Inside The Mix: The Heavy with Andrew Scheps
02h 03min
(50)
Mix A Garage/Soul Hit In The Box With Andrew Scheps
In this pureMix.net exclusive, Grammy Award Winning Engineer, Andrew Scheps, breaks down his stylized mix of The Heavy’s “Since You’ve Been Gone”.
When The Heavy sent the multitrack over to Andrew, it had a lot of attitude and direction already baked into the recording. See how Andrew takes tones that were intentionally distorted and mangled and works to enhance the original vision of the artist to create a mix that is full of vibe and attitude.
During this two and a half hour tutorial, Andrew will show you:
- The useful difference between compression and limiting
- How to make the choice between compressing and limiting
- Highlight the unique characteristics of individual tracks
- How to tackle instruments like Baritone and Tenor Saxophone, Trombone, Trumpet, Glockenspiel, Piano, Pipe Organs and more to work cohesively and fit into an aggressive rock mix.
- How to add density and size to drums using Andrew’s famous “Rear Bus” technique.
Learn how to enhance the artist’s vision to create a stylized, unique and exciting mix, 100% in the box, from Andrew Scheps, only on puremix.net
Parts of this site and some files are only accessible to pureMix Pro Members or available to purchase. Please see below our membership plans or add this video to your shopping cart.
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 01:18 - Session Layout
- 07:16 - Drums
- 12:17 - Kick
- 15:54 - Snare
- 18:14 - Kick Snare Crush
- 21:35 - Mono Overhead
- 23:41 - Overall Kit Mic
- 26:19 - Room Mic
- 26:50 - Kick and Snare Sample
- 28:14 - Toms
- 30:07 - Kit Bus Processing
- 33:00 - Overdub Hi-Hat
- 36:42 - The Sound of the Band
- 39:05 - Percussion
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Bass
- 08:20 - Guitars
- 21:00 - Keyboards
- 24:44 - Rear Bus
- 30:02 - More Keyboards
- 31:42 - Horns
- 37:43 - Strings
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Vocals
- 08:38 - Background Vocals
- 12:18 - Listen to the Rear Bus
- 14:28 - 2 Bus Processing
- 21:53 - The Middle Eight
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
00:00:07
Good morning, children!
and welcome back to
Monnow Valley studios in Wales.
00:00:11
A bunch of gear in here.
We're not going to use it today
because we're here
to go through a mix I did
for a fantastic band called The Heavy.
00:00:19
And now that I live in the UK,
I could be slightly presumptuous
and say, "a local band."
They're from Bath,
and they are great.
00:00:28
If you're not aware of them,
you will be,
almost immediately.
00:00:31
The song is called
"Since You Been Gone."
I'm going to play you the whole song
so you get a feel for it,
it's kind of old-school,
a lot of soul influence,
a lot of what you would think
could be kind of loops,
that sort of thing built into it,
but there are in fact
no samples on this song.
00:00:49
Live drums, live rhythm section,
live horns, background vocals.
00:00:53
It's a really cool track, and then also,
a little bit later on,
there's quite a bit
that got done in the mix
for the middle eight,
which is what they call a bridge
over here, just so you know.
00:01:04
We'll have a look at what I did there,
and mix-wise,
it's going to go a lot further
than some of the other
mixing videos I've done
where we're pretty much
mixing what's there.
00:01:13
We actually created quite a bit in this
one section, which is a lot of fun,
a lot of automating plug-ins,
that kind of thing.
00:01:18
Let's start by having a listen
to the song,
and while we're doing that
I'm just going to scroll around
in the session
so you can kind of see
what's what very quickly
in case you're not familiar
with the way my sessions look.
00:01:28
I go, top to bottom,
drums, percussion, bass, guitars,
in this case, keyboards,
then we've got some horns,
some strings,
and lead vocal, background vocal.
00:01:40
I'm going to scroll around.
00:01:41
Here's how it goes.
00:04:51
Quite a bit going on in the arrangement.
00:04:53
It's all pretty straight-ahead
except for the middle eight,
but there are quite a few instruments.
00:04:57
There is a separate video
which you guys can go have a look at
about session setup,
which goes through
how I have my template setup in one video,
and then how I use that template
inside of a mix session.
00:05:09
So, how I import things,
how I order my tracks,
how I color-code,
so rather than spend any time on that,
I think we can really
just sort of dive in.
00:05:17
What I'm going to do first
is just take out strings,
horns,
and vocals,
and we'll just get down to the band.
00:05:25
And then, we'll kind of do
the usual things,
start with the drums,
and build the rhythm section back up
until we just have the band,
and then we'll see how we fit
strings and horns on top
of an already pretty full arrangement.
00:05:37
So we'll just listen to the band.
00:05:38
I'm going to leave the percussion in
because there's not a huge amount of it.
00:06:06
First of all, the drums are funky as hell,
which is a good thing,
and it really does sound
kind of like a sample within the verse,
but then all of the fills
are played live and things like that,
so I think that's one of the keys
as to why this song is so awesome.
00:06:24
Everything else works around that,
but the groove itself is really cool,
and then, the rest of the
instrumentation is really simple,
and that, I think,
is again, the key to this.
00:06:35
You get to the verse
and you've just got
the droning bass and piano
to give you sort of one tone
between the bass and piano,
and then you've got
one little guitar backbeat.
00:06:54
Which gives you so much room
for those little accents,
like the pipe organ that comes in,
stuff like that,
but what it really also does
is it lets you just listen
to Kelvin's vocal
and he rules the song.
00:07:06
On repeated listenings,
you start to pick up
on all the little details
and that's what keeps it interesting
and brings you back to listen,
but on first listen, it is just
the badass groove and the vocal.
00:07:15
That said, let's break this down
to just drums,
because that's what we do.
00:07:20
We can start going
through some individual stuff,
and then once we get
the band built back up
then we'll start talking about
the overall mix compression,
EQ, stuff like that.
00:07:28
And I'm actually using a plug-in
on this mix bus
that I don't use on a lot of other mixes,
partly because it just wanted to be
a little bit more...
00:07:36
not lo-fi, but just a different sound.
00:07:38
You'll see that in a little bit.
00:07:40
So let's just check out the drums.
00:07:42
One of the things about the drums,
and in fact, this whole session,
and the whole record really,
is that things were recorded
to sound very much
like what they were going to end up being.
00:07:53
If you've watched
some of the other videos,
you've seen sometimes
that drums can be recorded
in a very flexible way,
so there are lots of microphones
and then you can mix and match
to kind of get the sound you're going for.
00:08:04
I didn't track this record,
I've just mixed it,
but I did go by the studio
while they were doing some recording.
00:08:09
When you look at this session,
the drums are across
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9 tracks.
00:08:16
That's actually split out a lot more
than some of the other sessions.
00:08:20
I think there were a couple of songs
where the drums were just on 3 tracks
because that's what they wanted
to sound like.
00:08:25
There are a couple of songs
where the drums were put to tape.
00:08:28
This kit was actually put to tape
and brought back,
I think more just for a little bit
of harmonic distortion on this song,
but on other songs,
the three tracks are completely
crushed on tape.
00:08:39
So they're really using
the recording process
as a sound-shaping process
and not just to capture
some people playing instruments
and then hope for the best later on.
00:08:49
And in some ways,
it can be more challenging
when you get a song
that's recorded this way
if it's not done well,
because you are boxed into a corner,
but it might not be the corner
that you want to be in.
00:09:02
In this case,
I think any shortcomings
there may have been on individual tracks
are completely overcome
by how great the performances are
and how cool the sounds are,
so, like, one of the things for me
getting the rough mixes
of songs like this on the record,
which are very groove-oriented,
were that the roughs felt great
just pushing the tracks up.
00:09:23
The groove is there,
but there's no real definition
in the drums,
so, me trying to bring out
the kick and snare,
me making sure that the vocal
is always on top when
he has the kind of voice
that you can bury and it will still work,
but really trying to make him lead,
making the horn arrangements be a feature
and not just another instrument,
that sort of thing.
00:09:43
So this entire project
was very much about that,
and then, also,
like I mentioned before,
in the middle eight,
on the whole record,
the band basically said,
"Look, we love the songs,
we think the arrangements are great,
we're totally happy with how
everything is working
in verses and choruses
and things like that,
we think musically the middle eights
are set up to be exactly
what they should be
in terms of being a break,
either harmonically or dynamically
from the rest of the song
so you can reintroduce the chorus,
you go somewhere else for a minute."
But they basically said,
"Do whatever you want
in the middle eights."
This song in particular,
I went pretty far with effects
and things like that,
so really creating soundscapes
from what I was given,
and we're going to delve
very deeply into that.
00:10:29
So I think that kind of sets us up
to start looking at individual tracks now,
and what you'll see as we go through this
is that these sounds
are very much the sound
of what I ended up using.
00:10:41
If you're familiar with my template
and the way I set things up,
I've got a Kick-Snare Crush,
which is a mono parallel compressor
for the kick and the snare,
which I'll take out for right now.
00:10:52
They were already running the drums
into a Stereo Bus,
which I held onto.
00:10:57
One of my concepts when mixing is,
whenever possible,
I use the session exactly as it came to me
and I don't want the session stripped back
to the raw tracks,
because usually
so much has been done in Pro Tools
since the thing was recorded
to make it work
that if you take everything off
and take all the automation off,
all the plug-ins,
you're not really left
with what the song is
and what the song became
and what made the band
decide it was time to mix,
so I would actually rather have
a much more complicated session
that I can simplify myself
as I start to figure out
what has been used
and how it has been used,
and then I can assess
each thing individually.
00:11:40
In this case,
there are quite a few plug-ins
that were left in the session
and I think I kept probably 80% of them,
and then there are quite a few tracks
without too much stuff on,
so I'll try to be good about telling you
what they used and what I used.
00:11:53
The drum kit is going into a Stereo Aux
which has some plug-ins on,
and then from there I'm sending it off
to both the Rear Buss,
which is interesting because I don't
always send the drums to the Rear Buss,
and also to my stereo drum compressor,
the Fatso.
00:12:08
So I've just taken all of the Sends off
for the parallel compressors,
so we're going to start hearing
just raw drum tracks
through my 2-bus chain.
00:12:17
So we'll start with the kick,
as we usually do.
00:12:19
They were using
this 88RS plug-in.
00:12:23
I don't know why,
just the engineer who was recording
the stuff was using it
and I think I just decided it was good.
00:12:29
I'm going to take off my plug-ins.
00:12:30
So this is the kick from tape.
00:12:37
So not the cleanest kick drum
recording in the world,
but it's cool-sounding.
00:12:41
I doubt there was a hole
in the front head,
and you can hear a lot of snare bleed,
it's one microphone,
it's bounced to tape pretty hard,
and you can hear
what they were doing to it.
00:12:56
It sounded fine to me,
a little bit of top end,
well, quite a bit of top end actually,
and a little bit of compression,
so I just left it.
00:13:03
Now, I may have tweaked, but usually,
when I'm looking at the plug-ins
that have already been used,
I never change any of the controls.
00:13:10
I either bypass, or I keep it intact,
and in this case,
I might have bypassed the compressor
and kept the EQ,
or the other way around.
00:13:17
Maybe they had a filter on it
which I took out,
but it doesn't look as though they did.
00:13:22
That's the way I treat their plug-ins,
is, "Okay, is it good, or bad?"
and if it's good, I keep it,
if it's bad, I get rid of it.
00:13:28
In this case it was good.
00:13:29
And then,
two things that I almost always
put on every drum kit.
00:13:33
Here is the kick
with some EQ that I added,
and it's the usual thing:
a little bit of 60 Hz,
I didn't actually use the Mid band at all,
and a little bit of 12 kHz.
00:13:43
No high-pass filter.
00:13:44
So this is just a little bit more
happy-face EQ.
00:14:05
And I hope what you're hearing
is the same as what I'm hearing,
is that it's helping the kick drum
with a little bit of length
on the release of the kick,
but it's actually making the snare drum
sound a lot better.
00:14:15
The snare mic itself is going to be
so much louder than that bleed
that it's probably not making
a huge difference,
but, that bleed is there,
I'm definitely not going to try
and gate that out,
so that is part of the snare sound.
