Fab Dupont Mixing Template

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Good morning, children! Today I'm going to show you the secret behind the magic ..just you and me! No sharing! I'm gonna share my template! It's priceless.

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In reality there's no magic, there are no tricks and nothing's priceless, I'm just gonna give you my template and show you how it works.

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The point here is not to unveil in the mystery, the point is to save time when you're mixing. Because mixing is extremely repetitive and if we wanted a repetitive job we'd move to Detroit and work for Ford! I noticed that there're lots of mixing templates floating around on the internet - that's the one with email - and .. they're not very good.

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And they're not very good because you open a file and then there's a whole bunch of stuff going on and routing going on, and plug-ins you don't have and it's just a mess and there's no explanations.. so, I thought it'd be very useful and fun to have a template that makes sense for all sorts of systems ..in Pro Tools, today.. and also, that is properly explained.

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Templates are tricky because they need to be very broad.

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You definitely not need the same tools when you mix a jazz trio or the Red Army choir.

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Those are two very different things.

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But, there are some common denominator things.

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Most like you're gonna have drums, most likely bass, maybe not for the Red Army choir but you know what I mean.

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And, you're gonna need stems, reverbs, printing tracks, stuff like that.

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And instead of doing the same gesture of creating the stems, every single mix, it's a lot easier to import them or to start with them in the session, already.

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There are two different way to take advantage of templates and I'm gonna go over both ways using this template.

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Which is perfect for both ways.

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The first way is the old-school console kinda way, where you open a session and you have your template and then you drag your audio into the existing template just like if you had a tape machine and a console, you just put the tape remember tape? On the tape machine, press play and everything is wired through a console and all the processing on the console and the routing is pretty much pre-defined, except for a few buttons. That's one way.

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The other way is the cherry-picking dandy kinda way.

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You have a session that is sent to you and has a lot of stuff in it.

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And then what you do is import parts of your template into that existing session.

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That's useful when you're mixing a full record, for example, and your template, may be your first song, and then you import stuff from your first song into the second song, so it's continual, and you don't have to start from scratch and you have some references and stuff like that.

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It's also useful if somebody sends you an existing session that's a bloody mess, which is most of the time, and you need to put some sense into it, and use your own routing, because your routing is your routing, and you own it and you share it with yourself! Before we go to examples I'm gonna run you through the template that should now be opened in your Pro Tools rig, in front of you, so you can play with it while I describe it otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever.

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To make things very simple I created some sign posts.

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These dark blue inactive tracks are inactive for a reason, they don't mean anything, they just tell you 'this is the acoustic drums area'. Boom.

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I know what you're thinking: I said blue, it looks gray.

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It is blue, but it's inactive, so it looks gray.

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You can see the blue up there, on a little label.

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The next inactive track is here, it says 'this is the electronic drums area', and the next one: 'this is the percussion area', and this is the bass area, this is the guitars area..

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and I use the same color template all the time, so I know what's going on, but it's nice, when you use the import dialog in Pro Tools, to have something that tells you: 'oh, this is this area, this is this area'. You'll see, it's pretty cool, it'll help you save time.

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So, acoustic drums area, right here.

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I created three tracks, Inside Bass Drum, Outside Bass Drum and a Bass Drum Low in case you use a sub like a Yamaha SubKick or something like that.

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Those three audio tracks are routed through a bus called 'BD sub' to this aux I called 'BD sub' and that is the sum of those three tracks.

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And then there's a send on this sub, that goes to another aux and that's the crush.

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So I can do parallel compression on the bass drum just by itself, right here, in the template.

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Next, if you're wondering what this very pretty pink track is, to the left of the bass drum audio track is, that is a special trick track.

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Sometimes you need to expand or gate the bass drum, and sometimes you just can't get it right because of timing issues.

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So what you could do, and I'll show you in a minute is take the bass drum inside microphone, copy it to that track, move it a few samples to the left, which now gives your DAW the ability to look into the future because this track, the pink one, after you do the copy-paste and move-to-the-left thing, will hear what is going on on the green track ahead of time.

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And that allows you to actually feed this track, called 'Bass Drum trigger', to the key of the expander. I'll show you in a minute because, explaining like this without seeing it serves no purpose. Once you see it you'll go: "Uuh!" But basically, we're gonna work at the local level, here, all things bass drum are happening, here.

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And all that is being sent and summed to a bass drum stem, which is kind of the master and that stem is being summed with the drum stem, the electronic drum stem, the bass stem, the keyboard stem, etc. etc. and that becomes your record.

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I'll show you how it's done later, when we grow up, if we grow up.

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Next is, snare drum! Two top snare, some people like to put two top snare microphones and a bottom snare. Those three audio tracks are routed to this sub, through a bus, and on that sub there's a crush send, which goes to the snare crush, so you can now do parallel compression on the bass drum, parallel compression on the snare drum, with like.. one click.

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I'm just talking routing now, I'll talk about plug-ins in a minute.

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Then, on the snare, there's a 'snare space'.

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Often, because the snare is so close-miked, for some kinds of music, it feels too dry and not right and it's very difficult to obtain the right structure, space structure, over the whole drum set.

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So sometimes it makes sense to have a bit of a space just on the snare.

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Which is created right here, so you have a send on the main snare, and it's sent to this..

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aux, and that aux allows you to have a little space just on the snare. Used all the time.

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And of course I implemented the same track that's the same trick as I had for the bass drum, for the pre-emptive gating-thing, which we'll see again, in a minute.

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This whole snare system, which is..

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all this, plus the sub, plus the crush, plus the space are being routed to a drum sub, along with all the other drum tracks.

