Fab Dupont Mixing TMBOY
02h 17min
(31)
TMBOY is an electronic “shadow pop duo” formed by members Sarah Aument and Will Shore. Their music has an organic feel, courtesy of Shore’s live vibraphone performances, mixed with elements of house and techno which serve to amplify the emotion in Sarah’s lyrics. Jingle writers by day, indie artists by night, TMBOY’s music combines synth elements with irresistible melodies and well-crafted lyrics that capture their audience’s attention and won’t let go.
In this puremix.net exclusive, Grammy award-winning engineer, Fab Dupont, mixes a single off of their upcoming record called “The Light” and demonstrates how he:
- Deals with a troublesome snare drum using techniques like pitch shifting, distortion, and transient design.
- Uses metering and gain staging techniques to set himself up for delivering to streaming platforms.
- Balances multiple bass synth patches against each other and creates space for each to avoid masking.
- Sets up his 2 bus compression to add density and weight to the mix
- Uses parallel compression to increase the impact of the drums
Once the mix is complete, Fab recalls the original mix that he did for the record to compare his on the fly, in the box mix to the version that went through multiple recalls and made the record to see which one wins.
Watch Fab Dupont mix the Brooklyn based duo, TMBOY. Only on puremix.net
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- 00:00 - Start
- 01:12 - Listen To The Rough
- 06:52 - Session Setup
- 08:25 - Metering
- 14:27 - Lead Vocal
- 23:59 - The Beat
- 36:41 - Bass
- 41:02 - Keyboards
- 43:17 - 2-Bus Compression
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Adding Space
- 05:57 - Background Vocals
- 08:53 - Compare Mix To The Rough
- 10:05 - Rework The Groove
- 20:39 - The Juno
- 28:51 - Keyboards
- 29:39 - Back To The Vocal
- 32:19 - Back To The Kick
- 33:40 - Vocal Compression
- 36:05 - Percussion
- 40:07 - Vocal Warmth
- 40:51 - Scrutinize 2-Bus Processing
- 42:31 - Lower The Output
- 43:32 - Listen On Headphones
- 53:46 - Back The The Percussion
- 55:41 - Adjust The Drum Crush
- 56:54 - Back To The Speakers
- 58:10 - Print Mix
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Recall Original Session
- 02:55 - The Session
- 03:23 - Recall Mix
- 04:41 - Input Today's Mix
- 06:08 - Analyze Mixes
- 08:34 - Looking At The Old Mix
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
00:00:00
Good morning, children!
Today I have the great pleasure
of being able to spend
a few moments with you
mixing a song from one
of my favorite bands
in the entire known universe: TMBOY.
00:00:10
The song is called "The Light."
It's from their current album,
it's out now, you can go check it out.
00:00:16
And to keep things interesting,
I'm not going to use a template,
I'm not going to use presets,
I'm not going to use anything complicated.
00:00:23
I'm going to mix it In The Box as I go
and explain everything I do.
00:00:27
Here we go!
I mixed this song a long time ago,
and to be honest with you,
I don't remember what it's like
and I definitely don't remember
what I did.
00:00:43
What we'll do after I mix this
is we'll probably go to my actual mix
from the actual record
and compare and see who wins.
00:00:50
One of the advantages of working
when the artist is not here...
00:00:56
No artist!
is I can do whatever I want,
and I don't have to stick to
the aesthetic of the record.
00:01:02
So this is purely an exercise in:
here is a track, mix it in the void.
00:01:07
The first thing I'm going to do
is listen to the rough mix
that Will and Sarah sent me.
00:01:12
You know what? While we're here,
let's put markers in.
00:01:15
I would say we should call the top
something like 'TOP',
and then go from there.
00:05:13
Let's put an 'END' marker,
say here.
00:05:18
What a delightful, wacky song structure.
00:05:21
There's no chorus,
there's a bunch of breaks
with nothing in them,
there are like three verses,
there are two bridges.
00:05:28
It is the anti-radio song,
so I love it.
00:05:32
These guys, Sarah and Will,
spend most their days
writing commercial music.
00:05:36
They're very good
commercial music writers,
meaning they write for ads
or they write music for movies
or industrials and stuff like that.
00:05:43
They're good at it, and they're very fast,
so I guess when they're done
working during the day
doing that music
that has a lot of boundaries,
they make music that has no boundaries,
which is probably why I love the band.
00:05:53
I called the sections whatever I felt.
00:05:55
I like to mark a section
that has just the beat
because that allows me to work
on just the beat
without muting the vocal.
00:06:00
Does that make sense?
So that when I get to the verse,
for example,
my vocal is not muted.
00:06:05
So I rarely, rarely mute the vocal,
so I will do anything
to not have to mute the vocal
in case I would forget to turn it back on,
if that makes sense.
00:06:12
You got to force yourself
to have good manners.
00:06:15
The 'Breakdown' with that weird,
little arpeggio was pretty cool.
00:06:18
There is another one,
I called it 'Longer Break'.
00:06:20
I called the third one
'Even Longer Break'
because it felt that it was
going to be longer,
but I think it may be the same
as the 'Longer Break'.
00:06:26
So those are the very arbitrary
section names.
00:06:29
I'm sure if you ask Will or Sarah,
they'd tell you,
"Dude, that's the chorus!"
but since everything is a point of view
and I'm by myself,
I'm going to call it this.
00:06:40
As you can see,
this session fits on the screen.
00:06:43
I don't have to scroll,
I can see every track on the screen,
and on this one,
if I go into the small fader mode,
I can see every single track.
00:06:51
Isn't that wonderful? I love it.
00:06:52
You'll see that the only thing
that's been done on here,
so we all understand what's going on,
is I color-coded the tracks
with my color-coding.
00:06:59
Green for drums,
red for bass,
pink and purple for the keyboards
—there are no guitars here.
00:07:05
Red for the vocals.
00:07:08
You know what? I'm going to make
the background vocal orange
just to really follow protocol.
00:07:14
There you go.
00:07:15
The only thing I've imported
from the session
is the actual objects for the reverbs
because I know I'm going to need them,
but there are no plug-ins on them.
00:07:23
So I have an Aux for Lead Tail,
I have an Aux for Lead Space,
I have an Aux for 8th Note,
and then I have the Spread,
but there are no plug-ins on them
and I want to choose them in front of you.
00:07:34
Everything in this session
goes to a Sum Bus
which is connected to this Aux right here,
and that Aux is then going to a Print Bus
which is connected
to this object right here.
00:07:44
This button right here
will switch between dark, like this
—in which case we're listening to
what's on the track—
to green —we're listening on Input,
to our current mix.
00:07:53
So, for example, if I go to the verse,
this is Will's rough mix.
00:08:01
And this is the rough tracks
without his mix.
00:08:13
Fair.
00:08:14
Not that far away.
00:08:15
Obviously there's no reverb,
it's pretty dry.
00:08:18
A narrow mixing object mode
is kind of against my religion,
so I'm going to go back
to the wide mixing mode,
and I want to keep this here.
00:08:26
The other thing I'm going to do
is I'm going to switch my metering
because right now
I'm on Pro Tools Classic,
which is a little bit
like getting your information
from La Pravda in Russia in 1960.
00:08:37
Not reliable,
so I'm going to switch to K-14.
00:08:42
Why that?
Not really because I'm using
the Katz metering system,
just because that's the meter
that's the most appropriate,
in my opinion,
to allow you to function
within the loudness meter range,
meaning, I know this
is going to end up on Spotify
or on YouTube
or something like that, right?
They're not going to make
a CD out of it, they said,
and so I know I'm going to have
to deliver songs
and spot check them
with Spotify to make sure
I'm in the ballpark of what they like.
00:09:10
And to do that, I like my mixes to be
roughly at the same level as Spotify,
and that is -14 LUFS-ish.
00:09:18
So even though this is not a LUFS meter,
the K-14 meter of Pro Tools,
it is close enough for jazz,
and so,
I'm going to set my meter there
so that, in general, I can take a look
and see that I'm in the ballpark.
00:09:31
If I wanted to be very precise about this,
I would probably use
a loudness meter like either
the Waves Loudness Meter,
or the iZotope one,
or whatever.
00:09:42
But for now,
we're just going to be really zen
and enjoy music and not be technical.
00:09:46
However,
we are not going to be technical,
with manners,
and I'm going to make sure
that I don't hit it too hard.
00:09:52
The other thing I want to do
is I'm going to do something
a little unusual.
00:09:57
I want to start by putting a limiter
on the two mixes,
so I want to go to,
say, for example, Dynamics,
and I want to go UA,
and use the Sonnox Oxford Limiter.
00:10:08
I love the way this limiter sounds,
so I want to use that.
00:10:12
I want to open the Attack here
because I don't want to, you know,
ruin my transients.
00:10:16
All I want is to have a general gain
of the whole thing,
and I'm going to place
the general gain of the track
because basically the balance is good
because Will is really good.
00:10:28
I'm just going to give myself
a little bit of gain here
so I don't have to give myself
as much gain from the different tracks.
