
Inside The Mix: The Lumineers with Ryan Hewitt
02h 00min
(56)
Watch Ryan Hewitt Mix The Lumineers
As one of the staples of the indie-folk genre, The Lumineers have seen the heights of the charts several times. In April of 2016, the band released the hit song “Angela”, with a meticulously crafted arrangement and sonic landscape.
In this puremix.net exclusive, Grammy award-winning engineer and mixer, Ryan Hewitt, goes inside the mix and deconstructs the song piece by piece, going further than simple mixing techniques to explain the effect that a great arrangement can have to build excitement and take the listener on a journey, from a simple guitar and vocal song to a full-blown orchestral climax.
During this 2 hour video, Ryan explains how he:
- Achieved the iconic vocal sound that establishes a connection between the singer and the audience
- Created bass guitar tones that translate to small speakers
- Added forward-driving momentum to unique percussion tracks
- Creates contrast and scene changes as the song moves from section to section, all building up to an emotional finish
This is your chance to sit next to Ryan Hewitt, and take a behind the scenes look at the creation of an indie folk smash hit.
After you've seen the video, download the stems and mix it for yourself.
Parts of this site and some files are only accessible to pureMix Pro Members. Please see below our membership plans.
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 01:13 - Session Layout
- 02:47 - The Final Mix
- 06:13 - Vision For The Song
- 09:42 - Song Breakdown
- 12:30 - Vocals
- 31:27 - In-The-Box vs Analog
- 35:10 - Acoustic Guitar
- 41:09 - Piano
- 45:01 - Kick
- 46:58 - Chorus Vocal
- 50:34 - Chorus Piano
- 52:35 - Tuned Kick and Toms
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - The Third Verse
- 01:47 - Bass
- 08:57 - Strings
- 14:40 - Chorus 3 Strings
- 17:46 - Background Vocals
- 18:56 - The Bridge
- 20:13 - Claps
- 23:59 - Automation
- 24:47 - The Last Chorus
- 27:42 - Chorus Kick
- 28:34 - Percussion
- 32:22 - Chorus Cello
- 34:29 - Chorus Background Vocals
- 36:30 - Build Energy With Faster Parts
- 37:52 - Overall Playback
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Why Use Automation
- 03:16 - Stereo Bus Processing
- 11:15 - Drum Hardware Processing
- 13:56 - Printing Versions
- 16:10 - The Loud Version
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
00:00:00
Hey! I'm Ryan Hewitt
and we're here at my studio,
House of Blues in Nashville, Tennessee,
and I'm going to open up my session
for The Lumineers' song, 'Angela',
and show you how I went about the mix
and what I was thinking as I did.
00:00:18
The basic setup of my studio
and of my sessions and templates
and whatnot
is covered in my template video,
so I'm not going to go into great detail
on that in this video.
00:00:27
I'm going to assume you've seen
how I set things up,
and I'm going to focus more on
my mixing,
and my decisions,
and the result of the mix.
00:00:37
So, this is
The Lumineers' song called 'Angela',
and we spent about a week
working on this song
in the studio with the band, so,
it went through a number of permutations.
00:00:46
Arrangements, tempos,
feels, etc.,
and we wound up with what we have here.
00:00:52
The basis of the song
is the acoustic guitar
and the vocals,
and everything else serves that,
it serves the vocal melody,
it serves the acoustic guitar feel
that he's got going on,
and secondary to that
could be the piano part,
that plays a major role in this song.
00:01:09
And then, the drums are sort of,
again, subservient to that,
so if I scroll up in the session
I can show you what's going on here.
00:01:16
I've arranged it
as I normally do in a session,
with the drums on top
just because I'm a creature of habit.
00:01:22
So we have all these drums
that are happening,
and various subgroups
and reverbs and stuff like that
strewn about
because it's sort of an unorthodox song
compared to a normal rock or pop song.
00:01:33
We've got the kick drum
and these associated things,
these tracks.
00:01:37
We've got some big toms making some noise,
we've got a shaker track,
we've got some handclaps,
we've got some big kicks
that are pitched to B and G,
and we've got this 'Shutter' thing
which I'll show you later.