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So, for drums I will have a bass drum that goes to the stem..

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and then I have all the drums except bass drum..

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that go to a drum sub, and that goes to the drum stem.

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The reason for this is, I am able to do local government and federal government, this is my local government, here.. the drum sub and all the little things, happening here.

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The federal government is over there, it oversees everybody.

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Makes sense? Aye. Let's go back to the local government.

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This drum sub, here, is sent to a reverb, called drum tail.

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Because it's nice to create some space around the drums and I always need it, so it's in the template.

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Next to the drum sub, there's a drum crush.

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The way I am addressing this drum crush is by using an aux and I'm choosing carefully what I'm sending to that crush.

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The bass drum, the clean snare drum, the hi-hat, which I almost never use, but sometimes, the tom sub, there is a tom sub, the 3 toms are fed to the tom sub, that's pretty self-explanatory.

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And then the overhead. And so I can choose my mix, here, in this fashion, of what I send to the drum crush.

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So if I wanna have my hi-hat direct, I leave it here, and I don't want it to go into the crush, I just mute it here, right? So I can change my balance of what goes into the drum crush, just by changing this mix, without changing the direct mix.

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It's very flexible and is the fastest way of doing it.

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We will talk about the plug-ins setup later for now, I need you to understand the whole routing, so it's in your head, before we start talking about plug-ins..

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Next to this whole drum thing is a VCA.

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So, that's why there's a little 'V' in front of the name of the track.

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So I know it's a VCA when I look at it in a list.

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This VCA allows you to control, at the local government level, all your relevant drum tracks, meaning, the bass drum and it's crush, and the drum and the drum crush. Remember: since we are separating drum stem and bass drum stem, you have to go to the federal government to actually change the level of the whole kit.

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It's complicated so it's nice to have a VCA, right here.

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Also, it allows you to solo the whole drum set with just one click, which is nice.

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You can't do that with your stems. Details, details! And this is my drum tail.

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Remember I told you a minute and a half ago..

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that this aux right here is sending to this reverb, so that you can actually have full space on the drums.

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So that's the acoustic drums, fear not: it is the most complicated so if you got this you're in very good shape.

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Looking at it, while you listen is very important.

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Just abstractly is not gonna work.

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This little sign post here tells you: it's electronic drums time! Wonderful! Not that different from real drums except that you don't need as much parallel compression because they tend to come very thick, those samples. So, I have put in this template a couple mono tracks and a few stereo tracks and there're a few sends, let me show you what they are.

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First, there's the tail, and there's a space, those are two different kind of reverbs, that are right here..

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and there is a crush, which is in exactly the same fashion as you saw in the acoustic drums and is going to this crush track, right here.

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Very standard, and all this is being sent to the electronic drum stem, which lives right here.

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Percussion sign post. This is the percussions section.

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I make a lot of records with percussion so I have a percussion section, very simple: There's a percussion space aux, right here.

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And all that is going to my other stem..

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Right here..

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If I feel like it, I'll rename the stem 'percussion stem' so it'll be easier to recall, later..

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sometimes I get too lazy for that..

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Bass! That you can see here.

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I have a DI and an amp.

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And then those two tracks are routed to this sub, right here, this sub goes to the bass stem, but also there's a send that sends it to another aux, right here that's called the bass crush, where you can have distortion that also goes to the bass stem.

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I use that on every mix.

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Acoustic guitars, electric guitars for the guitars section..

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all goes to the guitar stem, and they're being fed to a tail and a space.

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Two auxes which also go to the guitar stem.

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For guitars sometimes you get two acoustic guitars then I'll create a sub for that on the fly, because Pro Tools now has quick shortcuts to do that and it doesn't always happen and I don't want to cloud the template with stuff I may not use.

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Keyboard, synths, whatever: pianos, organs, kazoos..

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all that goes to the keyboard stem, there's very simple routing: there are 3 auxes a tail, a space, as always, and then a spread which is kind of a stereo-izer,which I use a lot on some digital keyboards that sound thin, and now, vocals: first, lead vocals.

00:12:27
Slightly different way of doing things: most often I will park the vocal on a track, and I will feed that track to an aux, and I will put all the processing on an aux.

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The reason for that is it makes it a lot easier to go back in versions to track, without any latency, all I have to do is run this through a different aux. There's lots of reasons to do this.

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For example you can have a vocal track for the verse.

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A vocal track for the chorus.

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Having them separate, not having to have twice the processing is nice allows you to adjust levels between the two and is really easy to do inserts and versioning..

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it's a little deep but I promise you this works. The auxes, this is the one that has a lot of auxes, I don't use all that stuff, on every mix, but it's nice to have in case I need it. A tail-end space, the office, which is that back-wall thing that I do, and an 1/8th delay, a 1/4th delay, the spread and then some special effects, some weird distortion special fx stuff..

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So I have a track for that, already made, good to go..

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and all that goes to the lead stem and then basically, a complete replay of all that for the background vocals.

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And I keep my effects completely separate because when I do stemming at the end of a project I don't have to worry about the lead vocal reverb ringing when I am printing just the backgrounds.

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Everything is totally discreet.

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Of course to be able to do this you need a fast computer and a lot of DSP but, it works.

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Let's move on to masters, as you can see it's written, here: 'masters'.

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If you noticed, since the beginning, the bass drum goes to the bass drum stem, the drums go to the drums stem, etc. etc. etc.

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These are all busses.

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Pro Tools has this amazing feature that allows you to have a master on the bus.

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Stay with me: a bus is a patch cable.

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It goes from A to B.

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It's just a cable.

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Imagine if you had a master fader here, a fader that you can take the level up and down in this cable.