00:10:34
You'll notice,
if I go to the actual track
and I put the waveform at a regular size,
you'll notice that it's all very quiet.
00:10:41
This is usually what happens
when somebody who has skills and technique
works in Ableton Live.
00:10:46
For some reason,
the exports from Ableton Live
always end up coming in
really, really quiet,
so I'm going to give myself some gain.
00:11:34
The vocals are wicked loud, obviously,
but if you listen to the beat section
you can tell that, you know,
5 or 6 dB of gain
bring us in the vicinity
of something acceptable,
so I want to start there.
00:11:45
The next thing I'm going to do
is I'm going to make myself some VCAs
because I'm not going to do
any stem mixing.
00:11:50
I'm going to mix straight
to a stereo Sum mix,
so, for those of you
who are not interested
in going through a really
complicated signal path,
I want to show you
different techniques that I usually do.
00:12:00
But still,
even though the session
is pretty small, I'm lazy.
00:12:04
I'm going to create a VCA Bus
for just the kick drum.
00:12:08
Trust me, there's a reason for this.
00:12:10
And I'm going to call it 'vBD',
and it doesn't follow any Globals.
00:12:15
I don't want it to have any Attributes.
00:12:20
I don't want this Group to do anything,
I just want it to exist. Be.
00:12:24
And then I'm going to make one
for the rest of the drums.
00:12:28
I'll call it 'vDRUMS',
same thing, no Globals,
nothing.
00:12:33
One for just the bass.
00:12:37
And so on, and so forth.
00:12:41
All keys,
including the Vibes, why not?
'vKEYS'.
00:12:51
And...
00:12:53
...one for the lead vocal.
00:13:01
And one for background vocals.
00:13:04
Although that's kind of
an overkill, why not?
And here is why I'm doing this:
I am here,
and I'm going to create a bunch of VCAs.
00:13:18
I think it's six.
00:13:20
Bass drum, drums, bass,
keyboards, lead vocal, background vocals.
00:13:25
Six.
00:13:26
I can count to six.
It's amazing! I can do jazz.
00:13:28
I'm going to assign that to...
00:13:31
...vBD,
vDRUMS,
vBASS,
vKEYS,
vLEAD VOX,
and vBACK VOX.
00:13:40
So now I'm on the right of my session,
I can go anywhere in my song,
and I can solo the bass drum,
and I can solo the drums.
00:13:53
I don't have to go back
to the other side of the session.
00:13:55
I have command control here
for all my tracks very easily,
and that usually is nice.
00:14:00
I can also do general moves pretty easily
and not Bus as much,
so this is one good way to use Pro Tools
to streamline the workflow.
00:14:08
Of course, Pro Tools doesn't understand
how to name the object
after the Bus you assigned to it,
and that's because Pro Tools
is very young and it's still growing.
00:14:17
'vKEYS'.
00:14:19
Name your tracks!
There you go.
00:14:24
All right! Bananas!
So for example, from here I can say,
"You know what?
Let's take a quick listen
to just the vocal."
Hear that?
Do you hear that, like, sharp edge "Aaah"
and that bump of energy there?
We're going to have to address that.
00:15:09
This is all very well done,
there's just that little
peak there, and then,
when we listen to it in context,
we'll see what happens.
00:15:15
Now, I know from his rough mix
that his intention is this.
00:15:23
It's Sarah underwater.
00:15:25
That's not my music, it's their music.
00:15:27
I love it, so I have to follow their lead
on what they sent me saying,
"Oh, that's where you want to go. Got it!"
So the first thing I want to do
is I'm going to use a Sonnox...
00:15:38
...SuprEsser to try and find that spot.
00:15:42
I'd say it's around here, with this stuff.
00:15:46
Check it out.
00:15:49
"We thought that,"
it hits you in the nose there.
00:15:52
I'll compress it a little.
00:15:55
A little more.
00:15:59
In context.
00:16:09
Without the correction.
00:16:18
Do you hear the difference?
It makes a huge difference.
00:16:30
This artifact of the recording
is now gone.
00:16:32
I'm going to leave this as is for now.
00:16:34
So what kind of support
I'd like to give this vocal, timewise?
Well, I need a nice, lush stereo reverb.
00:16:42
In those cases,
unless it doesn't work right off the bat,
I usually go to the EMT 250
because it's really glossy,
so I'm going to assign the vocal to that.
00:16:56
I'll use the 'track' function here
and go to Lead Tail.
00:17:13
Kind of perfect.
00:17:14
I want to make it closer,
I don't like that pre-delay.
00:17:16
I want the vocal to meld into the reverb,
just like Will had it.
00:17:24
But maybe not as much as Will had it.
00:17:40
I really like that.
00:17:41
And the other thing I'd like to do
is give it a little bit of a...
00:17:45
not a chorus, but kind of a shine,
an ensemble kind of thing,
and for that my favorite has always been
SoundToys MicroShift.
00:17:53
It's unbeatable.
00:17:55
This is really great.
00:17:56
I like III for this kind of stuff.
00:17:58
What I want to do also
is I will organize my Sends in order,
meaning that,
you know, I have four receiving objects
for vocal reverbs,
so I'm going to use Send number four
so that it's easy to track
what goes where.
00:18:13
It's geeky and it's OCD,
but, it works.
00:18:17
I'll mute the reverb
so you can hear what I'm doing.
00:18:50
So if you notice, check it out.
00:18:51
This is with the spread.
00:19:09
Notice that putting the MicroShift on
brings a little bit of heaviness,
just a little bit of heaviness
to the vocal.
00:19:14
That's something I don't need.
I'll play it again. This is without.
00:19:17
Listen to the bottom of the word "day."
I like what it does to the spark,
but it's bunching up,
so I will use just a simple
high-pass filter.
00:19:35
It doesn't have to be fancy,
I'll use the built-in Avid one
so you see how it works.
00:19:39
This is free, people!
And I'm just going to go way up high.
00:19:50
Until I no longer hear the difference.
00:20:12
I don't really like what happens
when she's starting to hit a little hard
into the 250,
so I'm going to compress
the Send to the 250.
00:20:20
I'm going to use a basic Oxford.
00:20:43
What I'm doing is I'm taking the Send
and before it hits the reverb
I'm compressing
the signal that goes into the reverb,
which means that when
she sings louder
the reverb is not going to
respond as much.
00:20:53
If you pay attention
to the difference here,
this is without the compressor.
00:20:57
Listen to the reverb.
00:21:04
Do you hear that extra energy
in the low mids?
Check it out.
00:21:13
This is with the compressor
before the reverb.
00:21:23
So the reverb is a lot more even.
00:21:25
Of course, that means that
when she sings louder
she's not going to get
accompanied with more reverb
as you would expect, so I have to...
00:21:32
I will have to season that to taste,
but doing it this way
allows me to not have the reverb
freak out on the loud parts
and still get that really nice lush thing
on the soft parts.
00:21:57
Control, control!
That's pretty good. I think
I'd like to give her
a little bit of distance,
like a little bit of depth,
so I'm going to put an Oxford there.
00:22:08
Why the Oxford?
Because I'm used to creating
that effect with that.
00:22:11
We could do it with another reverb,
but this is really simple
and easy to explain.
00:22:16
I want to put that in the Space slot,
Lead Space.
00:22:21
I'll mute the other ones
so you can really see what I'm doing,
but I usually would not mute
the other ones.
00:22:31
I was not going to use presets,
but this one is pretty badass,
so there you go.
00:22:48
Exactly what I wanted.
Just a little bit of distance, right?
I'm happy with this.
00:23:06
I don't think we need
anything else, for now.
00:23:09
The Reverb Time on this Office preset
in the Oxford reverb
is 0.45 seconds,
and a pretty small Size, right?
We're trying to imitate a small room
so that it doesn't sound
like she was so close-miced,
and it does the trick.
00:23:33
We started here.
00:23:57
A little too much of the spread,
but it's kind of addictive.
00:23:59
We'll see in the sauce.
00:24:01
Let's listen to the beat now.
00:24:19
Instead of using solos,
I'll mute everything
and unmute the things I need.
00:24:24
All right, let's do the beat
on the Beat section.
00:24:36
Okay, so,
hm,
it has a lot of personality, right?
But
it's got holes in it.
00:24:47
It has a little 'oink oink' I don't like.
00:24:50
I'm going to give it a chance to behave
and remove that 'oink',
which I think is going to be
in the 120 Hz area.
00:25:09
I'll loop that so we can work in peace
without being interrupted rudely
by the software.
00:25:31
That's okay. I want to remove
that tail of bottom,
hear how he goes 'boo-koom boo-koom'.
00:25:35
Check it out, without.
00:25:41
It's like there are two kicks, right?
'Too-ga too-ga'.
00:25:44
Not cool.
00:25:57
That's pretty good.
00:25:58
I think we are going to need
the venerable RBass,
our friend who's always here
in time of needs
to give it the sub.
