Inside The Mix: Andrew Scheps Deconstructing Rival Sons "Do Your Worst"
03h 01min
(40)
In 2018, The Rival Sons topped the US and Canadian Rock charts with their epic single "Do Your Worst," produced by Dave Cobb.
In this pureMix.net exclusive, watch as Andrew Scheps deconstructs his massive mix of the epic "Do Your Worst" by The Rival Sons.
Part 1:
- Explains how the production was done with producer Dave Cobb
- Discusses how the mixes were sent to him
- Explains how he decided the approach for the mix after hearing the rough
- Breaks down the layout of the mix
- Demonstrates how he created consistency across two separate kick drums between the verse and chorus
- Explains the overall processing on the drums
Part 2:
Continuing with the deconstruction of "Do Your Worst" by the Rival sons, award-winning mixing engineer, Andrew Scheps, explains his processing on the individual drum tracks, as well as his parallel compression busses.
Watch as Andrew Scheps:
- Explains the individual processing on the drum tracks
- Discusses how he uses a de-esser on the Scheps Omnichannel to shorten the length of the kick drum
- Breaks down how he creates glue between the attack and sustain of a drum by using saturation
- Explains how he approaches the Glyn Johns overhead micing technique
- Adds the Phaser drum track
- Explains the importance of working in the context of the mix
- Breaks down each of his parallel drum compression busses
Part 3:
With a massive foundation laid with the drums, Andrew Scheps continues deconstructing his mix of the chart-topping single "Do Your Worst" by The Rival Sons.
See how Andrew Scheps:
- Adds a sans amp to the tambourine
- Explains how the sans amp works
- Discusses how the parallel compression busses work to tighten the groove between the percussion and drum kit
- Discusses the history of the 1176 Anniversary edition that he uses as his rear bus compressor
- Breaks down his processing on the main guitar riff
- Demonstrates how he treated the doubled acoustic guitars on the choruses
- Gives a level matched example of the rear bus
- Deconstructs the synth and piano tracks
Part 4:
To wrap up his mix of The Rival Son's "Do Your Worst," Andrew deconstructs the individual processing effects and parallel compression he used on the vocals before wrapping up with a detailed breakdown of his mix bus.
See how Andrew Scheps:
- Explains how he approached the lead vocal compression
- Breaks down his parallel processing on the Lead Vocals
- Deconstructs his Pultec LA2A process
- Demonstrates the effect of the rear bus in context with the lead vocal
- Explains why too much cleanup work can be a bad thing
- Shows the vocal effect chains he used to emphasize the scene changes in the song
- Discusses how the parallel vocal bus compression makes the Lead vocals and background vocals feel more like a complete package, then separate tracks
- Breaks down his stereo bus chain piece by piece
Watch Andrew Scheps mix "Do Your Worst" from The Rival Sons. Only on pureMix.net
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:22 - About The Song
- 02:05 - Playing The Rough Mix
- 03:44 - Some Of The Challenges Of The Mix
- 08:54 - Running Through The Tracks
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Individual Tracks - Kick
- 08:04 - Snare Tracks
- 19:54 - Overheads
- 25:03 - Room Mics
- 30:13 - Kit Phaser
- 31:14 - Drum Kit Aux
- 38:06 - Kick Snare Crush
- 43:29 - Drum Kit Parallels
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Percussion
- 10:43 - Bass
- 22:46 - Guitars
- 38:06 - Rear Bus
- 41:03 - Keyboards
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Lead Vocal
- 04:24 - Vocal Processing
- 25:26 - Background Vocals
- 31:05 - The Mix Bus
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |
00:00:07
Hello children!
This is Andrew Scheps,
and welcome to Punkerpad UK
for a very first video shot here.
00:00:14
And today we're going
to deconstruct the mix
for a song by the band Rival Sons
called Do Your Worst.
00:00:22
This is album is produced by Dave Cobb,
who has produced every album
that this band has made actually.
00:00:27
I think he's been friends
of them for a long time.
00:00:30
They do a lot of writing in the studio,
I understand,
so sometimes you get
bits and pieces that might weeks apart,
from jams put together as songs
and there's an example of some stuff
like that in this mix.
00:00:42
I mixed about half the record, I think.
00:00:43
And Dave finished up
the mixes on the other half.
00:00:46
There's a little bit
of me not worrying about whether
our mixes were gonna go together
and that being someone else's job
but you always sort of keep that in mind
because since the producer
was finishing up the other mixes
and was getting rough
mixes from the producer
that gave me a really
good idea of the direction
that the rest of the album was gonna go.
00:01:04
Which means that the rough mixes
were a pretty important part of me
mixing the songs that I did mix,
I was referring to
them quite a bit for vibe,
general balance, that sort of thing.
00:01:13
One thing about this particular session
is sometimes I get sent the session
right where the producer left off,
which means,
it might be a very simple session
or it could be as complicated
as a full mix.
00:01:26
And sometimes I get a session,
like on these songs,
where everything is stripped out.
I've got all faders at zero
I believe they left a
little bit of the panning in.
00:01:37
And that was it.
00:01:38
So, if I opened up my
original session and hit play
it's just all the tracks playing.
00:01:43
So, my only reference to how they
left off the production is the rough mix.
00:01:47
And then every single
thing in this session
is actually something I did.
00:01:51
Which is interesting because a lot
of the mix deconstructions I've done
have been on more complicated
sessions that have come to me.
00:01:56
And sometimes I don't even remember
what's mine and what came to me.
00:02:00
So, if you see it, in this session,
it's my fault.
00:02:04
And there you go.
00:02:05
So I think what I will do first
is I'm gonna play you a
little bit of the rough mix.
00:02:09
Get up through the first chorus,
kind of going back into the second verse
and then I'm gonna
talk about it musically
because there's something
really interesting about this mix,
which made life a little bit difficult.
00:02:19
Here is the rough mix.
00:03:44
Very cool, riff rock, roomy drums.
00:03:48
That gives you this sort of
vibe of the song. But musically,
if you analyze what's
going on in the chorus,
if you're talking abstractly about
a guitar band song
and you're talking about:
'Well, how do we make the chorus exciting?'
Well, you might pick up the tempo,
you might go double time on the drums
or switch from tight hat to splashy hat
or splashy hat to ride cymbal.
00:04:11
You'd have
more rhythmically intricate guitars.
00:04:15
So you pick up tempo in that way.
00:04:17
This song does the
opposite of all of that.
00:04:20
The drummer stops
playing cymbals altogether,
except for some crash cymbals.
00:04:25
The beat is just kick and snare.
00:04:27
It switches from a fast riff guitar
to doubled acoustics
and some rhythm guitars
that are playing very slowly.
00:04:36
And basically, it's almost,
and anti-chorus.
00:04:40
So, you could approach it
as being something where
I'll make the chorus small,
almost like a breakdown chorus,
but it's very obvious from
listening to the rough mix
that is not the intent of the song.
00:04:51
One of the things I realized very early on
mixing this song was I had to have
something to do.
In the rough mix, what you get,
is you get the sort of explosion of size,
because you get double guitars
instead of single guitar in the middle
and you go from a single voice
to this gang vocals.
00:05:11
And it goes from a very dry verse vocal
to a pretty roomy gang vocals.
00:05:17
And that is cool
and it works but I also decided
that I didn't think
I was going to be able
to have that contrast
be as stark as it is.
00:05:28
I knew that I wanted to have
more effects on the verse vocal.
00:05:31
I wanted to have more
of slap thing going on,
there's actually, I believe,
there's a doubled vocal
in the choruses but
not in the verses.
00:05:38
So I was gonna pick up a little
bit of size in the vocal
going from this single verse vocal
to the doubled chorus vocal.
00:05:45
But I didn't wanna just
rely on that for the size.
00:05:47
So what I decided to do was,
other than the drums,
because I'm dealing
with the single guitar,
is to try and keep the mix
more mono in the verses.
00:05:57
More things in the middle.
00:05:59
So rather than taking my few
mono elements and spreading them out
and making the verse have
a big wide stereo picture,
I basically just left the room
that's on the drums and that little
bit of room that's on the guitar,
that's the only stereo thing
really going on in the verses.
00:06:16
So that in the choruses, the addition
of the doubled acoustic guitars,
the doubled rhythm guitars,
the doubled gang vocals
would really push out wide.
So, instead of having
a stereo thing but really
individual elements near the middle,
you end up with stuff all over
the place from side to side.
00:06:34
And then the other thing
was taking this sort of sonic picture
and I couldn't do it in the treble
but I could do it in the bass.
00:06:43
Normally you'd think like:
OK, you could grow it
from sort of here to here,
going from verse to chorus,
but because I'm losing the cymbals
I can't replace the
power of a splashy hi-hat
with some strummed acoustic guitars.
00:06:57
It's just not gonna do the same job.
00:06:59
But the low-end,
you've got all kinds of stuff you can do.
00:07:02
So I've got this roomy drum-kit,
a little "Bonhamy", so there's a
lot of low end going on in the kit.
00:07:07
There is bass that's doubling the riff
but I really wanted to
add an entire other octave
to the bass in the chorus.
00:07:16
We'll go through the whole
session and you'll see everything.
00:07:18
But they have added a Moog
and I'm really pushing
the bottom end of the bass.
00:07:23
That's where the
verse/chorus thing happens.
00:07:27
And one thing that's
really cool about that
is on a lot of mixes
one of the trickiest transitions to do
is out of the first chorus
coming back to the second verse.
00:07:38
Because whatever energy you've picked up
going into that first chorus
now you've got to lose it all
and get back to the verse.
00:07:46
So you're going somewhere familiar,
which is good,
you're continuing the story of the song,
which is good. But sonically,
that's why a lot of the songs
pick up a new guitar part
or some percussion.
00:07:57
Or some new element
happens in the second verse
because you need that
after this amazing thing that's
happened in the first chorus
and you're back to
just story-telling mode.
00:08:07
You've gotta have something else
to keep it interesting.
00:08:10
With this, you pick up a splashy hi-hat
and a fast riff and you gallop off
after the end of the first chorus.
00:08:16
So it ends up
making a lot of the rest
of the mix really simple
once you figure out the
transition into the first chorus.
00:08:24
There you go.
00:08:25
That's the big picture thing.
00:08:27
That was a very long
explanation of something
that probably took me about
1.5 second inside my head,
to just know that chorus
has to be gigantic sonically.
00:08:36
That was it.
00:08:38
But as I worked on the mix
and coming back having a look at the mix
I'm realizing that that's
where a lot of stuff happened,
it was to try and open up that bottom end
and spread out the rhythm
so the rhythm was in
the middle in the verse,
even though there was stuff on the sides
but the rhythm really
hits the sides in the chorus.
00:08:55
Whenever you're
deconstructing these mixes
you kind of wanna show everybody
everything all at once
because everything is important
and everything adds to everything else
but that's not really possible.
00:09:05
If you haven't watched my template video,
which at this point is 4 or 5 years old,
but that doesn't really matter
because the template has changed,
things have evolved
but the process is
basically exactly the same.
00:09:18
If you haven't watched that there
maybe some things that you wonder:
'Oh, hold on!
Did that come with the session
or did that come from
the mix template?'
But I can tell you right now,
every single thing that isn't an
audio track is from my template.
00:09:30
So that's the really easy way to know
what I've done,
what I've imported in from my template
and then what's I've done during
the mix because I'll be talking about it.
00:09:38
So, just really quickly,
I wanna run you through the tracks.
00:09:41
This should look
incredibly familiar to you
if you've seen any
session I've ever mixed.
00:09:45
Drums are this dark blue color,
I start with the kick drum,
I work my way down.
00:09:50
For me audio flows downhill,
it's like water.
00:09:54
So, my mix track is at the bottom,
my kick drum is at the top.
00:09:57
That's just the way it works,
if I have an Aux
that's collecting audio from somewhere
it's collecting it from
the tracks above it.
00:10:03
I've got some kick tracks feeding
the kick Aux
and I'll come back and talk about this
because this is actually
a little more complicated
than I usually have things going on.
00:10:12
Then we get snare,
overhead,
we've got some close room, far room.
00:10:16
And then there was a track where they
have bounced the kit through a phaser.
00:10:20
And that's it for drum tracks.
00:10:22
It's pretty straight ahead, no tom tracks.
00:10:24
I'm not even sure if he hits the toms.
00:10:27
No, he does, he does a lot actually,
because of all the drum fills going
into the chorus and stuff like that.
00:10:32
But that's just within the overhead mics,
there are no separate tom tracks.
00:10:35
So, pretty simple, but well recorded drums.
00:10:38
And then this is all template stuff,
which we'll talk about in a bit.
Then percussion, it's always next,
I like to keep the
rhythmic stuff together.
00:10:45
A couple of shakers, tambourine
and then in the chorus
there's actually a little kick overdub
and we'll listen to this stuff,
it's basically percussion.
00:10:54
Then we come down into the bass,
which there's a bass DI
and then I've duplicated the Bass DI
to do some processing to it.
00:11:02
There wasn't a bass amp track.
00:11:04
And then there's a synth
bass in the choruses.
00:11:06
Then we get in to guitars
and the guitars are actually
pretty straight ahead too.
00:11:10
There's the Verse Electric,
which is that riff
and then you've got the stereo acoustics
in the chorus,
like I was talking about.
00:11:18
And then you've got stereo electrics
and then you've got some miscellaneous
electric overdubs which we'll get to.
00:11:23
There's an extra part in one of the
choruses, and the we've got the solo.
00:11:27
Which is sort of spread out over
a bunch of different tracks.
00:11:30
That's it for guitars,
pretty straight ahead actually.
00:11:33
Keyboards, very very simple.
00:11:35
There's a piano
reinforcing in the choruses
and then we've got the keyboard here
called the 'do your worst keys guitar solo'.
00:11:44
And this is actually a keyboard
double of the guitar solo.
00:11:47
It's part of the guitar sound
in the solo but we'll have
a listen to that later on.
00:11:53
It's a really straight ahead session.
00:11:55
And then we've got our verse lead vocal,
chorus lead vocals,
there's a triple at the end.
00:12:01
And then we've got background vocals.
00:12:03
And it's four tracks of gang vocals.
00:12:05
That's it.
00:12:06
That's all there is,
everything else in the session
is either something I
created within the session
or brought in from my template.
00:12:12
What we could do is do the usual
start with the drums
and kind of work our way through.
00:12:17
Because there's some
interesting stuff with the drums.
00:12:20
I believe,
what I was talking about before,
how they write in the studio,
I think that the verses and
the choruses on this song
must have been
recorded at different times.
00:12:29
And they were pretty good about
not changing the drum mics in-between
but what happens is,
let me solo up the drums.
00:12:36
You notice I have a very
handy yellow VCA for the drums,
that's a big part of my mixing,
is to have a VCA for
every group of instruments.
00:12:45
So I can always get to that
group of instruments really quickly,
do big balance changes quickly,
if I have to print stems
I can just solo it up.
00:12:52
I'm really meticulous about this,
but we're not gonna go into the
5 or 6 hours I could
spend on session setup.
00:12:59
We'll do that in another video,
I have a feeling.
00:13:01
What I'm gonna do is play you the drums
going from the verse
into that little pre-chorus and then
into the chorus.
00:13:30
So you can hear the kick drum
changes pretty dramatically
between the verse and the chorus
and it's actually changing a
lot more dramatic than that.
00:13:37
This track right here
actually got a Drumagog on it.
00:13:41
I'm triggering a sample
to transition the kick
between the verse and chorus
because if I take that out and let
me just solo up the kicks, for you here.
00:13:50
I'll take this guy out.
00:13:52
So this is the verse kick drum.
00:13:57
This is the chorus kick drum.
00:14:02
I think it's a completely different drum.
00:14:05
But if you listen to the overheads
there's not much difference
other than the kick drum really.
00:14:12
What I think happened is,
either on the same
day or on a different day
they decided this chorus
needs a totally different kick drum.
00:14:18
So if we listen to a
little bit of the verse.
00:14:24
Chorus kick drum.
00:14:29
It's a little hard to tell because
the cymbals are different
but they don't sound that different
so it's the same kit,
the snare drum is very consistent
but the kick drum is completely different
and if I take out my sample
and we listen
out of solo here
it was really bothering me how
much the kick drum was changing.
00:14:47
So I'll just play a little bit
of the pre-chorus.
00:15:03
It's a really different tone,
which is cool and I like
the idea of the drums being different
but it was distracting.
00:15:11
And one of the things I'm always
trying to get rid of when I'm mixing
are things that are distracting me
because I should just
be listening to the song
not the kick drum,
especially going into the chorus.
00:15:22
Let me solo up again
these guys and I'll play
you just the kick drum
going in-between and then
I'll add the sample back in.
00:15:36
So, very different,
here's with the sample added.
00:15:40
Obviously the level is
gonna come up
because the sample is
being added in as well.
00:15:52
So now the kick can change character
but the attack of the
kick drum stays the same.
00:15:56
And I feel like enough
sonically is changing
that no one is gonna really care
or be distracted by that sort
of change in the kick drum
because the weight of it
will be consistent
enough that you won't feel like:
'Oh wait, hold on, something
really just happened in the drums!'
Even though they do
sound totally different.
00:16:14
The part is different
enough that I feel like
with just that little bit of consistency
now we can carry through
all the way through the song.
00:16:21
Drum wise
there's not a lot going on
on the individual tracks,
it's pretty well recorded
and I, as it turns out,
don't do a lot of processing
on individual tracks.
00:16:32
I never really have unless
I'm trying to make something.
00:16:35
So, this is a great
example session to look at
because if there is an insert I did it.
00:16:41
The only insert on any of the kick tracks
is Drumagog on my trigger track.
00:16:45
And to make that track, by the way,
all I did
was make a duplicate of the verse kick
and then copy the chorus
kick up onto that track.
00:16:53
That's all it is.
00:16:54
It's just a copy of the audio.
00:16:56
All that let me do was to not
actually have to think about it at all.
00:16:59
Drumagog is really good at just grabbing
something, every once in a while you've got
to adjust the threshold a little bit
but it's pretty good.
00:17:07
I don't have to think about it,
all you gotta do is chop
the audio on the track,
you get your kick drum.
00:17:12
Timing wise it seems to be
pretty much dead-on.
00:17:16
I've never had an issue with timing.
00:17:19
That's good,
because if you used to play
samples using Sound Replacer
or using MIDI,
things like that,
which I think we might
get into in another video,
all the different ways you can do this.
00:17:31
When you can find something where
you just hit play and copy some audio
that's what you're
looking for to go quickly.