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The value of that may seem a little weird, but there's value in it because of headroom and because of clipping.

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The master fader in Pro Tools allows you to gain stage your entire session without worrying of clipping.

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And you can do it in the space that's in-between your tracks and your stems, so you can actually offset using this fader, how much level you're gonna hit your stem with.

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What I did here is, I created 11 masters for the 11 busses and a VCA for these 11 masters.

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So I can use this VCA to actually offset my entire session.

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Right here.

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I can decide from this one fader right here, how hard I am hitting my stems.

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No matter what happens on my tracks.

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So you may see some clipping here, sometimes, and you may think: 'oh, no!'.

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And you may have the problem that most people have, which is, you have a great sound but you know you're clipping and you know it's gonna be a real problem but you don't wanna change the balance, here.

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And you don't have enough safeguards, I have put some safeguards in this template, but there's never enough safeguard. What you can do is just pretend it's not happening if it sounds right.. and then come in here..

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and offset your whole session, here. Isn't that wonderful? It's wonderful.

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If you do production in the same session as you're gonna do mixing later I recommend you have this VCA up at zero.

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Because you're gonna be crushing the levels like crazy. And when it's time to mix *pouf!* you just gave yourself 6, 12, 18dB of headroom with one fader, without changing any of your balances.

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So let's put this back at 6, 'cause that's how I start mixing, if I have to mix like this, on my laptop, for something quick and I am not using summing, that day.

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After that, we have the stems. So the stems are the receivers of all your audio.

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There's a little trick on those stems.

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There's parallel compression at the stem level.

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So no matter what you send to your stems it sends through this aux part of this signal to two separate parallel compression busses.

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One is called 'rhythm' and one is called 'band'.

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A lot of mixers do this.

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Andrew Scheps has a Rear Buss, where he sends a bunch of non-drum elements to a crush system that he you know, mixes with his real direct path, and that works for him.

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Michael Brauer has like 5-6 of them, and it's on a SSL, he's using aux sends and is ..it's really intense.

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I personally like to keep things simple.

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So I wanna use the strict minimum amount of processing that gives me the maximum amount of returns without having to think about it too much, because thinking is really painful.

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So the way I do it, when I choose to do parallel compression is: I have my bass drum, drum, electronic drum and bass stems, being sent to this crush bus, right here, called 'Rhythm parallel' and the rest, guitars, keyboards, vocals, horns, strings..

00:17:21
whatever, being sent to the 'band parallel'.

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If my FX/other stem is percussion, I'm also gonna send it into the rhythm, I just have to change, right here.

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Don't forget to do that! Ok, and that allows me to do parallel compression on the whole mix, very likely without thinking about it, because no matter what I do, if I move my bass drum right here, if I do something to my bass drum, because it's being sent to the bass drum stem, which is here, and the bass drum is being stemmed to this compression, this parallel compression, everything happens automatically.

00:17:53
It gives a certain tone and for pop music and things that need to be loud without being crushed that have a lot of density, this is the way to do it, and it's in the template.

00:18:03
If I don't like, I just mute this and that and I don't have to have it. If I'm gonna mix a jazz record or a philharmonic record I'm not gonna do that. If I'm gonna mix a Katy Perry remix I'm definitely gonna do that.

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Next is the printing section as is exemplified by this little track, right here.

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So, all these stems the direct stems, plus the crushes, the parallel compression, are being sent to a bus called 'sum'. This bus is being fed to an aux called 'sum'. The reason why I go through an aux is so I can have processing on the aux right here.

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This is kinda like your 2-bus, right? These are your individual processing stem-by-stem processing and this is your 2-bus stem.

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I also have a master on the sum bus.

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Meaning I can offset how hard I hit the input of this aux, right here.

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That's another security, to make sure that if I go crazy on the stems, right here, after a long mix, or if the drummer is in the room with me and he's tone-deaf and all the levels creep up, creep up, creep up..

00:19:05
just before I print I can offset my levels so I don't overwhelm the plug-ins that are here, and I don't clip.

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So this is a nice little extra layer of joy.

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And then, the sum aux is being fed to a print track which I put in record and I hit 'print'.

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And that's how the magic happens.

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There's also a click track.

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For those of us who use clicks.

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That's it! That's the template routing! I suggest - if you have the patience - and you can stand listening all this all again, that you rewind and listen to it, again.

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There's a chapter marker for you to do so.

00:19:38
Onto processing! I hate presets. I think presets are useless, for most things except maybe reverbs.

00:19:47
But for EQs, they serve no purpose. However, I kinda know which EQ I'm gonna use, so I might as well have it there, right? So that's the console approach where you know that's your EQ and compressor, you know them and go fast, that works for me! So, let's look at what I've done on the processing side of this template.

00:20:08
Pro Tools has two sets of five inserts.

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A-E and F-J.

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What I've done here is I've put the plug-ins I usually use but you may not have, on inserts F-J and then I've put standard Pro Tools run-of-the-mill, built-in plug-ins on A-E.

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What you'll find in the folder associated with this video is: two templates, one with just the Pro Tools built-in plug-ins, and one with just the 3rd party plug-ins so you don't have to clean up when you do the importing for yourself, so you can choose the one you want.

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And you'll also have this one, so you can look at both, in case it's entertaining to you.

00:20:45
Basically, here's how it goes: on bass drums, if they're acoustic, I'm probably gonna use a gate.

00:20:51
So let me turn these guys on.

00:20:55
Often, depending on who records the bass drum, I have to expand it, or gate it, because it's not necessarily well done and there's a lot of leakage that is not positive. Leakage can be great but it also can suck, bad.

00:21:08
I know that I have a gate.