00:01:49
We've got echoes, we've got slaps,
we've got bass tracks,
a clean amp and a dirty amp.
00:01:54
We have the acoustic,
we've got several piano tracks
doing different things here.
00:01:59
We've got the lead vocal
split on to three tracks,
as I discussed in my template video.
00:02:03
The verse part,
the chorus part, and the bridge part.
00:02:05
All different vibes
and different volumes that he sang at.
00:02:09
They all need a separate
very specific treatment for each part.
00:02:12
We've got background vocals,
we've got cello,
we've got violins,
and then we have all our effects
and all that junk at the bottom.
00:02:19
When we were working on this song
at the Clubhouse in Upstate New York,
we were pretty happy with our rough mix
so I sort of started with that,
and then expanded upon it
in the place that I can
hear things better,
like my studio I know really well.
00:02:32
My speakers,
my amps,
my monitor controller.
00:02:35
Everything here is, like,
the way I want it.
00:02:37
I've set up here for
two years now,
so I'm pretty used to how things sound.
00:02:41
It's easier to get really, like, zoomed in
on the parts that I'm
trying to handle here.
00:02:48
Let's play the song from front to back,
get an idea of where we're going,
if you haven't heard the song before,
and then we can sort of break
things down a little bit.
00:06:13
When I approach a mix,
I really think about
the intent of the song.
00:06:18
I put up the faders,
especially if I haven't heard
the song before,
I push up all the faders
and get a rough balance
to sort of feel out
what the band were thinking,
what the artist was thinking about,
and what the primary,
like, motivating forces,
and the primary emotional sort of journey
that the song is going to go on.
00:06:38
Wes and Jere's songs are like,
you know, cinematic,
the way they put these things together.
00:06:43
It's all about the vocal,
everything is about the vocal,
you'll notice it's really loud
and it's really wet,
so that's sort of the defining
characteristic of their recordings
and of the way they wanted me
to mix this song.
00:06:56
I mixed it the way I wanted to,
and then it was like, "More vocal,
more vocal, more vocal.
00:07:01
Make the vocal louder. Louder."
and I'm like, "Really? Really?"
And then it was like, "Oh!
Okay! I get this now!"
And after the first couple songs,
it's like, I just knew where
that vocal needed to sit.
00:07:12
In my studio, so I'm looking at you,
but behind the camera I have this post
that my monitor sits upon,
and I imagine the singer's head
being on that post,
and if the singer's head
is not on that post,
then, I haven't done my job yet
because the singer has got to be
way up in front,
particularly on his record.
00:07:29
Like, he's actually up here
as opposed to down there,
but most records,
the singer is there,
and on this one he's just
a bit more God-like,
and that's sort of the...
00:07:38
the phrase we were using
when we were thinking about these mixes.
00:07:41
So,
the vocal has to be clear,
but at the same time,
you know, he loves that reverb sound,
so,
there's a balance between
trying to make every word enunciated
so you can hear it on any speaker,
on any set of speakers, any radio,
and having that space come across,
that sense of...
00:08:00
not quite being in a well,
but, you know, something that's beautiful
and there's, like, this fog
on the ground, you know?
It's this incredible feeling
of space around the vocal,
so that was the mission
in all of these mixes.
00:08:14
And, you know,
to me, as a rock guy, primarily,
I want to make sure it's still moving,
that there's energy to it,
that there is this locomotion
to anything else
that can possibly help propel
the song along.
00:08:25
We've got that acoustic guitar
that's strumming along the entire time,
we've got piano chords,
and then we get the percussion
coming in later,
the bass helps move things along,
so everybody has got to pull
their own weight.
00:08:37
There was a lot
of very intentional thought
about each particular part,
when it was going to come in,
when it was going to play,
what it was going to play,
how fancy it was going to be,
how sparse it was going to be,
and each of those decisions
made along the way
informed the next decision,
so it wasn't like a collection of stuff,
like, "Let's pile a bunch of crap
on the song and sort it out later",
it was like,
"Mmm,
I don't know if the bass
should come in there,
I think it should come in a little later",
and we would play it from the top
and put the bass coming in
a little bit later,
and it was like,
"Okay, that's the way it is!
