This is a real-time shoot of a mixing session, with no smoke or mirrors. Going from rough mix to a final mix in an hour or so, complete with eqs, compression and reverbs. All steps are explained and commented.
Mixed with Dangerous Music Monitor ST, Dangerous Music Summing and Focal speakers, Avid ProTools HD|Native, UAD Satellite Quad, Great River EQ1-NV eqs.
00:00:16 Good morning children.
How are you doing?
Today we're gonna talk about mixing.
00:00:22 So who was here
for the recording?
Wow!
OK.
00:00:29 Who wanted to come here for the recording
but thought it was Alan Parsons
and then left when I showed up?
No? OK.
00:00:38 I came in yesterday...
00:00:39 Could we have the Pro Tools screen
on the thing that's over there, please?
Voilà! So...
00:00:45 I came in and I
color coded all my tracks.
00:00:49 Because I have the attention
span of a dying moth,
it's very important to me to know
what is what.
00:00:55 And I have a system.
00:00:57 Because if you have a system,
less thinking is involved.
00:01:00 Thinking actually gets in the
way of music if you ask me. So.
00:01:04 In green, the drums.
00:01:06 Because drums mean "Go!".
00:01:13 In red, the bass.
00:01:16 It has nothing to do with blood
or anything like that.
00:01:19 It's just, all my important things
which are bass and vocals,
and master are always red.
00:01:25 So if I have a track
that has say, 120 tracks,
which happens, 120 tracks,
I can look at the arrangement window,
which is this window here.
00:01:35 And I can spot that the top
red track is my bass,
the bottom red track
is my mixing.
00:01:42 Somewhere in the middle there's
a red track that is my vocal.
00:01:44 Right?
So for example, I just did
a song for the Rugby World Cup.
00:01:50 OK?
It was a 192 tracks.
00:01:53 The reason why it was 192 tracks
it's because Pro Tools only has 192 tracks.
00:01:59 If they had 512 tracks, they
would have sent me 512 tracks
of whatever it is that you can
put on 512 tracks.
00:02:06 When you have 192 tracks it takes
a day just to listen to everything.
00:02:11 Right?
And so, you don't wanna have
to listen to everything twice.
00:02:15 No, no, no.
00:02:16 So what you do is you listen to
the thing and say.
00:02:18 "Oh, I know what that is."
And then you color it
and then you put a comment
in comment window that says:
"You already listened to that one dude".
00:02:25 "Move on".
Right?
The coloring let's you really
know where you are
at all times in your session,
which is very nice.
00:02:31 You don't have to adopt mine,
but I strongly recommend you adopt
some sort of a coloring scheme.
00:02:38 So that's what I came in
to do last night.
00:02:40 I came to color my tracks.
00:02:42 Organize everything,
drums to the left,
bass, guitars.
00:02:46 There's no keyboards because
it's a real band.
00:02:55 And the vocal and everything.
00:02:57 So now we have that.
00:02:58 As a reminder, what we're doing
here is building a quick studio.
00:03:03 We built it with my crew who
came from New York, we built in like
less than a day.
00:03:09 If you wanna switch to the laptop
so we can name the pro-sponsors.
00:03:12 This was supported by
Dangerous Music
who makes the summing,
the monitoring and some
AD cueing I'm using today,
which is a brand that I use in my studio
everything in my studio is Dangerous Music.
00:03:25 There's also, I have a website
called Puremix.net where I do tutorials.
00:03:32 If you like what you see and you
wanna see more of that
you can go to Puremix.net.
You can see more of these tutorials.
00:03:38 In the style of what you see.
00:03:41 And then the other sponsors yesterday
were Mojave and Royer for the microphones.
00:03:46 It's all Mojave and Royer microphones.
00:03:48 Great River preamps and EQs.
00:03:50 Universal Audio preamps,
compressors and EQs.
00:03:54 Focal speakers.
00:03:55 And I use Avid Pro Tools
and Avid Pro Tools converters.
00:04:00 So.
00:04:03 We have a song.
00:04:04 What I did last night too
is I printed the rough.
00:04:07 It's great to have a rough.
00:04:09 Why is that?
Because mixing is all
about perspective.
00:04:13 And I can pretty
much promise that
you will lose perspective.
00:04:18 No matter how good you are.
00:04:20 And no matter how much you do this
and how many times you've done this.
00:04:23 You will loose perspective about...
00:04:26 four hours from now.
00:04:28 If you start your mix
now, from hours from now
that's when you
start screwing up.
00:04:33 On average, depending on the
number of tracks.
00:04:35 So, considering we have an hour to mix
this track, that's not gonna happen!
Yet...
00:04:40 I still recorded the rough
mix of what we did yesterday
and I think it's a good idea
to just refresh our memories...
00:04:49 Let's listen to the song,
it's a pretty song.
00:04:53 This is the Will Knox band
and it's called,
Cog in the Machine.
00:04:58 And this is yesterday's recording.
00:06:13 It's pop music so there's
a second verse
which is the same melody
as the first verse.
00:06:16 Then the chorus comes back.
It's so contrived.
00:06:21 The first step in mixing
is to try and develop a vision
of what you want it to sound like.
00:06:26 If this makes happy, print it.
00:06:29 Send it out.