00:21:10
Or an expander in my template. And I know that, no matter what..

00:21:14
the key is set to this bus called 'bass drum trigger'.

00:21:18
The reason for that is for simplicity and lower brain-share, meaning: if I am going to use an expander or gate on a bass drum and the same will go for the snare drum, I will copy the in-bass drum microphone track to my trigger trick, even if I am not gonna use the 'move-the-track-ahead-to -fool-the-DAW' into reading into the future.

00:21:41
Even if I don't do that, I will still copy the track, so that, no matter what when I reopen the session one year and a half from now, I know where the gate is, I know where the key is, and I know what's happening and I don't have to remember anything, I just look at it and I am just: 'oh! Right! That's what' happened!' So, I have three gates, sometimes you'll want all of them to be exactly the same so they open and close at the same time so you don't have any phase issue or false triggering sometimes you want them to be separate, because one is really a mess and another is not.

00:22:10
That's based on your ears.

00:22:11
If you want them to sync up all you have to do is take this bass drum track-group, remove it from the globals, and tell it to link insert 2. Boom. Boom.

00:22:24
So now, when you bypass insert 2, it bypasses it on all three bass drums.

00:22:28
If you don't want that you can remove that, from here.

00:22:32
But, it's in the template.

00:22:34
You may wonder why there is a gate, an expander, on the trigger.

00:22:39
Because you can do a lot of good work by actually expanding the trigger before you expand the actual track.

00:22:46
Does that make sense? So you pre-expand, if you will.

00:22:49
The key you're gonna send to this expander, right here, will be cleaner, because you're doing a little bit of expansion work on it.

00:22:55
Ok? For you to be able to do that, don't forget to assign this to an actual physical listenable output and remove it after, you don't want the trigger to be in the mix, otherwise it makes a mess.

00:23:06
So, because I've seen many, many mistakes, by default, my trigger is not in the mix.

00:23:14
Reason for that: this gets deep..

00:23:15
you can fast-forward if you're getting a headache is: you can listen to the trigger, right here.

00:23:21
You don't really have the need for this. Lots of people get confused about this let it go.

00:23:27
On the bass drum sub, for the built-in plug-in I use the Channelstrip, it does everything you need, it has EQ, high-pass, low-pass, and compression and everything, very nice. For the bass drum crush, I am using a channelstrip again, it's a good idea for the sub and the crush, to have at the very least the same hi-pass if you're not gonna use linear phase EQs.

00:23:50
On my personal plug-ins, on the stuff that I use with my 3rd-party plug-ins, I use the Pro Q-2 which has a linear phase EQ option..

00:23:58
for my crush, so if I need to hi-pass the bottom of the bass drum before I smithereen it, with my 1176, I will use the Pro Q-2, because it is linear phase, and thus I will not ruin the bottom of the record by doing that.

00:24:12
Since I haven't found a linear phase EQ in the built-in plug-ins, I recommend you sync up these two plug-ins at least for the hi-pass filter and you'll have less surprises.

00:24:22
This BF76 plug-in sounds nothing like an 1176 but it does sound dirty and ugly which is what you need for parallel compression, so it's perfect! For the snare drums.. everybody with me, still? Stay with me! Ok! I promise you, it will save time! Snare drum is the exact same thing, basically.

00:24:44
I have the gate, the gate key is set to the snare trigger, as you would expect, you copy whichever the cleanest snare microphone is, to the trigger.

00:24:54
You move it ahead if you want the look-ahead the super-look-ahead system or not..

00:24:58
it's your call and it's all the same thing.

00:25:01
For processing, I tend to really process the sum of the three snares. Sometimes you need to process one snare because it's really badly recorded or maybe the snare bottom is too fat or something like that, in that case I noticed that I forgot to put a channelstrip here, in the built-in thing, let's do that..

00:25:21
in my personal template I use the Oxford..

00:25:23
for most things. It's quick and I know it.

00:25:25
And the Oxford Dynamics, too.

00:25:27
And I will have the Pultec on my top snare..

00:25:31
20% of the time, if it's really, really..

00:25:33
dull, like an old broken 57, which lots of people use for that! Me included! Then you open the top with a Pultec, you can do that with a channelstrip if you are all-built-in plug-ins.

00:25:45
Then, processing-wise on the bus and on the crush it's exactly the same principle, as on the bass drum so I'm not gonna repeat myself.

00:25:53
It's not as crucial on the snare to match the hi-pass filters, because the phase shifts and the phase cancellation at the snare level, is not that big a deal, compared to at the bass drum level, where 60Hz is kinda like your life line.

00:26:05
So I wouldn't worry about it, too much.

00:26:08
The snare space, I tend to use the RMX 16, because I love it. The actual built-in AIR non-linear reverb plug-in that Avid gives you for free, works awesome! So, don't feel like you're less a man/woman..

00:26:23
Hi-hat, usually just a hi-pass filter.

00:26:26
The built-in EQ3 7-band EQ from Avid is awesome, it brews coffee, it does everything you need, it's free, it's really great.

00:26:35
Toms! I have three toms, going to the tom sub, expander/gates on the toms, you usually have to stay discreet, so I don't use the lookahead trick, because the toms are a mess, you can decide to go and cut all the audio out of the toms in-between the hits, I'm too lazy to do that, I use a gate..

00:26:53
I like the Pro Expander/Gate from Avid, but the built-in expander/gate, the Dyn3 is awesome..

00:26:58
it works great, it has hi-pass and low-pass filters, right here..

00:27:02
it's really useful and absolutely not a let-down.

00:27:05
I am just a geek so I like the extra features of this stuff.

00:27:08
Plus it looks like the Star Trek Enterprise so you really cannot resist.