Cut the bass out there. Done".
00:09:11
"Okay. Do we still have the song?"
"Yes, of course we have a song
because we've got
the acoustic guitar and the vocals".
00:09:16
"Okay, what's the next instrument?"
"Well, we need piano
because it's a piano band,
so, where does the piano come in?"
We played with that
and came up with a solid arrangement
of where all these things
were going to come in.
00:09:27
"Okay, drums", and so on.
00:09:28
Everything was very, very intentional,
particularly with this song,
this was a...
00:09:33
there was an interesting process
behind this song.
00:09:35
My goal was to help that along
and make it this, like,
you know, again,
God-like cinematic kind of song.
00:09:43
What I would've started out with this song
had I not tracked it myself
was the vocal
and the acoustic guitar.
00:09:49
Let's just go through
and break this song down,
and we will build the mix as I did
when we came into the studio to do this.
00:09:56
Let's mute everything
except for the acoustic
and the vocal.
00:10:02
And of course, the song starts like that,
so it's not hard to imagine
the song with nothing else,
so I'll mute all this stuff.
00:10:10
We'll just play it from just before
the first verse,
and you'll hear that we still have a song
even though it's only acoustic and vocal.
00:10:16
Check it out.
00:10:53
So now let's take a further step back,
let's take the effects off of both
of these things
and I can show you what it sounds like
in essentially a raw state.
00:11:03
Hopefully, all these things
will accommodate us.
00:11:06
I don't know if I automated
any of this stuff.
00:11:08
So, no reverbs, no slaps.
00:11:28
So you can hear how sort of
immediate and personal that is,
and that's...
00:11:33
that's one way of making a record,
like the Avett Brothers records I work on
are bone dry.
00:11:37
There's not a single drop of reverb,
except, I think, on one song
that I drenched it in plate,
but you can feel how that completely
changes the vibe, you know?
It's small, it's close,
and that's not what we wanted, so,
you know, we never really heard
the vocals like that, ever,
through the process
of making this record.
00:11:55
The plate was on from the get-go.
00:11:57
I got a sound at the studio that he liked,
and we wound up sticking
with that through tracking,
and then,
we had a real plate
at the studio, in fact.
00:12:06
Just a little aside.
00:12:07
That sounded really good.
00:12:08
We printed it when we finished the vocals,
when we comped and tweaked all the vocals
I would print the plate
so I could bring it home
with me to Nashville.
00:12:16
And when we got here,
I A/B'ed the real plate
against the UAD plate,
and I think in 90% of the songs
the UAD plate won,
so,
what you see here in the session
is what we used,
so this song was a UAD plate song.
00:12:31
And on the vocal
I did a mono plate.
00:12:34
I have two plates working
on this song:
I have a mono plate
just straight down the middle,
and then I have
a stereo plate here somewhere,
so here's another one.
00:12:44
The mono plate is set up like this.
00:12:46
I've used the A Plate
on the UAD EMT 140.
00:12:51
Generally, the B Plate is my favorite,
but for some reason,
I had this idea of
part of the song being a mono reverb
and then another part
being a stereo reverb,
and then there's a combination
of the two
so we get this different sort of effect.
00:13:05
But it just gave me this thing
that I hadn't heard before.
00:13:07
I sort of rolled with that
and had some fun.
00:13:11
So we have an echo,
we have the verse echo return on that,
and that is...
00:13:17
My favorite delay is the EchoBoy
from Soundtoys,
and I set up a Memory Man-type thing here.
00:13:23
I don't remember what 333 meant,
but regardless, it sounded good to me
so I sort of went with that.
00:13:29
I think it's maybe
a little bit out of time.
00:13:31
I think that's why I went with that.
00:13:33
And we got a little bit of slap on this,
which is down here,
another EchoBoy instance.
00:13:39
116 milliseconds, no Feedback,
just to give it some more depth,
things like that.
00:13:45
Let's listen to this. We'll leave
the effects off on the acoustic,
we'll turn these off for now,
and we can just listen
to these one at a time.
00:13:52
I can show you exactly
what's happening here.