00:26:06
Hello, gorgeous.
00:26:23
Okay. We started here.
00:26:39
So I'm trying to connect the point,
the 'puck',
and some sort of bottom that's of value.
00:26:54
I think it's a little too dynamic,
which, you don't hear me
say that very often,
so I want to compress it.
00:27:23
It definitely feels more stately.
00:27:25
I'm going to unmute the vocal.
00:27:36
That made me want to carve
some space in the 500 Hz area
to leave her some room.
00:27:58
So now we're good.
00:27:59
So we have the vocal here
and we have the bass drum
under it, here,
but I'd like it to go a little...
00:28:04
to have that thing it does sometimes
when the bass drum feels a little forward
in front of the bass drum,
but not louder, just a little forward.
00:28:11
And usually to do that,
once I have the right bass material,
what I do is I add a little bit
of this dude.
00:28:20
It comes free with any Apollo
you buy, which is great,
and it's very useful.
00:28:48
Not bad.
00:28:49
I think I can help it further
by carving a little more here,
maybe a little higher.
00:29:02
It was actually a little lower.
00:29:03
So what I'm doing is this:
I'm adding some bottom.
00:29:07
Because it's a Pultec,
and it's a shelf, and it's very broad,
it's also bringing some of that
100-ish area stuff up,
which I don't want
because it gives that nose,
so I'm carving 3 dB at around 100 Hz
to remove that stuff
that the Pultec has brought,
so now I'm doing this, right?
So pulling this back,
pulling some 500 Hz back,
putting this in,
I can choose which parts
of the kick peek through
so that the vocal feels
like it's floating above it.
00:29:31
Check it out.
00:29:50
It's doing the trick.
00:29:52
There was a little bit
of a level discrepancy here.
00:29:55
Let me try and match the levels
so I'm not lying to you.
00:29:59
I need two dB of gain.
00:30:03
Here you go.
00:30:05
I'll solo the bass drum
to make sure that the pre and post
is the same level.
00:30:17
It's the same level
distributed very differently, right?
We distributed the energy of the bass drum
from here to here.
00:30:36
It does the trick, right?
Let's see the rest of the pocket.
00:30:41
I'm going to loop the verse.
00:31:07
It's okay.
00:31:08
It's a really special sound,
it's got a lot of personality,
but it's not shining where it's at.
00:31:12
First, it's a little wooly
around 200-ish, I think.
00:31:30
I always like to fix
what I hear is a problem
where there is too much of
before I add anything,
because if you add something,
you're going to add more than you need
and it's going to mask the problem,
and then you're going to
fight with it for hours,
and we don't have hours
—there's cocktails later!
I still feel that it's
a little kind of 'uh'.
00:31:48
It's cool, I like the personality
of the song,
but it's not peeking,
it's not going through,
so let's try and give it
a little bit of energy
by using distortion.
00:32:14
That clap will definitely use a truckload,
which is the technical term of this.
00:32:28
And you know what? This clap,
I really want to hear it in stereo today.
00:32:31
I don't remember if I did that,
but I want to make this clap stereo.
00:32:34
It's an urge I have.
00:32:35
It would be very fascinating to see
if I did that on the original mix or not,
so I'm going to use
the spread delay trick.
00:32:41
Like this.
00:32:42
No delay on the Left, 20 ms on the Right,
maybe 30, maybe 10, I don't know,
and it sounds like this.
00:33:06
Now, EQ'ing the clap,
I don't want it to have this,
but I do want to have less bottom on it.
00:33:16
It's also loud as hell.
00:33:29
Great!
Open hat.
00:33:39
And I'm going to get rid of
that meat around 500 Hz
because I know it's a problem.
00:33:59
So let's check our levels here
with what we've done,
because most of the energy is here, right?
It's all right.
There is no 2-Bus compression,
the limiter is doing nothing,
it's all very reasonable so far.
00:34:29
I think that I'm going to run
into a problem with this.
00:34:32
I don't think that the drums
are hitting hard enough.
00:34:39
I might as well just
already create what I'm going to need
because I know I'll need it
because I've done this before
and I got bit before.
00:34:48
So I want to create a new mono Aux Input
and I'm going to create a Bus
at the same time
since Pro Tools has the kindness
of doing that for me,
and I'm going to call it,
say, 'DRUM CRUSH'.
00:35:02
And I want to send that to the same Sum
because, you know, we're In The Box.
00:35:08
And I'm going to
make it solo safe so I can hear it.
00:35:12
I'm also going to change the color because
we want to be consistent,
and I want to use a dbx 160
because it's badass.
00:35:23
I love this plug-in so much
that I went and bought some hardware
to have it also in hardware.
00:35:28
That's usually the other way around,
but that's the way I did it for this one.
00:35:31
So, I want to put them both Pre-fader
so that I can solo my Crush.
00:35:46
So you hear what it's doing,
it's that [mouth noises].
00:35:49
Cool!
I like it.
00:35:51
I can promise you
that the guy who designed this
at the time,
in 1912,
if he could have made it not do that,
he would have,
but the limitation of this thing,
that it does this...
00:36:06
is bananas!
because you can make it do this.
00:36:26
Borderline unfair.
00:36:28
So, what else can I do here?
We should listen to the soul of the song,
which is
that bass thingy.
00:36:50
Actually, right now it's registered
as a keyboard.
00:36:53
I think that's not good,
so let's change that.
00:36:56
So, to do so,
I want to make this happen this way
and I'm going to change the
vBASS Group,
and I'll Replace
by these two that I chose,
and I'm going to go to the vKEYS Group,
Modify it,
and tell him to no longer
consider Juno part of the band.
00:37:18
And I'll change the color too,
I want to make the Juno
kind of like the honorary bass.
00:37:23
It hangs with the bass
but it's not the bass,
it got a degree later
for having sold records.
00:37:28
Here we go.
00:37:41
So whether you consider this Juno
a bass or not
is a question of taste.
00:37:45
In my world, it's a bass.
00:38:33
I'm putting an EQ on.
00:38:34
It’s a preemptive EQ move.
00:38:36
I think we need a little more
harmonics on this
so we can hear it better.
Check it out.
00:38:50
I can hear it, but I can't really feel it.
00:38:52
I don't know how to explain it.
I need more, like...
00:38:55
rubbery qualities.
00:38:56
I like to use Tape Head for that.
00:39:16
It does just that. Isn't it amazing?
Wonderful! I love this thing.
00:39:23
So this brings us to the fact
that the honorary bass
is a little too fat.
00:39:37
It fights with the other bass.
00:39:38
Check it out without the EQ I just made.
00:39:40
Well, just a simple high-pass,
it sounds like this.
00:39:42
Listen to the red bass
and the orange bass, together.
00:40:01
We don't miss anything
from the orange bass,
but it no longer fights with the kick
or the red bass, which is great.
00:40:06
I want to solo the two of them
so you can really hear that difference.
00:40:09
This is without the correction.
00:40:22
But you really can't tell in the sauce
that you just emasculated
the honorary bass.
00:40:38
Already, my dynamics are creeping up
because of the Drum Crush,
so I have to be very careful with that.
00:40:44
I'm going to be a good citizen
and lower everything a little bit.
00:41:04
Let's listen to the rest of the keyboards.
00:41:22
I'll have you know that Will is amazing
at vibes, marimbas,
anything that you can bang on
with mallets,
and so he gave me two options
and I'm going to respect his wishes
and use the wet vibes, not the dry vibes.
00:41:35
He records everything in his apartment,
he has a lot of vibe-like
instruments in his apartment.
00:41:41
He records everything by himself
and does a pretty amazing job.
00:41:43
If I listen to the vibes by themselves...
00:41:51
There's a little bit of a bunch up,
that's going to be a problem,
so I'm just going to get rid of it
and do this.
00:42:04
Check it out. This is the vibes
without the high-pass.
00:42:16
It doesn't change the nature of the sound,
it just changes that 'nnn' thing.
00:42:20
Again, without.
00:42:30
It allows me to put it louder too.
00:42:51
Of course, you're noticing that the vocal
is getting buried a little bit, right?
Check it out.
00:43:01
So the natural urge
is to push the vocal up,
but as you just saw me do instinctively,
which is why I'm commenting on it,
is I'm starting to bring things down
to leave the vocal where it's at.
00:43:10
I'm looking at my meter over there,
which you can see it here too.
00:43:19
Very reasonable,
but it's moving a little bit fast.
00:43:21
Maybe we should do something about that.
00:43:24
Let's use something, you know,
standard edition,
from my good friends at UA:
the SSL 2-Bus compressor.
00:43:31
How do you spell SSL?
Aah... right, like this.
00:43:35
What I'm going to try to do
with the SSL compressor
is to slow things down,
slow the needles down
so it's not so dynamic,
so that I have more density.
00:43:43
There are a few ways you can use
a 2-Bus compressor.
00:43:46
In this case, I'm going to use
parallel compression.
00:43:49
If you were not to use
parallel compression,
you could use it very simply, like this.