00:14:27
I'll just play that again really quickly
so you can check that out.
00:14:41
You can hear the rolls
on the snare a little bit,
and then also,
there is something a little bit boxy
about the snare without the EQ
but rather than finding the boxy bit
and trying to take it out,
by adding top end above the boxy bit
it's sort of the same thing,
but I'm just getting the benefit
of a little added top end
which is bringing out
some of the detail stuff in the kick.
00:15:00
Then, Lo-Fi.
00:15:01
If you've watched any of my other videos,
you know all about this.
00:15:04
There is one knob on this plug-in
as far as I'm concerned,
it's the Distortion knob.
00:15:07
I never use any of the
other stuff on here.
00:15:10
And in this case, not a whole lot
because it's got quite a bit
of harmonic distortion
going to and from tape, and the way
they've compressed it on the way in.
00:15:17
It's just adding a little bit of drive.
00:15:19
I'm basically using it
just like a subtle clipper.
00:15:36
Nothing too crazy, but there you go.
00:15:38
So that's our kick.
00:15:39
Just really quickly, here is
without either of my plug-ins.
00:15:51
It feels like it's got
a little more bounce to it.
00:15:54
Before I talk about the Kick-Snare Crush
in this instance,
I'm just going to move over
to the snare track,
and then this way
we'll have the kick and snare
go into that compressor together
because that's how that
compressor is used.
00:16:06
Again, with the snare
they've got an 88RS on there,
and then it looks like I've used
the exact same plug-ins
one more time on the snare,
but here's what they were doing to it.
00:16:29
A little bit of brightening,
a tiny bit of compression,
again, sounds better with it,
so I just left that alone.
00:16:34
And then, move back into the realm
of what I usually do.
00:16:38
Top end.
00:16:39
Again, I'm not using the Mid control
and I think it's probably because the Mid
on the kick at 7.2
is more of the attack,
which I didn't necessarily want
on this kick drum,
the 12 kHz was enough.
00:16:53
And on snare I'm usually using
the 220 on the Low for body,
and then if I need extra top
I'll use that 7.2.
00:17:02
So I'm not using the Mid
in the midrange really.
00:17:05
It's sort of the bottom of the air,
so I use the midrange to go along
with the high shelf if I need it,
and in this case on both the kick
and snare I didn't actually need it,
so there's a little bit of 220
for the body,
and then quite a bit more of the top end
because that snare is sounding
a little bit dark.
00:17:20
So here's the EQ.
00:17:39
Same thing, it's just bringing out
all that detail.
00:17:41
And then on Lo-Fi
there's a little bit more distortion,
but again, 0.4 is kind of low for me
on a snare drum.
00:17:46
I'd be, usually, I think,
closer to sort of 0.6, 0.8,
maybe getting up towards 1.
00:17:51
But here's the effect of that.
00:18:12
It's just more fun to listen to.
00:18:14
Let me solo up kick and snare together.
00:18:16
What I'm going to do is I'm going to mute
the Kick-Snare Crush down here
so I can turn on these sends,
and then I'm going to bring
the Kick-Snare Crush in and out,
which is a dbx 160
just over 4:1,
and we should see the Above light
where I'm going over the threshold
just on the transients
of the kick and snare.
00:18:34
I'm not really smashing here,
but what this will do is really change
the character of the decay
of the kick and snare,
and because both the kick and snare
are going into this compressor,
it lets the kick sustain
until the next snare drum
and the snare sustain
until the next kick drum,
and for me, it just really
sort of reinforces the groove
by having the drums extend
right up to the next transient.
00:19:15
Just night and day.
00:19:17
To me, that groove really starts to pop.
00:19:18
And again, this is just
on the kick and snare.
00:19:21
The other thing is, listen to
the definition of the hi-hat
as I bring this in and out.
00:19:25
The hi-hat sort of comes to the forefront
because when the kick and snare
aren't hitting
this compressor is really bringing up
all of the bleed
that's going on in between the transients.
00:19:37
And in this case his hi-hat
is super, super-tight,
and the dynamics within it
are really cool
and you start to hear that a lot more.
00:19:43
Obviously, we're going to get that
from the overhead
and from the hat mic,
but
the detail
that starts to come out of the drum kit
on every microphone
with parallel compression
is what I really love about it,
so check out the hi-hat now.
00:19:57
This is without.
00:20:16
Really good. This is already starting
to come together.
00:20:18
Now, I want to be fair on this mix.
00:20:21
I'm not doing a whole lot to the drums
because they already sound
really, really cool,
and I'm not going to end up
doing a whole lot to it.
00:20:28
You'll see my usual stuff
with the Fatso later on
once we get the rest of the kit together.
00:20:33
I am sending a little bit
of the drums to the Rear Buss,
which doesn't always happen,
and once the whole track is built back up
I'll show you what that's sounding like
and why I'm doing it
in this particular case.
00:20:43
"If stuff sounds good, leave it alone"
is my motto.
00:20:47
I should probably have
a t-shirt that says that.
00:20:49
And it's part of my
legacy of laziness,
which means
I don't want to do stuff
that I don't need to do.
00:20:57
I could go in and wrench on EQs
on these drums
and really try and make them sound great,
but if in the context
of the whole drum kit
the drums feel great,
then all I need to work on
is what needs to happen to them
in the context of the entire mix.
00:21:11
And usually that's something I can do on,
let's say, the stereo Kit Buss
where the whole drum kit is going through,
or adding them to the Rear Buss
if I feel like they're getting
lost a little bit
and I want the drums
to make the rest of the mix
interact a little bit more,
but there's no reason for me to be doing
a huge amount on the individual mics
if they sound cool,
and in this case they did,
so there aren't any huge problems to fix.
00:21:33
I don't need to really put
a ton of EQ, so I didn't.
00:21:36
Now, this kit was recorded
with a mono overhead,
which is always fun and interesting.
00:21:41
Nothing wrong with that. There's...
00:21:43
it's just more of sort of
an old-school approach,
but what was actually cool about that
is it left the sides of the mix
open for me
to move the horns
and the background vocals,
and take up more space in the outside
because the hat and the cymbals
aren't moving around a whole lot.
00:21:58
A mono overhead,
and their plug-in,
they had an SSL on this guy,
and again, I don't think I touched this.
00:22:14
And let me move to the chorus
because that's where
there are a lot of toms going on.
00:22:25
Really straight-ahead.
00:22:27
It's very well recorded,
it's balanced,
it's not that close,
which is interesting.
00:22:32
And it's also, you can hear
in the balance of the kit
compared to the kick and snare,
it's not that loud either.
00:22:36
So we'll go through the rest of the mics
and see where we're getting everything
and I think we're going to find
that the room mic is going to play
a much larger role.
00:22:43
I mean, there's also a low kit mic
and some extra drum mics,
so I'm sort of building a kit
from individual microphones
as opposed to the standard
multi-miked close mic setup.
00:22:53
Really quickly, here's what
their SSL is doing.
00:23:08
Pretty much the same
sort of thing I usually do.
00:23:10
A little bit of top end,
they're not adding low end,
which is fine,
and a little taste of compression
to help bring that up.
00:23:16
Because this is a slightly less
traditionally recorded kit,
as we go I'm going to keep adding
the microphones in
so you hear the kit so far,
and then you'll hear the kit
sort of build up to where we end up.
00:23:26
So this is kick, snare,
and overhead together.
00:23:38
We're starting to get
a pretty cool picture of the kit,
so let's see what's next.
00:23:42
We have 'S'.
00:23:52
Kind of overall kit mics.
00:23:54
They've got an LA-2A on it,
on which I probably turned off the Analog
if they hadn't already.
00:24:00
This, in all of the Waves models,
by the way,
it's a very cool thing
that they've actually separated this out.
00:24:06
What they've done is they've taken
the parts of the model of the circuit
that are very noisy
but aren't necessarily part
of the actual compression
part of the circuit
in terms of this LA-2A,
and they let you, first of all,
set them for 50 or 60 Hz
because the characteristic noise
would be different
depending on the power supply,
and they also let you turn it off.
00:24:26
In this case,
I like to turn it off
because I use so much parallel compression
that that noise ends up getting
really, really loud
and it's like a really bad amount
of tape hiss at the end of the day.
00:24:38
I personally turn it off.
00:24:39
You lose a little bit of the character
and a little bit of the
harmonic distortion
you might pick up
going through the plug-in,
that's fine.
00:24:45
There's so much harmonic distortion
going on elsewhere
that I'm not really
too worried about that.
00:24:49
They've got the compressor on here.
00:25:04
Pretty straight-ahead.
00:25:05
Trim plug-in,
probably from them
when they were checking phase
and this is left at zero.
00:25:11
I mean, if I was being really anal
I would get rid of that plug-in
because it's not doing anything,
but it's low DSP,
so it doesn't really matter,
and Lo-Fi.
00:25:19
So, this
would probably be me.
00:25:22
I don't remember specifically,
but I think that I decided
that this mic was going to be
part of my dirty friend with the drum kit.
00:25:29
So here is clean.
00:25:47
There's quite a bit of gain once you got
the Distortion up this high,
but it's really...
00:25:51
that's the character of this mic.
00:25:53
Now I'm going to play you the kit
with those 4 mics
so you can kind of hear
what we've built up to at this point,
and keep in mind that these are all panned
straight up the center,
so we have a completely mono drum kit
up to this point.
00:26:13
It's sounding pretty cool.
00:26:15
I'm going to skip this next track
as it's only used in a couple of spots,
so we'll go find that in a second,
and let's move over to the room track.
00:26:22
No plug-ins at all on this,
so I'll just play it for you.
00:26:32
A nice, crusty room.
00:26:33
So here's the kit with that as well.
00:26:47
All right, so it's basically
just a little bit dirtier with that in.
00:26:51
Next, we've got something called 'Lo K'.
00:26:59
A trigger that they were running live
and actually printed to tape and back.
00:27:03
What I'll do is I'll play you the kick
with and without that.
00:27:17
It's not making a huge difference,
just a little bit of extra knock
on the kick drum.
00:27:21
And then they've got
a snare sample as well,
so that sounds like this.
00:27:32
They've got a little bit of EQ on it.
00:27:33
Not a whole lot, looking at it.
00:27:35
This is what it sounds like without.
00:27:46
You can see just a tiny bit of EQ
to help blend that in.
00:27:49
Now, here's the snare
with that sample.
00:28:03
It's just a tiny bit of extra attack,
which is good because
that snare is pretty long
and to try and get extra attack
out of the close mic
you'd probably end up bringing up
that ring a little bit,
so it's subtle but it's helping.
00:28:14
Really quickly, this track here,
which is a copy
of the 'S T' mic which is right up here.
00:28:25
And then it's being duplicated
and only unmuted
where that rack tom is hitting.
00:28:36
And what that's letting me do
is to add
a slightly distorted EQ'ed reverb.
00:28:42
So, basically,
it's just letting me add
a little bit of length.
00:28:46
So what I'll do
is I will let the first drum fill
go by without it
and then I'll solo it in
to add to that microphone,
and you'll just hear that tom
gets a little bit longer.
00:29:06
It sounds a little unnatural
with just those microphones,
but if we put the whole kit in now...
00:29:22
It just gives that tom the length
and the room sound
that the rest of the kit already has.
00:29:27
Without it, it sounds a bit dry.
00:29:29
Just yet another little element,
and these are the kinds of things actually
that you need to be thinking about
if you're mixing a drum kit
that's recorded in this way
where you only have a few microphones.
00:29:39
It's not good enough to say,
"Well, yeah, but I didn't really have
any options for that tom,
so that's why it sounds a little dry."
You can't go over to everybody's house,
who buys the record,
and explain to them why maybe that tom
doesn't sounds as cool as it could.
00:29:51
You need to make it sound awesome.
00:29:53
And, you know, it takes a little while
to go through and chop out all that audio,
but at the end of the day
it doesn't take that long,
and it's the difference between
the drums sounding great
and the drums sounding pretty good,
and I think, if given the choice,
I would always go for great.
00:30:06
Let me just show you
what's on the drum kit itself
because there are some plug-ins
we're listening through
that are on the Kit Buss.