00:17:36
The sample I'm using
it's actually one of the
stock Drumagog samples,
it's this Techno Kick 5.
00:17:42
Techno Kick 5 and Techno Kick 15
are two that I've seen
other fantastic mixers using it as well.
00:17:49
I'll solo it up,
it's not the kick drum you'd
want on this song at all.
00:17:55
It's a machine kick.
00:17:57
But
what it gives you is click and sub.
00:18:03
There you go. Sometimes I'll high-pass this
because I only want the click.
00:18:07
Sometimes I only want some sub.
00:18:09
In this cases I just
wanted the whole thing.
00:18:11
And Techno 15
is just longer,
basically. It's not 808 ish
but it is more long sub.
00:18:20
So, there are some mixes
where I've actually switched the sample
so that the downbeat of every section
gets the longer kick
and then the shorter kick.
00:18:31
Because I'm never
replacing drums with samples,
I don't think
I've ever actually done that.
00:18:37
I'm always enhancing.
00:18:38
So, I'm taking the air,
the performance and the dynamics
from the actual recorded
drummer performance
and I'm just
trying to find what is
the fastest way for me
to sonically make the drums feel
like I want them to feel
so I can move on.
00:18:54
And there was no point in doing anything
else other than triggering the sample.
00:18:59
Interestingly I'm noticing
that I didn't copy up all the audio.
00:19:03
So I'm actually missing the kick drum
coming out of this first chorus
and I'm doing this now so you
don't mention it on the comments,
because somebody will.
00:19:18
It's not there,
it doesn't matter.
In some ways
I'm gonna make the
case that it might be cooler
to have a little dip and then
you're back into the groove,
and that's why it works so well.
00:19:28
Yeah, that wasn't on purpose.
00:19:30
These things happen.
00:19:32
You know, you're zoomed
out and you're copying audio up
and you go:
'Yep, great, I got the chorus.'
Copy/paste
and you don't have the chorus.
00:19:40
Just a little a little mistake
but we're not gonna pretend
that I don't make mistakes
because I do it all the time.
00:19:45
And I gotta say,
one of the interesting things about
doing these videos is that
it used to be,
when I mixed on the console,
every time I'd be printing a mix
I'd also be documenting the mix
and I would find all of this kind of stuff
while I was documenting the mix.
00:19:59
So I'd be right in the
middle of printing mixes
and realize that:
'Hold on, the overhead is wrongly
going to the left side of that compressor!'
And you thing:
'Should I fix it, should I not fix it?'
My theory is, if it never bothered me
then it's not worth fixing.
00:20:15
It's anything that really matter.
00:20:17
If I took the sample out altogether,
obviously I'd miss it,
one missing hit, no big deal.
00:20:22
So you can see the kick
drum tracks themselves,
I'm not doing any processing on,
whatsoever.
00:20:27
In my template I got a kick Aux
which is just stereo Aux
with no processing on it by default
to collect all of the kick drums.
00:20:35
And the reason I use these Auxes,
and I'm gonna spend a lot of time talking
about template types of things,
I use them because they have
sends to my parallel processing
already in place.
00:20:46
And if I had to create these
sends from scratch every time
I would have to remember if some of them
usually get a little bit
less level than others.
00:20:54
And this way it's all in my template.
00:20:56
So if I've decided
that one of the parallel
compressors should
get a little bit less level
than the default, which for me,
the sends default to happening at zero,
I would have to remember to turn
that send down every time I made it.
00:21:07
I hate that stuff.
00:21:08
It turns out that these Auxes
are obviously very convenient
if I wanna EQ the kick drum,
which I do,
on this session,
but really they're there to collect audio
that's got to go off to parallel processes,
which we'll talk about in a second.
00:21:22
Because of the difference between
the verse and the chorus kick drums
I knew I wanted to EQ them differently.
00:21:27
I just made a copy of the kick Aux
called the Verse Kick Aux
and assigned it to a different bus.
00:21:33
No big deal at all, really.
00:21:35
They're identical and they
both feed the Drum-kit Aux.
00:21:38
Drums for me are one of the
slightly more complicated signal paths.
00:21:43
Kick drums go through an Aux,
snare drums go through an Aux.
00:21:47
A lot of times I will put
the toms through an Aux,
if there were tom tracks here
you'd see that.
00:21:53
And then, depending on the song,
I might take the overheads through an Aux
because I wanna process them
and they're stereo, on multiple tracks.
00:22:00
Sometimes I'll mix the hat and
the ride in with the overhead tracks.
00:22:03
It's just and easy way
to affect the overheads of the kit
without having to worry about
how many microphones or tracks.
00:22:11
Did I remember to change
the EQ on that thing?
It's just a really simple way to do it.
00:22:16
Those them feed a drum-kit Aux,
once they finally make it down.
00:22:20
You can see I've made Auxes for
the close room and the far room.
00:22:23
Those are not in the template,
they're made for this
that they all feed the same,
called the drum-kit Aux, which is here.
00:22:29
This exists because it needs
to be able to send off
to lots and lots of parallel stuff,
which we'll get to.
00:22:37
Because that's a big part of my drum
processing, the parallel compressors.
00:22:40
And I happen to do
some processing on this.
00:22:43
Quite often there won't be any actual
plug-in processing on the drum-kit Aux,
it really is just a way
to collect the audio
and sent it off to the mixbus.
00:22:51
Here are all my parallel processes
that are being sent to up here.
00:22:56
And then we have our Drums VCA.
00:22:58
These yellow VCAs for me
are big visual markers to say:
That is the bottom of the drum.
00:23:05
There are no drum tracks below here.
00:23:08
It's a way of organizing,
it's a way of finding my VCA
if I wanna solo the drums.
00:23:13
And it's a very big part of the
way I can move quickly,
especially on a session
I haven't opened up in a long time.
00:23:20
Like this one I mixed probably a year ago,
maybe longer.
00:23:24
But I can open up session from
5, 6, 7 years ago
and I know exactly what's going on.
00:23:29
It takes about 7 or 8 years before
we get into things that are so different
that I actually have to
reverse engineer them
but every single thing I've done in
the last many years has this setup.
00:00:00
So...
00:00:01
Shall we talk about
individual drum processing?
I know you'd like to
and so would I.
00:00:07
Like I said,
there's very little processing,
but I'll just show you what there is.
00:00:10
So, this is our verse kick, right here.
00:00:12
I'll solo that up.
00:00:14
And this is the Drumagog again,
so you're not missing anything
sonically going on here.
00:00:18
These three feed this Aux
and this Aux has a,
you're gonna see a lot of this kids.
00:00:24
Scheps Omni Channel, this is the
channel-strip plug-in I did with Waves.
00:00:27
It came out almost two years ago now,
quite a while ago.
00:00:30
I use it all the time
because if you get the
chance to design a plug-in
that does a lot why wouldn't
you use it all the time?
Because you've just made
the plug-in you really wanted.
00:00:40
One really good thing, as I'm flying
around this session and opening stuff up,
a really quick way for you to
get an idea of what I'm using
in the plug-in is the orange light will be
on for the modules that are engaged.
00:00:53
On this, you don't have to look
and see which kind of compressor
I'm using because I'm not compressing.
00:00:58
I'm just de-essing and I'm EQing.
00:01:00
The EQ is pretty straight ahead,
I've got a high-shelf at
8000, which I believe is the default.
00:01:07
And that's it.
00:01:18
A tiny bit of presence,
this was definitely not done in solo.
00:01:22
I can guarantee you, probably 80%
of what I'm about to solo up to show you
was not done in solo.
00:01:28
What this was, this was,
I'm listening to the song,
in the verse, I'm starting to
lose the attack on the kick drum,
come up here, open up the EQ,
add some high-shelf.
00:01:36
OK, all good.
00:01:37
It's the same as turning up the kick,
except I'm only turning up the high-end.
00:01:42
I think that's interesting
little concept to think about
and I use it a lot when I'm
addressing mix notes with people,
is if they say turn something up
what that means is they just
wanna be able to hear it better.
00:01:54
It doesn't mean you have to turn it up.
00:01:56
You can turn up just
certain frequencies of it,
now it is in fact louder
and it's easier to hear
but it's not stepping all over other stuff.
00:02:05
So, for me this was a:
'I want to hear the kick better
but I don't need it to be thumpier,
I just wanna a little bit of presence.'
So that's what that's doing.
00:02:14
And then this de-esser,
any time this threshold is
anywhere other than zero,
it is sucking frequencies out.
So I'm sucking out
98 and 165 Hz.
00:02:24
I can hold down the Ctrl
key and tap on this knob
and it will turn it in a band-pass filter
so we can hear what
those frequencies sound like.
00:02:31
And then I'll bypass it so you can hear
those frequencies coming back in
and why I might wanna get rid of them.
00:02:49
What you can hear in the background there
is the toms ringing, like crazy.
00:02:54
Here is with the de-esser in.
00:03:11
Kind of cool in a way, soloed up,
like, it's almost like a
little 808 thing going on.
00:03:16
Some of that is actually
probably coming from the sample,
it's not all from the recorded kick drum.
00:03:21
But what happens in the track
is that just gets messy.
00:03:24
You need that kick drum to go 'boom'.
00:03:26
Not 'boooooom'.
00:03:28
Because it's getting in to everything else.
00:03:30
You got a fast moving riff
that's doubled by the bass
so you don't need the kick
drum just hanging around forever.
00:03:36
So, it's basically shortening the
kick drum without using the gate.
00:03:52
It also really helps firm up the
attack of the kick drum to me.
00:03:55
It gives it an actually
thump in the low-end
instead of just being
kind of a wash down there.
00:04:00
That's the processing on the verse kick
and if we look at this chorus kick,
because the drum pattern is so different,
you don't necessarily wanna
treat this kicks the same,
the length on the kick
drum in the chorus is fine
because there's nothing else going on.
00:04:15
It's just that really simple almost
quarter note pattern with no cymbals.
00:04:19
Here we got the pre-amp on,
there's some saturation,
just odd harmonics saturation
that's gonna act like a top end EQ
and then the EQ is in
adding a tiny bit of the
resonant low-shelf at 80 Hz.
00:04:32
This is probably just to even up or even
make the chorus kick have extra
low-end compared to the verse kick.
00:04:41
Keep in mind, the sample
for the chorus kick is still
going through the verse kick Aux.
00:04:47
I didn't make two
separate sample tracks
because why would you bother?
The session is at 96 kHz,
Drumagog takes CPU
why would I have two of them?
The EQ and the processing on
this is not enough to be a problem,
plus, if any of that shortening I was
doing with the de-esser on the verse kick
was to do with the sample
now I'm doing it still to the sample,
in the chorus,
because that's the only audio going
through that Aux in the chorus
so I'm almost treating
the sample separately
from the kick drum mics for the chorus
and keeping that bit consistent.
00:05:20
So now what I'll do is play you
the chorus kick drum without the sample,
because that's not soloed up
going through this Aux.
00:05:27
And I'm gonna take
the saturation on and off.
00:05:30
What you should hear is it's doing
kind of the same job
as the high-shelf EQ is doing
on the verse kick.
00:05:50
It's basically top-end EQ
but it does it in a different way.
00:05:55
The way I like to think
about the difference between
saturation or harmonic
synthesizers or anything that is
creating audio as opposed to EQ
is EQ you're turning up what's there.
00:06:10
Which is great, it's very non-invasive
but you're stuck with what's there.
00:06:15
So, you're turning that up
and what if you don't like that.
00:06:18
Whereas when you're using saturation
you're actually creating
upper-harmonic content
based on stuff that's lower.
00:06:25
So, I'm taking this sort of
upper-mid part of the attack
and making that brighter
by adding harmonics to it
as opposed to just turning up
whatever harmonics are already there.
00:06:35
In this case it's all very subtle,
I could have done either job either way
so I could have used EQ on this one and
saturation on the verse kick or whatever.
00:06:43
But now let me solo up
the sample to go with this
and I'll take that in and out only because
we're not listening to the full picture
of the chorus kick drum without it.
00:07:04
Pretty subtle,
it just helps it come
forward a little bit.
00:07:07
And now here is that low-shelf,
and again, it's tiny.
00:07:10
It is 1.3 dB
at 82 Hz.
00:07:29
It just drops the kick drum a little bit
and let's it have power down below.
00:07:34
It doesn't really change how much attack
that kick drum has in the low-end
but it shifts it down,
which for me is exactly
what I'm trying to do.
00:07:42
If you remember,
back to the beginning of the video,
talking about extending
the bottom of the chorus,
part of that it's gotta be the kick drum.
00:07:48
A lot of it, as it turns out,
is the bass
but the kick drum
has got to drop as well.
00:07:53
That's it for direct processing
on the kick drum.
00:07:56
So let me go through individual
drum mics,
see what processing there is
and then we'll come back
and start looking at
all the parallel stuff.
00:08:03
Which is a much better part
of the picture actually.
00:08:05
Snare, we got a snare top,
a snare bottom
and then we've got a
'Black Beauty Tuned Up Gated' track.
00:08:13
This is like a sample
added to the snare in the solo.
00:08:18
I'll play it for you know because
we're gonna solo stuff up
but basically the solo
section we can come back to
once we got the whole
mix going and the guitar going.
00:08:26
The snare
does not change from verse to chorus.
00:08:35
That's verse, here's chorus.
00:08:43
You might be saying:
'But wait, Andrew, I hear reverb!'
And you might look
two tracks down and say:
'Snare verb and that's going.'
That's a parallel thing,
I'm using on this song
with the snare soloed
it sounds ridiculous.
00:08:58
I would never want a snare
drum to sound like that,
it's a bit unnatural.
00:09:01
As with almost everything I do
it's not meant to be reverb on the snare.
00:09:07
It's structural.
00:09:08
What it does is it makes the snare wetter
in terms of fitting into the overall
picture of the kit,
which is a roomy drum-kit.
00:09:17
I use a lot of the close mics
on kick and snare.
00:09:21
Well, on everything, really.
00:09:23
I get a lot out of them,
they get compressed to hell,
brought up in the parallel stuff.
00:09:27
So, sometimes what can happen is
you'll get this great attack
and thump and presence
but it's also dry.
00:09:35
And it no longer matches what's
going on in the sort of vibe of the song.
00:09:39
But even just in the sound of the
overheads and the sound of the room mics,
where the drum-kit feels wet
but now the kick and snare are here.
00:09:47
By adding a little bit of
this ambiance to the snare
it allows me to drop the
snare back into the room
that the rest of the kit is in
without turning it down.
And that's the really important part.
00:09:58
I can keep the kick and snare
really loud,
like crazy loud in terms of the balance
of the drum-kit.
00:10:04
But you still feel the whole kit
because they feel like they're
back in the room a little bit.
00:10:09
So that's what that reverb is about.
00:10:12
Let's have a look at processing
that's on the snare tracks
without the snare reverb.
00:10:17
So, on the snare top
I've got an EQ.
00:10:21
It's not doing much, but let's see.
00:10:23
It's obviously sucking out a ring
that's on the snare.
00:10:34
Just deadening that ring.
00:10:36
I use to use EQ3 all the
time for this sort of thing
because it has, if you hold down
shift and control,
it has the same band-pass functionality
for all of the controls,
so you can actually hear the ring
really quickly.
00:10:48
I don't pretend to be a tonmeister
and know what frequency stuff is at.
00:10:51
I hear that there's a ring,
it's in the mid-range,
I gotta find it and get rid of it,
I want something where I can
solo up the band really quickly.
00:10:59
So even though there are lots of EQs
that you solo and turn it into a band-bass
I want one that does it with a keystroke.
00:11:05
I don't wanna be mousing around,
looking for the little icon
or anything like that.
00:11:10
So that's what this is doing.
00:11:11
I could have done it with a de-esser,
I could have done it with any EQ.
00:11:14
But that's exactly what this is doing,
just deadening the ring on the snare top.
00:11:18
And then let me go ahead
and solo up the snare bottom again
and let's look at the processing
that's on the snare Aux.
00:11:23
So that's getting the snare top,
the snare bottom
and that Black Beauty
sample that's later in the song,
which we're not gonna worry about yet.
00:11:30
Surprise, surprise.
Another Scheps Omni Channel.
00:11:33
It's a very fine plug-in.
You can see that I'm only distorting.
00:11:37
This time I'm using the heavy saturation.
00:11:40
Just quickly, odd harmonic, even harmonic,
those are exactly what they say.
00:11:45
The sort of gain structure
of those harmonics
is tweaked to where I want them to be
but that's what it's doing.
00:11:51
It adds odd harmonics or even harmonics.
00:11:53
'Heavy',
some people think it's just:
'Oh that's odd and even'.
00:11:57
It isn't,
it's a totally different circuit
for the lack of another word.
00:12:01
It's a clipper.
00:12:02
But it's a two-stage clipper.
00:12:04
It just has a different knee to it
than a lot of other clipper
and it's just a sound that I like.
00:12:09
I'm using this to clip
and then I'm adding high-shelf
and I'm adding some mid-range,
rather at 1 kHz,
so I'm trying to get a little bit
of crack back on to the snare.
00:12:20
Which is interesting for me,
I don't usually
EQ kick and snare at around 1 kHz
but that is a very popular
frequency for the actual crack
of the snare drum. So we'll
listen to the saturation first,
it's up high,
this is gonna make a big difference.
00:12:45
You can hear it completely
changes the attack of the drum.
00:12:48
Instead of having this sort
of crack and then the ring
the crack has its own decay to it now.
00:12:55
Which I really like.
And again, that's part of
making the drum not feel as dry.
00:13:01
Here it is again.
00:13:14
To me it just feels like glue between
the attack and the ring of the snare drum.
00:13:20
Which are two very different sounds,
the sound of the stick
hitting the drum itself
and then the sound of the drum ringing.
00:13:27
But it's gotta be all one sound
and that saturation really helps
me feel like they're married together.
00:13:34
Then the EQ, I'm not gonna
bother with the bands individually,
we'll just bypass that top and the crack
and we'll see what's going on.
00:13:41
Again, these would have been done
in context, so not in solo.
This just would have been
probably pretty late in the mix process.
00:13:49
Hearing the drums with everything in
and just feeling like
I'm starting to lose
the snare a little bit,
so make it a little brighter and
then much later in the mix process
would be when I'm trying to get a tiny bit
more crack back on
because that's when the mix is
kind of as loud as it's ever gonna be
and that's when that stuff
starts to get suck back out.
00:14:20
Pretty obvious, really.
00:14:21
With it bypassed it makes me sad.