00:43:53
Reign things in.
00:44:22
It brings everything in,
does the little high-pass thing
that the SSL compressor does,
everybody is happy.
00:44:27
You could push it further, you could say,
"I'm going to super-compress,
open the Attack, and get some punch."
So now that's starting to sound bad,
but if you tuck that in
by doing parallel compression,
by reducing the amount
of compressed signal
and augmenting the amount
of dry signal, it sounds like this.
00:45:14
So that gives you extra punch,
but, the needles are now slowing down.
00:45:18
Then the other thing you can do
is go back to full compression,
done here,
and have a very fast Attack
and have a slow Release.
00:45:42
Obviously the needles are slowing down,
and now you tuck some
of the direct signal back in.
00:46:12
And you achieve your purpose,
which is more girth,
more density,
you get the transients
from the direct sound,
and you get this, like, mush
from the compressed signal.
00:46:21
The other thing you can do here is
high-pass the Sidechain
so that the bass drum
doesn't get touched by any of this.
00:46:51
That works!
From these three experiments,
what made me happiest, I think,
was the least amount of work,
which is open Attack.
00:47:01
Let's do the Automatic Release
and see how this works.
00:47:15
And now let's try the Sidechain.
00:47:29
I like it better neutered.
00:47:30
Maybe not the very, very bottom.
00:47:44
It brings a nice, kind of like,
togetherness to it.
00:47:46
Let's see if it holds.
00:47:48
Usually, when I'm working
with my entire system,
I have a limiter on every stem
that does a little some some,
and then I have my 2-Bus chain
which we'll probably see
when we open the real mix.
00:47:59
For this, I'm happy.
00:48:01
I'm going to use
the Universal Audio emulation
of my trusty Dangerous Music
BAX EQ Master.
00:48:11
Yes, master!
I will high-pass the very bottom of this,
even though the SSL
is already doing it by design.
00:48:17
I'm not sure it was an intentional design,
but that's what it does.
00:48:20
But this one I have control over.
00:48:37
Since the levels
are creeping up a little bit,
I'll go down 1 dB on my limiter.
00:48:42
Then, I'm going to add
a little bit of general air.
00:48:44
Let's try 18 kHz and go from there.
00:48:51
'Haahh'.
00:48:52
That thing on her voice.
00:49:11
I like this.
00:49:12
I'm going to lower
the parallel compression
on the drums a little bit.
00:00:00
The vocal has a space,
the honorary bass
has its own vibe, right?
The vibes are really wet.
00:00:14
Like they have a room
to them, but no tail,
so I think it's time to put some space.
00:00:19
So I'm going to click on the Vibes track
and I know I'm going to want to
put the Vibes
and that Juno thing
into some sort of a reverb,
and I'm going to call it 'TAIL',
so I'm going to use the first Send.
00:00:30
And I'll make it Stereo because,
you know,
we got used to stereo,
and I want to call it 'KEYS TAIL'.
00:00:39
Now these two tracks
are assigned to that Tail,
I'll put the Tail in the right spot,
which is after all the keys,
just as a mnemonic for me to know
where it is and not have to look for it.
00:00:48
I'm going to solo-safe it,
assign it to my Sum Bus.
00:00:53
I'm going to find some sort of something.
00:00:56
Usually on keys
is fun to have a little bit of
metal,
and I'm going to use the EMT 140.
00:01:04
I may or may not like it. We'll see.
00:01:07
Just the Juno for you to hear.
00:01:17
That's too fat, right?
It's muddy.
00:01:19
I'll high-pass it here.
00:01:33
It's not working for me today.
00:01:35
It's punished!
Let's use something else
like the Softube
TSAR-1.
00:01:43
Here we go.
00:01:47
So, I want something bigger than that.
00:01:50
Large.
00:02:03
I really like the color of this.
00:02:05
I want to open the Time.
00:02:49
So now with the vibes
in the reverb it's pushed back,
so I have this distance between the vocals
and the vibes, which is awesome.
00:02:55
I'm not 100% sure about the Juno yet.
00:02:57
I think that if I made this
a little thinner...
00:02:59
You know what? I'm not going to
even bother with that,
I'm just going to high-pass the Send,
so I'm moving the reverb down one slot.
00:03:06
I'm just going to high-pass
what I send to it.
00:03:16
So now let's take care of the drums.
00:03:18
That clap needs something
—something obnoxious.
00:03:20
Let's not be tasteful.
00:03:21
Will is not here,
I don't have to be tasteful.
00:03:25
I owned a RMX reverb,
let's use it!
There you go.
00:03:31
Boom!
Maybe a different Program.
00:03:51
Let's try this.
00:03:57
I don't think that's legal.
00:03:59
Let's try something else.
00:04:03
I can't stand that thing!
There's that chorusy quality to it
on this clap.
00:04:08
Let's use something else.
00:04:10
Let's go another way.
00:04:13
Usually I have no chorusing problem
with the Oxford.
00:04:36
I may get some hate mail about this,
but I don't care!
So then, I'm going to add
something to that snare, right?
It's a little kind of 'uh'.
00:04:45
Let's see if a little space...
00:04:47
And I want to create the space separately
so I can also put the clap in it.
00:04:51
Let's call it 'Drum Tail' for now
and see what happens.
00:04:55
I usually put the names
of reverbs in all caps
so I can separate them
from the names of the Buses.
00:05:04
So this is a reverb,
so I want to make it yellow,
solo-safe it, and send it to the Sum,
and see.
00:05:17
Usually I really enjoy
the Lexicon 224.
00:05:22
Actually, I should have tried
that on the clap,
but I'm happy with the Oxford.
00:05:57
Let's open the background vocal.
00:06:03
Recorded the same day, obviously,
so I can use the same tricks.
00:06:07
I'm going to use the same reverb
since we're not doing stem mixing.
00:06:11
I'm just going to add
a little more spread.
00:06:37
The background vocals
would benefit from being compressed
with a very fast Attack so that nothing
gets in the way of the lead vocal.
00:07:12
So I hear a little bit of a mask
on the bass drum.
00:07:19
This actually was where I thought it was.
00:07:55
That's great.
00:07:56
So this is on Verse 2.
00:08:00
As we did on the snare,
just for space.
00:08:20
And less on this.
00:08:25
I like this to be present,
and it feels good in the sauce.
00:08:53
So let's listen to Will's reference.
00:09:28
I was able to enhance his tones,
but his groove is better.
00:09:34
Why?
Because the subdivision, the upbeat,
has a much more important role
than I had gotten used to
by listening to my tones.
00:09:41
Check it out.
00:09:54
So all this subdivision stuff
is more important
than the hard-hitting stuff.
00:10:00
I like my tones better,
obviously I had time to work on them,
but I think his vision
of the groove is better,
so I have to adjust.
00:10:21
So this causes a problem
because I really don't like the sound
of this thing in my face.
00:10:26
This thing being the open hi-hat,
so I want to make it brighter.
00:10:47
By having it brighter
I can lower the fader,
and I still have the presence
but not the technicality of
having all this energy in the wrong spot.
00:10:54
Check it out.
00:11:02
Compared to his mix.
00:11:25
So I'm hearing something pumping,
something funny,
so we should look at
the 2-Bus compressor right now.
00:11:37
Maybe if I bring in
the Attack a little bit.
00:11:41
Not that much.
00:11:45
I don't like it,
so I'm going to compress a little more.
00:12:03
So I'm comfortable with my balance.
00:12:05
I'll raise the vocal here
because I do need it
and I don't really want to
readjust everything else.
00:12:27
So obviously my mix
is louder than Will's mix
because things are creeping up.
00:12:32
That's part of the joy,
so I'm going to lower
my limiter back down.
00:12:53
So I think the parallel compression
on the snare is too much.
00:13:05
I think the snare
needs some love in the bottom.
00:14:18
Cool! The drum fill is here, check it out.
00:14:21
This guy.
00:14:27
I've got to take advantage of that,
but to do so,
I'm thinking something obnoxious like
SoundToys Devil-Loc Deluxe.
00:14:37
It's deluxe, it must be good.
00:14:41
Wooh!
Check that out! More Crunch.
00:14:47
Nice and light.
00:14:48
In the sauce.
00:15:07
I'm still not happy with the snare.
00:15:16
It just feels dull, and it feels better
with a little bit of 10 kHz.
00:15:20
I'm able to get the spirit of his mix.
00:15:41
I'm really there,
I have better tones, I'm getting there,
there's still some magic missing.
00:15:45
The question is: where would the magic be?
To look for the magic
we shall try this.
00:15:51
I'm going to listen to
just the drums for a second.
00:16:02
Let me shorten that reverb.
00:16:13
The reverb-to-clap ratio is not ideal.
00:16:24
Maybe a little less stereo on the clap.
00:16:37
Again, I feel the snare is just...
I can't like the snare.
00:16:41
Let's see, maybe a little Alterboy.
00:16:43
That's a choir plug-in,
so I'm clearly not supposed to use this
for this, but I don't care!