00:27:11
Toms are so weird and different it's very hard for me to imagine ahead of time what it's gonna be like, it's really a reaction so I choose my plug-ins at the last minute, usually.

00:27:22
And very often there's nothing on the sub, I just do all my processing at the tom track level.

00:27:28
Overhead, just an EQ, I rarely compress overheads so I just put an EQ in there..

00:27:32
if I end having to compress overheads, then I'll choose whatever compressor inspires me at that moment.

00:27:38
I never had one in a template and I never import that.

00:27:42
For the drum sub, same thing, channelstrip here will do fine for you if you are in-the-box, for my personal 3rd party plug-in I have an Oxford that I usually use to remove any obvious problems that have been created by all this mess and a 33609 because, you know, that's what people have been doing. I could use something else just a habit, it's there, often I change it.

00:28:02
And then a Pultec, because I like how soft the high end is on that.

00:28:06
You can find whatever 3rd party plug-in you have to your template, if you're in-the-box.

00:28:10
I could do the whole thing with a channelstrip, works great.

00:28:12
For the crush, the drum crush, if you remember well, I have the same exact system, I have for the bass drum and the snare drum, except I'm using a 160 here because the 160 is delightfully broken, in certain ways for drums, so I like that.

00:28:25
On the in-the-box template I'm using a BF76 because it is dirty as hell and it is fun.

00:28:31
If you really wanna go over the top, you Shift+Click on the 20, here and you go in all-button-mode and then it really sounds bad, in a good way.

00:28:39
Then, drum tail, D-Verb D-Verb rocks, people! Personally, if I have the luxury I'll use a Lexicon 224 because it has that certain sheen plus I love playing with that stuff, because it's not so obvious, sometimes you make mistakes that are fun to listen to and you invent new things. So I like making mistakes.

00:28:58
D-Verb, in this case I chose 'ambient medium' and it works great on drums.

00:29:03
Many sessions I get have D-Verb on it because it's free and I just leave it in! I just do.

00:29:08
Be careful with D-Verb, in this particular case because of all the energy we're sending into it you'll notice here that there's a 4dB pad on the gain input to this reverb, that's what they have by default, I don't understand it.

00:29:18
In this particular case it was useful because we're sending a lot of energy to it, you can play with this over time, see what works better for you, gain staging, but I kept it this way because it kind of matches the level of this guy.

00:29:29
For some reason.

00:29:30
Everywhere else in the template, I change that to zero, if I remember well, like on the e-drum.

00:29:35
It's at zero.

00:29:37
Let's move on: e-drums processing. Channelstrip, I use an EQ and compressor if I need anything special, I add it after everything else is kind of the same.

00:29:47
The space, I use the RMX 16 for everything, because I just like the grain of it.

00:29:52
And I re-created a preset that's close on the non-linear. Perc space I use a D-Verb the hall, I like it. I like that tone, here..

00:30:02
and on my personal plug-ins I use the 250.

00:30:05
The rest of the processing for the percussion is very simple, channelstrip on the built-in.

00:30:11
Here, for my personal plug-in I like to use the Studer on percussion.

00:30:16
Because they tend to be recorded very close and very transient-heavy and the Studer will do a good job at softening those transients.

00:30:23
And make them sound a little further away and a little more interesting and fun.

00:30:29
Let's move on to the bass processing.

00:30:31
EQ, compression, and then, on the sub I tend to have a little bit of distortion if I can. So EQ/compression I like to use TapeHead for my 3rd-party plug-in. I love this thing it's really wonderful. It's a good way to add saturation without being obnoxious it's really easy to use, and it's super affordable, it's made by Massey plug-ins, it's awesome.

00:30:53
If you don't have it, I made a close very-close knock-off with the built-in distortion from AIR, which is super useful, it does so many things.

00:31:01
It's really good to explore this plug-in, you can do a lot of things with it, but this sounds close enough to this that it's good enough for jazz.

00:31:09
Here on the bass crush, if you remember, you access through this aux, the bass crush, I usually use the Devil-Loc or I use a Decapitator, if I am on 3rd-party, for the built-in plug-ins, I use the distortion from AIR again, and I just went crazy on it, made it a little heavier, sounds great.

00:31:27
For guitars, I like to use the Studer.

00:31:29
I love that Studer plug-in for transients, like I just said.

00:31:33
So, especially for guitars, acoustic guitars..

00:31:35
that go 'clink, clink, clink' it's really awesome..

00:31:37
It has a little softening with a sheen for the transients and I love that.

00:31:42
I don't know of a built-in plug-in for Pro Tools that has that. So you have to do without.

00:31:48
EQ/compression, usual..

00:31:49
A tail and a space, it's the same stuff as to the left of the template.

00:31:54
If I were not mixing a pop record, I would probably use just one tail and one space, and save some DSP. But since this is my pop music and my uber-template, I separate reverb as I mentioned a long time ago but I am gonna repeat it so you can remember it, so that when I do stemming at the end of the process I don't have reverbs from the snare bleeding into the vocal.

00:32:15
Every reverb is discrete.

00:32:17
Sends.. very simple stuff.

00:32:20
Same tail, same space, the way I do the stereo is very simple.. this is with the built-in plug-in, no delay on the left, full wet on the right, anywhere between, 5 to 30ms delay and a mono stem becomes stereo, it's easy, it's cool, you can do also with a Microshift from Soundtoys, which is my 3rd-party plug-in.

00:32:40
This one has a little more control but in the end..

00:32:44
makes things wide. Vocals: This is my basic chain.