00:14:10
Pretty subtle,
small sound, out of time,
just, you know,
I think I was thinking of just, like,
giving it something weird,
like, to take it to that
ethereal thing again,
to give it something that's not in time
that'll sit in the back
and give it some kind of weird lilt.
00:14:26
I think that's where that came from.
00:14:28
So it's a bit strange, but it works.
00:14:30
And then if we add the slap to that,
let's see what happens.
00:14:49
Another subtle sort of space thing.
00:14:52
I think if you listen with headphones
you'll hear that.
00:14:54
It's tough to hear it in speakers
when you're quiet,
but, you know, that's good.
00:14:57
It's these little candy things
that contribute to that overall
sort of vibe,
and,
as a beginning mixer,
I never understood why people would use
more than one delay.
00:15:06
I have figured out that
it's the combination of all those times
and textures,
feedback settings and such,
that can really bring that vocal alive,
that can make it,
first of all, very unique,
because only you are going to have
that specific combination
of those sounds, on that day,
particularly on that vocal,
because no one else is mixing that song.
00:15:25
You can use your imagination
to really put that vocal
in a very unique space.
00:15:29
To me,
this is a...
00:15:31
you know, it's an organic tune,
it's an organic sort of space,
they're not drawing your ear
away from the vocal.
00:15:37
It drives me crazy
when people make these zany effects
that bounce all over the place
that distract you from listening
to what the guy is saying.
00:15:45
To me, that's a failure,
so I want things that are subtle,
maybe have some earphone candy
for nerds like us
to go and, like, really geek out.
00:15:53
Put the headphones on and be like,
"What's going on in there?"
And, you know, for a moment,
not listen to the music,
but listen to the tech.
00:15:59
But generally,
we want the fans to listen to the music,
not to the tech, not to the things
that we are doing to the music,
if that makes any sense.
00:16:06
Pressing on, I've got a little bit
of double tracking here.
00:16:09
So, among the effects
I'm using on the vocal,
I have a doubler
and a slap.
00:16:14
The difference between that is the doubler
is taking the pitch
and moving it up and down,
and in this case, it's pushing it out
to the sides also.
00:16:22
It thickens things up
by pushing the pitch up.
00:16:25
I think I did maybe 10 cents up
and 10 cents down.
00:16:28
That's typically
what we like to do.
00:16:32
So I used this Waves plug-in
on this record,
it's one of the doublers I really like,
and this one, I believe,
will give you four voices,
four different pitches,
but I've only used two of them,
1 and 3 here,
and they're panned out at 45 degrees
and I've gone up and down six cents.
00:16:49
Six cents up, six cents down,
and it's modulating a little bit
so it's giving this sort of chorus effect,
and then just start thickening
that vocal out
because there is only one guy
out there through the whole song,
so I've basically given him
a little bit of support with that.
00:17:03
The slap, however,
is basically an echo.
00:17:06
It's a short echo
made famous by Elvis Presley,
that tape slap that's in the neighborhood
of 100 milliseconds,
and that helps give some depth
and some more character to the vocal.
00:17:17
That's a trick I use
on lots and lots of mixes that I do.
00:17:21
A really simple effect
that can be super-effective in the mix.
00:17:25
Sometimes that's all I use.
00:17:27
And in this case, there's no Feedback,
it's 116 milliseconds.
00:17:30
A little bit of high end rolled off,
a bit of low end rolled off,
and it's got the Studio Tape model,
so it's sort of like that
old-school tape slap.
00:17:38
It's a comforting sound to me.
00:17:40
With EchoBoy,
you can push things out to the sides
or you can vary the width of the slap,
and in this case I've made it
completely mono,
it's right up the middle.
00:17:49
Playing with where these effects are
can help, again,
give a feeling of depth,
or a feeling of width,
or both.
00:17:56
It can, again, make like
a signature sound for your song,
so, lots of stuff to play with.
00:18:01
So let's play the vocal.
00:18:03
We got the guitar dry,
vocal dry,
and we'll just have the slap on it.
00:18:08
Let's hear this.
00:18:25
In this case I'm using it very subtly,
but you can hear what it's doing
when I crank that up.
00:18:30
Let's play it with just the double.