00:30:13
So the first is an SSL compressor
that these guys have put on the kit,
and I would imagine
this is doing quite a bit,
so let me play the drums
and I will take this in and out.
00:30:39
It's doing what an SSL compressor does,
just helping get those attacks
to be a little...
00:30:45
kind of spongier, in a way.
00:30:46
It's really sort of helping glue
the drum kit together.
00:30:49
Then, next in line,
bypassed EQ,
so this is an example of a plug-in
that they would've had in the session
that I listened to quickly
and didn't want to use.
00:30:59
We'll just go ahead and make that inactive
because we're not actually
using that plug-in.
00:31:03
Then next, an L2
to bring the level of the drum kit up.
00:31:07
It's 4 dB of level,
and I'm sure there's quite a bit
of limiting going on here.
00:31:24
This is where some of that
kind of blown up,
lo-fi kit is coming from.
00:31:29
Having that amount of limiting
is not just gain
because you start to really hear
on the kick and snare it gets grainy
and it's really bringing up the room,
which is cool.
00:31:38
That's kind of the character
of the drum kit in a lot of ways.
00:31:41
I'm just following it
with some more Lo-Fi.
00:31:44
Overall, it doesn't matter that I've
already used some on the kick and snare.
00:31:47
Basically,
think of your mix
as traveling down through the mixer,
like, think of the actual signal flow,
so I've got my individual kick
and my individual snare
and those are channels on my console,
and so I make those sound good,
and if I need Lo-Fi to do it,
then I use some Lo-Fi there
and I start to build up my whole drum kit.
00:32:05
Now, the drum kit might sound
a little too clean.
00:32:08
Well, there's nothing wrong with doing
some more Lo-Fi later on.
00:32:10
Nothing wrong with having
two Lo-Fi plug-ins in a row
if that sounds better to you
than one Lo-Fi with that knob
cranked up more.
00:32:17
I think sometimes people
will talk themselves out of doing things
because, like,
"Well, I've already used an EQ on the kick
so I really shouldn't EQ the whole kit,"
and well, yes, you absolutely should
because that's a totally different thing.
00:32:28
EQ'ing the drum kit as a whole
doesn't mean
that you somehow failed
in making the drums sound good enough,
they're just not done.
00:32:36
So downstream you've got this chance
to do some overall stuff,
and in this case,
a little bit of overall Lo-Fi,
which sounds like this.
00:32:53
It's bringing some presence back
that was maybe lost with the L2,
things like that, so,
it just sounds good to me.
00:32:59
So that's the drum kit,
and now,
the only thing left to do on the drums
other than this overdubbed hat,
which I'll play for you right now.
00:33:07
This is just in the verses.
00:33:15
We actually have two hi-hats going on,
and I am panning those opposite.
00:33:20
Inside the drum kit,
I've managed to make the tracked hi-hat
kind of stay in the middle,
because the only thing
that's actually panned with the drums
is this duplicate of the tom,
and so that makes the drums
go a little bit stereo
as well as adding the reverb to that tom
in the drum fills.
00:33:36
The rest of the kit is very mono,
straight up the middle.
00:33:39
That tom splits off to the side
to make it a little bit stereo,
but this hi-hat overdub
is off to the left,
so now, all of a sudden
you get two hi-hats in the verse.
00:33:47
So I give the illusion
of a stereo drum kit,
but it's a very tight stereo drum kit.
00:33:52
It's not crash cymbals,
it's not room ambience all over the place,
so it keeps my drums
right in the middle
in a nice little package,
allowing me to have
sort of more of an old-school mono,
things panned
in different places approach,
but we get a little bit
of spread rhythmically,
which is important.
00:34:23
It would be really easy for me
to pop that hat in
with the rest of the kit
and try to make it sound natural,
but the idea of it is that
it is actually its own thing.
00:34:31
And the only thing going on here
is some Lo-Fi.
00:34:33
For the sake of completeness,
I'll play you that with and without.
00:34:47
There you go.
00:34:48
That would be the overdubbed hi-hat.
00:34:51
Overall, the kit is going
to this Stereo Aux,
and then it makes its way
to the Mix Buss from here,
but, I'm picking it off
and sending it to a couple of things.
00:34:59
So the first is the Fatso,
this is my very standard
stereo drum compressor.
00:35:05
It's one of two stereo drum compressors,
and on this mix I'm only using the Fatso.
00:35:10
So what I'll do is I'll play
the entire drum kit
with and without this Fatso,
and you can just get a look
at how much compression is going on
by having a look at the screen.
00:35:36
It's really bringing out
the decay of the snare,
the ring of the snare,
and again, it's just more glue,
it just sounds a little bit more exciting.
00:35:44
Yeah, I just love the way
this compressor adds
to the rest of the drum kit.
00:35:49
On this particular mix,
that's all I needed.
00:35:51
Again, I'm going to come back
to the Rear Buss,
because the Rear Buss on its own
doesn't mean anything
just for the drum kit.
00:35:58
It's about how the drums work
with the other instruments.
00:36:01
If I put that in now,
you'll hear the sound of the drums
change, it will get louder,
but it doesn't really have anything to do
with why they're in the Rear Buss
to begin with.
00:36:08
The only thing I will point out
is most of the time
my sends off to parallel compressors
are at zero,
Follow Main Pan, and Post-fader,
so that I'm picking up a copy
of whatever is going to the Mix Buss
and that's what goes to the compressor.
00:36:22
For the Fatso, that's exactly true.
00:36:23
It's exactly the mix of my drum kit
going off to the Fatso
so the Fatso can be blended in.
00:36:29
The Rear Buss send though,
on the drums is turned down,
and that's because
I want the drums to interact,
but I don't want them
to obliterate everything else
that's going on the Rear Buss.
00:36:38
So again, we're going to come back
to that later on
once we get the rest
of the instruments in.
00:36:42
What you may have noticed is
on a lot of other things that I mix
I'm going for a really impactful
kick and snare,
lots of attack,
and they're going to
really rhythmically drive the song,
whereas this is just not that kind
of drum kit.
00:36:55
It's recorded in a very stylized way,
the groove is very stylized.
00:36:59
A great phrase that these guys used
to sort of describe the feel
of the rhythm section
is crate diving,
which is when people used to be
thumbing through crates of vinyl
looking for cool loops,
and then lift that up,
and then there's the loop
you're going to use for your song
and things like that,
and they want the band to feel like that.
00:37:16
So, it's kind of an interesting
sort of inside-out progression of the band
where you start off writing with loops,
then you become a band
that plays and sounds like loops,
and sonically,
that's the way the band
still wants to sound.
00:37:28
So it's kind of cool
that they've stuck to
this sort of sonic vision
of how they want their stuff to be.
00:37:35
They want it to be dirty,
but at the same time,
I need the kick and snare
to rhythmically drive the kit,
so the big difference to me
when I listen to the rough mix, let's say,
and then my final mix,
is the kick and snare
are really much more part of the mix
as opposed to the drums
just sounding like a loop,
and that's the beauty of having it
played live and recorded live.
00:37:56
To kind of point that out,
what I'm going to do
is I'm going to play you
a little bit of the kit
with everything that I've done
except the Rear Buss,
and then I'll go back to how the kit
was delivered to me.
00:38:06
And hopefully what you'll hear
is the kit is going to get dirtier,
it's going to get a little more fun,
but it's also going to be
a little bit more defined,
which may sound counterintuitive
when it gets dirtier,
but the kick and snare
will be a bigger part of the pattern
because it'll just be easier to hear.
00:38:32
All right. Now let me take everything off
and you'll hear it without.
00:38:58
So now that the drums
are completely awesome,
let me just quickly whip
through the percussion.
00:39:03
There is not a whole lot,
but it's some of exactly
what you would expect,
and some other stuff.
00:39:08
So there's some claps in the verse
which are very, very quiet in the mix.
00:39:12
They just didn't end up being something
that really need to be brought out.
00:39:18
And all that's going on with them
is there is a compressor
which they've put on
to just give it that really
smashed up roomy sound.
00:39:31
And with the drum kit.
00:39:38
When you know they're there,
they actually make a difference
to the backbeat.
00:39:41
Listen to what sounds
a little bit like snare reverb
that comes and goes,
because every other hit has it.
00:39:53
It's a very cool effect,
and I like having them be that subtle.
00:39:56
If they were loud,
it's like a bunch of guys
standing around and...
00:40:00
which is not really
what it's supposed to be.
00:40:02
This has got to be a little bit tough,
and I think that just having it
sonically change up
is very, very cool.
00:40:08
I'll get rid of the drum kit again,
and your standard tambourine.
00:40:16
Or in this case, a yambourine.
00:40:18
That's just got an EQ that they put on.
00:40:20
I probably put in this high-pass,
and they've added a little bit of top end.
00:40:32
Pretty standard stuff.
00:40:34
And then when we get back
to another verse here,
we start to have a few more elements.
00:40:39
So there's a shaker.
00:40:43
Our claps come back, right?
Sounding very much the same.
00:40:50
But this is in the section of the song
that has the drum fills.
00:40:57
That's what those three claps are doing,
and again, it's subtle
and it's in the background,
but it really does change the character
of those backbeats.
00:41:04
So I'll play you that fill,
with and without.
00:41:24
Just a little more boring.
00:41:26
Very cool with that.
00:41:27
And then there's one other thing
called 'Drop',
which would be them dropping things,
and it's just, again, to add some length.
00:41:36
So that is going with the claps.
00:41:43
So it kind of gives a windup,
and with the drums.
00:41:58
It just makes the drum kit
more interesting,
but without calling attention to itself,
which I think is very cool
and that's a lot
of the sort of
mindset of people
who build with samples.
00:42:10
You have a main drum loop,
and then you might have a couple
of extra little percussion loops
that you bring in and out,
but you don't necessarily want them
to be heard in a big way.
00:42:19
So, this is that same thing
with live drums and live percussion,
like, "How do we sort of change the
character of the kit on these backbeats
and add some excitement
to this section?"
Well, do it with some percussion,
but not big, loud percussion,
whereas the shaker
is more of a rhythmic thing.
00:42:37
There's not much else going on with this.
00:42:39
The percussion
is not getting any overall treatment,
and in fact,
there are no parallel compressors on it.
00:42:45
The only thing that I'm using
is there is an Aux for the shaker.
00:42:48
It's getting a little bit of Aphex,
and you'll see the Aphex when I start
talking about vocal effects
because it's further down in the session.
00:42:54
Just a little bit of top end,
but so you can hear what I'm doing,
this shaker track goes to bus Perc 1,
bus Perc 1 feeds this Aux,
which then goes to the Mix Buss.
00:43:03
I could have moved this send
up to the track itself,
but this Aux is in my template.
00:43:07
It was available,
I just put it in there.
00:43:10
And the reason I left it as an Aux
was in case I wanted some Aphex
on some of the other percussion.
00:43:15
All I got to do is assign it to that bus.
00:43:17
It's just a quicker way to work.
00:43:29
And it's also really interesting actually
that the shaker keeps stopping.
00:43:32
So again, this entire set
with the drum fill and the percussion
as we go through here...
00:43:38
Well, let me play you this section
with the drums and percussion,
all the percussion this time,
and then I'll take all the percussion out
and I think you'll really
hear the difference rhythmically
as it goes by.
00:44:08
So the drums work fine on their own,
but with the percussion
it's just really cool,
and having that shaker stop
makes the "doon doon ka doon"
really reset the groove every time,
so you go busy/half-time,
busy/half-time, busy/half-time,
and in that section
is a lot more interesting
than it would be with just the drums
plowing through, I think.
00:44:27
So that concludes
the percussive elements of our mix,
and now we can move on to
some of the melodic elements.
00:00:00
Moving on to the bass,
they've done something
a little bit interesting on this song
and they did it on a few
songs on this record,
and that is that they have a bass
which sounds like this,
a very straight-ahead bass.
00:00:18
Right? A nice, distorted bass,
and there are a few plug-ins on it.
00:00:21
I'll show you what those are.
00:00:23
So there's an 1176.
00:00:35
This is with all buttons in,
and with the attack and release
set where they are and how it's going,
you can really hear the distortion
that you get out of an 1176
with all buttons in.