00:32:49
Melodyne, De-esser, I like the XILS De-esser, I also love the FabFilter, not because of the name, De-Esser, the combination of the two is lethal, EQ/compression and then a Pultec if I need to enhance things. This is really a starting point, it changes all the time, based on how good or bad the vocal is.

00:33:08
There is no built-in pitch correction in Pro Tools, there is a channelstrip, so let's put it on there.

00:33:14
And you can do most of everything I do with the channelstrip, so I'm gonna leave it at that.

00:33:19
For the Pultec you'll have to find your own solution.

00:33:21
These are all the vocal reverbs.

00:33:23
I use the UAD 140 for everything, because it's awesome.

00:33:28
I love the sound of it. I made a D-Verb preset that is pretty close, it feels good and is pretty useful, so you have it in there..

00:33:36
Space, same thing, I use the Hall, it really has that Lexicon-y kinda vibe..

00:33:42
I like that.

00:33:43
For the Office, I made a room preset that feels like my Oxford Office, so you have..

00:33:49
parity now..

00:33:50
if you work in-the-box with no third-party.

00:33:53
A delay is a delay 1/8th note, 1/4th note. I like Echoboy, because I can change the tone of it, so it starts with it, in this position.

00:34:01
I'm never gonna want it to be fully fat, and I'm never gonna want it to be fully bright.

00:34:05
So, I already have that in my template.

00:34:07
Then the rest I'll play with, especially the style, right here, it's awesome.

00:34:12
The built-in delay, is a delay. It repeats stuff.

00:34:15
You can play with the low-pass filter, to make it darker, it works great, I recommend it.

00:34:20
For the spread, on vocals, the Microshift is great the delay trick is a little brutish.

00:34:26
So I like the Ensemble in the built-in plug-ins, let me turn it on.. there you go.

00:34:32
This works awesome on vocals.

00:34:34
Check it out! It's very good.

00:34:36
And you can actually play with this to change the phase, it's nice, it's nice! For the extra FX, I usually use the FX Rack from Soundtoys, in my personal stack, and then I stuff it with stuff I want.

00:34:49
Here, as a placeholder, I put the Filter Gate because you should listen to it..

00:34:52
not a lot of people use this, and it really is insane what it does. It's really a fun plug-in to use.

00:34:58
Then, for the background vocals, it's all the same.

00:35:01
And here, for the stems, I am using the Oxford Limiter as some of you may know, I created a preset on the Dyn3 the built-in limiter of Pro Tools, that is close, you just have to lower the threshold, here and then you can offset here.. right? With the sum offset if you have the Oxford Limiter, I can only recommend it and the way it works is, you just raise your level into it or lower your level out of it, very easy.. for the parallel compression as I mentioned before, on the built-in we're using the BF76, because it is crunchy and of course there's a little limiter, here..

00:35:43
and here for my 3rd party plug-ins, I am using the 1176AE because it has a 2:1 thing and it's nice.. it does the job, I like the sound of it.

00:35:51
And that's about it! There's a limiter at the end, same here.. I recommend, if you can, to use a true upward limiter for your sum, I don't like Maxim, so I couldn't bring myself to put it on the template.

00:36:03
Don't tell anyone! Now that we know how to use the template, let me hide the 3rd party plug-ins..

00:36:11
And let's use only the built-in Pro Tools stuff..

00:36:15
and let's show you a couple examples of how to work! Option 1: old-school console kinda way.

00:36:23
So I'm gonna open this so I have some room, we have this, if you make it big enough it's easy to read what it is I recommend grid mode so all the stuff you drag is in the same spot.

00:36:39
You find the folder with the stems..

00:36:41
these are the stems for Zelab 14 'Face your fear or die' from the good people at ViFolly, you can select your track, start with the kick, by the way, in Pro Tools, if you hold Control it will force-drop your audio where your play marker is, which is really practical for this particular purpose, kick..

00:37:00
bass drum, I put the bass drum in here..

00:37:03
I'm gonna copy it here, right? So that, one is on the trigger, one is on the bass drum in, kick out..

00:37:15
'BD low' is the kick sub, right? There you go! If I press play in Pro Tools, now..

00:37:22
I have sound right away! And not just output 1-2, I have sound going through everything! The sub, the crush, the stem, the sum, that's nice! That's worth all the time I've spent making you a template! Here's top snare..

00:37:38
So, I'm gonna do this, so this boring as hell, so why don't we just fast-forward through this..

00:37:49
If you're out of mono tracks, just duplicate one, make sure you don't copy the playlist and now you have an extra mono track for the snare reverb reverse intro..

00:38:12
Et voila'! It's a good idea just for entertainment purposes to rename the tracks that you have to duplicate and to get rid of the tracks you don't use, like for example there's the electronic drum tracks are not there..

00:38:23
So we'll get rid of them.

00:38:25
So we have good feng shui. This is not exactly percussion music.

00:38:28
So it can go away.

00:38:31
And so on and so forth, let me save it as..

00:38:34
at this point this is the part where you remove the template, you call it a name.. it could go to the desktop..

00:38:40
call it.. you know, 'ViFoley..

00:38:42
template', for example.

00:38:45
Boom.

00:38:46
And, I'll go through it rename the stuff that needs to be renamed and the thing that's amazing is, if you press play right now the tracks are fine, but you can see that you are already hitting your sum a little hard, so you can pad it 6dB here, because you know that your levels are gonna creep.

00:39:07
So you already give you 6dB of headroom right at the top from the raw tracks.

00:39:16
Now all you have to do is, find that piano, mute it and move on! Wait! You have questions! Good questions! Ok, I'll answer your questions! Let me show you a couple tricks, then, if you insist.

00:39:27
Let's go back to the left and talk about that gating system.