There's too much reverb on it,
but this is interesting.
00:17:13
What I did with the Alterboy
is I played with the Formants.
00:17:17
I'll solo the snare so you can hear it.
00:17:29
I distorted the hell out of it.
00:17:36
I could also try and pitch it.
00:17:48
Let's hear in context.
00:17:56
Even less reverb.
00:18:06
I think the clap
is still a little too fat.
00:18:08
I'll remove more of the middle.
00:18:18
What happens if I go above...
00:18:21
like, add some 5 kHz to the snare.
00:18:33
So, without the Alterboy.
00:18:41
It gives it a bit of a stereo thing.
00:18:42
Why don't we reduce the stereo?
Because it doesn't sound so good.
00:18:59
Even less.
00:19:02
I miss the Formant.
00:19:05
Too much of a Formant. Let's try this.
00:19:11
Without.
00:19:17
This is nice!
Let's see if I can make
the bass drum fatter.
00:19:28
So I can push the bass drum a little
and I'll make sure that my high-pass here
is accordingly adjusted.
00:19:53
If I add a little bit of
real gentle shelf on the bottom...
00:20:03
This is starting to sound
a little more vibey, right?
I think we can go higher on the snare,
a higher frequency.
00:20:24
That's Will's mix.
00:20:34
So let's bring those basses back on.
00:20:41
I think I made a bad judgment call
with this Juno,
putting the Juno in the reverb, because...
00:20:48
I misread what it does for the song.
00:20:54
It really is kind of like the whole song.
00:20:55
Obviously, since it's the intro,
I think it needs to be
better taken care of.
00:21:19
I want to try something
like a little bit of saturation.
00:21:21
This plug-in usually works great
for this kind of sustain stuff.
00:21:25
Also, I often use it
on full mixes,
it's called the
Precision Maximizer thingy.
00:21:47
I think I went a little too fat
on the snare.
00:22:03
That's a good vibe!
If I do the same trick
where I make this a little brighter,
I can take it down a little.
00:22:22
I still feel like I don't have
the presence I need,
even with the Maximizer, so,
I could gate it to try and do that,
but that's going to pump.
00:22:31
I could do, like, some transient stuff.
00:22:32
Let's see if I can get the [noises],
that 'kkk kkk kkk' thing to come out.
00:22:36
There's a million transient designers,
let's try the...
00:22:40
No, not the Inflator, the TransMod.
00:22:41
Let's see if that one works.
00:23:00
It works like a charm!
Let's see on the verse.
00:23:57
So clearly the magic comes
from that Juno thing,
and it's much, much better now,
so that was a big
misjudgment on my end.
00:24:08
I think we could use more of this.
00:24:25
You know what?
Let's try what failed earlier on the...
00:24:30
...clap, on this. You never know.
00:24:33
Don't give up'cause you have AMS.See? Don't give up!
Yes sir!
It's better, it's not great.
00:25:20
Also, it goes 'pa pa ka ka hmm'
and I don't really like
the dynamic of that,
so,
who needs dynamic?
Dynamics are for wussies.
00:25:29
Here we go.
00:25:31
Here is this,
what people would do.
00:25:52
That's a little louder.
00:26:08
So you may have noticed
that I put one Juno on the left
and one Juno on the right.
00:26:12
That's just a reflex I have
when there is a lot of stuff going on.
00:26:28
It sounds great, the bass,
but I need to high-pass the very bottom.
00:26:32
On its own it's fine,
with its friend it's crowding.
00:26:58
As you can tell,
I'm still being annoyed by the snare
and I tried to add 10 kHz.
00:27:03
Too bright, too peaky.
00:27:04
I tried adding more 5 kHz,
same problem.
00:27:08
It'll happen.
00:27:09
Let's see with less 300 Hz.
00:27:20
I'm really liking the trio of this,
I think this sounds
bananas!
Remember I used a RBass
and I put some 60 to give it girth.
00:27:35
Now that I have the Juno back forward
maybe I can drop the RBass
from 60 to lower to make some room.
00:27:57
Nice!
But then I miss a little bit of that...
00:28:04
I need a little bit of that punch.
00:28:07
For these kinds of, like, really
compact bass drums,
usually the SPL
Transient Designer works wonders.
Check it out.
00:28:31
Pretty cool, right?
And then, I have a Pultec here,
I might as well use it.
00:28:35
10 kHz.
00:29:13
So clearly this guy
is going to need some reverb.
00:29:16
I'll try that.
00:29:41
So now I am very tempted
to open up the top
of the vocal.
00:29:46
Just the very, very top,
like 16 kHz and change.
00:29:53
Bridge.
00:29:58
5 kHz.
00:30:31
I see a printed delay here from Will.
00:30:33
I'm sure it's good, I trust Will,
plus it's in there.
00:30:35
If he took the pain to print it
and put it in the session
and call it 'Vox Delay'
and put it next to the voice track,
I think he needs it,
so I'm going to use it.
00:31:11
The clap is still too wide.
00:31:13
Let's go and try 5 ms.
00:31:40
The Juno is awesome but it doesn't shine,
so let's use the same processing
as the other Juno.
00:31:45
Maybe some transient.
00:32:06
I sense some automation
in our near future.
00:32:21
There's still something that doesn't hit
right on the bass drum, but we're close.
00:32:27
It's too much of that bottom.
00:32:31
And I can have more of the direct sound.
00:32:42
I may have overdone it.
00:32:53
That sounds good. First verse.
00:33:42
I think there is room for a smidgen
of compression on the vocal
so that the levels are more consistent,
and also so that I can get
a little more presence
by opening the Attack
and bring the vocal forward.
00:34:14
See how on "to sleep"
the energy of that goes down?
With.
00:34:28
You know what I mean?
Check out this phrase again.
00:34:29
This is the way we've been listening to it
for the last...
00:34:33
I don't know, how long
have we been doing this?
Two hours? Three hours?
Eight hours? Days?
So check out the phrase,
listen to the top of the phrase
and listen to "to sleep."
See how it goes behind the snare, right?
Now with the compression.
00:35:02
It stays there,
but it's not compressed
when it gets to that point,
it's just compressing the louder part
so everything is a little more steady.
00:35:08
And since the Attack is quite open,
it doesn't really change
the tone of the voice.
00:35:12
Let's see what it does on the first verse.
00:35:14
That's pretty cool.
00:36:07
It's really starting to sound
like a record.
00:36:09
Let me see the other fills I've missed.
00:36:10
There's one in the Whirlwind right here.
00:36:23
Less, and put some tail on it.
00:36:30
What's this?
Something that has a lot of
low mid transient energy,
let's take care of that.
00:36:53
That's great.
00:37:00
Let's push it all the way in the back
by adding some of that reverb on it.
00:37:10
So now you can really hear it
all the way in the back.
00:37:12
If I remove the reverb...
00:37:23
There's something cool, 'Chicka Chicka'.
00:37:25
I propose we listen.
00:37:31
I find it's very similar to the 'Clave'.
00:37:47
So there is another Juno
doing the same thing
with a little variation,
so let's just not reinvent the wheel.
00:38:15
Let's listen to Verse 3 from Will's demo.
00:38:42
Let's call that progress.
00:38:44
I think that the subdivision problem
is solved, right?
I'm going to use the background vocal
to do something fuzzy.
00:39:12
And make it feel far away.
00:40:09
I like where everything is,
I think the tones are great,
I think it hits hard.
00:40:13
For some reason,
I kind of feel like it hits harder
than the mix I did for the record.
00:40:18
We'll know soon.
00:40:19
I'm going to give the vocal
a little bit of the...
00:40:24
what Sonnox called 'Warmth'.
00:40:26
On the Oxford Dynamics
there is a little thing here
called 'Warmth'.
00:40:30
It's not warmth, it's an Inflator.
00:40:32
It's like a very limited Inflator,
but it's limited in a good way.
00:40:36
It makes the vocal jump out.
00:40:37
Check it out, without.
00:40:54
I like it. I use it on vocals a lot.
00:40:57
Let's scrutinize our 2-Bus processing.
00:41:36
I dig this!
I have this irrepressible urge
to put a little bit of this
for some reason.
00:42:11
And there's a little too much of that 30.
00:42:33
Notice how my levels here on the right
are close to zero.
00:42:39
But a little loud,
so I'm going to lower
the output of the SSL
to get to a more reasonable place.
00:42:45
Now,
lowering this right now
is going to create a vacuum in your ears
because we've been listening to this
at a certain level
and I'm going to take it down
X amount of dB
to try and gain-stage my stuff.
00:42:57
Now,
doing that is going to feel softer,
which means it will feel underwhelming,
so you have two options:
either you decide you will get
used to it, option A,
or option B, you just raise your level.
00:43:06
I recommend you get used to it,
but if you can't get used to it,
raise your levels.
00:43:11
Monitoring levels, that is.
00:43:35
What I'm going to do now
is I'm going to listen on headphones.