00:14:24
It's all you need to know.
00:14:25
And that's it, that's all the processing
on the snare drum, other than
this.
00:14:31
Smack Attack, it is one of the many
transient designer type plug-ins.
00:14:37
That gives you a knob for the attack
and a knob for the sustain.
00:14:41
This knob for the sustain
is probably less about the actual
sustain of the drum
and more about again
making it sound wetter.
00:14:50
But also, this is gonna add
sustain to the attack of the drum,
which is what that saturation was doing.
00:14:56
So, we'll have a listen to that.
00:15:14
It's longer and the attack
has a grainy decay to it
that ties it into all the bleed.
00:15:21
And I actually really like the bleed
on the snare track.
00:15:25
The hi-hat is loud but it's not
crazy loud. I don't feel as though
it's louder than the snare drum,
which does happen sometimes.
00:15:33
So, I'm not worried at all about the fact
that doing something like this
is gonna bring up that bleed.
00:15:39
That's what helps glue it into the track.
00:15:41
Bleed between microphones,
whether they're on the same instrument
or different instrument
can be the exact bit of glue
that you really want.
00:15:49
One thing that I often say when
I'm teaching a general mixing class is:
'Don't go through your tracks
at the beginning of the mix
and clean them up!'
You're going to take
stuff out that you want.
00:16:02
You might want the bleed of the
guitar amp into the overhead mics.
00:16:07
You might not,
but until you got the mix going
you don't know how that
bleed affects the guitar sound
and what happens is
you're looking at a drum track
and you're only thinking about the drums,
and you decide:
'Man, he's not playing for 8 bars,
I'm gonna clean that up.'
It could be a mistake,
I always leave that stuff till later.
00:16:25
Obviously in the track,
if I'm getting way too much
hi-hat one of the places to look,
especially because I don't
have a separate hi-hat track at all,
is the snare track.
00:16:34
But until it becomes a problem
I don't go looking for it.
00:16:38
Really quickly we'll just
have a look at the snare
so we don't have to come back later.
00:16:42
So, in the solo section,
what I should do really
is play you the drums.
00:16:54
It's a little bit like a combination
of the verse and the chorus pattern.
00:16:57
We finally got cymbals with
it but it's a very simple thing
and you can hear that this
sample is just a gated reverb.
00:17:09
I believe in the rough mix it
was actually pretty loud too.
00:17:12
It's cool but I decided to use it
much quieter so it's a structural thing.
00:17:17
Again, the snare just spreads out,
goes stereo,
it does a little bit more
and is a little bit longer
but you're not supposed to be
listening to the snare drum there.
00:17:26
So, if the snare changes drastically,
it's a problem.
00:17:29
We'll listen in context
but I don't wanna unsolo things now,
that's just too much
information too quick.
00:17:35
But that's what that snare is doing.
00:17:36
Otherwise we're looking at just
those other tracks for kick and snare.
00:17:40
The rest of the kit,
really straight ahead.
00:17:43
So, while we're on the snare,
I'll show you one of the
parallel things going on
which is the snare reverb,
which I muted earlier.
00:17:49
This is straight out of my template.
00:17:50
I'm sure I didn't tweak anything
except this gate threshold.
00:17:55
I've got a gate before the reverb
because I only want the very attack
of the snare getting in there.
00:18:00
This is a place where
I don't want hi-hat bleed.
00:18:03
I'm not trying to put reverb on the hi-hat.
00:18:05
This is just a really simple gate.
00:18:13
So on some drum recordings
you're not gonna have as
much of a difference in level
between the snare attack and the
bleed of everything else getting in,
but you can always find a level
where you'll get 90% of your snare hits
into this reverb.
00:18:25
And the quieter ones that
don't necessarily make it in,
if you're having trouble
cutting the rest of the bleed out,
they were quieter anyway
and no one is gonna miss it.
00:18:33
That's what that does.
00:18:35
It just gets the snare attack
and it sends it in to this reverb.
00:18:38
It's just an ambiance.
00:18:40
It's one of the stock plug-ins
that comes with Pro Tools.
00:18:42
It's nothing really special going on.
00:18:45
It's short, it's under 1 second.
00:18:47
And it's really meant
to feel like a room track.
00:18:51
It's a way of taking this incredibly close
snare drum sound
but making it sound like somehow you
got it from a mic that was 6 feet away.
00:19:00
Here's with and without.
00:19:15
To me it's almost a magical thing,
the snare drum doesn't
go up or down in level
but it moves back
and feels like it's part of the
drum-kit as it's supposed to.
00:19:25
Without the reverb it
feels like it's right here
and the rest of the kit is here in that
Bonhamy room that you want to be in.
00:19:31
So, that's what that's for.
00:19:33
Most of the time
I will use this just in choruses,
just in loud parts of songs
because structurally,
that word again,
I'm trying to make the drum-kit keep
up with everything else that happened.
00:19:45
On this particular song I needed to push
that snare drum back
once I've made it come very far forward
with the processing and
the parallel compression.
00:19:55
Let's move on to the overheads, shall we?
Very exciting.
Overhead top, overhead side.
00:20:01
So, this would be Glyn Johns
miking technique,
which would be very appropriate
for a Bonhamy drum sound
because Glyn Johns is
one of the guys who recorded
many of Led Zepellin
albums with John Bonham.
00:20:13
He and his brother Andy, look them up
if you don't know them.
00:20:16
Legends.
00:20:17
The way that the mic setup is done
is you get one overhead mic,
which is literally over
the center of the kit,
usually directly over the snare drum,
but it doesn't have to be.
00:20:26
And then one on the side of the kit,
almost always on the
floor tom side of the kit.
00:20:31
And then this is one of those geeky times
when you actually measure the distance
because you don't want the
snare to start shifting
if you decide to pan this overheads.
00:20:41
You measure the distance from the center
of the snare drum to the two microphones.
00:20:45
It's not a natural sounding
picture of the kit, at all.
00:20:48
And I've tried so many times
to record drums like this
and it's only in the last year
I started having success with it.
00:20:55
And I think I've just started
treating the microphones differently.
00:20:59
I'm not trying to get a
bit stereo picture of the kit.
00:21:02
In this particular case
you can see that I'm panning the top mic
a little bit to the left
and I'm leaving the side mic hard right.
00:21:11
Let's have a listen to what
they sound like individually.
00:21:20
Nothing but cymbals.
And here's the side.
00:21:29
They're not that different to be honest.
00:21:32
But let's listen to the tom
fill going into the chorus
and see what we get in terms of the toms.
00:21:39
Let me go back to the top just so
we're listening in the same order.
00:21:50
You can hear they're
very different with the toms.
00:21:53
This is why, when you put them together...
00:22:00
You don't get a natural stereo picture
but you do get a wide picture
even with that top mic only split off
29 to the left.
00:22:08
It's a slightly odd micing technique.
00:22:11
It obviously works.
00:22:12
Who doesn't love Led Zepellin?
And on this particular mix I just decided
to really honor the top side thing
because when I split them out more
it just started sounding crazy.
00:22:21
But I did manage to get
a good amount of spread.
00:22:24
On the overhead Aux
I'm doing a little bit of processing
and interestingly there's one
bit of processing which I tried
and then got rid of.
00:22:32
And I just left the plug-in in the session
because I thought
maybe I'd come back to it.
00:22:36
This was a high-pass filter
on the kick drum,
and this is something
I wouldn't normally do
because I don't need lots of
low-end information out of my overheads,
especially
with how much cymbals is going on in the
pattern in the verses and things like that.
00:22:50
I let the overheads be
drum-kit and cymbals.
00:22:54
They don't need to be kick drum.
00:22:55
On this particular song,
because of the way the drums were sounding,
this got left out.
00:23:01
So I'll play it to you
with this and then without
and you'll hear the low-end of the
kick come back in.
00:23:16
Normally that low-end is
something I would wanna control
but obviously in context
I felt like the drums needed
a little extra 'oomph'.
00:23:24
There was some 'oomph' that I'd taken out.
00:23:26
The other process in here
is a plug-in that is only
active in the verses.
00:23:32
This is something I do a lot.
00:23:34
I do it in the Omni channel
but I also do it in this EQ
because I'm really used to do it in here.
00:23:39
This is almost -10 dB at 3 kHz.
00:23:42
So this is again, hold down Shift and Ctrl,
sweep the frequency,
find the really nasty part of the cymbals,
pull them out.
00:23:48
I'll play you with and
without in the verse
but then, more importantly,
I'm gonna play you the chorus.
00:23:53
And I'll tell you why in a second.
00:24:16
I think it should be pretty
obvious why it's in there.
00:24:19
Normally that EQ would just be on
all the way through the song.
00:24:22
But if you remember there
aren't really any cymbals in the chorus.
00:24:26
So, here's what it sounds like
not EQed and then I'm gonna switch it in
and what you'll hear
is a little bit of the air
just gets sucked out of the room
and there's no reason
to do it in the chorus.
00:24:52
It's more than a little,
it actually kind of kills the snare drum,
all that cool rattle from
the snares themselves
gets sucked out.
00:25:00
It's just automated to
bypass in the choruses.
00:25:03
And that's it for overheads.
00:25:05
Then,
very similar processing going on for the
two pairs of room mics.
00:25:11
We've got close rooms
and they're labeled Close Room Ride
and Close Room Hat.
00:25:18
Basically that's which
side of the kit they're on,
helping me with the panning.
00:25:22
There's also a helpful note.
00:25:23
Hold on, let me make the track bigger.
We can all read this together.
00:25:27
'Producer liked room mics
out of phase with each other'.
00:25:30
That's telling me
that the far room and the close room
wanna be flipped in polarity
with respect with each other
but it doesn't say which way
they should be with the kit.
00:25:40
Because it's got the exact same
thing going on in the
comments of the far room
and the close room.
00:25:47
So, that means one
of them should be flipped
I just had to mess around
and figure out which.
00:25:52
The first plug-in here on the close room
is a Trim plug-in
with the phase flipped,
no level there's nothing else going on.
00:26:01
Then there's an EQ which
is doing a very similar thing.
00:26:04
So what I'm gonna do
is play you close rooms
with and without that EQ
and that way you can hear
the cymbals getting sucked out.
00:26:11
Then I'll go through the far rooms and
then we'll listen to the phase relationship
between the two sets of room mics
then we'll listen to the
phase relationship between
the rooms as a whole and the kit.
00:26:36
Very similar to what
it's going on the overheads.
00:26:38
But again, in the chorus,
it's automated out.
00:26:53
Because if I'd left it in you can hear
it just sucks air out of the room.
00:26:56
It's gonna be exactly
the same thing down here
with the far room.
00:27:02
Here's the verse.
00:27:04
So this EQ also adds
a little bit of low-end
but again, only in the verse.
00:27:23
Really straight ahead. Here it is
in the chorus if I had left the EQ in.
00:27:27
Here's it without first.
00:27:42
Why would you leave that in?
So, game time decision
but it just became something
that obviously was a big deal to me
to change between the verse and the chorus
because the patterns change so much.
00:27:53
Now we're gonna solo up the rooms together
and I'll bypass
this Trim plug-in so we see what happens
when the close room
is flipped back to the
polarity it was recorded in.
00:28:15
Subtle but you can really hear the low mids
glue themselves together
when it's flipped.
00:28:20
I'm gonna do the same thing in
the verse so you can hear that.
00:28:35
It's interesting because it's not where,
usually what happens,
especially with cymbals,
when you flip the polarity
between two things
that have got cymbal bleed in
you really hear comb-filtering
in the cymbals change.
00:28:46
It's not necessarily
better one way or the other
but it's very different.
00:28:50
In this case it's not that different
but the kick drum
changes drastically to me.
00:28:55
There you go.
Now, in the rest of the kit
the easy way to do this is,
let me copy this guy down here
and I'll bypass.
So this is the way the drums are,
as used in the mix.
And let me go ahead and solo up my
VCA again.
00:29:21
So now I'm gonna play it again for you
but this time with the far room flipped
and the close room as recorded.
00:29:37
And I'll flip one more time.
00:29:57
So, in some ways, this sounds better,
whatever that means
but the snare is jumping out to me.
00:30:04
It sounds unnatural.
00:30:06
Like the drums are bigger
but I don't really like the way
they're sitting as a drum-kit.
00:30:10
So, that would be
why I decided that these are
the ones that should be flipped.
00:30:16
The only other track
here is this Kit Phaser.
00:30:20
This is later in the song.
That's of those big epic drum fills.
00:30:28
Who doesn't like phased drums?
Especially if you're
doing the Bonhamy thing,
you can sit on and say:
'I'm Jimmy Page,
I'm gonna phase the drums!'
Do it. Always do it.
00:30:39
That mixed in with the fill
gives the full sound of that drum fill.
00:30:43
You haven't heard this fill before,
this is one going into the guitar solo.
00:30:47
But I'll just play you with
and without the phaser.
00:30:56
A very fine drum fill
but...
00:31:05
Just that little bit of movement
underneath makes it more exciting.
00:31:08
And you might not even
really notice it in the track
but it definitely will make you feel
different as you head into the solo.
00:31:16
One tiny bit of processing left
and then we're on to the parallel stuff.
00:31:21
Down here on the drum-kit Aux
there are actually a couple of plug-ins.
00:31:26
Which is not that unusual for me
but again, like you've seen
with a lot of the other tracks,
I don't do a ton of
processing directly on here.
00:31:32
Scheps Omni Channel, one more time.
00:31:34
There's a little bit of
saturation going on,
odd harmonics again,
a tiny bit of presence.
00:31:40
There is a tiny bit of high-shelf,
0.3 at 8 kHz.
00:31:45
That's just the default frequency.
00:31:47
And I believe all the rest
of this are gonna be zero.
00:31:50
So it's a tiny bit of top-end
and then I'm actually
doing some compression.
00:31:55
Which is interesting.
00:31:57
The mix here is at 100%
but the threshold is only
turned down a little bit.
00:32:01
So the way this compressor works is,
you turn the threshold down if
you want it to compress more.
00:32:07
You don't have Input and Output.
Well you do have an output control
but because it's part of the
processing going through
and you can reorder the process,
it doesn't know where
it's gonna be all the time
so I thought that the best way
to handle this would be threshold
so that your audio input
always stays the same
and then you do have an
Output control if you want to
but there is auto make-up gain within it.
00:32:29
A little bit of optical compression,
which would be LA-2A ish,
something slow and mushy
but it's in crazy mode,
which I'm not gonna go too
far into depth in this plug-in,
in VCA compression, a good example
of that would be an SSL compressor
and there's an infinity to 1 setting,
which is basically hardcore limiting.
00:32:48
But it's got a really special sound to it.
00:32:50
Then in FET limiting, which would be
an 1176, for instance,
I thought that the all-buttons in
would be a great thing to have,
that non-linear crunchy mode
so that's kind of baked into this
infinity to 1, our version of it.
00:33:04
And then we just
decided to come up with like:
'What about if an optical one
went into crazy non-linear mode?'
That's what this is,
it grabs a lot more
then it would but it's not like just
having an optical limiter.
00:33:18
I'll play you with and without
the tiny bit of saturation
and tiny bit of compression
then we move on to the last plug-in
before the parallel stuff.
00:33:41
The cymbals get a little bit grainier,
out of context
it's very hard to hear,
in context it's gonna be very subtle
bit it will just make the drums feel
a little thicker.
00:33:51
Here is the tiny tiny bit of high-shelf.
00:34:10
Tiny bit of EQ
soloed like this,
I actually like the drums without it.
00:34:15
But that's not the point, is it?
Obviously other things are
eating up some of that top-end
so I felt they needed it.
00:34:22
And here's the compressor.
00:34:43
A little bit of pumping,
a little bit of glue.
00:34:46
It just pushes the kick and snare
back into the drum-kit.
00:34:49
So, you can see there
are 4 or 5 different things
that are doing
that job for the snare
and they all do a little bit of it.
00:34:55
Take any one away and the snare
starts to get dry and separate.
00:34:59
All these things together are really
helping glue the drum-kit together.
00:35:02
So,
I'll bypass all of them at the same time
so you can hear kind
of the overall processing.
00:35:30
Interestingly
there's no low-end EQ
anywhere in this plug-in
but the kick kind of gets the
most benefit from the plug-in.
00:35:40
So, this is why it's really
important to work in context,
first of all,
just the whole drum-kit
as opposed to always soloing up
individual drum mics
but then really
dropping the drums into the mix
and doing this because
this compression is probably
what's giving me that
extra 'oomph' on the kick.
00:35:58
In context it would make it come out more.
00:36:01
As opposed to
adding a bunch of low-end EQ
which would do kind of the same job
when you are in solo
but we do it in a
very different way
when you drop it
into the rest of the mix.
00:36:13
So, that's what's going on there.
We got one more plug-in on this track.
00:36:16
Soothe, a very fine plug-in.
00:36:19
It's funny, I go in waves on this,
like, I'd use it a lot
and then I kind of forget about it.
00:36:23
It's just a way to tame
high frequency cymbal stuff.
00:36:27
And this particular song was
really difficult with the cymbals
because you needed the energy,
you've got to have
big crashes going all the
way through the verses.
00:36:36
But you cannot have that
top-end taking your head off.
00:36:39
It's kind of a dark track, in a way.
00:36:42
It was to have all that cymbal energy
but without having a
bunch of harsh high-end
so here's with and without.
00:37:00
You can hear, when it's on its own
it's almost a little unnatural sounding
because it's sucking things
sort of as they come up.
00:37:07
The cymbals sound more
natural and open without it.
00:37:10
But in the track it was just crazy.
00:37:13
I would imagine this is the default curve.
00:37:15
I almost never touch this and
I just do the depth control and that's it.
00:37:19
I haven't gotten so deep inside this one,
I'm really that great at tweaking.
00:37:23
But it works really well
just when something is harsh
but it's not just something you can
notch out at a particular frequency.
00:37:32
Because either
that doesn't take care of it because it's
lots and lots of different frequencies
or because it's happening dynamically
and if you just suck that out
whenever it isn't really harsh
your sucking all the air out.
00:37:45
So, it's a dynamic EQ
in a way, I guess,
but it's very granular and really gets
into the details of the upper-mids
which I don't wanna do.
00:37:54
I turn one knob, it sounds better, done.
00:37:58
So,
that is the drum-kit except
for all the parallel stuff,
of which there is a ton.
00:38:05
The easy things first.
00:38:08
Easy thing is the Kick Snare Crush.
00:38:11
This is a parallel
compressor just for kicks and snares.