00:18:46
It's sort of a headphone thing,
it made me feel good to put
a little bit of that on.
00:18:51
They're all subtle things.
00:18:53
This lead vocal verb (LVVerb),
what is that?
I don't remember what I put on that.
00:18:58
EMT, surprise.
00:19:00
So this is on the C Plate,
so I've used all the different
plate samples
on the UAD reverb,
so this one is shorter than that mono one.
00:19:06
If you remember,
that mono plate
was around 3 seconds up the middle
and this one is just over 2 seconds
out to the sides.
00:19:14
It will give you that illusion
of more depth,
of the reverb going from out here
into the middle,
the way it decays will be different.
00:19:21
And again, it's just this
so technical nerdy stuff
that no one's ever going to notice.
00:19:26
It was just something
I thought of at the time,
I tried it out,
it seemed to work.
00:19:30
I also like to put this Stereo Width thing
on the reverb return
so it sort of opens those up
outside the speakers.
00:19:36
I think this may have been
the first record I did this on,
and I've now gone even wider,
a little more aggressive
with that Width control.
00:19:43
Rolled off a little bit
of bottom end on the back,
and on the plug-in itself
I filtered out 180 Hz.
00:19:51
A crucial part of the sound of this song
is that reverb.
00:19:55
So I'll play it again
with all these effects back on it
and just cut to the chase.
00:20:19
So let's play this completely dry,
no reverb whatsoever.
00:20:23
I got to bypass this one
because it's automated,
and then I had some reverb
on the Crush send,
so let's get rid of that as well.
00:20:31
So here's the vocal
and the guitar
bone dry.
00:20:51
And now let's turn all that stuff back on.
00:21:14
You can feel how much that comes up
from super-close
to now where we've got
this ethereal kind of sound.
00:21:20
Well, that's it for the effects
on the vocal,
but let me show you what
I've been doing with plug-ins
on Wes's vocal here.
00:21:26
I recorded this stuff,
so I did it the way I wanted,
which is,
we had a Soyuz microphone
through my Tree Audio Branch back there,
and that's a tube mic pre,
two-band EQ,
and compressor,
so I squeezed him to tape.
00:21:40
When he gets loud in here...
00:21:42
And I say tape generically,
meaning to whatever medium
I'm recording to.
00:21:47
So I compress on the way in generally,
I get the sound as I want it,
you know, as far as I can get it
on the way into Pro Tools,
so in this case,
he was going through that compressor,
and there were some times
where he was hitting it pretty hard.
00:21:59
I'm not afraid of squashing something,
particularly vocals,
because you need to be able to hear
every single word,
and the combination of compression
and manually riding the fader
is how you get there.
00:22:09
I didn't need to compress him that much
by the time we got to the mix
because I had already done it
on the way in.
00:22:16
We just have this little LA-3A.
00:22:17
I doubt it's doing very much.
00:22:20
Let's bypass all these plug-ins.
00:22:22
And we'll keep this dry again.
00:22:26
Here's with no plug-ins
on the vocal.
00:22:39
Sensitive, nice.
00:22:41
I'm going to put the LA-3A on.
00:22:52
You can feel it already
just evening it out a little bit,
those peaks where he's pushing
and emoting like that,
it's just sort of bringing
them down just a little bit
such that those last bits
where it's really quiet
come up by default,
so it's a delicate balance of, like,
how much can you really push on him
before you completely level
and ruin that emotional performance.
00:23:13
Not only is it something
to look at on the meter
if you really want to go there,
but you have to listen and hear
and feel how that compressor
is affecting the message
of what he's saying,
particularly on vocals.
00:23:25
It's really, really something
to pay attention to.
00:23:28
On a rock song, I'm not afraid of smashing
the crap out of the guy,
but on a really sensitive song
it can affect the dynamics
and the mood of the song immensely.
00:23:37
So the other bit of compression
I'm doing on them
is this parallel crush bus here,
the lead vocal crush (LVCrush).
00:23:43
I generally send that
as a unity post-fader send,
so the more I ride him louder,
it'll push into that
parallel compressor bus even more.
00:23:51
I'll show you what's happening there.