00:39:32
First things first, you have to make absolutely sure that in the mixing pane here, 'compensate sidechains' is on! Otherwise, thou shalt suffer! The other thing is depending on your version of Pro Tools, there may be a "feature" from Pro Tools, right now..

00:39:46
that prevents you from working easily..

00:39:50
And the feature is, if the track is not going to a physical output then the sends are not delay compensated.

00:39:58
And that.. is wonderful, of course but..

00:40:01
anyway, so on this rig, I know it's a problem.

00:40:03
I didn't put it in the template because if you have a fully-native rig, in certain versions, it works, but certain rigs, it doesn't.

00:40:11
So if you set up your sidechain, and you use the external sidechain like this..

00:40:17
on the snare trigger, and you play it and it sounds like this..

00:40:21
so first: this is the snare..

00:40:27
and then you turn your gate on and it sounds like this: you have a delay compensation problem.

00:40:35
The solution to that problem, if that happens it to just assign this to a physical output, make sure it's muted and then..

00:40:45
and you know it works, because if you mute this, no more sound! Now, let me show you a couple extra tricks.

00:40:54
By the way, if you assign to a physical output and do everything right, cross all your Ts and it still doesn't work close your session, re-open it, you never know.

00:41:05
So now we have the ability to treat the sidechain signal separately.

00:41:11
If I click on this button, here..

00:41:13
I hear what's being fed to my sidechain, which is this guy.

00:41:22
And so, as I told you before, now I can expand that. Check it out.

00:41:30
So that is not my favorite snare sound but it's super clean and there's nothing else in it, right? Great! Now this direct signal is gonna be able to listen to that and have a super clean snare, I'm removing the sidechain monitor, I am now actually gating the snare using this clean signal that is being processed as my director for when the gate opens and closes and it sounds like this.

00:42:04
If I mute, it sounds like this.

00:42:13
And here's the part that rocks: since I have a separate track for my trigger, I can remove some audio at the beginning, so I can edit the way I want, I can select it move it, 1-200 samples to the left, and now I can basically force the gate to open 100 samples before the actual hit.

00:42:38
If you compare the sound, you get the attack back. Isn't that wonderful? I think that's good enough for the old-school tape-console style thing, let's look at importing your template into an existing session, next.

00:42:59
This is the ViFoley 'Face your fear or die' raw stems, into an existing session.

00:43:05
There's a little bit of panning on, everybody's going to Output 1-2, sounds like this..

00:43:16
This could be the kind of session you get from a collaborator who's kind enough to organize everything the way you like it or close enough to the way you like it.

00:43:23
So the first thing I usually do in those situations is I import my stem system.

00:43:27
Pro Tools has this wonderful 'import session data' key command is Shift+Opt+i, and we're gonna open from the template, and then, in here, you can choose what you import.

00:43:39
I want my stems.

00:43:41
So I am gonna import, say..

00:43:44
and this is where the little markers are interesting, stems, are here..

00:43:47
and also I see that masters are here..

00:43:49
I'm gonna import all my masters, remembers the masters allow you to pad everything and the VCA master, crucial.

00:43:57
And then all my stems, including the rhythm, the parallel rhythm and the parallel band, and then the sum bus master, the sum and the print, and then the click, you never know.. that might be useful.

00:44:09
Now, these are all auxes and masters, they have no data on them, so..

00:44:14
this is not very important right now.. let's keep moving.

00:44:18
So now, I have imported in my session, all that good stuff, at the bottom.

00:44:24
But all this is still going to Output 1-2 without touching any of the stuff we just imported.

00:44:33
Here, depending on how intense you wanna be, you can say: 'ok, my template will work for these drums.' So you can go in and go back to this template- importing process..

00:44:47
and then say: 'ok, I'm gonna need the drum trigger, but the rest, I'm gonna map.' Meaning I am gonna say: 'ok, this is my source, meaning the template, and this is my destination, meaning this session.

00:44:59
I could decide to match tracks and then Pro Tools tries to be smart about figuring out which is which for example: if this as BD low is the same as BD par..

00:45:08
and Snare Top is Snare Top.. that works 50% of the time.

00:45:13
Or you can decide to do it by hand, which is still a lot faster, than trying to re-create everything.

00:45:18
So if I do it by hand, clicking here, on a track, imports it as a new track and then I can say: 'ok, on the template bass drum in microphone, should go into my Kick in..

00:45:29
track, in this session.

00:45:31
Template Bass Drum out to Kick out..

00:45:33
Template Bass Drum low should go to Kick Sub, even though the Kick sub means 'sub-harmonics' and then I'm gonna import my busses, the 2 auxes the snare trigger I'm gonna map the snare to Snare Top.

00:45:50
Snare Top 2 I'm gonna map to Snare Side.

00:45:53
Snare Sub, Snare Crush, Snare Space, the Hi-Hat I suggest we map to the hi-hat..

00:46:00
Tom 1, 2 and 3..

00:46:02
I'll let you guess.

00:46:06
There you go. Let's not forget to import the tom sub, map the overhead to the overhead, which apparently were recorded with Coles.

00:46:15
Drum Crush, Drum Sub, the VCA and the Drum Tail. Let's stop here.

00:46:21
So now, I have chosen all the tracks in my template that are relevant to the tracks in this session and I'm gonna map them, but there's one more level.

00:46:29
I have to make sure, when I am importing just settings, to not import the playlist, because if I import the playlist, I'm gonna basically wipe out the audio content in these tracks.

00:46:40
Which is not a good look! So, do not import the main playlist and also, if you want to keep your file management tight, remove the alternate playlist option and the clips and media option.