00:43:38
So, obviously,
you may have been listening
on headphones since the beginning.
00:43:42
I haven't, I've been listening on my SM9s.
00:43:44
In my process, there's always a segment
in which I listen on headphones
because that allows me to see
the extension and the movement
of the very bottom,
which no room will give you,
even this amazing room,
and also, it's going to allow you
to listen to the song
the way people are going to listen to it
since 98.8.3.3 percent of people
listen to music on headphones these days.
00:44:06
So, let's do that.
00:44:07
Let's go to the second verse
because it's got the most amount of stuff.
00:44:11
I'm going to lower my speakers here,
I'm going to grab my trusty
Focal...
00:44:17
...Spirit Pros
and just check it out.
00:44:19
It's really important that you don't
blast yourself with the headphones.
00:44:30
First reaction:
the bass drum is not loud enough.
00:44:38
And also, I'm kind of neutering it here.
00:44:47
Let's see what's happening
on the high-pass filter.
00:44:56
That really is a sweet spot,
so, let's see this one.
00:45:05
That makes a mess,
so let's find something else to give it
that 'oomph' thing at the bottom.
00:45:09
I want something fairly precise.
00:45:11
You know?
I don't need to reinvent the wheel.
00:45:13
Let's just use this guy
—this guy is great.
00:45:53
It does some of the job,
but it's not making me super, super-happy.
00:45:57
Let's try that Softube thing.
00:45:58
Usually I have this Neumann EQ
that's always on,
which we'll see probably...
00:46:02
I don't remember,
but probably we'll see it
when I recall the real mix,
and maybe this is the closest to that.
00:46:12
So this is Softube's
kind of like vision
of what that thing is kind of like-ish.
00:46:19
Let's go in the bottom.
00:46:22
And let's go pretty narrow.
00:46:44
I was just checking.
00:46:54
That works for me.
00:46:55
Bass.
00:47:15
I'm going to need less
of those transients.
00:47:28
That is pretty nice!
I'm at 230 Hz right now.
00:47:37
If I lower the Shelf and give it
a little more gain on the 2-Mix,
then everything should
come together a little more.
00:47:43
This is where we're starting.
00:47:49
All that's pretty nice,
but let's try anyway.
00:48:11
Check this out!
When you are at 230 Hz, listen to
the top of the kick.
00:48:22
Now listen at 166 Hz.
00:48:28
It tucks under nicely,
just this little descending part is nice.
00:48:32
And the way we were before
was 1 dB at 230 Hz.
00:48:34
Check out the top of the kick.
00:48:42
It doesn't have the inspiration of this.
00:48:52
I have to check my low-cut filter.
00:48:53
It's all about masking a relationship,
but let's check the low-cut filter.
00:49:06
So 36 is nice,
it's got that 'oomph' thing,
but now it's muddy.
00:49:11
This is 43.
00:49:17
36.
00:49:23
Maybe a little less of this.
00:49:31
So I like that, so what I'm going to do,
I'm going to come back here
and have a little less gain.
00:49:57
I wish I had the in-between,
not +2 but +1,
especially on the Active Equalizer.
00:50:02
I don't, so it's a compromise.
00:50:04
I don't think it's the end of the world
and I think that we really gained
the bottom of the kick.
00:50:08
We'll see when we get back on speakers,
but I think this is really becoming nice.
00:50:11
Let's see the transition from the intro
to when the beat comes on.
00:50:28
We can say it hits hard.
00:50:29
I think the tone is great,
but now, with all this new energy,
it's maybe 0.5 dB louder, or something.
00:52:07
Something bothered me
in the upper range of the bass drum,
apparently, long-term,
I'm not able to make the compromise.
00:52:13
Do I want to go back and screw
—technical term—
with the Active Equalizer
or with the BAX?
Nah! I'm just going to cheat.
00:52:27
Let's listen to the instrumental,
for example.
00:52:57
I think that the second bridge Juno
could be louder.
00:53:10
Let's see what Will meant.
00:53:49
I think I made the same mistake here.
00:53:53
I think this is already affected enough,
I think it needs its own space.
00:53:59
I think it needs more of this.
00:54:09
Let's see if this is better.
00:54:18
It doesn't need the Crunch,
but it could use the density.
00:54:40
A little too fat
—just a little bit, just a little bit.
00:54:52
Let's put this in the middle.
00:55:44
I think that on headphones...
And I may regret this,
so I'm tracking my steps, right?
I know that I just raised
the Drum Crush by 2, almost 3 dB.
00:55:54
I feel it's beneficial to the kick,
but not to the snare,
so I'm keeping track of my steps.
00:55:59
3 dB.
00:56:04
So, if I listen to it soloed...
00:56:10
Eh!
Maybe I'll try 3 dB less
on the snare Send.
00:56:14
This is all very approximate
because it's so compressed.
00:56:24
If I undo that
and undo my 3 dB, it sounds like this.
00:56:32
If I redo both, it sounds like this.
00:56:38
I think the snare is very deserving.
00:56:40
Just a little less.
00:56:52
So I like the relationship
between the bass drum and the snare drum,
better that way on headphones.
00:56:58
Let's...
00:57:00
I'll make sure that
it's the same on the speakers.
00:57:09
So the bass drum is too loud,
but it sounds bananas!
I think this constitutes
a very good 1.0 mix,
especially since we did it on the fly
with none of the systems I have
to gain speed.
00:57:55
What I propose we do is I print it,
because we've heard this enough,
and then open the actual mix
from the actual record,
import this mix into it,
and then compare, and then I'll show you
what I did then, and
maybe compare with what I just did,
which would be, I think,
very, very educational.
00:58:15
'TheLight PUREMIX 1.0'.
00:58:19
Shaka Laka Boom.
00:58:21
I'll get my markers.
00:58:25
I usually select markers
when I print the song.
00:58:28
Why?
Because if I select the markers
'TOP' and 'END'
every time I print the song,
every single print is phase-accurate
and exactly the same.
00:58:36
It saves lives.
01:02:36
Et voilà! Let's switch
to the other session.
00:00:00
I just opened the last session
of the last mix for "The Light,"
for the TMBOY record.
00:00:06
It's version 1.3,
which means I mixed it once,
and then recalled it, 1.1,
recalled it, 1.2,
and recalled it, 1.3,
so this is a pretty belabored mix.
00:00:15
I have here the MeldaProduction MNotepad,
which I use on every song to take my notes
at this point.
00:00:22
I tend to leave it open
so that when I open the session
it's the first thing that hits me
and I can't miss it,
and I can't say, "Oh, I forgot to recall,"
because it's there.
00:00:31
So it says
on V1.3
I used an HD Native rig
with a Buffer at 1024.
Let's check the Buffer.
00:00:39
We're good.
00:00:40
The Buffer makes a difference,
because if you print stems
with different Buffers,
the latency is different,
the compensation is different,
and then you're in hell.
00:00:47
So you have to make sure your Buffer
is the same on every session,
at least for mixing and recall.
00:00:52
And the 2-Bus, which is up there,
is flat, meaning I'm not using
the Paralimit,
I'm not using the Harmonics,
I'm not using the transformer on there.
00:01:01
At zero, no processing, nothing, all flat.
00:01:04
And then I have the Liaison.
00:01:07
So the Liaison B: Insert 1 off,
Insert 2, Neumann,
On.
00:01:13
+2 dB at 40 Hz.
00:01:16
This is money,
you'll see.
00:01:19
Insert 3,
Flip 3-4.
00:01:23
So I Flip,
and then I'm in the Insert Loop,
and the Return of the
Parallel Return is at noon.
00:01:30
So this is the Parallel Processing Loop
of the Dangerous Liaison,
and it's these compressors
that are in that Loop.
00:01:37
And I need to have the Link on,
the Gain at 0,
the Threshold at 0.
00:01:45
That's good.
00:01:46
Attack at 100 ms,
and the Release at 300 ms.
00:01:52
Insert 4
is the BAX.
00:01:56
I'll make sure the BAX is on,
and HPF at 30 Hz.
00:02:02
Nothing at the bottom,
+0 dB at 166 Hz.
00:02:05
+1.5 dB at 7.1 kHz,
low-pass at 70 Hz.
00:02:09
Insert 5 is the Dangerous Compressor.
00:02:14
It's all standard.
00:02:15
Bass Cut, Sibilance Boost,
Smart Dyn, Soft Knee,
1.4:1,
with the Gain at noon,
and the Threshold at +1.
00:02:24
Because I'm in Stereo Link,
I don't have to handle the bottom buttons,
except this one.
00:02:30
And then, Insert 6
is the Manley,
and the Manley is +2.5 dB at 20 Hz.
00:02:37
Kind of like the stuff I did
on the Pultec,
would you believe?
And +2.5 at 12 kHz,
and then,
the transformer is on, but at 0,
we just saw that.
00:02:48
Back through the Dangerous Convert AD+,
with the Transformer on,
but none of the Emphasis.
00:02:53
And here we go!
So this is my session,
the same exact tracks.