00:38:17
It is for all kicks and snares
and it's one compressor.
00:38:22
Both the Verse Kick, Chorus Kick
and the snare all the way through
are being sent to the same compressor.
00:38:28
It's off of this send here
which is at zero,
post-fader, follow main pan
as are almost all of
the sends in my session.
00:38:37
So it's just picking up a copy
of whatever I've made
that thing sound like,
sending it off to the compressor.
00:38:43
And we come down here
to the Kick Snare Crush.
00:38:47
I'm very meticulous about naming busses.
00:38:49
Name your busses.
00:38:50
If you don't already name your busses
start naming your busses.
00:38:53
There's nothing worse than:
'What's going at bus 21 and 22?'
Name it.
00:38:59
Kick Snare Crush.
00:39:00
It's a really simple chain,
it's a dbx 160 VU.
00:39:04
It's what I used to use on hardware.
00:39:06
It's what I use in the software.
00:39:07
The only thing to take note of,
which doesn't matter on this song,
because these are all mono tracks,
except for that sample added in the solo,
it's a multi-mono compressor.
00:39:17
It's gonna make much of difference here.
00:39:20
I like multi-mono
compressors for the most part
on everything
because I use so much
parallel compression that's stereo,
and multiple instruments are going in,
if something weird is
happening on the left side
that's way up above the threshold
for a second on that parallel process
I don't want the right
side to get pulled down.
00:39:41
Because to me that's gonna start
really messing with the stereo image
so I let the left side
take care of itself
and let the right
side take care of itself.
00:39:48
With some compressor plug-ins,
and I don't know for
a fact about this one,
it also can change not only
what's going to the detector circuit,
because normally what would happen is,
on a stereo compressor,
there's a mono detector,
take the left and right, sum them,
turn them down 6 dB,
feed them into the compressor,
that's what the threshold
is actually looking at.
00:40:08
So it's looking at a mono sum
but it can also change time constants
when you start strapping
compressors mono or stereo.
00:40:16
This particular one,
it's just two of them
sharing the detector circuit,
as far as I know.
00:40:21
But I just don't want the left side
to affect the right.
00:40:24
This particular mix,
it wouldn't make a difference,
it's all mono going in anyway.
00:40:28
We'll look at how much it's compressing,
even though that's something I never do
and then I'll take it out.
00:40:33
You're gonna notice
there's a lot of level coming.
00:40:36
Though I would be surprised if
we're that far above the threshold.
00:40:40
So, what's happening is,
you're getting a big level boost.
00:40:44
But mostly what you're getting
is just the uncompressed kick drum.
00:40:48
And you're especially getting
the attack of the kick and snare
because dbx 160s have a slow attack.
00:40:55
I don't know what the time is,
it's fixed, you can't touch it.
00:40:58
But it is just slow
enough that is great on drums
to give you a nice transient.
00:41:20
One of the things,
I'm hearing but it also really points out
how hard it is to work with things soloed,
when I mute this,
the level of the dry kick
and snare go down quite a bit
but the level of the snare
reverb doesn't change
because it's being sent
from the snare before it gets to this.
00:41:37
So I'm gonna go ahead
and mute that reverb
while we listen to this.
00:41:41
Because otherwise you
just hear it get really wet.
00:42:06
Obviously the level changes quite a bit.
00:42:08
If you've got a volume knob in easy reach
you can level match that as I'm switching.
00:42:13
The attack
totally changes for the kick and snare.
00:42:16
And the amount of cymbal bleed changes.
00:42:18
Let me go to the
chorus just because
you can really hear more easily
what's going on with the kick and snare
because there are no cymbals.
00:42:25
Here's a very specific thing to listen to.
00:42:27
The snares on the snare drum
are just ringing the whole time.
00:42:32
What happens when I pop this in,
you get tons more attack
on the kick and snare
but those snares don't really come up
because that's when the
compressor is kicked in
so it holds them down
in the parallel process.
00:42:46
So we get all the benefit of the attack
but we're not just bringing up the noise.
00:42:51
That's why I wanted to play this,
because in the verse,
you hear those cymbals coming up
and you feel like
it's really not much
different than just turning it up
but it really is. So listen to
all that snare rattle going on.
00:43:14
So the attack comes up ten times more
than that sustained snare rattle.
00:43:19
So it really is changing
the character of the kick and snare.
00:43:24
I love the way this thing sounds.
00:43:25
I've used it on every mix since long
before I was even in the box.
00:43:29
One of those sitting in a rack,
kick and snare, all day.
00:43:32
The other parallel things,
I'm gonna go ahead and
turn the snare reverb on,
are on the entire drum-kit.
00:43:40
They're all being sent to
from the drum-kit Aux.
00:43:44
They're post fader,
they're follow main pan
and what that does is it picks up
a copy of the drum-kit,
sends them off to stereo things.
00:43:52
I'm gonna go in a slightly odd order
because I'll go in the order
that I added this to template.
00:43:58
The first Drum Crush that I had
in my template was called,
surprisingly,
Drum Crush.
00:44:05
And we come down here,
find the Drum Crush.
00:44:08
It's a Fairchild.
00:44:09
Because Fairchilds are cool
and even though I do own
kind of a ridiculous amount of gear
I never owned a Fairchild.
I decided to own a house instead.
00:44:18
Because that's kind of your choice
when you're buying Fairchilds.
00:44:21
But I love the feel of them on drums
and very early on,
when I was starting to mix,
I would put a Fairchild
across the drum-kit,
on some songs it was really cool
but there were a lot of times,
when it was just too much.
Inappropriate.
00:44:36
They're not that tweakable,
you've got
5 time constants usually.
00:44:42
This has six,
but basically one and two are usable
in normal musical contexts
and three through 6 are made for
vinyl mastering.
00:44:51
That's what they're for.
00:44:53
Five on the original hardware,
the release time
is something like 2 minutes.
00:44:57
Because what it's meant for is,
you build up to the climax
of a classical piece of music
and then you don't want
it to pump as it let's go,
so for the rest of that movement
it will actually let got
the compression very slowly.
00:45:11
This is because when you're cutting vinyl,
back in the day,
computers were not controlling
the distance between the grooves,
so as something got really
loud you had to contain the level
and you'd be manually increasing
the distance between the grooves.
00:45:25
But you wouldn't wanna
waste space on a record
so as the compressor is releasing
you could also start
tightening up the grooves.
00:45:32
That's what the Farichild is built for.
00:45:34
One and two much more musical,
really cool for drums,
never bought one.
00:45:38
What I'm gonna do
is I'm going to mute
all of the other guys.
00:45:43
So I'm gonna mute this guy,
I'm gonna mute this guy
and I'll mute this guy.
00:45:49
And also just to make it really
easy to hear this compressor,
I'm gonna go ahead and
mute the Kick Snare Crush.
00:45:55
it's a little unfair because now the
drum-kit doesn't sound like the drum-kit.
00:45:58
But the returns of the Kick Snare Crush,
you can see, go straight off to my Mixbus.
00:46:03
So they're not getting
sent to the Fairchild.
00:46:05
So, I'll just take them out.
00:46:07
You'll hear more about what
the compressor is doing
but less about what the drum-kit
ended up sounding like.
00:46:12
But we'll A/B all these things
once we've gone through them individually.
00:46:16
So here's a little bit of the Verse,
with and without.
00:46:27
And again,
I've gotta mute that snare reverb.
00:46:30
It's part of the snare sound
but it's out of context so it's
completely the wrong level.
00:46:36
Let's try that again,
just the Drum Crush.
00:46:53
It does what every good
parallel compressor does,
as well as adding a bunch of level.
00:46:57
So, these things are very
hard to listen to critically
but you don't really wanna spend too much
time listening critically
because the whole point of,
especially on drums,
because of the transients
and you really get into
the attack and release times
and the time constants
within the compressors.
00:47:15
They change the feel of the drums
as much as they change
the sonics of the drums.
00:47:20
This one feels really good to me.
00:47:24
I will play it again,
taking it in and out
and you can try and
maybe adjust your levels
as you're listening back to get
a better feel for the feel of it
but it is gonna add a bunch of level
and that's just gonna be the case
as we go through all my parallel stuff.
00:47:38
Because by definition that's what it does,
it adds level.
00:47:54
To my ears what it's doing is it
obviously accentuates the
kick and snare attack
but it really brings up the extra
noise of the kit and the cymbals
and starts to make it
sound like all one drum kit.
00:48:06
So let me move a little bit
quicker through the rest of this,
then we can hear them all together.
00:48:11
The next one is Fatso.
00:48:13
The Fatso was something that I had used
in hardware on a mix, 99 Problems.
00:48:21
And when I had to make a new chain
for the drums
I just thought I didn't wanna go
through all my compressor plug-ins.
00:48:28
Because, here, I'll show you,
because it's kind of funny.
00:48:32
If I had to go through and try
every single one of these plug-ins
it would take a really long time
and I don't wanna do that.
00:48:40
I thought: 'Well, I know,
I've used this before, I'll use it.'
So I'd never used
the plug-in version of it,
which is why I used the Fatso Jr,
because the Fatso Senior
had all these other controls
I didn't even know what they were.
00:48:52
And I don't wanna be presented
with too much information.
00:48:55
And I started going through
presets till I got something
that sounded pretty cool in parallel
then I just started tweaking things.
00:49:02
One of the reasons I said
I generally like
dual mono compressors for
parallel stuff
is because this one,
in the preset, was linked.
00:49:12
And that was pointed out
to me years ago and like:
'Oh, well, it must
sound better unlinked.'
And actually
I'd spent time tweaking it linked
and when I unlinked it
it didn't sound as good
and the last thing in world
I'm gonna do is re-tweak something
to try and fit in with
some philosophy of mine.
00:49:31
Because the philosophies are always just
trying to find ways to say things
that have nothing to do with words
and that's the origin of the
Language is a Virus quote,
which is an awesome thing,
it's also a very good
Laurie Anderson song.
00:49:45
But what it means is that
these words are constructs
and the words have
ideas that are tied to them
and so they make you think certain things
but there's no way to put into words
accurately what you hear.
00:49:59
So,
that's another one of my favorite phrases,
talking about music is like
dancing about architecture.
00:50:05
It's just doesn't mean anything to say:
'I always like the sound of this'.
00:50:10
Because you won't
always like the sound of it
and you won't be able to explain why.
00:50:13
The cool part is you
don't have to explain why.
00:50:16
You just have to really believe that
you like it better one way than the other.
00:50:20
This is better linked.
00:50:21
Anyway, let's have a listen to it.
00:50:24
Here is the verse
with the Fatso only.
00:50:40
Same sort of thing as the Drum Crush.
00:50:42
A different sound to it.
00:50:45
Just for fun
I will do the Drum Crush
and the Fatso together now.
00:50:48
The level is gonna change a lot
but here's with.
00:51:08
Pretty drastic.
00:51:09
Again, a big level difference,
but there you go.
00:51:12
That's two stereo parallel compressors
across the entire drum-kit.
00:51:17
Then the third one
was one that I built
for a very specific
reason for a record,
which I'm not gonna get too far into
but I was looking for something
to really bring out the
detail on the drum-kit
that have been played very quietly.
00:51:29
And I was looking for a compressor
that would really pick-up
the detail of the drums.
00:51:34
So it wanted to be something
kind of non-linear
and I tried the 1176 with all-buttons in.
00:51:39
And it just wasn't right and I thought:
'What about the Devil-Loc?'
Because that's something that just
absolutely destroys stuff
but what would happen if I didn't give it
a whole lot of level.
00:51:51
So, the send to this one is at -33.9.
00:51:55
You don't often send only the
tiniest bit of level into a Devil-Loc
but it actually sounds really good.
00:52:03
Here is with and without the Devil-Loc.
00:52:07
Which is just set on stun, basically.
00:52:11
Yeah, not a whole lot,
that's crazy about this.
00:52:16
Just sending that tiny bit of level.
00:52:18
If was sending it at the
full-level of the drum-kit,
like I am to the Fatso or the Fairchild
it would absolutely destroy it,
this would basically be a
fader full of white noise.
00:52:26
But with this it's gonna
act a lot more like
a regular parallel compressor.
00:52:30
So here you go.
00:52:51
You can hear,
it's more distorted than the other two,
it adds some grain to the cymbals.
00:52:56
Which may be a little
bit much on its own
but with the other guys, so now...
00:53:01
Might as well just do all three
of these together, right?
We're obviously picking up
tons of level with all three
but it just sounds like a much more
exciting drum-kit to me.
00:53:34
It just feels like the drummer
was laying into it and having more fun.
00:53:40
Pushing things forward,
the cymbals get grittier
and that's all good, I like that a lot.
00:53:46
The next thing is even more
odd then the Devil-Loc with
the tiny bit of level going in
and this is something I built years ago
to make drums longer.
00:53:58
I was trying to find a way to create
a room around the drums
but not use reverb,
because I'm not good at reverb.
00:54:04
And it just sounded really unnatural,
every single time I tried to add
a room sound to the drum-kit.
00:54:10
And so I built
some distortion thing.
00:54:14
This is what I will do
when I'm looking for
a new parallel chain.
00:54:19
I can really go down into the
weeds and plug-ins I don't use.
00:54:22
This may be the only time I ever used
the Trash 2 plug-in.
00:54:25
It's awesome
but it's just so deep,
I don't have the time most of the time,
I'm trying to do something really specific
and I know how to do it
so I won't just go mess around
with the multi-band clipper
that I've got with Trash 2.
00:54:38
But in this particular case
I knew I was gonna spend a lot of
time building something
that I was gonna use over and over again.
00:54:45
So, I could take the time,
I could use plug-ins
I don't know that well
because I only have to figure it
out long enough to make the chain
and then I never look at it again.
00:54:53
The only time I ever open this plug-ins
is when I'm doing videos.
00:54:57
There's some Trash
with Nasty Boy.
00:55:00
I went through all of these until
some of them sounded pretty cool
and then I started getting rid of top-end,
thinking I could do it all in here
and then I realized:
'Well, I don't know that EQ well enough,
so let me just put an EQ and
get rid of all of the mid-range.'
I felt that would be good.
00:55:19
Every once in a while
in a mix I'll come in here
and also high-pass the output of this,
if the kick drum is getting too crazy.
00:55:25
This song,
it's all about the kick drum being crazy.
00:55:29
This is the Drums Dirt.
00:55:31
Normally this is something
I would only use in the choruses.
00:55:34
Only in the loud parts of a song.
00:55:36
On this song,
like with the snare reverb it became
a part of the drum sound.
00:55:41
The drums change so drastically between
the verse and the chorus,
I don't to help them do that,
it's just that little bit
of EQ that automates
and that's pretty much it.
00:55:51
But here is with and without Drums Dirt.
00:56:16
You can hear on its own. It's nasty.
00:56:19
Thus, Nasty Boy.
00:56:21
But that's OK because we're hearing it
out of the context even
just within the drum-kit.
00:56:26
So let me put the Devil-Loc,
Drum Crush and Fatso back in
which is gonna bring up
the cleaner
parallel compressed drums
but Devil-Loc will still be the same
relative level to the drum-kit
and you'll hear that it
just adds this kind of power
to specially the low-end.
00:56:44
But it really to me just adds muscle
to the drummer.
00:57:07
I'm just gonna play it one more time,
listen to the length of the kick drum,
it's starting to come back to those
kick drum tracks
before I sucked the low-mids out.
00:57:17
But it's doing it in this really
powerful deep way
and not in that ringing kind of
tuned up 808 way that it was doing
on the kick tracks themselves.
00:57:43
I love that.
00:57:44
Again, this mix
has more of it than usual
and it has it all the way through.
00:57:50
It's special case.
00:57:51
Normally, in my template, I think
this defaults to -17
which with this amount
of distortion is actually quite a bit.
00:57:58
So actually, just o you can hear that,
let me turn it down to -17.
00:58:01
I'm gonna do something I do quite a bit,
just leave myself a note
what level it was, even though
I'll be able to use 'Undo'.
00:58:07
But I believe -17.1
is my template level.
00:58:12
Just a random thing
but that's where it landed.
00:58:26
And here's back up to where I have it.
00:58:41
So, there you go.
00:58:43
The last thing on this is there is
actually a reverb on the drums.
00:58:48
This is something it was in
my template for a little while,
I actually switched
to a different reverb,
I don't use it very often.
00:58:54
But this reverb has
something specific on it.
00:58:58
So this is Seventh Heaven
from LiquidSonics.
00:59:00
It is a Bricasti clone.
00:59:03
What it's got, which is interesting,
is this very low
frequency reverb slider.
00:59:08
This will completely stereorize
the low-end of the reverb.
00:59:13
First I'll just play with
and without the reverb
and then I'll play with and
without this low frequency thing.
00:59:38
It's a bit subtle
and also,
let me put the snare reverb back in
just so we're actually hearing
our drum-kit the way it's supposed to be.
00:59:44
I'll do this again, you're not gonna notice
a gigantic difference.
00:59:47
In context though
it does help add a little
bit of ambiance back
that's getting sucked out by the guitars.
01:00:13
It's a lot more about that
low end reverb than without it.
01:00:16
So, just real quickly,
let me take this out.
01:00:38
You can hear that low-end
just start to spread a little bit.
01:00:41
In headphones it can
actually be kind of annoying
or really cool but it's not subtle.
01:00:46
If you use this plug-in
definitely check that out,
it's a really cool feature to have.
01:00:51
Just so you can hear
the drum-kit before we start adding
more stuff to it again.
01:00:55
This is with everything back in,
including the Kick Snare Crush,
Snare Reverb.
01:00:59
And just to remind you,
we've got a Fairchild on the Drum Crush,
we've got a Fatso on the Fatso,
because I'm cryptic that way.
01:01:05
We've got a Devil-Loc on the Devil-Loc
because, again, cryptic.
01:01:09
We've got a Trash 2
on the Drums Dirt
and we've got a little bit of
reverb on the Drums Reverb.
01:01:26
And a little bit of the chorus' drums.
01:01:39
Et Voilà! Drum-kit.
01:01:41
We're one VCA down,
five or six to go.
00:00:00
The next group of
tracks down is percussion.
00:00:03
Really straight ahead.
00:00:04
They've done shaker and tambourine
in the verses and then in the
choruses we've got a couple
other things so I'll play
those for you separately.
00:00:11
In the verses...
00:00:19
Exactly what you'd expect.
On the tambourine,
I'm actually adding a Sansamp.
00:00:25
Here's the tambourine on its own,
without.