00:00:45
It sounds more like an EQ
than a compressor really,
so let me play that for you again
and check out what it's doing
to the fuzz. It's quite cool.
00:01:08
Compressor, distortion,
you be the judge.
00:01:11
Very cool.
00:01:13
After that,
there's a SansAmp on it,
which I believe I added.
00:01:17
Here's what that's doing.
00:01:31
That's the actual drive part
of this bass sound.
00:01:35
Last in the chain on this fuzz bass
is an L2,
and I'll play it with and without,
and basically we're going to get
level out of this,
but it's also going to help
even out the notes
so that it's really kind of a slab of bass
instead of being notes,
quieter notes, louder,
which will always happen with bass
because of resonant frequencies
in the room you record,
the bass itself will have some dead spots,
things like that.
00:01:55
Here's with and without.
00:02:09
It's just doing the job
bringing it up in level,
but also,
every note is exactly the same level.
00:02:14
Now, I'm using a limiter in this case
because first of all,
a limiter is just a compressor
with a very high ratio.
00:02:22
That's it.
00:02:23
100:1 is the definition of,
"Now I'm a limiter
instead of a compressor,"
which means you'd have to go up
100 dB on the input
before you went up a dB on the output.
00:02:31
So, it's basically a brickwall compressor
is what it really is,
and in my mind,
when I think about compression,
first of all, I don't use that much
insert compression as you've seen
unless I'm really going for an effect,
an 'all buttons in' thing,
that kind of thing,
just because I always lose a little bit
of the natural sound of the instrument,
but the way I think about it in my mind
is that with a compressor
you're pushing the tops down,
like that,
whereas with a limiter,
especially one set up like the L2,
as you bring that Threshold slider down,
it's like you're pushing your audio
up against the ceiling.
00:03:07
And whatever hits the top
just starts to flatten out,
but not in a purely square wave
clipped way.
00:03:13
It will start to even things out
in a way where,
because of the way
the gain structure is,
you're actually bringing up
the quiet stuff
and the loud stuff
just can't get any louder.
00:03:22
Now, another way you could solve this
if it wasn't a fuzz bass
and you really wanted to keep
the character of the bass
is with a parallel compressor.
00:03:30
Then you can overcompress it,
which will severely
even out all the notes.
00:03:34
It'll also bring up the reverb,
but then as you blend that back in
what will happen is
because the compressor is so consistent,
it will sort of lessen
the difference between the notes.
00:03:45
So, that's kind of a best
of both worlds thing
where you keep the purely natural sound
of the uncompressed bass,
or guitar,
or whatever it is
you're trying to even out,
but you get a little bit
of the dynamics control
that comes from compressing
the hell out of something.
00:03:59
So, the choices between putting
a compressor directly on the instrument,
putting a limiter
on the instrument instead,
or using something parallel,
is just about how much
of the original character
you want to retain,
and then you'll start to build up
a library in your head
of what sounds good
in those three different modes,
and then you just move on from there.
00:04:19
Really quickly,
here's without everything.
00:04:32
Not exactly subtle, but that's okay.
00:04:34
Now, a very cool thing that they've done
on a lot of these songs
is they've actually doubled the bass
with a six-string.
00:04:42
Basically a six-string bass,
but it's an octave up.
00:04:53
It really just sounds
like a picked guitar,
but what this does
when put in with the bass
is it gives you
some of that kind of Höfner
old-school '60s, '70s sound,
but on a distorted bass,
which is really difficult to achieve.
00:05:06
If you're playing it clean,
you can absolutely get the tone
of that Motown pick R&B midrange bass,
but you can't do that
if you start adding distortion
because the attack goes away.
00:05:18
So rather than having a clean bass DI
where you're fighting to get that midrange
to poke through the bass distortion,
double it up an octave
and you actually get that kind of attack,
which is appropriate to the song
on top of the fuzz bass,
which is appropriate to the band.
00:05:41
Once we have more of the instruments in,
I'm going to come back to this
because what you'll see
is that they build,
especially in the intro and the verses,
they've got lots of people
playing that part in different octaves,
so the guitar is playing that,
I believe the piano is playing that,
and it just goes to be
almost an orchestration effect.
00:06:00
So the way Ravel
would build pipe organ sounds
out of five different instruments
within the orchestra,
all playing the same part
in different octaves,
they do the same thing
for the entire song,
but in this case for the bass
by having that octave bass.
00:06:14
And then, in certain sections of the song
they have yet another track,
which is the octave down
of the clean bass,
so this is back in the regular
octave of the bass,
but it's just adding
a little bit of weight
and it's not that loud,
but here's with and without that bass.
00:06:47
It's just adding that definition
back into the main octave bass,
and then,
I'll leave all three of these tracks on
and you'll hear when that goes away
and it goes just to the bass
and the high octave
that the bass kind of
cleans up a little bit,
and that's also when the guitar
stops doubling it,
but the piano continues.
00:07:05
So the timbre of this part changes
but the part continues.
00:07:18
That's that great kind of transition
from chorus bass to verse bass,
but it's the exact same part,
but it just tightens up,
gets a little bit drier.
00:07:26
It's very, very cool,
and just in case you're wondering,
there's another limiter
on the six-string bass.
00:07:33
That is actually more to bring out
the spring reverb that's on there,
so I'll play it with and without,
and obviously the level
is going to come up
like 3 dB or so,
but you'll also hear more of the spring
with this limiter than without it.
00:07:54
So now you really hear
the bubble of that spring reverb behind.
00:07:58
Not a traditional bass,
but it's quite cool.
00:08:00
The only send
that the bass is going to
is the Rear Buss.
00:08:04
Again, I'm not going to talk about that
until I've got the band built up
because it doesn't really do
anything on its own.
00:08:10
There is a Bass Crush
imported from my template
into the session.
00:08:13
Not being used.
00:08:15
It never got used.
00:08:16
I...
00:08:17
anyway, it's a long story.
00:08:18
It's boring, and you
don't want to hear that.
00:08:20
We get to move on
to some new instruments.
00:08:23
There is one main guitar
that goes all the way through the song,
and in the intro
you'll hear that this is actually doubling
that main part that the bass was playing.
00:08:42
It's really dirty, it's an inversion,
so the interval is different,
but if we put that with the bass...
00:08:55
So you can hear harmonically
all of a sudden we've gotten
a lot more complicated
because the difference
between bass and guitar
is on that low note, but they're
playing the same top note.
00:09:03
There is not a lot going on.
00:09:05
The guitar was recorded this way.
00:09:07
There is again the limiter
and equalizer that they had on,
which I'll show you.
00:09:11
They're adding quite a bit
of midrange here.
00:09:23
The combination
of their compressor and EQ
is just bringing out
the attack of the guitar.
00:09:28
The sustain doesn't actually sound
a whole lot different,
but you're hearing a lot more
of the pick on the string,
that kind of thing.
00:09:50
That is the main guitar,
and this guitar plays
all the way through the song
though in the verse
it switches to just backbeats.
00:10:04
Which again, with the bass
is a very cool juxtaposition now.
00:10:07
So instead of playing together,
now they split up.
00:10:16
And I'll play you the transition
from intro to verse,
so just like the bass tightened up,
all of a sudden the whole track
tightens up
but gets more rhythmically varied.
00:10:34
There's more going on,
but at the same time
there's a lot more room for the vocal.
00:10:38
Just good arrangement, good playing,
very cool tone.
00:10:43
Down below that we've got a fuzz guitar,
which is just in the choruses.
00:10:49
Which is just doubling that main phrase,
which is also on the main guitar.
00:10:57
Reverby, fuzzy,
we're not doing anything to that at all
except sending it off to the Rear Buss.
00:11:02
Now, there's this send here
off to a plate
on the main guitar,
which, if I find that in the session,
is a reverb that they made.
00:11:12
There is a plate reverb
which is actually the same reverb
I normally use
for my vocal verb.
00:11:18
It's what's in my template.
00:11:19
This is something that they built.
00:11:21
I believe they built it
mostly for the horns,
and then it stuck around
and got used on the guitars.
00:11:26
Really quickly I'll show you
the main guitar dry and wet,
and you'll hear it mostly in the verses.
00:11:44
It just takes the spring reverb
from the amp,
which is panned with the guitar,
which is sort of mid left,
and it spreads it around the whole mix,
which,
when the drums are going
you're not necessarily
going to hear that,
but it will feel a little more stereo,
which is what they're going for.
00:11:59
The other thing I want to point out
and it happens throughout this track
is how there is one chord
in the middle of this verse
that falls off.
00:12:08
It's a little bit longer.
00:12:09
Here, I'll play you one before it,
and then it.
00:12:14
And it's just a little, little detail,
and it probably happens
where there's a hole in the vocal,
but it might just be happening
and it's this great idea
of the random human performance.
00:12:25
So these parts are very worked out,
the sounds are very stylized and specific,
but within the sort of rigid definition
of what it's going to be,
everything is allowed
to be sloppy and loose
and that's what makes
this song exciting,
because stuff keeps
changing and moving.
00:12:42
The tambourine and the shaker
are not quantized at all,
they're all over the place.
00:12:46
The drums aren't quantized at all,
so his groove is awesome
and every once in a while
he rushes into a fill
and that's fine,
because that's what drummers do.
00:12:54
They get excited as they go into a fill
and then they settle back into the groove,
and that's what makes it sound cool,
and also it makes it sound
a little bit more old-school
than if you had just lifted loops
from the old records
and played them at a strict tempo
all the way through.
00:13:07
So this fuzz guitar
basically does doubling
whenever there are riffs.
00:13:15
All the way through.
00:13:16
I don't think it ever plays
anything on its own,
except in the second verse
where it gets its own part,
so we go from having just the backbeats
to having the backbeats and the fuzz
halfway through.
00:13:33
If you remember what our bass does,
it's actually going to start
doubling the bass.
00:13:43
So we're harmonically
not adding anything new,
but we're sonically building the song
and it's also starting to get more stereo,
and especially when you remember
that the drums
are basically straight up the middle,
every new element that comes in
that's off to the side
is exciting and new.
00:14:00
It's not just sort of placed
within the stereo spread,
there's a real spot for it to come out.
00:14:05
There are a couple other guitars here,
which I'll play you very quickly.
00:14:10
There is this guitar, 4.
00:14:22
And then there is guitar 5
doing a very similar thing.
00:14:35
Now, guitar 4 has a compressor on it.
00:14:38
I believe they put this on.
00:14:40
I'm sure what it's going to do
is it's going to make this guitar
much wetter being in,
and let's see if I'm right.
00:14:57
I win!
It's wetter with the compressors,
so that's really all it's doing.
00:15:01
It's making the attacks
not stick out quite as much,
and it's making the sustain
of that reverb really come out.
00:15:06
It's also... you can hear it bringing up
some hum
that was in the guitar tone.
00:15:12
A lot of times,
if that's something that bothers me
I'll use one
of the noise reduction plug-ins,
either, like, Z-Noise from Waves,
or obviously,
the suite of stuff
from iZotope is ridiculous
and it can be
much more precise
than maybe you can get
with some of the plug-ins
that are trying to do stuff in real time,
but in this particular case
it just didn't matter.
00:15:32
This is a dirty track.
There was no point in cleaning it up.
00:15:34
It's not that it might not
have been better
to have cleaned it up,
but it's not hurting things
to be a little bit noisy,
so that's okay.
00:15:43
These guitars are just going off
to the Rear Buss.
00:15:45
That's all they're doing.
00:15:46
There's also pan automation,
and one thing that maybe you noticed
is that as I was scrolling
through the session
and we listened to the song
is a few of the tracks
are showing automation lanes.
00:15:56
I always leave the track
showing the automation
if there's something automated
other than the volume,
and it's just a reminder to me
that it's automated
because otherwise I might decide,
"Hey, I want to mess
with the panning on that guitar,"
and I grab it and I move it,
and of course, it's going to snap back
because there are breakpoints
on the track.
00:16:15
I need to know that
and I can visually see immediately,
"Oh yeah, I automated the pan
on this guitar."
So at the end,
guitar 4 and guitar 5,
just to be a little exciting
are panning themselves back and forth
across the spectrum here.
00:16:42
It goes from mono to stereo
and mono to stereo
and the reverb is switching sides.