00:03:00
It should all be the same.
00:03:01
Interestingly enough,
here I used automation,
whereas in our earlier mix,
I don't know if you noticed,
but in the end there was
no automation nowhere.
00:03:08
There's not a lot of automation here,
there is just a little bit on the Juno.
00:03:13
Everything else is actually working
just with the balance,
with no automation.
00:03:18
A little bit on 'Juno DRY',
and a little bit on the vocal,
probably because of
different gain-staging.
00:03:23
First, let's recall the mix.
00:03:24
Let's make sure that it sounds
the same, right?
So I'm going to
shrink this a little bit
so I can see better.
00:03:31
I had not put Memory Locations,
probably because I was in a hurry.
00:03:36
Let's go to the second verse
and see what happens.
00:03:46
Original mix.
00:03:54
Today.
00:04:03
A little bit different, isn't it?
That's the joy of working with hardware
because I can tell you that my notes
are extremely precise.
00:04:10
I kind of like today's mix
better, actually.
00:04:34
Punchier today, that's okay.
00:04:36
I think that this mix
has a much fatter bass,
but doesn't hit as hard.
00:04:42
Let's see! So I'm going to create
a new Playlist
and call it, New,
'THE LIGHT PUREMIX V1.0'.
00:04:50
It was called '1.0'.
00:04:51
I want to go to my Finder.
00:04:53
Let's go fish for the mix
that we did earlier,
'TheLight PUREMIX 1.0',
and drop it on that Playlist,
and synchronize it.
00:05:03
So now we're able, by using
the same magic green button,
to compare between this afternoon and now.
00:05:09
Of course, we're going to have
to level-match
because the odds that I completely
level-matched this thing
are slim to little.
00:05:29
I sort of kind of
level-matched it somehow.
00:05:30
Let's try that again.
00:05:39
Maybe this afternoon's mix
is a little louder,
like, maybe 0.5 dB, 1 dB-ish.
00:05:44
Let's see.
00:06:08
Isn't that fascinating?
Let's start from the beginning.
00:06:10
This is what we did today.
00:06:11
To analyze really the parts
that matter, like the drums,
let's listen to the beat place.
00:06:16
So I'm going to do one round of the beat
from this afternoon's mix,
and then I'm going to go on Input
so we listen to my mix from ages ago.
00:06:39
I have to lower today's mix a little more.
00:06:59
So we notice that
what I did today is brighter
and that the kick has more punch,
but we notice that there is more glue
on the mix from the other day.
I'll play it again.
00:07:27
That bass drum really hits hard.
00:07:28
Let's see with the vocal.
00:07:30
So, old mix.
00:08:05
Tough, heh? Old mix.
00:08:24
Basically the vocal is the same, right?
There's just a little bit
of a difference in volume,
but the vocal is the same.
00:08:29
I think that
I like the bass drum better today
but I like the snare drum better
in the old mix.
00:08:35
Let's look at the old mix.
00:08:36
This is fascinating! This is fun!
I should do this more often
in my free time.
00:08:40
By now we've been discussing it
long enough
that you will recognize this stuff,
the exact same tracks,
so just a quick background
on how the session is organized:
everything is going to a bunch of Stems
that are right here.
00:08:52
These are Auxes.
00:08:54
Unlike the previous session
where the bass drum
was going to the Sum Bus,
here, the bass drum
is going to the Bass Drum Stem,
and on the Bass Drum Stem
I have a limiter
which is probably not getting hit
very hard. Let's find out!
It's getting hit nothing,
but there's also an extra 'last-minute,
last-chance-before-the-desert' EQ,
and there is a Send
to a parallel compression system
with this 1176 AE here.
00:09:30
Somehow I decided not to use
parallel compression on this mix.
00:09:33
All that sum of those things
is going through the 2-Bus.
00:09:36
The 2-Bus is coming out,
going into the Liaison,
the Liaison is going through
the 2-Bus mix I just described,
and that's going through the Convert AD+,
and the Convert AD+ is going back
into this Sum Bus,
and in this Sum Bus
I have a little bit of a push
at 45 Hz.
00:09:51
Remember I was looking for the same thing
on the mix this afternoon?
And a limiter
which is probably not limiting.
00:10:02
The limiter is just hanging out.
00:10:04
All right! That's it!
Now that you know everything routing-wise,
let's look at what I did different.
00:10:08
This is really interesting!
Let's look at the bass drum.
The first thing I see on the bass drum
is I organized
some sort of a reverb on the bass drum.
00:10:17
Check it out!
I'm going to make it loud
so you can hear it. It's at -13.
00:10:37
It does that little thing of bottom
that I didn't have before.
00:10:41
So,
on the kick drum itself
I'm removing 500 Hz.
00:10:46
Here I was bothered by 50 Hz at the time.
00:10:50
A little bit of compression
like the other one,
a little bit of Transient Designer
like the other one,
so I basically did the same thing.
00:10:56
I also
lowered 300 Hz.
00:10:59
And guess what? RBass at 36,
so it's all basically the same stuff.
00:11:03
At least I'm consistent.
00:11:05
Let's look at the snare.
00:11:09
That is so much better than
what I had this afternoon. Why?
Okay! An Eventide!
So, why would anybody
want to put an Eventide on the snare?
Because one loves David Bowie!
And so, this is the same exact snare
and I'll prove it to you right now.
00:11:25
Puny.
00:11:27
But,
the Eventide does this.
00:11:38
That 'fff fff' thing gives it more thing.
00:11:40
I kind of did the same thing with the...
Was it an AMS or something?
Tape Head, so I used
Tape Head on this one
instead of Decapitator at the time.
00:11:52
Neither here nor there.
00:11:54
I removed a little bit of that
wool at the bottom on the EQ.
00:12:01
Aha! Removed that transient
that I didn't like,
that I tried to hide with so many things.
00:12:06
I just removed it with the SPL.
00:12:11
Compression. That's for the...
00:12:13
...fills.
00:12:23
So basically the same thing
I did this afternoon,
and here's the AMS. My goodness!
Then I have a Reflection Engine.
00:12:38
Which, frankly, I couldn't
tell you why I did it.
00:12:41
Then
a Pultec.
00:12:45
With the same thing: a push at 5 kHz,
a push at 16 kHz.
00:12:51
And then
a Studer.
00:12:55
So, when you see nine plug-ins
on a track like this,
it means struggle.
00:13:00
It means that I just didn't know
what to do with it,
just like you saw me
screw with it all afternoon.
00:13:05
Basically, I don't like the snare,
but because he likes the snare
and it's his record,
I left the snare and I did
the best I could with it.
00:13:12
Why an AMS and then a Reflection Engine
and then a Pultec and then a Studer?
It's basically, as you go through the mix,
you have ideas like, "Okay, maybe if I
soften the transient, then it will work,"
so you put the SPL,
and then that softens the transient,
and at that moment in time, it feels good.
00:13:28
Or maybe on the second recall
it feels good,
but on the third recall, because you added
something else in that space,
it feels kind of dull
and then you add some Pultec,
but if you add some Pultec
it brings the transient back out,
so you're going to add the Studer.
00:13:40
So you could go back preemptively
with other things,
but when you work with someone
and very often that person says,
"I love it the way it is!
Don't touch anything!
Just, like, a little of this
or a little of that,"
and then you can't touch anything
because if you touch something and they're
emotionally attached to what you did,
then it's the biggest can of worms
in the history of the universe,
so you tend to add things.
00:13:59
Personally, I'm pretty emphatic
about going back and saying,
"Look, I have this, I can recall it.
How about we go back here?"
But with Will, since we
work together so much,
I know that when he says "I love it,"
but he says, "but there's just
this little thing missing,"
that means that I need to go
further in processing
to give it a more vibey,
more processed vibe.
00:14:20
They're not looking for purity here,
they're looking for something
that has its own very particular tone,
even if it's lo-fi.
00:14:26
So, that's why I did that,
and that's why you might see this.
00:14:29
Now let's look at what I did
with the clap.
00:14:34
So, same idea I had,
but I did it differently.
00:14:36
I crushed it with Tape Head
—I was in a Tape Head mood that day.
00:14:39
Same thing, removed
the bottom of the clap.
00:14:41
Spread it, 5 milliseconds,
exactly the same thing.
00:14:44
And then I added some high end,
but here, I used the Send
and I sent it to this fantastic
AKG reverb.
00:14:54
And that's pretty awesome.
00:14:56
And what did I do
on the open hi-hat?
Exactly the same thing.
00:15:03
A Lexicon. I used the Lexicon,
it's kind of falling in the same spot.
00:15:16
I love that,
what I did with the RMX on the bass drum.
00:15:20
Check it out, without.
00:15:30
I don't know where the idea came from,
but it's a pretty good idea.
00:15:32
Let's see why the bass is fatter.
00:15:34
Oh! Guess what?
The parallel compression
is exactly the same.
00:15:42
So even though I started from scratch,
did not use my template,
did not remember what I did,
I tend to have done the same thing.