00:23:52
I've got an 1176 on him,
it's my usual sort of parallel thing.
00:23:56
It's a gentle song, so I'm gentle
with that parallel.
00:23:59
Slow attack, fast release,
4:1,
typical setting on an 1176.
00:24:05
Let's see what that's adding
to the game here.
00:24:24
You can hear what that crush is doing,
it's like it's making him
about a foot taller.
00:24:28
That's the sort of feeling I get,
so check it out again with the crush.
00:24:40
So you get that same emotion,
but you're also sort of
propping him up a little bit,
like maybe...
00:24:46
I don't know what you would
call it in percentage,
but the feeling is of, like,
a little bit more urgency to it.
00:24:51
That's what I feel like this
crush is doing
in this particular song.
00:24:54
To feel that sort of vibe
from the parallel,
I would go as slow as I can on the attack
and as quick as I can on the release,
so that way you're not
hearing compression,
you're just hearing,
like,
thickness.
00:25:06
It's a thickener, it's what it's doing,
it's like it's just beefing that sound up
without losing that
emotional content.
00:25:14
We have that unaffected sound,
like, the only barely compressed
lead vocal track,
and we're adding
this much more compressed sound to it,
but that compression
is not subtle.
00:25:25
If we listen to this by itself,
it is not subtle,
but,
we're adding a small portion of it
back to that uncompressed sound,
and what that parallel bus
sounds like by itself,
it doesn't matter, you know?
It's the feeling of what it's doing
to the overall picture of things,
and of course, no one is ever
going to hear it like this,
so it's even less important,
but the philosophy of it is to,
you know,
be able to have that really hammered
kind of thick sound
added to that gentle nice guy
on the main track.
00:25:55
You don't want to overdo it,
because again,
you can overcome that gentleness
with this sort of smashed sound,
and you got to be careful
about that ratio.
00:26:05
Now, if I was doing
like an aggressive rock song,
this parallel bus
would be a lot more, like, nasty
and mangled and compressed
and distorted and saturated
and all these things we love to get into,
but on a pretty track like this
we have to make sure
we don't go too far into that realm.
00:26:21
The next thing in the chain
is the SSL
UAD plug-in.
00:26:26
This has sort of become my go-to
vocal-clarifying EQ.
00:26:31
I've always loved the sound
of SSL 4000 EQs
and we have this great model
of it in here.
00:26:36
And generally, I go here
for like...
00:26:39
the clarity range to me
is between 2 and 3 kHz,
but that's also the range of harshness,
so it's a delicate balance
of figuring out
exactly what frequency
is going to help poke
that vocal through the mix,
but also not become harsh.
00:26:53
Here I've got probably,
this looks like maybe 2.2 kHz
or something,
it's like, who knows what the number is,
and again, that's not important.
00:26:59
I listen to it and feel
how it's going to work.
00:27:02
I got a little bit of top end going here,
cut out a little bit of boxy low mids,
and I've added a little bit at 150 Hz
to give him a little more chest sound.
00:27:10
He's got a bright kind of reedy
thing to his voice,
but that's his trademark,
so I don't want to lose that,
I don't want to take away that...
00:27:17
that, like,
that edge he's got to his voice,
because that's Wes, you know?
Take that away and you have
anybody else but him.
00:27:25
So it's a delicate balance around
making it clear,
concise,
and deep.
00:27:32
Let me play it without this EQ,
and then I'll play it with.
00:27:53
So a little bright,
a little more present,
a little chestier,
just clearer to me.
00:27:59
That's what we're going for here.
00:28:01
The next in the row
is another little clarifying EQ.
00:28:04
There was just a little bit
of a boxy issue
around 200
and around 650.
00:28:09
That's sort of gone.
00:28:10
I rolled off the extreme low end
to make sure there's no
sort of room noise
bleeding through.
00:28:15
And I use this EQ in particular
because it's a little bit more
of a visual graphic
and I can be a lot more precise
about where I'm going.
00:28:22
I can be precise with the Q width
and know that I'm at this frequency
with this kind of bandwidth,
and it's also got this really nice
graphic illustration
of what's happening.
00:28:39
The frequency analyzer can help you
hone in on the frequencies
that are being a problem.