00:16:47
The point of that is, let me put in
the main guitars we've already heard.
00:16:51
This won't be everything
that's in there,
because there is also piano
and obviously the strings
and all the rest of it,
but within the context
of this driving, repeated
rhythmic figure that's going on,
it just gives me more stereo motion
once again.
00:17:03
By having mono drums,
all of a sudden
stereo becomes
a huge element of the mix
that I can use to create excitement,
to create size,
where a lot of times
you start off very stereo
so there's not a whole lot that you can do
in terms of just stereo panning
that's going to really make
a massive difference in the mix.
00:17:22
In this case, it absolutely does.
00:17:24
So here is that end section
with bass and the main guitar,
and those two guitars panning behind it.
00:17:41
Just more fun,
and why not?
And most likely I came up with that
just because I felt
like I was getting a little bit bored
in that last chorus,
and, "What can I do?"
and, "Oh, pan the stuff around,"
and it worked, move on.
00:17:52
I'm sure this was not something
where they said,
"Okay, and at the end we would really like
these guitars to pan."
This is purely based on,
"I need something to happen here.
What do I do?"
And on a mix where all of the instruments
are this stylized and this specific
in terms of their task,
sometimes it's harder
to make stuff out of nothing
where I can't take a sort of
generic-sounding guitar
and explode it into a reverb
because there's already spring reverb
all over this thing,
so panning becomes a place
where I can generate excitement.
00:18:22
These guitars here
I'm not going to talk about yet
because these are actually
for the transition
into the middle eight,
so this is part of what I created
inside the middle eight,
which we'll talk about all at once.
00:18:34
The same with this middle eight harp.
00:18:36
This is an overdub that they did
but I'll talk about it
in the context of the middle eight,
and then blow it as a track I created,
which is a copy with some reverse stuff,
things like that.
00:18:44
The only other thing with the guitars
is they're all going to a guitar bus.
00:18:48
This, again, would've been
something that the band did
while they were working on the song.
00:18:52
All of the guitars we've been hearing,
and I'll go ahead and solo them up,
are going through
a Fairchild.
00:19:00
We can hear what that's doing.
00:19:07
And let me go to the end here.
00:19:22
It's doing what compressors do,
it's just gluing them back together,
bringing up a little bit of the ambience.
00:19:27
And then another compressor,
because, why not?
This is something that
other people, not myself,
actually do quite a bit
where you double-compress,
you do a slow compressor
into a faster compressor.
00:19:49
So one of them
is doing much more about the glue
and the sustain,
which would be the Fairchild,
and the other one is doing much more
to do with the attacks of the guitars
and things like that,
that's the SSL.
00:20:00
So what I'm going to do now
is play you that guitar bus
and I'll bypass the two compressors
at the same time
because they really do go together
to compress the guitars.
00:20:08
So on their own,
they're making a big difference,
but the big deal is what they both do.
00:20:31
They're actually quieter
with the compressors
because they're not doing
too much make up gain,
but it's just gluing everybody together,
they're not sticking out,
they're all working as a package.
00:20:40
It's just saving me time.
00:20:42
Again, all of those guitars
are going off to the Rear Buss.
00:20:45
We're almost ready
to listen to the Rear Buss,
but not yet.
00:20:48
There are a couple of main
elements I want to get to,
sort of band elements,
because they're really part
of everything else
that we've already been talking about.
00:20:56
This gets us into the keyboards,
and basically there's a main piano track,
and this is going to be doubling the bass,
or the guitar, or both,
or sometimes playing its own part.
00:21:06
Really quickly I'll just show you
what it's playing.
00:21:14
Doubling the bass, and then
in the verse it does the same thing.
00:21:20
But just like with the bass,
on the bass they've lost
the low octave double,
here they're losing the high octave,
so we go to a cleaner sound.
00:21:28
You don't hear as much of the rattle
and that kind of midrange growl
that's on the piano.
00:21:32
And then, when we get to the B sections...
00:21:38
More of a standard piano part.
00:21:45
And then doubling the riff.
00:21:46
So, it's a reinforcement,
but then in the B sections you get sustain
like you would out of the guitar
as opposed to more of the rhythmic groove
that you get out of the bass part.
00:21:56
It's also
a pretty lo-fi upright-sounding piano
and there are some plug-ins on it.
00:22:01
There is a Decapitator,
which I'll play you with and without.
00:22:17
So pretty subtle, kind of the same thing.
00:22:19
I use Lo-Fi for it,
just a little bit of clipping.
00:22:22
That is followed by
a compressor at 20:1,
so this is giving you
that overcompressed
kind of Beatles-y sound
that we've all grown accustomed
to hearing on those recordings.
00:22:50
It's really smoothing out the attack,
bringing up the sustain,
really just doing more
of that kind of lo-fi thing
they've got going on.
00:22:57
And then, because I decided their
Decapitator wasn't doing enough,
I put a little bit of Lo-Fi
on there as well.
00:23:14
Three things in a row that are all
kind of doing the same thing.
00:23:17
I'm just making it
a little more sustain-y,
a little less attack-y,
a little more old-sounding.
00:23:23
Like I was saying before,
this piano goes together
to be a huge part of the timbre
of the parts that are going on,
so every once in a while
you absolutely hear the piano,
especially at the end of that B section,
playing chords, really a piano part,
but elsewhere,
it's just finishing the sound of the part.
00:23:39
So, we've got the low bass,
we've got the high bass that's clean,
we've got the low clean bass,
we've got the picked, weird fuzzy guitar
with the spring reverb,
and we've got the piano,
and all of those together
along with our extra guitar in the intro
make the groove,
so here is the three bass tracks,
the two guitar tracks,
and the piano track.
00:24:22
You can really hear
how you set up this two-note riff
as the motor of the song,
but then you just keep changing it.
00:24:30
You heard that higher octave
come in halfway through the intro,
then you hear both high octaves
go away, going into the verse,
you hear the bass dry up,
you hear the guitar stop following,
so it's really clever and simple.
00:24:40
It's not a big deal,
it's not like it's magic,
but it's very, very well done.
00:24:44
So now I think we can actually
start talking about the Rear Buss.
00:24:48
What we're going to do now
is go back up and unsolo,
and we've got the core of the band here.
00:24:53
There aren't strings and horns,
which are a big part of this song,
but in terms of building up the groove
and the actual sound of the mix
we have all the elements we need.
00:25:03
There are a couple other keyboards
that I'll come back to
in a second,
but I want to talk about
the Rear Buss first
now that we've kind of got
everybody together.
00:25:12
Here is the way the mix sounds
going to the Rear Buss.
00:25:16
Remember everything is going
to the Rear Buss
except the percussion,
and the drums
are turned down a little bit.
00:25:22
So I'm going to turn that Send back on.
00:25:24
That's down -12,
and I'm going to play you
a bit of that,
and then I'm going to go
take the drums back out
and you'll hear why the drums
are in the Rear Buss.
00:25:49
All right, I'm going to do that again.
00:25:50
So first half of the intro
the drums are in,
second half of the intro they're out.
00:26:12
Just a totally different sound.
00:26:14
What needed to happen because
so many of the instruments
are playing that same rhythm as the drums
is without the drums
going into the Rear Buss a little bit
they sort of sit on their own.
00:26:24
They're playing the same rhythm,
but it doesn't feel as though
they're as locked in
as they are.
00:26:31
I mean, rhythmically,
this stuff is actually pretty tight
in a really loose, groovy way,
but it just didn't feel like the snare
was sort of part of that backbeat,
so "doon do doon do doon doon Ka,"
which is where the lead guitar
is going to take over in the verse,
that didn't feel to me like it was there,
and when I add it into the Rear Buss,
it actually starts working.
00:26:51
So as a refresher on the Rear Buss itself,
that's down here,
it is a multi-mono compressor
that is a key part of the Rear Buss.
00:27:00
It's two mono compressors,
so something loud on the left
only affects the compression on the left,
loud on the right only affects the right.
00:27:07
1176 at 2:1,
and I'm going to hit Play again
and you'll see what sort of compression
we're getting on this.
00:27:30
You can see that the Rear Buss
is sitting around -5.
00:27:33
I never look to see how much compression
there is in the Rear Buss,
that really just sets itself
as I'm building the mix,
and sometimes I'll have a look at this
and it's barely moving at all,
sometimes it's absolutely crushed,
but 90% of the time
I don't even look at it.
00:27:47
Now,
this particular plug-in was chosen
because I was matching hardware.
00:27:52
This was part of my journey
of moving from mixing
on the console into the Box.
00:27:55
I used some old Blackface 1176s
that were probably broken.
00:28:00
They were very grainy
and had this real push in the midrange,
so I went through every single
1176 plug-in I could find
and this was the one
that did that midrange thing the most.
00:28:11
But, obviously,
2:1 is not available
on any actual hardware 1176.
00:28:16
Mine were at 4:1,
but at 2:1 they sounded right.
00:28:18
I've got the Attack as slow as possible,
and that is just because that's the way
I almost always use 1176s.
00:28:25
The Input and Output gains
were set to match the gain structure
of what was going on with my hardware.
00:28:30
The only thing I might ever change
is the Release time.
00:28:32
Now, this Release time is set
about where I always had it set
with my hardware.
00:28:36
If you set it to the fastest Release,
what can happen is it starts
to jump around
and you can hear it pumping,
but sometimes,
if the Release is too slow,
the Rear Buss turns into a slab.
00:28:47
You kind of lose too much
of the air in the mix.
00:28:50
I mean, one of the things
that happens with parallel compression
is you give up clarity
and space in the mix
to get excitement and glue.
00:28:58
I happen to be able to take quite a bit
more of the excitement and glue
over the clarity and space
than other people.
00:29:03
A lot of other people would think
my mixes are way too dense,
but that's the trade-off
in terms of how much of something
like the Rear Buss you use.
00:29:09
But within that, this Release time,
if I'm feeling like it's too dense
but I like the sound of the mix,
I can come in here
and speed up the Release,
and all of a sudden
it's not pumping quite as hard.
00:29:20
It'll be pumping faster,
but it doesn't stay down
and just fill up like a bucket of glue
poured over the mix.
00:29:27
That's the only control
I ever look at on here,
and the only real key to this
is its multi-mono.
00:29:33
That's because that's the way I like it,
but if you're building
your own chains like this,
definitely experiment.
00:29:38
I mean, I went through at least
seven or eight different 1176 plug-ins
before deciding this one
was going to work.
00:29:45
That's the case with all
of these parallel chains.
00:29:48
Just mess around and try different stuff
and try things that aren't multi-mono.
00:29:52
Try it stereo and see what you like better
because the character of it
is much more important
than the sound of it.
00:29:58
It will change the way stuff feels
more than it changes
the way stuff sounds.
00:30:02
That's our Rear Buss.
00:30:05
So now I can quickly get through the rest
of the elements that are in this.
00:30:08
In the B sections
we've got a nice little glockenspiel.
00:30:17
It's just doubling the top
of those little arpeggios,
and then we've got
this pretty cool little organ
that in that same section
is playing little stabs.
00:30:32
A little bit of EQ
and compression on there.
00:30:34
I'll bypass it for you,
but it's not doing much.
00:30:45
The compressor is just evening it out,
you can hear a little bit more
of that slap delay.
00:30:50
But this also does
some very cool stuff in the verses.
00:30:54
So you've got this little stab.
00:30:57
In the middle of the verse
everything is very tight and picking,
and that's sort of the only sustain,
so I'm going to play it
from a little bit before that.
00:31:10
Right where that little sustain
on the guitar happens,
and right there, and they're
panned right and left,
all of a sudden you get this stereo 'Bah!'
that then goes away.
00:31:19
It's very cool.
00:31:20
In the next verse it does
the same kind of thing.
00:31:25
It's all just little details,
little stuff.
00:31:29
Cool arrangement.
00:31:31
This other track here
is only in the middle eight,
we haven't gotten there yet,
and that's it for keyboards.
00:31:36
There's not a whole lot going on.
00:31:38
They're going to the Mix Buss
and to the Rear Buss.
00:31:42
Now,
the other two main elements,
and they're actually big players
on this entire record,
are
the strings and the horns.
00:31:50
The arrangements are awesome,
the sound is awesome.