00:15:48
On the fills I used
Devil-Loc. Wow!
But I added a reverb on this one.
Let's check this out.
00:15:58
It's much better with the reverb,
I should have done that.
00:16:00
Fired. Next!
I didn't touch much of the rest.
00:16:03
Let's see why the bass is fatter here.
00:16:17
Basically the same processing.
00:16:19
Probably fatter because of the way
the 2-Bus chain reacts,
not because of the processing on it.
00:16:26
I high-passed it, removed the stuff
that bothered me around 100,
and compressed.
00:16:30
I compressed it here,
I did not compress it this afternoon.
00:16:32
Maybe that's the difference.
00:16:33
I don't know. Let's see the main element.
00:16:36
The main element is this dude.
00:16:41
I made it brighter, same thing.
00:16:43
Here, I compressed it.
00:16:47
Maximizer. See? Same instinct.
00:16:49
Tape Head.
00:16:51
I don't remember if I did that.
00:16:52
Transient Modulator. Goodness gracious!
I went heavier this afternoon.
00:16:57
And then I high-passed because
that's who I am.
00:17:00
Okay!
Kind of the same thing.
00:17:03
And I copied the settings
to the other Junos.
00:17:06
Fair enough.
00:17:08
What did I do on the Vibes?
I high-passed them
and sent them into the reverb.
00:17:15
Here I used the 140,
wide open, high-passed,
sounds familiar.
00:17:20
How much of it did I use?
A lot!
Basically the concepts,
the instincts, what this song
made me want to do,
is basically the same,
which means
that I had a mental picture in my head
of what I wanted the song to sound like.
00:17:44
The end result
is in the same family,
kind of like a first cousin kind of vibe,
but the process is pretty much the same.
00:17:52
So that tells you that there's not
"a mix" for a song,
there's, like, a bunch
of mixes for a song.
00:17:56
Do you mix it in a vacuum, as a single?
Or do you mix it as part of a record
where you have to match different songs
to get a record vibe?
It makes a big difference.
00:18:06
Now let's see what I did on the vocal
because that's pretty fascinating.
00:18:09
So here I processed the vocal quite a bit.
00:18:18
The plug-in is on but it does nothing.
00:18:20
I removed a little bit of the bottom,
which I did not do on the other record.
00:18:24
I have a little of compression.
00:18:27
I have the Warmth at 100%.
00:18:34
But I'm almost not compressing.
00:18:35
Let's see what happens on the big ones.
00:18:37
This is what I did:
I actually did pre-compression leveling
using Clip Gain,
and I probably removed some
breaths and stuff.
00:18:48
That's what I did here,
probably because that's what I did
in the other songs.
00:18:51
Instead of compressing the vocal
I went and Clip-Gained
the different phrases
so that they worked together
before I compressed,
probably so I could use less compression
because that's the mood I was in
at that moment.
00:19:11
Otherwise, same vibe.
00:19:13
The other difference here is I have
parallel compression on the vocal.
00:19:21
The same thing that Andrew does.
00:19:24
I actually ripped this from Andrew,
which is, I know,
pre-emphasis,
compression,
de-emphasis.
00:19:31
I add my own stuff,
which is, I like to de-ess that
so that it's not in my face.
00:19:35
And also, if there's a problem,
I also suppress it here,
but it's nice to give it girth, right?
Just a little more presence.
00:19:49
Reverb-wise
I used
a 140.
00:19:55
That's a pretty short one.
00:19:56
That's my depth, that's the thing
that I did with the Oxford
this afternoon.
00:20:01
And here
is a really long Oxford,
so I basically reversed my instincts.
00:20:06
This afternoon I did the Tail
with the 250,
and I did the 'Office' for the room
with an Oxford.
00:20:13
Here I did the exact inverse
on the record,
probably because that was imported
from a different song where I did that.
00:20:19
So here the long is done with the Space.
00:20:22
I'm going to mute the other reverbs.
00:20:34
And then, this is the short EMT.
00:20:49
The EMT works nice as a little,
short kind of room thing.
00:20:57
I have a delay here.
00:21:03
Hear that?
I didn't like that this afternoon,
and I have a spread
with the MicroShift, same one.
00:21:17
So the difference here is
I used parallel processing
where I did not this afternoon,
probably because there is
parallel processing on the vocal
and every vocal on that record.
00:21:26
And I used the same reverbs
as the rest of the record,
whereas this afternoon
I started from scratch,
so my inspiration was to use
a 250 for that glossy thing
instead of an Oxford,
which does the job very well,
and to use the Oxford for the room
as opposed to the EMT,
which, I didn't remember I did that
and I kind of like it.
00:21:44
I probably will do that again.
00:21:45
Also, there is here something
called 'End Throw',
so let's find out
what the 'End Throw' is about.
00:21:52
The 'End Throw'
is about nothing.
00:21:56
It probably was something I did
and Will came in and said,
"Ugh. Nah! Don't do that,"
so, it's gone.
00:22:05
What did I do on the background vocal?
What I did on the background vocal
is I copied the processing
from the lead vocal.
00:22:23
Fair enough.
00:22:25
And then I put its own reverb instead
of sending it to the same reverb,
and it's just a simple,
normal, 2-second reverb,
like a Hall kind of vibe.
00:22:32
And that's it. That's all I did.
00:22:34
On the 2-Mix there is nothing
because everything is done in analog,
except for that little punch at 40.
00:22:40
So I have 2 dB at 40 on the Neumann,
and another 3.8 dB at 45 Hz.
00:22:46
That doesn't mean
that there is 5 dB in that area.
00:22:49
Because of the compression
and the interaction
between the different processing,
it's just like little touches of things
that let you compensate
for other things taking away your bottom.
00:22:59
If you compress a little bit here
and some of the bottom has gone away,
then you put the compression after.
00:23:03
If you think about it,
this EQ right now
is after the compression on my 2-Mix,
which means that the Dangerous
Compressor is pushing against it,
the transformer here
is pushing against it,
maybe I'm hitting
the Convert AD+ really hard
to get a little bit of that crunch,
and so then I decided to compensate
with a little bit of 40 Hz under
because I felt like I was missing it.
00:23:24
Let's listen to see if it was valuable
or if I'm out of my... mind.
00:23:40
Nice and generous,
just the way we like it!
By the way, we wanted to
listen to the Neumann.
00:23:45
This is with and without the Neumann.
00:23:47
We'll start with.
00:24:10
So there you have it!
An In The Box on the fly mix
versus a recalled and recalled
and recalled
analog summing
plus all sorts of analog stuff mix.
00:24:23
They both sound great.
00:24:25
I have a soft spot for the record mix
because of the snare,
and also because of the general density
which is a little easier to get with,
you know, a pair of LTD-2s in line,
but
the In The Box mix is not that far.
00:24:41
I'll let you be the judge.
00:24:43
Thanks for watching!
Et voilà!
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Software
- Avid EQ3 1 Band
- Avid Mod Delay III
- Fab Filter Pro-Q2
- Massey Tape Head
- Oxford Dynamics
- Oxford Limiter
- Oxford Reverb
- Oxford Supresser
- Softube Active Equalizer
- Softube TSAR-1 Reverb
- Sound Toys Decapitator
- Sound Toys Devil-Loc
- Sound Toys Little Alter Boy
- Sound Toys Micro Shift
- UAD 1176LN Rev E
- UAD AMS RMX 16
- UAD Dangerous BAX EQ
- UAD EMT 140
- UAD EMT 250
- UAD Lexicon 224
- UAD Maximizer
- UAD Pultec-Pro Legacy
- UAD SSL G Bus Compressor
- UAD dbx 160
- Waves RBass
Fab Dupont is a award-winning NYC based record producer, mixing/mastering engineer and co-founder of pureMix.net.
Fab has been playing, writing, producing and mixing music both live and in studios all over the world. He's worked in cities like Paris, Boston, Brussels, Stockholm, London and New York just to name a few.
He has his own studio called FLUX Studios in the East Village of New York City.
Fab has been nominated for Grammys 6 times, including two Latin Grammys and has received many other accolades around the world, including Victoires de la Musique, South African Music awards, Pan African Music Awards and US independent music awards.
David Crosby
Queen Latifah
Jennifer Lopez
Mark Ronson
Les Nubians
Toots And The Maytals
TMBOY is Sarah Aument and Will Shore. Together they create shadowy electronic pop that has an unusually organic feel for music that leans heavily into house and techno. As a songwriter, Aument’s vocals expose the difficult process of understanding who she is, while Shore’s vibraphone playing and production amplify the emotion in each lyric.
The Light
CLICK_HEREMusic CreditsThe Light
By TMBOY
TMBOY is Sarah Aument and Will Shore. Together they create shadowy electronic pop. It has an unusually organic feel for music that leans heavily into house and techno. As a songwriter, Aument’s vocals expose the difficult process of understanding who she is, while Shore’s vibraphone playing and production amplify the emotion in each lyric.- Artist
- TMBOY
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