00:46:53
So basically what you're doing right now is you're basically importing the settings from the template but not the audio, not the clips nothing, just the plug-in settings and the volumes.

00:47:02
And you press 'ok'..

00:47:05
And it thinks..

00:47:07
And organizes all that stuff.

00:47:09
And unfortunately, all the busses and everything are put together in a row somewhere and you have to organize stuff, but it's still a lot faster than doing it by hand, so I'm gonna do it quickly, here..

00:47:21
and.. the trigger is here.

00:47:25
And.. the snares..

00:47:29
Boom.

00:47:32
I always re-organize things in the exact same order as it is in my template so that I don't have to think and I always know where to go find stuff..

00:47:42
these are the drum tracks we worked on..

00:47:45
the plugs were deactivated in my template so that's why they're deactivated here, obviously, in your template, once you have it set up for yourself the plug-ins will be activated so you don't have to do this and.. you have to make sure that you have no tracks that have fallen through the cracks like, for example: all these weird drum tracks that are not in my template, like crush reverbs and stuff..

00:48:05
you have to take of them manually, so I am gonna assign them to drum sub..

00:48:10
and go from there, the beauty now, of course is: you have everything set up, ready to go..

00:48:14
in just a few tweaks you can have a great drum sound.

00:48:17
If you don't wanna loose your mind..

00:48:19
since you only have one monitor output I recommend that you mute everything that you haven't already re-assigned, so in our case everything that's not a drum set element, should be muted.

00:48:34
And so on and so forth, let's do it again for bass, I know that my bass on template, like this..

00:48:40
don't worry about the "source session start time is earlier than session start time" unless you're doing post..

00:48:46
Ok, so Bass DI should go to Bass DI..

00:48:49
There you go..

00:48:50
Bass Amp can go to whatever.. Bass SansAmp.

00:48:54
And then the Bass Sub is gonna get imported.

00:48:57
I do not import all the playlist, I go for it, there you go, it's happy..

00:49:03
and I'm gonna assign the distortion to the bass sub, nice..

00:49:13
let's turn these on..

00:49:30
A real manly bass sound, really fast.

00:49:32
Another way you could use this, is..

00:49:35
and I separated this for you, you can say: 'Ok, I'm just interested in the stems and so I made a session for you where it's just the stems and just the masters so it's really quick..

00:49:45
just import all that and boom: you're good to go! And one with just reverbs, so I made you a session that has nothing but my reverb settings. But here's the trick! 50% of the work of doing the reverb setup is the bus.. so you have to make sure you stay consistent and you always use the same ones from session to session so that when you import it, that bus shows up in your bus list, right here.

00:50:08
So you have to be very careful about using the same thing all the time..

00:50:12
and if you do, things are gonna magically import into each other and never have any problems and everything will be wonderful and there will be world peace.

00:50:21
So, if you noticed here..

00:50:22
my preset frequencies are the starting points of where I am always looking for trouble.

00:50:27
Right? But that's not the default for the Pro Tools plug-in. There's a way to force Pro Tools to default to that. It's call the User Default.

00:50:35
I'm gonna show you with a different plug-in. Let's choose..

00:50:37
Non-Linear Reverb, for example. All right..

00:50:39
Ok, cool, so that's a certain sound.

00:50:47
But that's not your default setting, that's not what you want it to be.

00:50:50
So, the first thing you do, is you setup what's your default setting.

00:50:59
Much more useful! Now, that's what I'm talking about! You want this to come up as your starting point, every single time you launch the plug-in.

00:51:11
You really want that. I promise.

00:51:13
The way to do that is, first things first: save it.

00:51:16
So you save your settings as..

00:51:18
and you call it: 'badass..

00:51:20
bass drum sound.' So that's saved.

00:51:25
The second thing you do is, you click up there and you go to settings preferences..

00:51:29
and you set the plug-in default to User Setting.

00:51:33
And the third thing you do, is you set this as User Default.

00:51:39
And now, every time you're gonna instantiate your AIR Non-Linear Reverb, it will call your 'badass BD sound'! Automatically.. isn't that wonderful? Yes! It is super-wonderful for example, even if you're not into this particular sound, in general..

00:51:56
But say for example you're doing 45 tracks of background vocals, and you want an EQ on all of them..

00:52:01
and you like the starting point to be the same, everywhere.

00:52:04
It's worth 2 seconds to do this and then you can do it everywhere.

00:52:07
For my money, although it's free, my EQ3 always comes up like this, because it works, and same for my Oxford EQ and same for my Oxford Compressor.

00:52:15
My Oxford Compressor comes in with the Compressor IN.

00:52:18
Because, the factory default is that the compressor is off.

00:52:21
And if you instantiate, the odds you're gonna want it to compress something are really high! So why it comes up with the compressor off puzzles me! So I re-did it so it comes in with the compressor on, because I am a genius! You now have the templates on your HD, in a safe folder, somewhere nice.

00:52:37
Great. I strongly urge you to look at them before you wanna use them..

00:52:40
because, if you start using them under pressure, they may slow you down, before they save you time, which is not a good look.

00:52:48
Use the main one, with the stock plug-in, if that's what you want.

00:52:51
If you happen to have all the same plug-ins I have then you can use the 3rd party one, and then you have the reverb one, if you just wanna import reverb..

00:52:59
and, I never mentioned it before, but the template also has basic markers.

00:53:02
Because it's most likely that you're gonna have an intro..

00:53:04
and then a verse, and then a chorus..

00:53:07
and then a second verse..

00:53:08
and then pre-chorus, and a second chorus and all that stuff and so it's there so you don't have to type, because typing..

00:53:14
..you know..

00:53:16
Et voila'!