00:31:54
It's very kind of old-school,
very natural-sounding,
so here's some horns
that are, again,
they do a lot of doubling
of the main riffs,
low harmonizing,
and they do have a couple
of their own parts.
00:32:21
Classic, really well played,
cut kind of dry.
00:32:25
The only thing that's going on
is on the baritone sax,
which I'll solo up for you.
00:32:28
I've put an RBass
just to get a little more low end
to push through,
because once the track
starts getting dense
with the kick and the bass
and things like that,
then all of a sudden,
something that might have sounded
really big down low
like the baritone sax in a rough mix
doesn't have room anymore to be as big,
so now I've got to amplify it.
00:32:58
It's doing quite a bit,
it's adding sort of a lower
octave to that,
which to me just helps the horns
sound as big as the rest of the track.
00:33:06
There are two ways
you can go with horns:
you can actually decide to filter them
and make them very small,
which is cool,
and they can still sound big in a mix
because they're poking out
of this very small place.
00:33:17
In this case we wanted
the horns to be big,
because again, it's also about
the contrast in the dynamics.
00:33:21
They're playing this big wall
over the intro,
then you get to the verse, they drop out,
and you're left with all
the really tight picking stuff.
00:33:28
It makes a huge difference
in the dynamics.
00:33:30
There's also this track
called Horn Vortexion.
00:33:41
I think they had a Vortex in the studio,
and they just ran the horns through it.
00:33:45
There's also a Brilliance,
a little bit of midrange EQ
as well as a Trim flipping the phase
because obviously, when they bounced
through this piece of gear,
it was flipping it over.
00:33:54
And that's also going off
to the plate a little bit,
but not very much.
00:33:58
You can see there's barely any.
00:34:00
But I'll play you the horns
with and without that extra track.
00:34:17
There's a lot of that great,
present midrange
that's coming from this mix of the horns
put through the Vortex.
00:34:22
I don't know exactly what the Vortex
was doing on it,
but it sounds great
mixed in with the rest of the track.
00:34:27
There is a track called Horn Piece.
00:34:29
Again, part of middle eight,
I'm not going to deal with it.
00:34:32
So the horns come down into an Aux,
the Horn Buss,
and that has
the Fairchild
and then just a high-pass
to get rid of some of the actual boom
of that RBass.
00:34:46
Let's just solo up the horns again.
00:34:47
I'll play them with and without
the Fairchild.
00:35:03
Pretty straight-ahead insert compression,
and then this high-pass
is just helping tighten things up
a little bit.
00:35:17
Without it, you can hear
that the baritone sax
is actually starting to sort of boom
and it almost sounds like a ground hum
or something like that,
like there's a constant tone
that's coming out of that RBass,
so this helps with a nice, gentle curve
to even that out
and make it just sound like cool low end.
00:35:34
From there, it's going off
to the Rear Buss,
as always,
and it's also going to a spring reverb.
00:35:42
This is just,
whenever I want an old-sounding reverb
I go for a spring.
00:35:46
The Softube Spring Reverb sounds great.
00:35:48
I've used it on a lot of records.
00:35:50
In this particular case
I'm using a stereo instance of it,
but if I'm doing something
that isn't sort of a wall of brass,
because these brass are spread out,
they're mostly on the right,
you can see it from the way
the panning is,
but they are spread,
and I wanted it to wrap back into the mix
so I'm using a stereo reverb.
00:36:06
So there will be quite a bit of crosstalk
between the left and the right side
of the reverb.
00:36:10
Putting the horns into
the right side of the reverb,
but we get reverb on both sides.
00:36:21
And really quickly, actually,
let me put in
a multi-mono version of that,
and I'll copy the settings.
00:36:35
I'll bypass this guy.
00:36:36
Now, with multi-mono,
if something goes in on the right,
it only hits the right-hand reverb,
so these aren't panned completely
but we should see this reverb
should be a little bit more right-heavy,
otherwise this is a pointless exercise.
00:37:03
It sounds pretty similar,
but I can hear it kind of wrapping
around to the left a little bit.
00:37:07
It's not a huge difference,
but what's good about
multi-mono reverbs
is if you're trying
to place them precisely,
like, let's say you've got a spring reverb
you're adding to some guitars,
some very tight guitars,
you can decide where you want
to pan the guitar
any time,
and if the send is set to Follow Main Pan,
the reverb will follow
that guitar precisely,
whereas if you're just going off
to a stereo reverb
you've got this wash of reverb
behind the guitar,
so it's going to sound much less
like an amplifier reverb
and more like a mix reverb,
so that's the difference between
multi-mono and stereo reverbs,
and the way I use them.
00:37:41
So that's horns.
00:37:43
Strings, again, pretty straight-ahead.
00:37:45
Have a listen to them.
00:37:46
Very well recorded.
00:38:03
Beautiful texture,
they're a little bit lo-fi.
00:38:05
Now, these are in fact mono
and then they're being panned
about, well, panned 63 to the left,
so more than halfway left.
00:38:13
So again,
they're not quite as narrow as the horns,
but these are meant to be treated
as instruments that you can pan,
so I'm not looking for a wash of strings.
00:38:22
This is very much meant to be mixed
like mono elements
placed in the stereo field
and they all do their jobs,
and then at the very end,
and also in the middle eight,
things are panning all over the place,
and it gives the great contrast
rather than having this big
stereo mix the whole time
and then I just try to make
something exciting by panning.
00:38:41
That doesn't really work
because I've already got stuff
panned all over the place.
00:38:44
These are discrete elements
that do a job,
and with the way the guitars are panned,
the strings are panned,
and the horns are panned,
they all go together
to make a stereo song.
00:38:55
This is the best way I can think of
to describe it.
00:38:57
So on the String Buss itself,
another limiter and EQ
that they popped on here.
00:39:02
I'll pop that off for you
so you can hear what's going on.
00:39:15
Not much. A little bit of compression,
no EQ,
and then I'm actually putting
a Lo-Fi on there.
00:39:20
This is something where
if it's hard to hear horns or strings,
sometimes making them sound worse
is the way to go.
00:39:27
Filtering, distortion, that kind of thing,
and all of a sudden it's much easier
to hear them in the context of the mix.
00:39:46
Much more present
with that Lo-Fi on there,
and again, they're going off to the plate
and to the Rear Buss.
00:39:53
That's it for the strings,
except for an extra room track
which doesn't make it
into the String Buss
because I actually wanted that
to be stereo.
00:40:01
They recorded a stereo room.
00:40:09
This gives me a little bit
of a wash underneath
that actually lets me have
a stereo wash in this second B section
as opposed to the mono strings,
so it's just a way
to grow the arrangement.
00:40:21
I decided not even to use
the room mic earlier on,
and then later leave it stereo,
and have that spread the strings out
underneath a little bit
in the middle eight.
00:40:30
There are actually some pizzicato strings,
which they've only recorded
the room tracks of.
00:40:40
That gets us into some of the madness
that is the middle eight,
so I'm going to leave those alone for now.
00:00:00
All we're left with
with our normal arrangement are vocals.
00:00:04
The thing about this record and this band
is that the vocals are phenomenal.
00:00:10
The singer has such a distinctive
voice and delivery,
and the energy is just awesome.
00:00:15
I'm going through my usual chain.
00:00:17
If you look at the video about my template
and the way I set up sessions,
you'll know that there is
sort of a clean vocal path
and there is a very compressed
vocal path,
and I'm using that Pultec/compressed
vocal path all the way through,
so here's
the lead vocal
without the Pultec.
00:00:41
And we'll go back up
to the vocal track itself
to see what processing there is,
but really quickly,
here is the chain
that is the Pultec
pulling out the low end,
adding a bunch of 8 kHz,
getting compressed,
and then having the low end
added back in.
00:00:58
And if you want a more
detailed explanation,
definitely check out the video
about the template
because I go through this specifically,
but basically, what it acts like
is a 3-band compressor
with the low and the high bands bypassed,
so it's compressing
the midrange of the vocal a lot
and leaving the lows and highs alone.
00:01:14
It's a trick that a lot of people
used to do with hardware
before there were multiband
compressor hardware units
or plug-ins available,
and it was a way to make the vocal
much more present.
00:01:24
This is what that sounds like on its own.
00:01:33
You can hear there is quite a bit
of smash going on there
and this is with the clean channel again,
which only has
a little bit of Phoenix,
a tiny bit of compression from RVox,
and then
just a limiter to make sure
we don't actually peak out
on the way out of this channel.
00:02:05
It's a parallel compressor basically,
but it's a really specific sound.
00:02:09
I've never even tried this
on anything other than vocals.
00:02:12
It might be good,
but it's so specific to the
frequency range of the vocal
and it just makes the vocal
incredibly intelligible and present,
so you can have the vocal a lot quieter
and it will still pop through the mix.
00:02:24
Now,
that said,
let's go up to the vocal itself
and see what's going on
because here's some stuff,
some of which was left over
from their session.
00:02:32
So they're compressing
the vocal quite a bit,
and I think without that
you'll hear that it's really not
the same vocal sound.
00:02:52
This 'all buttons in' compression
is a big part of the vocal sound,
it's that spitty thing
that brings up all of the little
tiny details,
all of the little breaths,
and all the vibrato comes out much more,
so it's a big part of the sound.
00:03:05
After that,
there is a Decapitator
just to basically
decapitate it a little bit,
a little bit of clipping.
00:03:26
So much more appropriate
with that distortion,
and then that is followed by an API EQ.
00:03:31
So this would have been in the session
because I don't think
it would've occurred to me
to put an API on the vocals.
00:03:37
It's adding a little bit of midrange,
both the 2.5 kHz and 3 kHz,
which is interesting, you're actually
moving the shelf down
below the midrange bump.
00:03:46
You're basically just adding
a bunch of presence here,
and then 1 kHz here.
00:03:50
So you see 1 kHz, 2.5, and 3 kHz
all have been added,
but only a little bit,
and then, leaving the low end alone.
00:04:06
This is bringing out what's below
what the Pultec/LA-2A/Pultec
chain brings out,
so that's much more of the presence
and this is much more
of that midrange intelligibility,
and I mean, I still think of it
as presence,
but technically it's a little bit below
where presence would be,
but I feel like it's the tone
of the vocal itself
that is being brought out here.
00:04:28
It's being sent off to the plate
and to Bus 15,
which let's see if Bus 15
is actually anything,
which is the slap.
00:04:38
These are some effects
that came in with their session
and I just never had to change them.
00:04:43
Now, I could have moved these sends
down to my vocal bus here,
which is where everything gets combined
and sent off to the Mix Buss.
00:04:52
I may have actually tried that
at one point,
but then the vocal was just way too loud
going into their reverb and their slap,
and I liked the balance
of what was going on.
00:05:01
Their slap is
just an EchoBoy, pretty straight-ahead.
00:05:08
117, 125, stereo slap.
00:05:11
And it's also not 100% Wet,
which is interesting,
is the way they set it up,
so part of the level of the vocal
is actually coming
from the return of the slap.
00:05:20
It's a bit messy for it to be that way,
but I also just decided
I didn't really even care
because it was working.
00:05:27
So if the balance works,
as long as it's something I can work with
and I don't get into something
where now all of a sudden
I can't turn the vocal up or down,
then I'm fine to leave stuff
the way it's set up.
00:05:37
Now, also, the plate which we saw earlier
and the slap that we just looked at
are going off to the Kit Buss,
which is an interesting place
for them to go.
00:05:46
This would've been something
that they did in their session,
so these effects are actually going
through the drum kit bus,
most likely because they wanted them
to pump a little bit
along with the drums,
and again, it just worked.
00:06:00
There's no reason not to do it,
so I just left it that way.
00:06:03
So every once in a while
some stuff comes in
that either was done by accident
or was done on purpose very quickly
while the session was being worked on.
00:06:12
If it's working, don't undo it,
unless it's going to hamper you later.
00:06:16
Definitely don't keep things in the
session if it's going to tie your hands
or if you just can't really figure out
how the stuff is interacting,
but otherwise,
there's no reason to change
something that's working.
00:06:25
So in this case,
there's a bit of a bizarre
routing going on
with the vocal effects,
but I'm fine with it.