00:00:33
It's a very nice sounding tambourine.
00:00:35
But a little bit bright
and what we'll do is,
I'm gonna put the drums in
with this in just a second
and I'll bypass but here's the
tambourine with and without the Sansamp.
00:00:58
Just really quickly,
Sansamp plug-in.
00:01:01
It's basically a four band distorter thing.
00:01:05
You've got EQ here,
this is like EQ on the output,
low and high.
00:01:09
You got level,
you got your pre-amp, so this is
basically input and output volume.
00:01:14
But then these 4 are
just different frequencies.
00:01:17
So this is low, low-mids,
upper-mids and top.
00:01:21
There you go,
they don't always work exactly like that,
you can almost think of it
like a 4 band EQ of distortion.
00:01:28
I'm adding upper-mids
and just by distorting it
it gets rid of some top.
00:01:33
But let me put the drums in with that
and you can hear with and without.
00:01:48
You can hear with the distortion
it really sinks into the drum-kit
and it's just a little bit
of extra rhythmic motor.
00:01:55
I didn't want it to feel like:
'Hey, here's the tambourine player.'
Because the chorus has very
definite percussion
the verse didn't really need to.
00:02:05
So, with the shaker.
00:02:20
Barely in there.
00:02:21
Not terribly important.
00:02:23
Let's move on.
00:02:24
In the chorus we've got
four tracks of percussion.
00:02:27
We got something called Band Percussion
which is basically, I believe,
the whole band playing percussion.
00:02:37
It's actually just tambourine.
00:02:39
Overdub.
00:02:47
Really flammy copy of
the chorus drum pattern.
00:02:51
And then we've got these two guys.
00:02:58
Very hard-panned stomps and claps.
00:03:03
Let me put that in with the drums.
00:03:29
You can hear the beginnings
make the sound wider
plus you can hear that that tambourine
is the only thing that moves fast
in the chorus.
00:03:39
So, that's my little motor
that keeps it from getting
too slow and too halftime.
00:03:45
Now the stomps and claps
are very wide to begin with,
I'm running them
through and Aux and it has...
00:03:53
a little Scheps Omni Channel.
00:03:55
On these it's got saturation again.
00:03:57
It's got the 'heavy',
so that's the clipper.
00:03:59
It's also got 'thump',
it's meant to sort of feel like
the resonance you get
by just running audio through
an LA-2A or Fairchild or a Helios
where the low-end
kind of gets this boost.
00:04:10
It's actually just a very
broad EQ at about 100 Hz.
00:04:16
So there's 2 dB of that
and then I'm adding a little bit of top.
00:04:20
So we can hear with and without that
on the stomps and the claps.
00:04:38
Just better.
00:04:40
I'll play it with the drums because
that's what's important, really.
00:04:58
It just helps them
stick out a little bit more.
00:05:00
But in a way it sort of
glues them into the drums,
it gives them a bit more,
sounding like they're in the same room.
00:05:06
Speaking of that,
you may notice that all of this percussion
is going to an Aux called 'Perc 1',
with the stomps making
one stop along the way
and it goes to 'Perc 1' as well.
00:05:17
'Perc 1' is practically a copy of
the Drum-kit Aux.
00:05:24
I can't get them on the
screen at the same time
with the way the track layout is
but you've got your Fatso,
down at the bottom
then you've got your Drum Crush
and your Devil-Loc.
00:05:33
So those are exactly the same.
00:05:35
I do not have these
going to the Drums Dirt
and then I do have
them going to the reverb.
00:05:40
So they're going to all the
parallel compression things
that we just listened to on the drums
with the exception of the snare reverb,
which was only for the snare anyway,
the Kick Snare Crush which was
only for the kick and snare
and the Drums Dirt, because I didn't need
to add distortion to these.
00:05:55
So, it gives them all the same
sonic benefit.
00:05:59
What I could do
is I'll
mute these guys, the Drum Crush,
Fatso, Devil-Loc
and Drum Verb.
00:06:18
All that same massive boost in level
but more transient, more sustain.
00:06:22
It's an odd thing how you can
get more attack and more sustain
yet it actually is
not just louder.
00:06:28
Every single one of this changes
the character quite a bit.
00:06:31
But what's important is that
it's the same compressors
as the drum-kit is going to.
00:06:37
So, they interact.
So really quickly,
let me give the easiest example
of why I like sending multiple
things to the same compressor.
00:06:44
Let's say you've got a drum beat
that is...
Well, it's got kicks and snares in.
00:06:50
If you send the kick to a dbx 160
and you send the
snare to a different 160,
on most drum patterns
the kick,
the transient will just get
through the compressor
and then it will start clamping down,
snare same thing.
So you get the exact same enhancement
of the transient, the sustain and
the noise and all that kind of stuff.
00:07:10
But they don't
interact and that's fine
because they're not
hitting at the same time.
00:07:14
Now, have a pattern,
four on the floor with the kick,
2 and 4 with the snare.
00:07:19
Now twice every measure
the kick and the snare
hit at exactly the same time.
00:07:24
If you they go to separate compressors
you're accentuating the attack of the kick
and accentuating the attack of the snare.
00:07:31
When I say they happen
at the exact same time
what I mean is that they don't
happen at exactly the same time.
00:07:36
There's a flam, every drummer will flam
and it's part of the feel,
we wouldn't really want a drummer
that could play them exactly together
every single time, it would be
so tight it would be kind of weird.
00:07:47
So what happens is you're
actually accentuating the flam.
00:07:50
Whereas if you put the
into the same dbx 160
whoever gets there first wins.
00:07:57
Because that transient
goes up over the threshold,
the things are a little
bit slow so it misses it
so that transient is doubled.
00:08:04
You have your uncompressed one and
your compressed one and it's turned up.
00:08:08
Then the compressor kicks in,
turns down the rest of that drum
but it also is already compressing
when that second transient hits.
00:08:17
That second transient
is actually de-emphasised
but you still hear it.
00:08:22
So you get the great pattern of
four on the floor with the back-beat
but you don't have this 'bllooomp' flam
getting accentuated.
00:08:31
And what you'd have
to do without that is say:
'Well, I guess on beat 2 and 4
I'll turn down the snare compressor.'
Why would you do that?
Let them rule.
00:08:41
So, if you take that
and extrapolate it out to
the entire drum performance
and then the entire drum
and percussion performance,
whoever gets there first gets
accentuated rhythmically
and their attack gets turned up
but them the benefit sonically
of the parallel compression
gets spread over all of
the other sources that go in.
00:09:02
So it actually rhythmically
will tighten up the performance
but without making you do any work.
00:09:09
And that works exactly the same way
when you're talking about
vocals and bass and keyboards
going into the same compressor.
00:09:15
But it's much easier to think about
with the attack time and the transients
of the drums.
00:09:20
All that said, let me just solo up
drums and percussion
and you're gonna hear them
going into the same compressors
and they should all lock into a
really good groove.
00:09:32
And then I'll take the compressors out,
they'll drop in level 4000 dB
but they'll also sort
of separate
and that's the bit that I don't like.
00:09:40
I'm also gonna take the
Drums Dirt out while I'm doing it.
00:09:43
I guess we'll do the
Kick Snare Crush as well.
00:09:46
I'll leave the reverb because who cares?
The kick and snare are
coming up in level quite a bit.
00:10:09
But you have to trust me when I say
it doesn't just sound messier
because the kick and snare are quiet,
so you hear all the other attacks.
00:10:19
The kick and the snare
are ruling those compressors,
all of them.
00:10:23
And so you still get the really
wide stereo thing from all the flams
but you don't have
flams that are distracting
and that is the magic of the
shared parallel compression to me.
00:10:35
And it's easiest to hear it on the
transient stuff
but it does the exact anything
with any instrument you put it.
00:10:41
Alright, I think we can move on.
00:10:44
Bass,
like I mentioned very early on,
there is a bass DI track and
that was all there was.
00:10:50
There's no bass amp setup.
00:10:51
What I did was just
make a copy of the bass DI.
00:10:55
I've got the DI itself.
00:11:05
Very nice.
00:11:07
We got a little Ampeg on it,
just because it sounded
very much like a DI.
00:11:19
What I'm using this for,
I'm not trying to make it sound like
it's going through an amp.
00:11:23
That's what the next track
with the Sansamp on it is doing.
00:11:26
This is just to make it
sound like a really good DI,
instead of something that's just:
'Oh, here's the bass.'
It's more processed and
it's more of a DI sound
I would actually wanna use
on its own,
possibly,
and then blended in with something else.
00:11:41
This is DI processing but not
for it to sound like an amp.
00:11:54
Because sound for this sound
would be much dirtier than that
but that's like a really
good clean amp sound now.
00:12:01
Then the copy of the track,
here, has a Sansamp.
00:12:07
And by the way,
for those of you not working in Pro Tools,
there's an Italian company
called Nembrini,
and they have a plug-in
called the PSA 1000,
which is what this piece of gear
originally was modelled after
and it doesn't sound
exactly the same as this,
neither of these sound exactly
like the hardware,
but who cares, it does the job,
and it has all the same knobs on it.
00:12:33
So, for a lot of people who watch this
who don't work in Pro Tools
this is a plug-in you can't really
get your hands on
because it's a Pro Tools only thing
and has been for years.
00:12:42
So, you now can get a Sansamp plug-in
that's laid out exactly the same way.
00:12:45
So if you wanna mess with stuff
and have your little four band distortion,
all good.
00:12:49
Here's what I did,
you can see the Pre Amp is all the way up,
I'd imagine this is rather dirty.
00:13:01
So this is all about the mid-range.
00:13:04
Add them together...
00:13:13
I could,
for instance,
I'll just make a copy of this
so I can mess with the second one.
00:13:20
I could bring up low-end here,
I'm actually taking some low-end out
by taking this bus down.
00:13:32
You can hear it stars to get messy
as you add the low-end here.
00:13:36
So what I wanted was this
very clean powerful low-end
but with the nasty mid-range up above.
00:13:43
Let me switch back
to the one actually set.
00:13:52
That's not necessarily
a bass tone on its own,
that you'd say:
'Oh man, that is awesome!'
But it has all the elements
of what it needs to have,
it's got the definition
and the low-end on the DI track
and it's got this nasty mid-range thing,
which, as we'll see,
is voiced a little bit lower
than the distortion on the guitar.
00:14:11
So, together this will be a good thing.
00:14:13
This also is the first
appearance of the Rear Bus.
00:14:16
I'm sure, unless you've only
just become aware of my hairy self,
that you've heard about the Rear Bus.
00:14:23
This is a shared parallel compressor
that I use on all instruments
that are not rhythmic.
00:14:28
It used to be I would use it
on all non-rhythmic instruments
except for bass and then years
ago I started putting the bass in.
00:14:36
And that's what I do.
00:14:37
I'll show you what that is
but until we get more instruments in
it doesn't make a whole
lot of sense to hear.
00:14:44
We'll listen to it on the bass
and then we'll wait till we've got
all the guitars going
to listen to it again, interacting
with the bass and all the guitars.
00:14:53
It's gonna be all the way down
at the bottom of the session.
00:14:56
It's called Rear Bus.
00:14:57
It is multi-mono
and it is
an 1176.
00:15:03
This is because in hardware,
years and years ago,
I had a Rear Bus on my quad Neve console,
called the Rear Bus, for the Rear speakers,
and I sent it off to a pair of 1176s
that were probably pretty broken,
they're very old, Rev Ds.
00:15:19
And it just did a mid-range presence thing
and that's what I was really looking for.
00:15:24
And I went through every
single 1176 plug-in I own,
which is quite a few, there's a ton of
people who has done 1176 plug-ins,
a lot of them are really good,
they're all totally different.
00:15:34
But
none of them were doing this
mid-range thing that I wanted.
00:15:39
So finally I tried this one.
And this is a very odd plug-in.
00:15:43
Basically, back in the day,
Urei made 1176,
you got your Rev A through H I think,
maybe it even went to I or J,
and these were all different things.
You had blue-stripes, black-faces,
silver, LN, blah blah blah.
00:15:57
They're all variance of the same thing.
00:15:59
They all have an Input and Output control.
00:16:01
The Input feeds the threshold,
it's a fixed threshold compressor.
00:16:05
So if you turn up the Input
it gets louder
but it also compresses more.
00:16:09
The Output control is literally a fader
on the output.
00:16:12
You have continuously
variable attack and release times.
00:16:16
And they're a little odd where,
all the way down,
that is the slowest attack.
00:16:22
This is the fastest release.
00:16:24
And then they would all have four ratios,
which would be 4, 8 , 12 and 20.
00:16:30
And then you could push in
combinations of the buttons
because physically they would stick in
and that would take the compressor
into this weird non-linear mode,
which is awesome, the all-buttons in
1176 is probably
one of the classic 'using a piece
of gear not like it was designed' things
in all of the recording history.
00:16:47
So, anyway,
not that long ago
UA was, the current UA company,
was celebrating the
anniversary of the 1176,
I would assume the
50th or 60th anniversary.
00:17:02
They've been around for a long time.
00:17:04
And they decided: 'Well, let's build a
hardware compressor, limited edition,
that would be the 1176
of everybody's dreams.
00:17:14
All the stuff that people
wish the 1176s would do.
00:17:18
It has characteristics of the black-face
but also characteristics
of the blue-stripe,
because generally people thought:
'Oh, blue-stripes are better on vocals,
black face on guitars.'
Whatever, people had favorites.
But they just do sound different.
00:17:30
So they took some of what was
cool about the black-face,
some of what cool about the blue-stripe
and also added this 2:1 ratio.
This is the only 1176 ever made
that has a 2:1 ratio.
00:17:43
And then after they had
the hardware for a while
they actually modeled the hardware
to make the plug-in of the hardware
of the anniversary edition
that doesn't really copy any version
of the plug-in
or the hardware that ever existed before.
00:17:58
All of that is a very long story to say
that's reason it was the last one I tried
out of all of 1176s plug-ins
and it does the mid-range thing.
00:18:08
Obviously, on my black-faces
I was not working at 2:1,
so this is not copying the hardware,
it's just copying the vibe.
00:18:15
That's it.
00:18:16
Really long story.
00:18:18
You can see from the gain structure,
it's not gonna be
compressing a huge amount,
obviously I could be
sending a bunch of level into it.
00:18:25
Input is turned down a bit,
output is up quite a bit to get
some make-up gain.
00:18:30
But as with all compressors
they're always doing something,
even if they're below the threshold.
00:18:36
There are a very few compressors
that if you put low level input
and then you A/B with and without
that it sounds exactly the same.
00:18:44
There's always something going on.
00:18:46
So even if this meter wasn't moving,
and on this mix I'm sure it is,
but on a lot mixes that
meter doesn't even move,
it sounds totally different.
00:18:55
This is a parallel compressor on the bass
but also you can see this R
in the last Send slot of a lot of tracks.
00:19:03
It's every instrument that isn't rhythmic.
00:19:07
But you'll hear it right now
just on the bass.
So I've got the bass
and post-fader, at zero, follow main pan,
picking-up a copy of the bass
with all the processing
and going to the Rear Bus.
00:19:19
Let's come down here.
00:19:20
I will mute the Rear Bus, here's the bass.
00:19:45
It's moving quite a bit
even with just the bass.
00:19:47
So I can tell this thing
was getting slammed.
00:19:50
But I don't ever look.
00:19:51
I don't care.
00:19:52
It just sounds the way it sounds.
00:19:54
You can hear how much it adds
this power to the low-end of the bass.
00:20:00
The level is coming up again,
it's always gonna happen when
you're auditioning these things.
00:20:04
It really just glues things together
and the sort of common
way to think about when you compress
is it's hard to get low-end
through a compressor.
00:20:14
That's absolutely true
but I'm not directly compressing the bass,
I'm parallel compressing the bass,
when I blend it back in
it's a totally different thing.
00:20:24
You'll hear it again once
we add all the guitars in.
00:20:26
But that's the Rear Bus.
00:20:28
There's one other track lurking up here
in the light blue fellow.
00:20:32
That's the Moog
and this is just in choruses.
00:20:36
And it sounds something like this.
00:20:43
It's sub.
00:20:45
And nothing else.
00:20:46
And you can see it actually
doesn't go to the Rear Bus.
00:20:50
And that's because
compressors grab low-end
and hold on for dear
life and don't let it out.
00:20:55
That's what they do.
00:20:56
And this sub was actually
just destroying that compressor
and making it not do its job
on all the rest of the instruments
and this doesn't happen very often
but this particular
instrument is not going there.
00:21:08
Obviously it must have
been bothering me that
I was having trouble with
the low-end on the bass
in the chorus and it just made think:
'Oh, let me try bypassing the Rear Bus send.'
It's not something I do a lot.
00:21:21
And I would have
automatically assigned
the Rear Bus Send as
part of my session prep.
00:21:26
The prep is color-coding, track ordering,
then I import everything from my template
and assign all the outputs.
So I'm listening with all the parallel stuff
before I do anything.
00:21:38
I've heard the rough mix
because I've listened to that
while I'm assigning all my tracks
and giving colors and stuff like that
but as soon as I start mixing
the parallel stuff is in,
bus processing is in.
00:21:50
Because otherwise, it's all gonna
sound different if I put it in later.
00:21:53
So, there would have been Rear Bus
on that Moog probably
until very close to sending off
the first mix and I just thought:
'How am I gonna get the
choruses even bigger?'
'This low-end isn't as
big as I wanted it to be.'
I tried taking this out.
00:22:06
Great. I probably had
to turn it up quite a bit.
00:22:09
But that's all good. So that
is not going to the Rear Bus.
00:22:11
I can play you the
bass with and without it in chorus.
00:22:15
But they're sort of doing separate jobs.
But here it is.
00:22:37
It's so far below the
bass in terms of frequency
that to me they're just two
totally separate instruments.
00:22:44
That's the bass. We're picking
up speed as we go downhill here.
00:22:47
Next would be guitars.
00:22:50
There are quite a few guitar tracks.
00:22:51
There's this 'Swamp Boogie' track,
which, as it turns out,
is only used in the Intro.
00:22:58
Sorry, the 'Swamp Snake Boogie'.
00:23:00
I'm not gonna
even speculate what a swamp snake is.
00:23:03
This is that Intro guitar.
It's very roomy.
00:23:13
And that's all it does.
00:23:14
I believe that it's actually a room mic
from the verse guitar.
00:23:20
But it's used on its own in the Intro
and then that guitar
switches to the close mic.
00:23:26
Which is in this verse
electric right here.
00:23:37
That's the main riff of the song.