00:06:31 Right?
Now, if you tell yourself:
"Well, the vocal is a little mid heavy
and it's a little flat, and
I don't hear the back-wall
then the bass rings on
that one note
I wish that the bass drum
was a little louder
when it hits this".
00:06:44 Then you are ready
to start mixing.
00:06:46 But if you listen to the track
and you have no idea
of what to do with it.
00:06:50 Then mix is done, move on.
00:06:53 Right?
Don't start twiddling knobs because
you have 700 plug-ins,
of which you bought three,
at your disposal.
00:07:07 It's important, it's all about
projecting a certain vision.
00:07:11 How do you develop the vision,
you develop the vision by...
00:07:14 listening to music.
00:07:16 The more that you
listen to music,
preferably different
kinds of music,
not just super heavy
thrash metal,
but also what super heavy
thrash came from,
and everything around that
style created your taste.
00:07:29 Then you have a reference.
You can tell yourself, OK...
00:07:31 If you listen to enough
Folk music
and then enough
modern pop music,
I think that the Will Knox band
is not really a folk band,
they're definitely not a pop band,
I don't hear 'UUmm tsss umm ttss'.
00:07:44 We have a folk writing sensibility
with a kind of like a odd
shaped sonic imprint
that's gonna borrow from all those styles.
00:07:55 I happen to listen to all
those styles so...
00:07:57 I have and idea of how I want
the vocal to sound
because I would like it
to sound like
the way the other sounds but
with a little different thing in it.
00:08:05 And then I have and idea of
what the space should be
because I have it in
my head already.
00:08:09 I already know what I want
this to sound like in the end.
00:08:11 Once you have your vision,
you get to set your mix up.
00:08:14 Today I'm gonna show you
analog summing.
00:08:17 Analog summing is basically the
way records have been made
from the time they had consoles
and tape machines up until
someone decided it was cool
to make music with just the computer.
00:08:29 Right?
So for that period of time,
which is the period of time
that most of the records
we like come from,
then there was a brief period of
time for ten years when people decided
that it's totally cool to make music
with computers and nothing else,
and then everybody is wising up.
00:08:47 What is analog summing?
Imagine a 2-inch machine.
00:08:50 Imagine because they're no longer around
so you have to have good imagination.
00:08:53 Imagine a 2-inch machine
and a console, those you see around.
00:08:57 And then a half inch machine
for printing.
00:09:00 So you have a source,
then you have the mixing
apparatus
and then you have the recording
apparatus. Everybody with me?
In the modern world we use computers,
there's no going back.
00:09:13 They do what they do very well.
00:09:15 But there are some things that
they don't do necessarily as well,
And that's why I personally
work with analog summing.
00:09:20 If you see in this
phenomenal graphic,
you see that the DAW is my source,
audio tracks, bottom left. OK?
I have 16 channels
coming out of my DAW,
so you see the new
Avid interface there.
00:09:34 So 16 analog channels of music
coming out of my DAW getting into
my analog summing box,
in this case, Dangerous 2-bus.
00:09:42 Which is the same thing
I use at the studio.
00:09:45 It's the same as having a
24 track machine,
having 24 channels coming
out into a Neve console.
00:09:50 Right?
In this case, the 24 track machine
is replaced by Pro Tools,
and the Neve console is replaced
by the analog summing box.
00:09:58 Still with me?
Right. Now...
00:10:02 Although, quad is a wonderful way to
listen to music, so is 5.1, so is DTS 10.1.
00:10:07 It's fun.
00:10:09 But contrary to popular belief,
we all listen to music on Ipods
and Iphones.
00:10:13 So you need it to end up being,
2 tracks, stereo is a beautiful thing.
00:10:17 Or mono if you are
really old school.
00:10:20 But nobody hear just does mono.
00:10:23 And so
the Dangerous 2-bus will
sum those 16 channels
of music and give them
turn them into two channels of music
that you can print and then go
ruin it, make it a MP3
and send it to the world.
00:10:38 Once it comes out of the 2-bus,
I get back to Pro Tools
and I print that, just like somebody
would print to a half inch machine
in the old days. Then you print
and then you monitor it.
00:10:50 So you have two channels
so you can listen
and for that I use the
Dangerous Monitor ST,
which is the one with the
sexy remote.
00:10:59 It's OK to pat the remote
at the end of the class.
00:11:04 So that's the system I'm gonna
use right now.
00:11:06 Source,
summing,
in this box here.
00:11:11 Out of this box,
back into the converter.
00:11:14 Out of the converter, into my
monitor section, into my Focal Speakers.
00:11:18 The way I start a mix, usually
of course, unless it's instrumental,
I'll start with the vocal.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Fab Dupont is a Grammy 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.
"Thanks" Fab... this series is absolutely AMAZING!!!
I also had a great time watching it live in the audience at Gearfest.
You're truly one of the best in the business!!!
"Touch The World"
F.L. Freeman, Audio Engineer/ Mixer
111 Entertainment LLC
Stone
2011 Sep 27
Just finished watching all 4 videos. Absolutely fantastic. They are concise, insightful, and funny too!
My favorite quote has to be, 'Air is often the best form of compression.' WOW!!!!
Looking forward to all your upcoming tutorials.
Keep up the great work!