00:06:30
So that is the lead vocal.
00:06:32
The only thing that's going on
is this send to my Stereo Vocal Crush,
which is yet another
1176 with all the buttons in,
and this is all just for grit.
00:06:44
And I'll show you the vocal
with and without.
00:07:02
So you can hear a lot of
the sort of dry level of the vocal
is coming from there.
00:07:07
Some of that is because of the way
the vocals are being sent to the effect,
so, when I mute that,
what I'm muting is a dry vocal
going through there
as opposed to the vocal having the effects
after going to this parallel compressor.
00:07:21
So my vocal
will have a different amount of effects
depending on how much
of the parallel compression I use.
00:07:28
That could seem as though
it's very unwieldy,
but again, I build this vocal sound up
very, very quickly,
and it works,
and if I need more effects
by turning that send up,
I will get more effects.
00:07:37
So, it still works,
it's just a little bit unorthodox,
but in this case
I really don't think it had any
detrimental effect on the way
I was mixing this song.
00:07:46
The vocal just sounds good, and off we go.
00:07:48
The only other place the vocal is going
is into the Rear Buss,
so it meets up with the
entire rest of the mix,
and everybody starts to interact
just like you heard
before I had the vocals in.
00:08:00
Now the vocals are part
of that Rear Buss mess
and once we get the background vocals in,
I'll go back and do
the Rear Buss on and off.
00:08:07
The drums will get a little bit too loud,
but you'll really hear that interaction
between the vocals,
the strings, the horns,
and then all the other instruments
that we've listened to before.
00:08:16
The other sends that are to my
traditional vocal effects are off,
which is the Aphex to get some top end,
the vocal reverb which is just a plate,
and the spread,
which is a little micro pitch/slap,
so, short delay with pitch shift.
00:08:28
They already have the effects
that are mimicking this exact same thing,
I liked the way they sounded,
I kept theirs, I never turned mine on.
00:08:34
So it came in with the template,
but I never bothered to turn
those sends on.
00:08:38
The last thing in terms
of musical elements
are the background vocals,
which are quite cool.
00:08:45
I'm just going to jump around
and play you what they are
so you can hear what's going on.
00:09:10
Really strong,
soul,
almost choir female background vocals.
00:09:15
They sound great,
you can see there are no plug-ins
going on on the individual tracks
except this one
that has a little bit of...
00:09:22
well, quite a bit of Brilliance,
so I can play what's going on there
just to have a listen.
00:09:34
It's just doing exactly what it says,
bringing a little presence out.
00:09:37
But then all of these vocals
are being collected down into a BV Buss,
which,
when I got it, had an LA-2A on it,
and this I bypassed
because I just didn't like
what it was doing.
00:09:48
It must have been crushing too much,
especially because I still have
my Stereo Vocal Crush
that I'm going to put on it.
00:09:55
We'll just get rid of that,
but they also had
one of their 88RS plug-ins,
which would have had
some compression and EQ,
so let's have a listen to that.
00:10:04
I'll unsolo that,
and we'll listen to the big group.
00:10:18
So you can see there is a ton
of top end being added,
which sounds great,
and no reason for me not to,
and it's got a shelf at 3 kHz.
00:10:25
So that's presence, air,
all of the above,
brightening it up,
it sounds really good.
00:10:31
I kept that.
00:10:32
Then,
just like I do on everything else
that I do with background vocals,
they come up to a copy
of what the lead vocal had.
00:10:38
So there's a clean track
which has
the usual harmonic distortion,
a tiny bit of compression,
and then the limiter
just to shave off the top.
00:10:47
Then it's got
the Pultec chain,
which is the Pultec into the LA-2A
into the Pultec,
and then
a little bit of extra bright EQ on the top
just for grain.
00:10:59
These vocals wanted to be bright
to cut through everything else
that was going on.
00:11:03
And then those two chains
get collected down into
a Chorus Vocal Combiner,
which is my background vocal combiner.
00:11:10
It was called Chorus Vocals
for a while. I'm not sure why.
00:11:13
And then the only sends
I'm using here are:
there's a send off to the Spread,
so we can hear that come and go.
00:11:19
So this is with and without the Spread.
00:11:33
Just a little bit more like a record.
00:11:35
You have that little extra delay,
which acts like a slap,
a little pitch-shifting
that acts like a chorus.
00:11:40
It also just sounds like more voices.
00:11:43
That sounds great.
00:11:44
And then there is the Stereo Vocal Crush,
which once again, is going to make these
nice and aggressive.
00:11:49
So here's with.
00:12:02
So you can hear that that
'all buttons in' 1176
is a big part of the way
those vocals sound.
00:12:08
Without it,
they still sound really good,
but they're kind of flat,
and they're dark.
00:12:14
This not only makes them more aggressive,
but it also makes them brighter.
00:12:18
Okay, so now that I've
introduced all the elements,
let me play you the song,
and I'm just going to play it
sort of halfway through the intro
up through the B section.
00:12:25
We won't even get to the chorus.
00:12:26
But this way,
you can remember
all the individual elements
and hear how the arrangement
was put together,
but then I'm also going to go back
and play it without the Rear Buss.
00:12:35
The drums will jump up in level,
but I think you'll hear
so much of the interaction that's
happening in this mix will go away.
00:12:42
After that, I'm going to talk about
the 2-bus chain,
and then we're going to get
to the middle eight.
00:14:14
It's a lot clearer,
but it's a hell of a lot less fun to me.
00:14:18
So all of that really cool interaction
and bounce and vibe is coming from
that shared parallel compression
that's across the entire mix
on this particular mix.
00:14:28
Speaking of across the entire mix,
I'm going to quickly run
through my 2-bus chain.
00:14:32
It's the same as most of the mixes I do.
00:14:36
Things are in a slightly different order
than some of the other mixes,
but there's also
a different limiter on this
than on pretty much
every other project I mix.
00:14:44
I just happened to use
something else on this,
trying to be a little more lo-fi.
00:14:48
We start off with the Fairchild 670.
00:14:51
This is not compressing it all,
the Threshold,
which is actually a send
to the detector circuit,
is all the way down.
00:14:57
I even have the Mix only at 50%.
00:14:59
I'm just trying to get a little bit
of the harmonic distortion you get
by modeling all of the endless tubes
and transformers and miles of wire
that's inside one of these things.
00:15:07
So here's with and without.
00:15:27
Sounds better with, I would say.
00:15:29
Then comes the only compressor
in my mix bus chain,
a Neve 33609.
00:15:34
The limiter is out.
00:15:35
Nothing going on here.
00:15:37
There is
2 dB of make-up gain
within the compressor circuit.
00:15:41
I'm at 1.5:1.
00:15:43
The attack time is not negotiable
on this compressor.
You have no control over it.
00:15:48
I'm at the fastest release time,
100 milliseconds,
which has a very definite sound to it.
00:15:53
And I'm going to play you
with and without this compressor,
and what you're going to hear,
I'll play it in the verse
where it's a little sparser,
is the difference
in the transient material
just feels completely different to me.
00:16:05
Also, the threshold is up always,
so this is the least amount
of compression I can get
given how much level
I'm pushing through the compressor,
but when I take it out,
you'll see that the feel of the mix
just completely changes.
00:16:34
You saw, as that was playing,
that the gain reduction meters
were getting up to around 4 dB.
00:16:38
That's about as much as I would ever have.
00:16:40
This record we really pushed.
00:16:41
I mean, part of the sound of the record
was compressing these mixes quite a bit,
so that's a little more
than I would normally have
in terms of the way
that the meters are moving,
but again,
I don't look at these meters.
00:16:53
This gets set by the way it sounds.
00:16:56
It just turns out that this mix
was really pushed,
which is part of the sound.
00:16:59
Next, we've got
the Brainworx bx1.
00:17:03
This is a Mid/Side EQ.
00:17:05
Very little EQ,
I have a 1.3 dB shelf at 8 kHz,
so it's boosting up the top end
on the sides only,
but keep in mind
that the sides is most of the mix.
00:17:18
The only stuff that is not on the sides
is the stuff that's exactly in the middle.
00:17:23
It's easy when you're processing Mid/Side
to think about the middle
as being like this wide,
and then the sides are over here.
00:17:31
The reality is
the middle is just a hair's width
that's everything that's exactly mono.
00:17:38
Anything that's even slightly stereo
is in the sides,
so this is really
a nice EQ on the whole mix,
but it isn't right in the middle.
00:17:45
Then the other element that I'm using
is the Stereo Width control.
00:17:48
This just makes the mix wider.
00:17:50
Another thing it does,
this mix doesn't have too much of it,
but if you have lots
of hard-panned elements,
it can help make them
not quite so distracting in headphones
because it takes a little bit
of the out of phase signal
and pops it in the other speaker.
00:18:02
In this case it's really
just doing the widening,
so I'll play you the mix
with and without that.
00:18:23
On the face of it
we're not doing too much here,
but it really changes
the way the mix feels to me.
00:18:27
I think it's the widening
more than the high shelf,
but I really love
what that does to the mix.
00:18:32
Next in the chain is a happy face EQ,
we've got almost +3 at 100 Hz,
and then we've got almost +4 at 10 kHz.
00:18:41
Nice and broad.
00:18:42
It's really acting more like a shelf
than a bell up that high.
00:18:45
This is going to make
a huge difference in the mix.
00:19:04
We're obviously picking up level
because of how much EQ there is,
but, it doesn't sound like it's just EQ.
00:19:10
What it really does
is it keeps me from having to EQ a lot
on individual tracks.
00:19:16
There are two great bonuses to that:
one is I can be lazy
and not put in a bunch of EQs
on individual tracks,
but the other thing is,
I'm not wrenching a ton of EQ
that's then going into
my parallel compressors.
00:19:28
So the tracks are less processed
into the parallel compressors,
I build up my really nice balance,
and then I, overall,
crank the top and the bottom
and that sort of completes the sound
of the mix to me, EQ-wise.
00:19:39
So, that does a lot.
00:19:41
In hardware,
I always used Langs
because Pultecs felt too floppy to me.
00:19:46
They kind of ring a little bit,
the tube amplifier just...
00:19:48
I don't know, it doesn't feel as tight,
so I've gone through lots
of different Pultec-style EQs.
00:19:53
It doesn't even have to be
a Pultec-style EQ,
it's just something nice and wide.
That's the idea.
00:19:57
You could even do it with two shelves.
00:19:59
It would sort of be the same thing.
00:20:01
I like not using a shelf
down on the bottom,
especially because I don't really want
to be cranking up tons of stuff at 5 Hz.
00:20:07
That's just asking for trouble,
especially when the next thing
in the chain,
ignore this bypassed plug-in for a minute,
is your limiter.
00:20:15
This particular limiter
is just the Soft Clip
inside of this plug-in.
00:20:20
At its heart, this is
a tape emulation plug-in,
and basically somebody just said,
"Hey, you should check out
the Satin plug-in,"
and I checked it out just as I was
starting to mix this record,
and I felt like
I didn't necessarily wish
that I could print these mixes to tape,
but I wanted to hear, like,
"What would happen if I use tape
to really smash this up?"
So I'm going to bypass this,
and you're going to hear
not a massive difference,
but you're going to hear
the character of the mix change,
and again, it's going to get dirtier
and less clear,
but this is sort of the finishing touch
to all of the dirtiness
we've been introducing
on individual stuff along the way.
00:21:12
It's just that last little bit
of sponginess.
00:21:14
The Soft Clip really is just acting
like a limiter,
but it's the...
00:21:19
It's hard to describe it
other than that spongy attack,
and that's what you would get
if you hit tape too hard,
and that's exactly what I tried
to do on this mix,
was to get a little bit of that.
00:21:29
I'm not going to go into all
the specifics on this plug-in,
but if you're into this kind of thing,
you should absolutely pick it up
because, among other things,
it's like a playground down here
for noisy, weird stuff.
00:21:40
You can move the Head Bump around,
you can misalign the Azimuth,
you can do all kinds of stuff
that you can't do on a lot
of the tape emulation plug-ins.
00:21:48
This one just has a cool sound
and goes a little bit further out of spec
than some of the other ones would go.
00:21:53
As promised, we're finally going to get
to the middle eight.