00:23:39
It's got one of these guys on it.
00:23:41
And you can see there's a
little bit of automation in here.
00:23:44
There's so much change in
between the verse and the chorus,
this stuff really had to be automated more
than I normally would within plug-ins.
00:23:51
There's a lot of even harmonic saturation.
00:23:53
So that's gonna bring up the top end.
00:23:55
I am filtering top and bottom,
300 Hz on the high-pass
and 7.5 kHz on the low-pass.
00:24:04
And then I'm adding a tiny bit of top.
00:24:06
Which might seem
counter-intuitive because I'm filtering
but this shelf is at 8 kHz
and this is guy is at 7.5 kHz,
which means, because of the slope,
we're down 12 dB at 7.5 kHz here.
00:24:19
But I wanted to tilt it just a little bit.
00:24:22
Maybe I could have opened up the filter
but this is just a
different way to do it.
00:24:26
Then,
this is something I do
on guitars quite a bit,
I'm adding mid-range,
not a lot,
only 1.3 dB on a broad slope.
00:24:35
And I'm adding 2.2 kHz.
00:24:37
A lot of times I'm actually
adding lower than that.
00:24:40
1.4 to 1.5, this is a great
kind of throaty frequency
in an electric guitar.
00:24:45
And the great thing about it is it
brings out the notes of the guitar part
without bringing out the noise.
00:24:51
So it's below the noise.
00:24:52
Once you get up into the 3 kHz range
it sounds cool because it's bright
and it's present
but it can also be quite noisy
and you really change
how distorted the guitar sounds,
which is not something I'm trying to do.
00:25:04
This is automating.
00:25:05
If we look at the automation for the EQ,
I'm automating this boost
at 2.2 kHz
to be in at the Intro,
out at the Verse,
back in at the pre-chorus.
00:25:17
This guitar is not playing choruses.
00:25:19
Back in the re-intro, out in the verse.
00:25:22
What this is is this some
presence on the guitar
that I really wanted to have
and without that extra 2 kHz boost
it just felt a little bit flat
but it was fighting with the vocal.
00:25:34
Once the vocal is in
no one is gonna notice that that
guitar gets a little bit darker.
00:25:39
And they tend to happen
not at the same time
but there's enough vocal
over the top of the riff
that I was having trouble
hearing the vocal pop out
as much as I wanted it to
so that's why I'm
getting rid of this boost.
00:25:52
Let me play you the
bit of the Intro
and I'll get rid of the entire plug-in,
which we'll take out the saturation,
high-pass and low-pass filter
and the top end EQ. And in the Intro
we'll also get rid of that mid-range.
00:26:08
You'll hear what the mid-range is doing.
00:26:10
Then we'll move into the verse,
I'll let it play in
and I'll take it out
and you'll hear that the
change is not quite as drastic.
00:26:17
Again,
out of context it doesn't mean a lot
but with the vocal it does.
00:26:30
Big stuff going on here.
00:26:32
You can hear there's some
really cool boomy low-end.
00:26:37
That's awesome on its own.
00:26:38
It was totally gumming up the work.
00:26:40
So again, here's the Intro sound
with the processing.
00:26:51
There you go.
Now, let me move into the verse.
00:26:55
And you'll hear that low-end
but you shouldn't hear as
much of a boost in the mid-range.
00:27:12
Now I'm gonna play you the end
of the Intro going into the verse
with this plug-in in
and what you'll hear is
that mid-range dropping out.
00:27:20
Listening on its own you're gonna say:
'Well, the guitar doesn't sound as good.'
Once we have the whole mix going
you might think back and say.
00:27:26
'Well, Andrew did a good job of
making the vocal right on top of the mix.'
Part of that is scooping out,
not evening scooping out,
just not adding the extra 2.2 kHz.
00:27:50
You'll noticed I switched
one bar into the verse.
00:27:54
That's because he doesn't start singing
until the hole in-between the riff.
00:27:58
So I didn't wanna switch it
at the downbeat of the verse,
I switched it once the vocal came in.
00:28:02
You don't notice that
that mid-range isn't there.
00:28:04
It's subtle but in the
context with the vocal
it makes a big difference.
00:28:08
That's enough about that.
00:28:10
There is also a soothe plug-in
which is not automated,
that can go away.
00:28:16
Probably what I was trying in the verse,
before I decided to just do it
with a little EQ move.
00:28:23
Then I'm actually adding reverb.
00:28:25
I built a reverb, which is very unlike me,
for this verse guitar.
00:28:29
And it's Valhalla Room.
00:28:32
OK, fine.
00:28:33
I love this plug-ins,
I don't reach for them much,
for some reason and I sort of forget.
00:28:37
I go with Altiverb quite a bit
because you've got
kind of everything in there.
00:28:40
I go to D-Verb, all the time.
00:28:43
This is a great room sound
and I must have just thought
that this guitar just sounds too dry
because I've sucked
all that low-end out of it.
00:28:51
And I needed to keep it
roomy along with the drums.
00:28:55
Here's without it.
00:29:08
Just more of that amp in a room sound.
00:29:11
That's it.
00:29:12
Since I'm going top to bottom
let's just find the second
Swamp Snake track.
00:29:18
At the end of the solo
this room track is coming back in.
00:29:24
If you remember this is the
room track from the very Intro.
00:29:33
This is, when we listen to the whole solo,
a little bit of guitar that
leads us back into the chorus.
00:29:38
Everything kind of cuts.
00:29:40
There's even a drum hit
bounced in with it, I don't know why
but there you go.
It's something they’ve made
and I liked it and it
helped bridge the transition
from the solo back into the chorus.
00:29:50
That's all that does.
00:29:51
Then, we get into our chorus guitars.
00:29:54
That's it for verse guitars.
00:29:56
Right? It's the main verse guitar,
that's it.
00:29:59
Chorus has a bit more going on.
00:30:01
We've got two acoustics,
which you can see are panned.
00:30:04
I'm showing the pan automation
because I think I was playing with
whether I was gonna automate that or not.
00:30:09
But it's not automated.
00:30:11
You can see because it doesn't
have the highlight on it.
00:30:13
I'll just go back to showing
waveform on these guys,
there's no point in showing pan.
00:30:18
Two acoustics
that are going down through this Aux.
00:30:24
There it is again.
00:30:43
Saturation, the clipper.
00:30:45
And you got 1.9 dB
at 2.7 kHz.
00:30:51
I'm gonna bypass these individually
because you'd think a little bit of EQ
at one frequency and
a little bit of clipping
would not completely
change the performance.
00:31:00
It just sounds like such a more
digging in performance of this.
00:31:04
I'm a little surprised
to how much it's doing.
00:31:07
I'm gonna take this out individually
so you can hear which is doing more
I don't know,
I just wanna hear it, actually.
00:31:12
Let's listen.
00:31:37
That's pretty good.
00:31:38
That's not what you'd normally think.
00:31:40
'Oh, that's what distortion sounds like.'
But that's what it sounds like.
00:31:43
It still sounds incredibly clean
but the power in the strumming,
the actually feel of the
pick hitting the strings,
that's night and day.
00:31:52
This EQ, I don't think it's
gonna big as big an impact,
this is more kind of presence
leading towards air.
00:31:58
So it's like a mid-range boost that
gives the impression of a top-end boost.
00:32:27
So, there you go.
00:32:29
A little bit of processing
goes a long way,
especially in the track.
00:32:32
And again, this goes off to the Rear Bus.
00:32:34
We'll listen once we get all the guitars
and then we'll listen to guitar and bass.
00:32:38
OK, here are the main electrics.
00:32:41
These were recorded with
and SM57
and an U67,
I'm assuming and I just
balanced them whatever I felt like.
00:32:49
There's no magic to this at all.
00:32:51
Doubled electric guitars,
going into an Aux with,
you know what's coming.
00:32:56
Here we go.
00:32:58
I'll play you with and without
and then we'll talk about
what's actually going on.
00:33:26
There's a lot,
there's that saturation again.
00:33:29
But only the odd harmonics.
00:33:31
This is almost more like an EQ thing,
not like that clipper.
00:33:34
The Thump,
we're definitely hearing the Thump.
00:33:36
I'm gonna take the Thump on and off
and you'll hear it sounds like
the cabinet bloom in a room, kind of,
it's hard to describe but you'll hear it.
00:34:08
It's pretty good for a little
2 dB boost at 100 Hz.
00:34:11
But there you go. Again, very very broad.
00:34:15
And then there is EQ again,
a tiny bit of top shelf,
I would imagine I didn't touch this,
it's at 8 kHz.
00:34:21
And then this is at 1.9.
00:34:24
So again, what I'm doing,
and I'll do it right now.
00:34:26
I'm just holding down and control
and moving this frequency
until I find something that sounds cool
that I wanna bring out.
00:34:49
Just that mid-range presence.
00:34:51
It's actually still a little bit higher
than what I would normally go for
but I think I needed it.
00:34:57
I didn't need the rasp down lower
because that's where the bass is sitting.
00:35:01
So, that's just what worked.
00:35:04
It's not because of
anything other than it worked.
00:35:07
And there is actually
FET compression on here.
00:35:10
Not much but again
it's that infinity to 1 setting
with a really slow attack.
00:35:15
The threshold is barely down at all again.
00:35:18
There will be a little bit of make-up gain
coming in with this.
00:35:46
Just a little compression, why not?
That's the main electric rhythm guitars.
00:35:52
That is 80% of what's in
this track other than vocals.
00:35:56
We've got some extra overdubs here
there's a little melody overdub,
which I'm splitting the microphones here.
00:36:04
With the main electrics,
I'm basically hard-panning them.
00:36:08
With this melody
I'm splitting the two microphones
just to make it wide.
00:36:20
But I'm doing absolutely nothing to them.
00:36:22
They go straight to the mixbus,
they go off to the Rear Bus.
00:36:25
That's it, it's just the guitar sound,
I didn’t feel like I needed
to do anything to it.
00:36:29
The next thing is the solo.
00:36:31
And it's tracked on lots
of different performances.
00:36:35
So, each performance
is, I believe 1A and 1B
are different microphones
on performance one
and then 'Solo 2' and 'Solo 3'
and then there's 'Solo new',
which finishes it off.
And that actually, chops off.
00:36:49
And I'm gonna put in
Swamp Snake 2
because that's what finishes the solo.
00:36:55
I'm gonna play you the whole thing
and then there's no processing
whatsoever on this solo, apparently.
00:37:01
I don't know what the hell happened there
but there you go, I got lucky.
00:37:31
There you go,
it's cool because it's so wide
and again, this is a theme of this mix,
the stuff is either in the middle
or is crazy wide.
00:37:40
Having the doubled solo here,
there's really not much to say about it,
it's the tone worked and I cranked it up
and anytime I felt like I couldn't hear
the solo well enough I just turned it up.
00:37:50
I never felt like:
'Oh, I need to go in and
tweak the sound of that.'
The guitar tones are cool,
the performance is great.
00:37:57
I love adding that extra little bit
and the way it switches.
00:38:00
And it just felt like
they'd spent a lot of time
getting that the way they wanted it.
00:38:04
Why would I mess with it?
Everything else is meant
to go around it really.
00:38:08
So that's it for guitars.
00:38:10
So, as promised, what I'm gonna do
is come up here
and I'm gonna solo up
guitars and bass
and we'll hear in the verse first,
really is just bass and a single guitar
and I'm gonna take
the Rear Bus in and out.
00:38:24
What you're gonna hear is
the interaction between the bass
and guitar are just gonna change.
00:38:30
You're just gonna feel like they're
playing a little bit more together,
which, especially,
in the verses,
they're playing exactly the same part.
00:38:38
Here's the riff. Guitar,
bass with and without the Rear Bus.
00:39:21
I'm sure the comment section
for this video is gonna be:
'Why can't you level-match stuff?'
Well, welcome to my world.
00:39:28
You can't, it sucks.
00:39:30
But there you go.
00:39:32
The presence on the
guitar changes completely.
00:39:35
That's that weird mid-range
thing I was talking about.
00:39:37
I don't know why this plug-in does it.
00:39:39
It doesn't really make a lot of sense.
00:39:41
Again this is compressing
more in the Rear Bus
than I think some mixes.
00:39:45
This is mix quite loud, actually.
00:39:49
Which is just something,
it's just loud,
so there you go.
00:39:52
So, that means the level
difference in the parallel stuff
is going to be loud,
because there's a lot of parallel
compression getting the level up.
00:39:59
Once we get the vocals in
we'll come do this again
and you'll just hear things
interact more and more.
00:40:03
But while I'm here,
here's the chorus with
and without the Rear Bus.
00:40:33
And now,
because you've all been asking for it,
and I've been asking for it,
we're gonna make the
editor actually level match that.
00:40:40
So here it is again,
closer to it so you can hear the
interaction between the guitars.
00:40:45
I would say,
listen for the way the acoustics
and the strumming electrics
actually kind of glue themselves together
and the bass
feels like part of it.
00:40:54
They just all feel like more of a band.
00:40:57
Here it comes.
00:41:26
In to keyboard land.
00:41:27
Almost nothing going on.
00:41:29
We've get this keyboard in the solo.
00:41:32
It's a little Farfisa kind of thing.
00:41:43
Kind of doubling the
harmonic structure of the solo
without playing the notes,
which is cool.
00:41:49
Here,
let's listen to the solo with and without.
00:42:16
OK, I'll be honest,
I can barely hear it too.
00:42:19
It's not a big deal in this song.
00:42:21
This song is about the guitars.
00:42:22
It is there, there's a tiny bit of
sparkle that comes on the sustains
but it's not a big deal in this song.
00:42:31
The next thing is some piano,
which is a bit of a bigger deal.
00:42:35
It's doing much more of a
structure reinforcement thing
in the choruses and then in the out chorus
it actually has a pretty important part.
00:42:53
Just doubling low-end,
it's a really common thing to do.
00:42:57
Piano reinforcing the low-end,
it just gives this great
woody sustain to it.
00:43:02
But then in the second
half of the last chorus...
00:43:12
It adds the ostinato octave up top.
00:43:15
And that just really
helps drive the song.
00:43:18
Just so you can hear what it does,
let's do bass, guitars and piano
in one of the early choruses.
00:43:48
It almost sounds like
I'm turning the bass up,
when I have it in.
And that's fine,
I'm not looking for this
to sound like a piano.
00:43:55
I'm looking for more weight
and girth in the chorus.
00:43:59
But in the last chorus,
I'll start with it in
and then take it out
and you'll hear how much
energy you get off of that right hand.
00:44:33
It's a big part of building the song.
00:44:35
So that's when the piano
really comes into its own.
00:44:38
Before that, not so much.
00:00:00
The only thing we've got left is vocals.
00:00:03
And the vocals are pretty straight ahead.
00:00:06
There are some things sort of leftover
with me trying to make stuff happen
that never happened.
00:00:13
Like, I've got an FX
where the spread,
it's a micro-pitch slap,
we'll talk about it in a second,
I'll go through all the
vocal FX one-by-one.
00:00:22
But there's a Sansamp
that I was automating
in on the verses
because I was trying
to figure out
how to make the verse
vocal really stand out
but not sound anything
like the chorus vocal.
00:00:33
But
that never got used.
00:00:35
That thing is inactive.
00:00:37
I'm just gonna not bother
showing that automation.
00:00:39
It's just confusing.
00:00:41
I can move the spread back down
with the other effects
and then we'll talk about it.
00:00:46
So we've got a lead vocal,
it has a compressor on it.
00:00:50
An all-buttons in.
00:00:52
I'm trying to give it some aggression.
00:00:54
Here is the verse vocal on its own.
00:01:18
A little more natural uncompressed.
00:01:20
In the track it just
wasn't working without it.
00:01:22
So I went with it.
00:01:24
This is something I was
doing at the time as well.
00:01:27
I was compressing
individual vocal tracks a lot.
00:01:30
I've actually kind of stopped doing that
or doing a lot less now.
00:01:33
This is also of a time
and it might that if I was mixing
this song from scratch today
I might not do this but it
definitely worked for me there.
00:01:41
One thing I wanna point out
because this was a really difficult thing.
00:01:46
And I was automating EQs,
it's why I went to distortion
on the spread FX,
the first line of the vocal
is own an octave
from the entire rest of the vocal.
00:01:58
And getting that line to pop out,
because it's the first
time you hear his voice
and you can't have
the singer sound like:
'Humm, whatever'.
00:02:06
And then kick in. It's gotta be exciting.
00:02:08
And this was really difficult.
00:02:10
And it's part of why that
1176 is really helping me on it.
00:02:14
Just listen to the first two lines
with and without the 1176.
00:02:30
It sounds natural but it's just quiet.
00:02:32
It's not pushed in the same way.
00:02:34
And when the track starts to get big,
basically the vocal just disappears.
00:02:39
So that was a big deal and
I think if we look at
the automation.
No automation on there.
00:02:45
There might be some clip gain.
00:02:47
Yeah, so 2 dB on the clip gain,
which again, is gonna push it
into the compressor harder,
but that's what made
it actually pop out.
00:02:54
I seem to remember spending
a lot more time on that.
00:02:57
I do remember for a long time,
working on getting that vocal
to feel like it exploded
in the way it had to
but still have somewhere to go
once he goes up the octave
because then you stay
there for the rest of the song.
00:03:11
So, that needed to be a big jump
but you couldn't do a jump by
starting from somewhere small.
00:03:18
It made song
incredible hard to mix.
00:03:21
In the chorus,
it's on a new track
and it's doubled but it's
basically the same sound.
00:03:28
So here's the chorus vocal.
00:03:41
It's an identical 1176 just dragged down
from here.
00:03:47
So that's it really
for lead vocals,
we'll get into what
the FX are on them
and then in the end
there is actually a triple
of the vocal as well.
00:04:11
I'm mixing more of a package
of lead vocals for that last chorus.
00:04:14
Which is good.
00:04:15
That's it for vocals,
they have the exact same processing again,
I'm sure I just Opt + dragged
the 1176 from track to track.
00:04:24
The lead vocal processing
looks a little different than
some of the other processing
because I have a parallel
process for the vocals
before they then go off to
all of the other parallel stuff
like the Rear Bus,
there's a Vocal Crush, things like that.
00:04:40
So, it's like a pre-parallel parallel thing.
00:04:43
And the way I do it is I just assign
all the vocal tracks to
something called Lead Vocal Bus
and then I have two auxes
that get that same input.
00:04:53
So the inputs of both Lead Vocal Bus
and the Lead Vocal's Bus' bus,
those two aux faders have the same input.
