..

00:40:42
6 clicks of the Transformer, on the 2-Bus+.

00:40:44
So that's about it. I'm also hitting my converter a little hard..

00:40:47
this is mixed loud, I use the converter a little bit as a clipper, I'm not being very metrosexual about it.

00:40:56
I'm being kind of like 'rrr!'. And that gives that edge which I kinda like. If you look at the recording levels, here..

00:41:12
it's definitely in the red.

00:41:13
And I was experimenting with that..

00:41:16
the sound of a converter going *sounds* I don't know.. I like it for this kind of stuff..

00:41:21
a little crunch..

00:41:22
and I use the output master of the 2-Bus to actually hit the A/D converter a little harder to be able to get that like.. compression, if you will, that..

00:41:33
transient..

00:41:34
softening..

00:41:35
from..

00:41:37
the 2192, as opposed to do it with a plug-in. So this is like..

00:41:41
hardware abuse.

00:41:43
And it gives a little bit of that edge. It's nice.

00:41:46
Let's make sure that you control it, otherwise..

00:41:49
you hate yourself in the morning. Again.

00:41:51
Let's listen to it from beginning to end.

00:41:54
Knowing everything that we know, now.

00:41:56
You can hear all the details, that I've been putting there in our little, very important, reverb throws, and all those little things that make it a very special mix.

00:42:07
For a very special song! Those guys are awesome.

00:45:21
Et voila'!