00:21:56
On this record,
and not just on this song,
I went down to meet the band
before we started,
and they played me a couple of songs,
and then we had some back-and-forths,
and I don't remember if this was
on Skype or in the initial meeting,
but what they said was,
as I was saying earlier,
that they felt like, musically,
the songs were awesome,
loved the arrangements,
all the rest of it,
but that in the middle eighths
of these songs
to feel free to kind of go nuts.
00:22:18
They felt like, sonically,
they could really go somewhere else,
so what I'm going to do
is actually play you
the original rough mix
just of the middle eight.
00:22:26
The vocal arrangement
is a little bit different,
but basically you'll hear
the elements that I was given,
and they were in no way saying,
"This is the way the middle eight goes."
They were saying,
"Here's the raw material.
00:22:36
See what you can come up with,
and make this awesome,"
which is sometimes intimidating,
but it's also...
00:22:42
you get to have fun!
You get to actually really try
some stuff and be creative,
and as long as the relationship
between the artist and the mixer is good
and you don't feel like,
"Well, hey, how come
I'm finishing your songs for you?"
which can happen.
00:22:55
Sometimes there can be left things to do
that you shouldn't do,
whereas this was absolutely
my chance to just be creative,
try anything I wanted,
and see what happened.
00:23:05
And you'll see as we go through it
I tried some stuff that was terrible,
and then finally
arrived at where we ended up
on the record.
00:23:11
So here's the way
the middle eight came to me.
00:23:49
It's very much set up in two halves,
you get the breakdown,
then you get things back in,
you get the lead vocal coming back strong,
and they're not necessarily
telling me that,
"Okay, this is what should
happen structurally,
and just make it sound different."
It was literally,
"Do whatever you want
and let's see what happens."
The first thing I decided to do
was that the track needed to be small.
00:24:12
The extra plug-in on my Mix Buss
is just a filter.
00:24:16
You're going to hear everything,
so rather than me play it,
I'm just going to show you
what happens to the filter as we go,
because if I play it,
you'll hear 100 other elements
coming at the same time
and it might be confusing.
00:24:26
But basically,
this is bypassed right up until
the downbeat of the middle eight,
and then,
I'm automating,
so you can see that the filter
closes up here.
00:24:36
So the high-pass
is at 400 Hz,
and then as we go through
the middle eight,
this will start to open up.
00:24:46
Here, let me actually show you.
00:24:48
This is the low-pass frequency here,
and then I'll show you
in another playlist
the high-pass frequency.
00:24:54
And you can see that they sit static
for the first half,
which is the breakdown part,
and then they will slowly start to open up
as we get to the actual chorus,
and then it's gone again,
bypassed completely
when we actually
get to the downbeat
of that final big section.
00:25:11
So this is an overall effect,
but the main stuff that I did
was all just on individual little effects.
00:25:18
Something they gave me to work with
was this harp,
which is really cool.
00:25:31
And it's got their limiter
and equalizer on it,
as well as having an EchoBoy.
00:25:36
These are effects that they gave me,
so there's no point
in listening without it.
00:25:40
That's the sound of the instrument.
00:25:41
So one of the very first things I did
was decide, "Let me pan that left,
and then let me take each individual chord
and reverse it."
So I just made a copy of the track.
00:25:50
It's a duplicate.
It even has the same plug-ins.
00:25:53
There's no reason
why they've moved over a slot,
that just happened.
00:25:56
And I panned that hard-right.
00:25:58
So now we have a forwards version
and a backwards version
going left to right,
so it should sweep across.
00:26:14
Getting a lot more motion
out of that right away,
so that's the very first thing I did.
00:26:19
So the next element in the middle eight
which I did a very similar thing to
is the piano,
which is just doing a high octave melody
that walks through
the entire middle eight.
00:26:35
So I did the exact same thing:
I made a copy of the piano track,
I took every single note
and individually turned them backwards.
00:26:41
Now, there's a very quick way
to do this, by the way,
so let me walk you through this
so that you can see what's going on.
00:26:47
If you make a copy of the track,
then that gives you
all of the same plug-ins if you want them,
but it gives you the same sends
and it goes to the Mix Buss,
whatever is the quickest way to do it
instead of making a new track.
00:26:57
Then copy the audio
to the new track,
then once it's copied,
let's pretend now this is a copy,
if you use Tab to Transient,
which is on here,
you can actually just tab yourself
to each individual note
and split the region.
00:27:11
Now, if I want to reverse these guys
but I want them to stay in place
as opposed to reversing the entire piano,
the easiest way to do it
would be just to come up here
to AudioSuite and hit Reverse,
then render the next one,
then render the next one,
but, if you have a bunch of regions,
and you say
'create individual files, clip by clip',
what it will do is take
each individual region
and apply the AudioSuite process in place.
00:27:39
So what it does is it takes
every single note,
turns it backwards,
but leaves it in the same timing
as the original forwards note.
00:27:46
So, that's how I do that quickly.
00:27:48
Believe me, if I had to do
these individually,
I probably wouldn't even do it
half the time
because it's just a lot of work.
00:27:54
Take the reverse of the same part,
auto-pan it a little bit,
so this is different.
00:28:00
Where before I had that autoharp part,
put it on the left, had the reverse
be on the right,
it sweeps along,
this leaves the piano in the middle,
which is where the piano already is,
because it's a discrete element
of the song
that's already existed,
but then take a backwards version
and pan it behind it,
and I'm panning into the reverb.
00:28:19
So the idea being
that the dry piano is panning
and any time there is a note
that's going to really hit the reverb,
that reverb trail
gets left behind in the stereo field
wherever the pan was at that point.
00:28:33
If I put it through the reverb first
and then panned it,
it would just be a different effect.
00:28:38
It's the idea when you build effects.
00:28:40
Do I want to pan the reverb,
or reverb the pan?
In this case, I wanted to reverb the pan.
00:28:44
So, together, this is
what the piano does now.
00:28:59
And because of the speed of the AutoPan,
it's not set to be rhythmic really,
but it just happens to be
where it keeps landing
with the long notes on the left,
which is fine.
00:29:09
Probably every mix I printed,
it was different.
00:29:11
That AutoPan is not a huge part
of what the middle eight sounds like,
but, it's just another moving
atmospheric thing.
00:29:17
So the next element,
which starts to get even freakier here,
is the pizzicato strings,
which,
if I bypass the special part
of the effect,
we just have a little bit of EQ here,
and maybe some compression.
00:29:30
Again, this is left over
from their session that they sent,
and then, some Lo-Fi,
which I may have added
before I found the effect
that I was going to add.
00:29:50
Just making them a little present,
bring them out,
but then, the big guy here
is the LayD,
which is delay backwards,
so it's a reversing delay.
00:30:00
And it also has pitch-shift in it,
so what I'm doing is,
if you see this automation lane,
I'm automating the Mix knob
so that we get a little bit more
of this effect
as the section continues,
so I'm going to play you
from the top of the section
and you'll start to hear
these higher pitch
backwards delays coming in.
00:30:29
Come on!
And this is without it.
00:30:38
This effect was very much inspired
by the fact that the lyric is 'raindrops',
and I just thought,
"Well, that's what I need.
00:30:45
I need the sound of raindrops."
So to me, the pizzicatos going
through this pitch-shifted delay
became the rain.
00:31:04
Here is the piano,
the reverse piano,
the harp, and the reverse harp.
00:31:09
And the glock,
and the pizzicatos.
00:31:29
And then add to that
the clean background vocals.
00:31:46
So you can hear the contrast
between the dry vocals
and this very atmospheric mess
going on underneath,
which is exactly what I
wanted to have happen.
00:31:53
And you also noticed there was
another element in here,
and what that is is
that's part of me trying to figure out,
"Well, how do I transition
into this section?"
because, let me take out
a couple of things that I added.
00:32:09
So this is the way we got
from the chorus into the middle eight.
00:32:19
It's cool, but it just
sounded very abrupt,
so I thought, "Well,
let me take a couple of things
and make them sustain."
So the first, most obvious one
was I added a reverb to the drums,
and if we look at this Break Verb,
it is an Altiverb,
it's a spring.
00:32:33
It's just yet another long spring.
00:32:41
Now I'll solo up the drums
so you can hear what happens.
00:32:49
Shazam!
There is a little downbeat,
but it's not enough,
and it sounded a little tricky,
and I can sort of hear it.
00:32:55
I thought, "What else is playing
on the downbeat?"
Well, there are guitars here
which I actually made
to do this transition.
00:33:14
Right? And lots of reverb on those guys.
00:33:16
But then, even that wasn't enough,
so I came down to the horns
and I actually bounced the horns.
00:33:25
And I'm going to get rid of the effect.
00:33:28
And so the first thing I did
was just to bounce that last
chord of the horns,
and then used Vari-Fi to slow it down.
00:33:42
A really typical tape stop thing,
but,
when you add
a crazy delay,
FabFilter because it's fab,
like Fab, actually.
00:33:53
Then, this is what you get,
and this is the final raindrop element.
00:34:13
I'm automating the Feedback control
so that I can actually switch it off,
so once the track starts building,
I get rid of that.
00:34:20
Now, you might think,
"Andrew, you're a genius.
00:34:23
All of those elements
work together so well!
How could you do that,
all in one pass?"
Well, the reality is
this took me a long time
over the course of several days.
00:34:32
I would keep coming back
to this and hear it,
thinking I had done it,
and it was terrible.
00:34:36
Like, "Oh God. All right,
I'll work on this some more."
You know, there was a ton
of experimentation
to get this middle eight right,
but once it was right,
and the biggest part to me
wasn't even the sound
of the middle eight itself,
it was the transition into it.
00:34:49
It's this idea of
this steam train just rolling
from the very beginning of the song,
it's relentless,
and then all of a sudden
you just go off a cliff
and you're floating.
00:34:58
And then, being able to pick up
on the lyric, 'raindrops',
was just sort of an added bonus.
00:35:02
I really liked the way that stuff sounded,
but, together,
what it lets you do is have
this complete break from the song,
change up the vocal a little bit,
not have it come in as strong,
it comes in much more filtered.
00:35:13
I just made a copy of the vocal
and took out all the low mids
so that it's a lot quieter
in that section,
and it just really gives you
a total reset
and this other sonic space to be in,
and then the track comes back,
hits you over the head, and we go out.
00:35:29
So I'm going to play it
from just before the middle eight
into the last chorus so you can
kind of hear the whole effect.
00:36:21
So it's all very organic
in the way that it happens,
and hopefully,
it doesn't shock you into not listening
to the song anymore,
which, that would be the problem
if you go too far,
but it does the job
of emotionally kind of sending you
off somewhere
so when the band comes back in fully
it sounds really tight and tough again,
and it's something you haven't
heard in a second.
00:36:42
Basically, that's that.
00:36:44
That is The Heavy, "Since You Been Gone."
Really creative, really fun,
really different from a lot
of the stuff I work on
just in terms of how stylized
the recording is,
because a lot of people
tend to record very safely
and these guys do not.
00:36:56
They just go for it.
00:36:58
And also,
a lot of creative leeway
and room to try things
and not worry about failing.
00:37:06
That was kind of the biggest thing,
was to be
comfortable enough in what I was doing
that I could send them
something that was terrible,
thinking it was okay,
they say, "That's terrible,"
and I don't curl up in a ball
and want to die.
00:37:18
I actually think like,
"Okay, great. Let me go back
and make this better
now that they've said
what they don't like about it.
00:37:23
I hear it, and I think I have an idea
of what to do better."
So, really creative,
and a lot of fun to work on.
00:37:29
So, I hope you enjoyed it!
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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
The Heavy are a British rock band from Bath, Somerset, England, formed in 2007 and have released four albums as well as a wide array of singles. Their music has been widely used in the media, with their 2009 single "How You Like Me Now?" being used the most and becoming the band's signature song.
Since You’ve Been Gone
CLICK_HEREMusic CreditsSince You’ve Been Gone
By The Heavy
The Heavy are a British rock band from Bath, Somerset, England, formed in 2007 and have released four albums as well as a wide array of singles. Their music has been widely used in the media, with their 2009 single "How You Like Me Now?" being used the most and becoming the band's signature song.- Artist
- The Heavy
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