00:05:01
That's a parallel process.
00:05:02
It looks messier than
just doing it with sends
but I don't like having to put
individual sends on lots of stuff.
00:05:08
The only reason
I do the Rear Bus the way I do is because
I don't want everything running
through auxes all the time
because I don't necessarily need them,
like the solo track,
it just goes straight to the Mixbus,
that's fine.
00:05:20
Why have to assign them to another Aux?
There's no point.
00:05:23
But with the vocals,
they always need this processing.
00:05:27
So, this is the way to have it
in my template so it's easy.
00:05:29
I just assign the track outputs.
00:05:31
So the top lead vocal
track is a very simple,
it's basically the dry lead vocal,
by dry I mean not terribly processed.
00:05:39
This has been around
since long before
I started mixing completely
in-the-box again.
00:05:44
And in fact this
probably from when
I was mixing in-the-box
before I even had a console.
00:05:49
Because I loved Phoenix,
the original Phoenix,
and I love Phoenix 2, a little
bit of harmonic distortion.
00:05:55
I don't think I've touched this plug-in,
other than to change it
from Phoenix 1 to Phoenix 2,
in 10 years.
00:06:02
Maybe 12.
00:06:03
Let's say 12,
I haven't touched this in 12 years,
if you can believe that.
00:06:07
So it's on Luminescent
and the process is up a little bit.
00:06:13
There you go.
00:06:14
Gold Brightness.
00:06:17
A little bit of harmonic distortion,
that's all it's doing.
00:06:20
This is left over from when
this was in my template,
even when I was mixing on a console.
00:06:26
Just a tiny bit of Renaissance Vox.
00:06:28
It's just a great vocal compressor
and the fact that really,
even though it has 3 knobs,
it only has 1 knob.
00:06:34
And you pull that down,
the make-up gain works great.
00:06:38
Basically you're getting
0.7 dB of gain out of it.
00:06:42
It sounds good, I've not gotten rid of it.
00:06:45
I don't really need it.
00:06:47
I think about this track as having
no processing but it has a little bit.
00:06:51
That has never not worked on a vocal.
00:06:54
There's so little going on
but that's always there.
00:06:56
That Aux then goes off to something
called the Lead Vocal Combiner.
00:07:00
Which is this Aux here.
00:07:02
And that's where it can get some
overall processing for the vocals
and it's where it gets
sent off to all of the effects.
00:07:08
Like with the kick and snare aux
it's a stop along the way to the
one that goes to the mixbus
which is the drum-kit Aux
but I've got some extra processing in here.
00:07:19
All of the vocal tracks also
go into this,
which is kind of old news at this
point but it's a pretty cool chain.
00:07:28
So, it's Pultec into
an LA-2A into a Pultec.
00:07:32
Let me get them all on
the screen at the same time.
00:07:36
Take the vocals, go into a Pultec,
attenuate at 100 Hz,
a lot.
00:07:43
Pretty broad.
00:07:45
Boost 8 kHz.
00:07:47
Don't attenuate anything up high.
00:07:49
Get rid of the low-end, really boost
the upper presence of the vocal,
so the top-end.
And this boost is pretty broad
so it's reaching down
into the mid-range.
00:07:59
Then you go into an LA-2A,
it's just a really slow compressor,
it also has a
high-frequency or flat knob,
which is a high-pass filter
to the detector.
00:08:09
Originally on the hardware
it was built so that you could
use an LA-2A as a de-esser.
00:08:15
Imagine having enough money to have
hardware LA-2A to use as de-essers.
00:08:20
Those were the days.
00:08:21
But now everybody has got plug-ins,
so that's good.
00:08:24
This crushes the vocal,
there's quite a bit of peak
reduction going on here.
00:08:29
And it crushes the really
mid-rangy portion of it.
00:08:33
Then you go into a post-compression EQ
add in a bunch of 100 Hz again.
00:08:38
And, this has been
pointed out to me many times,
I am not attenuating at 8 kHz,
which had just been boosted,
I'm attenuating at 20 kHz
but when I realized
that I've made a mistake
and this was set wrong
I switched it to 10 kHz
and thought that would be close
and I didn't like the way it sounded.
00:08:55
So I just left it.
00:08:57
Technically you're
supposed to suck out
some of the crazy mid-range
you added in the first EQ
but the reason I say "technically
you're supposed to do" anything
is this is a hardware chain
that was popular mostly on the East Coast.
00:09:11
This is one of those weird
East Coast/West Coast mixer things.
00:09:14
Which I think is just people
didn't see what other people were doing.
00:09:18
And it was used in the 90s on vocals.
00:09:20
But this would have been
the insert on the vocal.
00:09:23
For me it's a parallel thing
so I don't care that this
doesn't sound great on its own.
00:09:28
it's when you blend it in
with the basically unprocessed
vocal that it sounds great.
00:09:35
This gets blended in at -17.1 dB,
so it's way down, it's 15.1 dB lower
than this fader.
00:09:44
That doesn't mean a lot
because the gain structure
is different going through the two tracks
but you add a little bit of this in
and it completely changes
how easy it is to hear the vocal.
00:09:54
It sounds less natural,
which if you're doing an acoustic track
or you've got an Intro
or something like that
is not necessarily what you want
but
when you're trying to get a
vocal to cut through cymbals
and electric guitars and
things like that
it just brings up the presence
of the vocal like crazy.
00:10:12
Normally I would only
use it in the choruses,
another of these structural things.
00:10:16
Here I'm using it in the
verses and the choruses.
00:10:19
The pre-choruses, if you remember,
are where he sings on his own
and then you get this guitar
and drum fills and things like that.
00:10:26
So the vocal is very exposed
and it didn't need the extra processing
so I'm saving it for verses and choruses.
00:10:34
Real quick,
I'll solo this up and I'll mute
the Pultec,
I'm just gonna play you the first 4 lines
and then I'll mute it.
00:11:16
We'll do that again and unsolo it
and you'll hear the whole track
and I'm gonna play that with and without
and what you'll hear is that the
quiet parts of the vocal stay on top
as opposed to getting
sucked down into the track.
00:11:28
So here's with.
00:11:51
Again, with. And just listen to
the very beginning of the third line.
00:12:04
'Well you don't recognize'.
Listen to the 'Well you' without it.
00:12:14
It's just underneath
the cymbals without it.
00:12:17
With it it slams right through.
00:12:19
This something where you it keeps
you from having to ride the vocal as much.
00:12:24
Which OK, that's being lazy, maybe.
00:12:27
You should really ride the vocals,
it's the most important thing in the mix.
00:12:31
But it's more than that.
00:12:32
It's a feeling of that vocal
being able to ride on top.
00:12:35
Instead of having to push
it over the top constantly.
00:12:40
I've got no problem riding the vocal.
00:12:42
This mix I didn't ride the vocal
though it was in touch mode
so obviously I was getting ready to.
00:12:47
But in a lot of mixes I do.
I just didn't feel like
I needed to
once I had the Pultec in there.
00:12:55
And I just call it Pultec because
that's what the track is called
but it's the Pultec, LA-2A, Pultec chain.
00:13:01
It really changes the
character and it really to me
keeps the vocal in front,
which I love, there's a difference
between being loud enough
and being in front and I like
that he really leads the mix.
00:13:15
But again,
because of the interaction in the Rear Bus
he leads while he's singing and as soon
as he stops singing guitars come up.
00:13:21
So I think now it's time
to check out the Rear Bus.
00:13:25
I'm gonna mute Drums and Percussion.
00:13:29
We'll come back to the rest
of the vocal FX in a second.
00:13:32
But since we're listening in context...
00:13:34
And I'll play you the verse
with and without the Rear Bus.
00:13:37
Again,
the level is gonna be crazy different.
00:13:40
I think this is another time
we'll tell the editor: level-match.
00:14:17
Even with the level difference
the vocal is way too
loud without the Rear Bus
but you can Rear Bus pushes
the vocal down into the guitars
not into them
right on top of them and
everybody is really gluing together.
00:14:31
And it makes a big
difference in the track as well
but you lose so much level that
basically just sounds way too loud.
00:14:38
It's a very difficult thing to actually
show you in context but I'll try.
00:14:57
I mean, that's your kick/snare up mix,
basically.
00:15:01
But trust me, it makes a big difference.
00:15:04
Back up to the vocals so we can look
at the processing that's actually on them.
00:15:07
On this lead vocals combiner,
so after I've gone ahead
and added a little bit
of this Pultec,
LA-2A, Pultec thing
I have a de-esser.
00:15:16
One thing I wanna mention about de-essing,
de-essers are looking for energy
in a certain frequency range
so it actually makes sense quite often
to de-ess the vocal first.
00:15:28
Have a de-esser as your very first insert
because that's when the Ss
haven't been compressed down
into being anywhere near the
same level as the rest of the vocal
if you a sibilant vocal.
00:15:40
What you're looking for is contrast
between the frequency
range you're trying to control
and the rest of the vocal's sounds.
00:15:46
Quite often,
if I'm having trouble with the vocal
this is in my template
but I'll add individual de-essers,
even the exact same
de-essers set the same way
to the individual tracks,
double de-essing, before and after.
00:15:58
One of them is taking of the recording
and one is taking care of the
processing I've done to it.
00:16:04
There you go. We've got a de-esser.
00:16:06
A little bit of a Devil-Loc.
00:16:08
Interesting, there's quite a bit of
dirt on this vocal.
00:16:37
That sounds more like what
you'd expect that 1176 to be doing.
00:16:42
It really takes the impact of the
words that he's singing and
makes them sound compressed.
00:16:50
This is very much about it sounding
like a very compressed vocal,
that's what I was going for
on this particular mix.
00:16:57
And then another de-esser. There you go.
00:16:59
De-ess before, after, during,
between meals,
while you're cleaning your teeth.
Always de-ess if it needs de-essing.
00:17:07
Don't worry about using multiples.
00:17:09
Multiples are good.
00:17:11
So that's the processing
on the vocal itself.
00:17:14
If you wanna hear without
the de-essers we can do that
but, you know...
Alright.
00:17:18
You wanna hear without the de-essers?
OK, OK, here we go!
Here's without both de-essers.
00:17:36
There you go.
Another thing I wanna point out
and I'm gonna unsolo the vocal.
You hear the 'P' on 'preacher'?
That's exactly the kind of thing
that if you just solo up the vocal
as one of your to do list items
at the beginning of a mix,
you'd fix that.
00:17:50
But in context I'll bet you it
actually sounds kind of cool
for him to explode the mic on that.
00:18:02
It happens right with the kick drum,
it's just extra low-end in the mix.
00:18:05
It sounds absolutely fine,
there's no reason to fix it.
00:18:09
And it might sound
less powerful without it.
00:18:11
I'm not gonna bother
finding out right now
but the really important
thing about mixing
is don't have too much of a to-do list
because you will clean up stuff
that you actually wanna keep.
00:18:22
Mess can be good.
00:18:24
It can be bad but wait for it to
be bad before you clean it up.
00:18:28
Alright.
00:18:29
Here are the sends.
00:18:31
Now, there are two sort of sets of sends
and I'm realizing I actually forgot to
mention something on the percussion.
00:18:37
The percussion is also
being sent to an Aphex,
which is Aphex Aural Exciter.
00:18:42
Let me show you what
that does in the chorus.
00:18:55
It does exactly what you'd
expect an Aphex to do.
00:18:57
It just synthesizes some
top-end based on the mid-range
so it's a little crispy.
00:19:01
I really like it, it's not like eqing.
Because again,
if you just turned up what's
there it would be noisy
but it gives you this kind of presence
but above the normal sort of
mid-range presence frequencies.
00:19:14
That is one of the
FX that is on the vocal.
00:19:18
So here are all the sends
to the vocal FX
and I'll go through them in a second
but just so you see what there is total,
there's the Aphex Aural Exciter,
there's Reverb 1,
Reverb 2,
a Spread,
which we talked about a little bit before
that had the distortion that I didn't use.
00:19:33
And then slap, we're making use of a lot
of slap delay on this particular vocal.
00:19:38
The Aphex is,
you guessed it, an Aphex.
And it's soloed...
00:19:44
There.
00:19:46
And here's what it sounds
like with and without.
00:19:59
Just that tiny bit of grainy top-end,
that's what the Aphex does.
00:20:03
I'm not using the second
reverb on the lead vocal
but the first reverb, vocal reverb 1
is filtered.
00:20:10
That keeps things like that plosive
out and it also keeps sibilance out.
00:20:16
I've seen this described on-line as the
Abbey Road reverb trick.
00:20:21
This is just using reverbs.
00:20:24
You know, EQ the send to the reverb.
00:20:26
De-ess the send to the reverb.
00:20:28
Put a delay on the send to the reverb.
00:20:30
Now you've got pre-delay.
00:20:32
Processing a send on its way
to a reverb is not a trick
it's just part of mixing.
00:20:37
So, like with the snare drum
I'm gating it, here I'm filtering it.
00:20:41
It's just a little processing
before we get into a Plate reverb.
00:20:46
Nothing special about this plate,
I kind of like it.
00:20:49
Like I said before I'm
really bad at reverbs
and this one seems
to work most of the time.
00:20:53
I think I like it though
because it has a picture
of a Sherman Filterbank,
right there.
00:20:57
And that's a really cool sounding filter
and I own one.
00:21:00
And so that's why I like it.
00:21:04
Here's the lead vocal
with and without the reverb.
00:21:16
It's reverb.
00:21:17
It's not very exciting.
00:21:19
I'm not using vocal reverb 2
on this particular vocal
but I am using on the background vocals.
00:21:26
I'll show it to you now,
it's really exciting.
00:21:28
It's a copy of the filter
and then it's a D-Verb.
00:21:31
That's all.
00:21:32
This was because I was having
trouble hearing the vocal reverb
and I was just bummed out it
and I thought:
'Well, I can always hear D-Verb.
00:21:40
Especially if I send it to the Rear Bus.'
So, most of the FXs just
go straight to the Mixbus,
this one actually gets
sent to the Rear Bus.
00:21:47
This is when I want reverb.
00:21:49
I wanna hear the Reverb!
It's on the background vocals.
00:21:52
Not on the lead.
00:21:53
Next is the spread
which is,
a gate.
00:21:58
Which is still on,
that gate is normally off,
I only use it when I'm using a Sansamp,
which gives you kind of the Deftones FX.
00:22:07
We're not gonna talk about it now
because I didn't use it.
00:22:10
But this just keeps all the little
breaths and mouths noises and stuff out
and just lets the vocal through.
00:22:16
And I just left it.
00:22:17
But what we're using on this song
is a Micro-Pitch Slap.
00:22:21
Very standard stuff.
00:22:22
Up a little lift on the left,
down a little bit on the right.
00:22:25
You could go the other way if you want.
00:22:27
And the only thing
that's slightly weird is
normally you do sort of
10 or 20 ms delays
to keep within the Haas effect so you
don't hear the delays separating on short
like Ss, Ts, Ks and stuff like that.
00:22:40
These are long enough so they do.
00:22:42
So I use a little bit less of
it than I would otherwise.
00:22:45
But it's wider than the
normal kind of micro-pitch slap.
00:22:50
I just did this starting a while ago
and I kind of like it
and I left it,
I thought I'd shorten it and I don't.
00:22:58
So that's it.
00:23:00
And there is a gate
on the output just
because that plug-in is noisy,
you can see the threshold
is almost all the way down.
00:23:06
Here's the vocal with and without
the Micro-Pitch slap spread thing.
00:23:22
It just spreads a little bit.
00:23:24
Again, this is structural,
this is not mean to be
a vocal FX, this is mean to be
the vocal doesn't sound so dry
compared to all of the crazy wetness
I've created with distortion
and compression
and reverbs, etc,
on all the other instruments.
00:23:38
Then Slap is this last guy.
00:23:41
Normally this send will be down,
I don't know, -20, -15,
something like that.
00:23:45
On this song it's quite a bit louder
because the slap is all the way through.
00:23:50
There's a filter on this
but you don't really need it
because I'm using this plug-in,
Bucket Brigade Delay.
00:23:59
I'm not gonna go into it now,
but if you don't know
what a bucket brigade is,
it's awesome.
00:24:03
Look it up,
look at what an actual bucket brigade is
then look up what a
bucket brigade delay is
and it's treating capacitors like
they're people with buckets of water.
00:24:12
And that's really cool.
00:24:13
Anyway.
00:24:14
It's a very filtered sounding delay.
00:24:16
I love the sound of it and this
is a big part of the vocal sound actually.
00:24:32
There you go,
that is the defining sound of the vocal
for the verses.
And it's in the choruses as well.
00:24:39
But having that happen
was in-place of distorting
the vocal for the verses.
00:24:45
So, me experimenting with that Sansamp
was just on the way to try and figure out
something that would be good.
00:24:51
If you remember back to the rough mix,
and the rough mix sounds really cool,
but the vocal is pretty dry in the verses
and really doubled and wet with
the gang vocals in the choruses
and that contrast was weird.
00:25:03
To me, even though I will change sonically
between the verse and the chorus,
it's still the same guy singing,
it doesn't matter that now he's
doubled and panned out a little bit
and has a crowd with him.
00:25:14
To really completely change
the sound of the vocals
when there isn't a reason to
would just be distracting to me.
00:25:22
So this slap ended up
being the thing that glued
the verse to the chorus
together sonically.
00:25:28
That's it for the lead vocals.
00:25:30
If we come down to the background vocals,
this is one place and it
makes sense if I explain
in terms of the template
where
audio actually flow uphill.
00:25:41
We've got the exact
same set of Auxes here,
Phoenix 2 going into an Rvox, .7.
00:25:48
This is the Pultec with
the thing and the stuff.
00:25:52
It's just a copy of it for
the background vocals.
00:25:54
So the background vocals
and the lead vocals get their own Pultec.
00:25:59
That's because sometimes
the background vocals need it,
the lead doesn't and I don't
wanna do it with the send,
it just gets messy that way.
00:26:07
But then all of the same sends
to all the same FX.
00:26:10
Now,
the two things that are to the left are
the Stereo Vocal Crush.
00:26:15
This is a vocal compressor that's parallel
and it's shared between the lead
and the backgrounds.
00:26:22
And it's an 1176 with all-buttons in.
00:26:25
Multi-mono, so on the background vocals
they'll actually spread
and won't smear things.
00:26:31
It does what it says.
00:26:33
It adds aggression, really, it's a like
a fader full of attitude for the vocals.
00:26:37
Let me play you some verse vocal
with and without the Lead Vocal Crush.
00:26:42
And you'll really hear
it change character.
00:26:46
It's not just level,
it really is about the character as well.
00:27:04
It's kind of a weird thing,
the all-buttons in
makes it very non-linear
and in a way it's almost expanding.
00:27:10
It's not compressing because it grabs
things and makes them too loud.
00:27:15
Without this
all of that compression I've put
of the vocal tracks themselves
now all the life has been
completely crushed out of the vocal.
00:27:22
It's great because it's a package and
it will ride on top of this very noisy mix
but it also just sounds crushed.
00:27:30
With this in
it counter-balances how much
I'm crushing the vocals themselves
and makes them stand out again.
So just have a listen again.
00:28:01
And remember, what's getting fed into this
is that compressed vocal that
you hear when I muted.
00:28:10
So, by feeding that really
over-compressed vocal
into this all-buttons in,
non-linear, weirdo mode 1176
it opens it back up.
00:28:19
And gives you that aggression and
that presence that's all gone
without it.
00:28:24
The other thing
should be no surprise.
00:28:27
The Rear Bus.
00:28:28
So that's just taking
a copy of the vocal,
putting it in with the bass, keys,
guitars, background vocals
and they interact and do
the mid-range presence thing.
00:28:36
That's what they do.
00:28:38
So now really quickly,
background vocals,
gang vocals...
00:28:55
That's all they do.
00:28:57
They doubled the
first halves of each line,
let the lead vocal take over.
00:29:01
So, with the lead vocal.
00:29:15
Without the Rear Bus and
without the Stereo Vocal Crush
those levels won't kind of mix themselves.
00:29:21
You can hear that lead sinks
down into the background vocals
just a little bit when
it's doubled with them
but them it slams forward
and it's good and loud.
00:29:29
If I take these two things out
what will happen is,
they'll start to separate a little bit.
00:29:36
And it won't feel like a package
of vocals when they sing together.
00:30:03
All of the character of
having that group come and go
but you still get your
lead vocal being the lead,
it just works better as a package.
00:30:11
It's going to all of the same stuff
with the addition of the longer reverb.
00:30:16
This is something I do quite a bit,
the background vocals will be
more affected then the lead vocal.
00:30:23
One of the things it does,
especially with reverb, slap or the spread
anything with delay or reverb,
is it will push them back a little bit
in the sort of front to
back 3D picture of the mix
or however you wanna think about it.
00:30:37
So with the lead vocal
being slightly drier
it will be slightly closer to you.
00:30:42
It should seem somewhat obvious because
that's what we talk about with reverb
but think back to the snare
where the sound of the
snare drum didn't change
but adding the reverb made it
sound like exactly the same snare
but somehow further away.
00:30:55
That's exactly what you're doing by putting
more effects on the background vocals.
00:30:59
Which is a good thing.
00:31:00
I think that's it. There's one more FX
that's in my template that we're not using
so you don't get to hear about it.
00:31:07
Eventually, every single track,
whether it goes there directly or
goes through an Aux on its way there
goes to the Mixbus
and all of the parallel
stuff goes to the Mixbus.
00:31:17
So that's my Stereo Bus
that collects everything.
00:31:20
That comes down here,
I've got a Master Fader for it so I've got
sort of gain structure
after the fact.
00:31:27
This lets me just turn down
the Mixbus itself,
no matter what's going on beforehand,
before it gets into my 2-Bus processing.
00:31:35
On the Mixbus master is just some meters.
00:31:38
And these meters are not calibrated.
00:31:40
They only have 10 dB of headroom.
00:31:42
If these are pegged
the mix is really loud
and I know that.
00:31:47
It's just normally on a second screen
I can glance over at it
and get depressed at how loud the mix is
and then I ignore it
again and I just work.
00:31:54
No audio processing in there.
00:31:56
Then Mixbus feeds this
Aux called the Router.
00:32:00
I could have called that the Mixbus
but that would be weird to me
because the bus is
what's collecting the audio
so it's just what I name things.
00:32:07
And it routes the Mixbus
through all this crap and
then onto the actual Print track.
00:32:13
So the Print track down here,
I'm always listening through in Input
and that way I can switch back and forth
very quickly between either
the rough mix
or a previous version of
the mix if I'm doing revisions.
00:32:25
Personally I don't use reference tracks
because they confuse the hell out of me,
I don't need to go into that
but that would be my reference,
I'm switching back to the rough mix
to say: 'Am I better?'
Because you've always gotta be better
and being louder or brighter
or sounding better isn't better,
it's gotta feel better.
00:32:42
And that can be one of the
most depressing things ever,
as you work on a mix for hours and hours,
you think it's sounding great,
feeling really great,
switch back to the rough mix,
sounds like ass and feels awesome.
00:32:54
Terrible things. It happens all the time.
00:32:57
So, you need be able to
reference quickly, the way I do it,
mixing through the audio track,
switching input.
00:33:02
OK, let's go through the actual
processing on the Mixbus.
00:33:06
We start with the
Black Box Analog Design thing.
00:33:11
It's a tube saturator piece of hardware
which was then modeled.
00:33:15
I kind of like it, the mix is only at 50%.
00:33:19
I'm not distorting this much.
00:33:21
It adds a lot of really
cool kind of top-end.
00:33:24
So what I'm gonna do
is I'm going to play you
the Intro. Let's do the Intro so we
don't mess with the vocals too much.
00:33:44
It adds level again but too me
what happens is the cymbals
get a little bit more present
but the snare starts to kind of explode.
00:33:51
Because it's getting distorted.
00:33:53
It's very loud.
00:33:54
Keep in mind
that the uncompressed snare drum track
and the Kick Snare Crush version
of the snare drum,
which is letting the transient through
because the kick and the snare
aren't hitting at the same time.
00:34:06
So that transient is very loud,
it's making it
all the way down here to the Mixbus.
00:34:11
So, my peaks are crazy loud
and I have no compression on the Mixbus,
at all, there's a limiter at the end
and that's it.
00:34:20
So when we get to the
Limiter on this particular mix
it's gonna be quite a bit of limiting,
that's a bit of the sound of the mix,
but on a lot of my mixes,
the kick and snare
will limit like crazy.
00:34:31
Eight dB,
10 dB sometimes,
which scares me because
that's a hell of a lot,
but in-between transients
there's absolutely no limiting.
00:34:39
Again, this mix is very thick,
there's a lot going on,
it will be limiting
anyway and I'm using it
like a compressor
as well as like a limiter
but these transients
are making it through.
00:34:50
So the transients of the kick and snare
are gonna get a lot of
benefit from something like this
whereas the track itself
won't get quite as much.
Again, listen to the snare drum.
00:35:13
It sounds great without it,
it sounds a little better with it.
00:35:16
It's a subtle thing.
00:35:17
Next, brainworx.
00:35:19
This is the bx_digital V3.
00:35:22
I used to use the V2 and then the
V3 came out, it's one better so I use it.
00:35:26
This plug-in does a lot.
00:35:28
I generally do three things with it.
00:35:31
I use the stereo-width control
so I add some width.
00:35:35
I have a tiny
high-shelf, 0.9 dB at 8 kHz
on the sides only.
00:35:43
It's not in the middle,
it's just on the sides.
00:35:45
I don't know, it's been in there years.
00:35:48
If I take it out
I miss it so I leave it in.
00:35:51
There's no great rhyme or reason to it,
I just like it.
00:35:54
The other thing I use quite
a bit on this is the bass-shift.
00:35:58
And so, what it does
is it keeps the
energy of the mix the same
but it does it by sucking out around
250 and adding at around 50.
00:36:09
You can go backwards and add
low-mids and take out low-end.
00:36:12
I don't know why you'd ever do that,
that would sound terrible.
00:36:15
It keeps the level hitting
the limiter exactly the same,
everything else around it is the same.
00:36:20
Basically it takes the low frequencies
and shifts them down and octave,
it's what it feels like.
00:36:25
The kick drum will really change.
00:36:27
I'll start by bypassing the entire plug-in
but then I'll just bypass the
bass-shift on the next pass.
00:36:33
So you can listen to just what
it does to the kick and bass.
00:36:48
And that's just the graphic didn't go
but the bass-shift actually did go.
00:36:53
So now,
I'm gonna bypass just the bass-shift
and listen to the very bottom
of the kick and the bass.
00:37:12
What it does is it kind of pulls the
kick drum down below the bass
and let's have its own spot.
00:37:19
A lot of times people ask:
'How do you manage the low-end
between the kick and the bass?'
This is one of the ways I do it.
00:37:24
It just seems to drop the kick
but without dropping
the bass along with it
so it helps them separate a little bit.
00:37:30
Plus,
you don't need a lot
of information at 250,
you can easily lose some 250
and add some low-frequencies below it.
00:37:39
One of the benefits of the stereo width,
other than just being wider,
is that
I mix in headphones quite a bit,
people listen in headphones
all the time now.
00:37:51
I mean,
how many people don't go through a day
without seeing people with
AirPods in their ears, right?
Or ear-buds or something?
People listen to music on
headphones all the time.
00:38:01
Having something just
on the left side of a mix
when it's playing on its own
can actually hurt
because your brain is not happy
about getting sound in
one ear and not the other ear,
that starts messing with your other ear
to figure out what's wrong.
00:38:15
It sounds really bad.
00:38:17
So then you have to start thinking
about that when you're mixing
or you don't think about
it when you're mixing.
00:38:22
Like, well: Do I not pan a 100
or just pan everything
92 or something like that?
The way stereo width works
is it takes out of phase
version of what's hard panned
and adds it to the other side.
00:38:36
So, the benefit,
other than just having a wider mix is,
if I had something panned hard left
a little bit of level would
actually be on the right side
and it would keep my ear from pulling.
00:38:47
So, even listening on ear-buds
at loud volumes,
it sounds a little bit more natural.
00:38:52
It's like adding crosstalk
between the left and the right.
00:38:55
I don't like the idea of adding crosstalk
because I spend a lot of time trying
to place things and have stuff be wide
but I do like the idea of stuff wrapping
around even if it's outside the speakers.
00:39:06
So that's what that's for.
00:39:08
Next in the list,
happy face EQ.
00:39:12
That's it.
00:39:13
This particular mix I've added a little
extra of the top end
but it's around 3.
00:39:18
I don't think that's dB.
00:39:20
It's three Pultecs of 100 Hz.
00:39:23
And it is 4 Pultecs of 10 kHz.
00:39:27
There you go. Happy face EQ.
00:39:29
The way I think about the parallel stuff
but especially my Mixbus processing
is this the way my console sounds.
00:39:37
That way
I can have tons of guitar
tracks with no EQ on them.
00:39:41
Because they're all getting this EQ
and this is what I want on everything.
00:39:45
I want low-end,
I want top-end and then that way
I can shape the mid-range
with those little bits of EQ on the guitars,
on the piano or in the vocal.
00:39:54
And I've got a lot of
control over the mid-range
but I'm not having to
add low-end to everything.
00:39:59
It's more processing power,
it's more phase distortion,
it's more everything.
00:40:03
Why not do it with one
plug-in at the very end?
It's not a new concept but I do it.
00:40:08
I'm gonna play you a little bit of
that Intro with and without the EQ.
00:40:11
The difference is gonna
be absolutely gigantic.
00:40:28
I don't need to say any more about that.
00:40:30
Of course you want that.
00:40:32
Let me skip this second last plug-in
and just go over to the Limiter.
00:40:36
I love this Limiter.
00:40:38
New Fangled Audio.
It's the guys at Eventide
and it's a 26 band limiter.
00:40:43
It also has transient emphasis,
which basically,
because there's a look-ahead on it,
remembers when there was a transient
that it just crushed
and it adds some of it back in
post-limiter
and then clips it off
so that you still don't get overs
but you can add some of
the transients back in,
post-limiting, which is awesome.
00:41:04
It also, though they put it
in after I've mixed this record,
because it's no on,
they also have inter-sample over,
true peak limiting.
00:41:13
You won't get people yelling at you that
the red lights turned on
on their box even though
they don't turn on on your box.
00:41:19
But that's not on on this case.
I'm not adding any gain at all.
00:41:22
There's zero gain going in
and there is zero
on the threshold
but you're gonna see
there's a ton of limiting here.
00:41:44
And now sonically,
I'm gonna play that without
and I'll switch it on off
like I have been doing.
00:41:49
First of all, I hope you noticed
that other than the kick and the snare
there's actually no limiting.
00:41:53
Later on, when the vocals are in,
and things like that there is a bit.
00:41:56
It's just the transients.
00:41:59
I am fine with having even 8 or 10 dB
of limiting on just the transients
because it's not doing
anything to the rest of the mix.
00:42:07
As crazy loud as this mix is
it's contained by the parallel compressors.
00:42:12
It's just those transients.
00:42:14
This is the most
transparent way I've found
to get rid of the transients that would
otherwise be clipping.
00:42:36
It's pretty transparent
actually on this mix.
00:42:39
It's not having a
gigantic input sonically,
which is exactly I like in a limiter,
because I hate limiters.
00:42:45
They always sound like
they're destroying things.
00:42:48
This one sounds the least like a limiter.
00:42:50
That's why I use it. It's a really
awesome transparent thing.
00:42:55
A bit of a CPU pig,
a bit of a latency pig,
but that's the price you pay
for a good limiter.
00:43:01
The last thing
and you can see it's bypassed here,
it is actually automating.
00:43:07
It's bypassed and that's because
I have a reverb on my Mixbus.
00:43:12
I'm really bad at reverb
but I found that this reverb,
on my Mixbus, makes me happy.
00:43:18
It's actually the same guys,
it's Eventide again.
00:43:21
And it is only 15% on the Wet/Dry mix,
so there's much to it.
00:43:28
I've turned down mic 3,
which is the far mic.
00:43:31
Sometimes I'll shorten the decay time,
things like that, I'll mess with it a little bit
but not too much.
00:43:37
Basically it is adding reverb to the mix.
00:43:39
This might seem like a weird thing
but if you go back to the 50s and 60s
there was actually mastering reverb.
People would add reverb to a mix.
00:43:48
In the 70s you could buy Spring Reverbs
that would hook up to your stereo so that
you could add reverb to
every record you listened to.
00:43:57
I don't recommend that
but this works really well.
00:44:00
It doesn't necessarily sound like reverb,
except when you have quiet spots,
which is why it is automating.
It's bypassed for the Intro
because you really heard
the extra bit of room,
because there's only one element
and it starts and stops and
you hear the decay of the reverb
but when the track is going
it's harmonic distortion,
it's smearing,
it's glue.
00:44:20
It's like, I guess, a parallel compressor
but it's a parallel reverb
mixed at 15%.
00:44:27
Here's what this sounds like.
00:44:53
I just love the way that sounds.
00:44:54
It sounds exciting to me.
00:44:56
And it does the same sort of thing
that a bus compressor can do
but I just cannot find a
bus compressor that I like.
00:45:04
I used to use the 33609
on absolutely everything
and I was getting sick of
it for probably 8 or 9 years
before I finally got rid of it.
00:45:13
SSLs don't make any sense to me.
00:45:16
I've tried the Fatso, I've tried all
kind of other stuff, the Mpressor.
00:45:20
I don't like any of them
because they're changing stuff.
00:45:24
So I leave it for the limiter to do
but this gives some of that messy glue
that you get out of a
good bus compressor.
00:45:31
It's magic.
00:45:32
So, again, here's the Intro sound
with the processing.
00:46:00
Just a little background
on the plug-in itself.
00:46:03
It's called the T-Verb because
it's the Tony Visconti verb
and apparently that is a signature
so if you ever wanna forge a check,
that's the way to do it.
00:46:12
This is the main live room at
Hansa recording studios in Berlin,
which is very famously where
the three Berlin era David Bowie
records were made,
including Low. Just great records.
00:46:25
Some people Brian Eno produced them.
00:46:27
He did not, he showed up and did
a lot of processing
and a lot of keyboards stuff
and hung out
but Tony Visconti produced those records.
00:46:34
This is also where the first
Iggy Pop record was made,
that David Bowie produced.
00:46:39
And if you don't know that little
bit of history it's worth looking into
because they are David Bowie
songs that he did in the 90s
in very produced ways
that were actually done
by Iggy Pop much earlier
but David had produced them back then.
00:46:54
Interesting, little factoid.
00:46:56
This is a model of that room.
00:46:59
Here's the mix start to finish.
You've seen all the pieces.
00:47:03
Here it is.
00:51:09
Et Voilà!
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
- Audio Ease AlitVerb
- Avid BBD Delay
- Avid D-Verb
- Avid EQ-7
- Avid ReVibe II
- Black Box HG-2
- Brain Worx bx_digital V3
- Crane Song Phoenix II
- Eventide H910
- Eventide TVerb
- Fab Filter Pro-DS
- Izotope Trash 2
- Liquid Sonics Seventh Heaven Professional
- New Fangled Audio Elevate
- SansAmp
- Sound Toys Devil-Loc
- UA Ampeg SVTVR
- UA Fatso Jr
- UAD UA 1176AE
- Valhalla Room
- Waves Aphex Vintage Exciter
- Waves CLA-2A
- Waves CLA-76
- Waves Omni Channel
- Waves PuigChild 670
- Waves PuigTec EQP1A
- Waves RVox
- Waves Smack Attack
- Waves dbx 160
Andrew Scheps is a music producer, mixing engineer and record label owner based in the United Kingdom. He has received Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album for his work on Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium, Album Of The Year for Adele's 21, and also Best Reggae Album for Ziggy Marley's Fly Rasta.
Andrew started as a musician, but found that what he enjoyed most was working behind the scenes. This led him to study recording at the University of Miami. After graduating, he spent some time working for Synclavier, and then on the road with Stevie Wonder (as a keyboard tech) and Michael Jackson (mixing live sound). But he found his home in the studio, and he honed his craft working for producers such as Rob Cavallo, Don Was and Rick Rubin.
Andrew collaborated with Waves in order to create his own line of plug-ins which include the Scheps 73 EQ and the Scheps Parallel Particles.
Andrew is one of the best known mixing engineers in the world, well-known for his Rear Bus mixing techniques that he developed working on his 64 input Neve 8068 console and his love for distortion of any kind. If you are watching pureMix videos you will see that he managed to carry his analog sound signature over to a fully portable digital rig. These days, Andrew mixes completely In The Box as it allows him much greater flexibility and the ability to work on several project simultaneously.
Beyonce
Lana Del Rey
Red Hot Chili Peppers
U2
Michael Jackson
Green Day
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