00:28:44
I use the low-cut filter here
because it doesn't sound like anything
and because you can vary the slope on it
and put it wherever you want it.
00:28:51
And again, you can sort of
visually see
that you've fixed the problem
that you heard with your ears
listening to the song.
00:28:58
Yeah. Great tool.
00:29:00
Next in line
is a multiband compressor.
00:29:03
This Waves one is really good,
and again,
trying to get more clarity.
00:29:07
The vocal thing is usually clarity.
00:29:09
Hopefully I've recorded it correctly
and it's not an issue of, like,
trying to make the guy sound good.
00:29:14
In this case it's just a matter
of clarifying things,
so,
I want to get chestiness with him,
but I don't want it to get
out of control on certain words,
and
there was some reason I went to this
multiband set up here.
00:29:26
You know, just to attenuate
upper bass, if you will,
to keep it from, like, mugging the song.
00:29:31
It just felt like it was a little
overwhelming at times.
00:29:33
And then,
to tame some of that strident stuff
in the upper harmonics of his voice,
that thing I was talking about
earlier, that edge,
I put a little bit of action
on this top band over here.
00:29:44
Let's see if it's affecting things
on this particular line
we've been studying.
00:29:57
You can see
and you can feel and hear
how that's sort of helping
just clarify those little regions.
00:30:04
So here's without the multiband.
00:30:25
It's controlling that chestiness,
it's controlling that edge,
but it's not taking it completely away,
and because it's a dynamic,
it's essentially a dynamic equalizer,
you are letting his emotion come through
and just touching it down
whenever you need to,
so this is a really useful tool on vocals.
00:30:41
And finally we have the de-esser,
another UAD plug-in that works really well
just to tame the 'esses'.
00:30:48
Here's without.
00:31:07
You can see it's set up to just affect
the loud 'esses',
so, like, 'wilderness inside'
is not an issue in terms of sibilance,
but the other ones,
you know, just sort of
bop them a little bit.
00:31:16
Thankfully, he's got really good
control of his 'esses'.
00:31:19
There are singers I have worked with
who can't control them,
they have almost like a teapot whistle
coming out of their mouth.
00:31:25
You can see all the tools
we have available,
even just on a vocal, here, In The Box.
00:31:29
We were talking earlier about
mixing on a console and how much
I love mixing on a console,
and
it's interesting, like,
mixing in the bad old days
of having in front of you what you have,
I mean, you have a rack of gear,
you have some things,
and you have EQs
and compressors in the console.
00:31:46
The bad old days were sort of ham-fisted
by today's standard, you know?
You had a compressor,
an EQ,
and maybe a couple of de-essers
in the rack,
and now we have
all this multiband crazy stuff,
we have precision EQs that don't change...
00:31:59
that have a consistent phase response,
we have as many compressors
as we can possibly want of every design
and every possible permutation.
00:32:08
Is that good or is that bad?
I don't know the answer to that.
00:32:12
I just know that
I can control things the way I want
in a very, very precise way now
that we couldn't do before.
00:32:20
Does that make better records?
It could be argued either way, I think.
00:32:26
The thing that I try to avoid
is spending too much time thinking about,
you know, "What EQ should I use today
on this particular thing?"
Having experience on consoles,
and hardware, and such like that,
I sort of have a memory bank
of which EQs do things the way I want
on the application
I'm about to put them on.
00:32:46
So, I mean,
even though I've got
like 200 different EQs in this box,
I can automatically eliminate 95% of those
just by knowing,
all right, an SSL EQ does this well,
an API does this well,
a Helios does this,
a Neve does this,
and we have models
of these things that work,
you know, for all intents and purposes,
exactly like the real thing.
00:33:08
I can know already
what's going to work and what's not.
00:33:13
Sometimes I get surprised.
00:33:14
I'll try a wild hair idea
and put something I don't think
is going to work
on this application,
and then sometimes maybe they'll work
and I'll have another thing
to put in my memory bank
of useful tools,
and other times
it's just an abject failure,
and I'll remember also
to never use that again
on that particular thing.
00:33:31
So, way more things to think about
when working In The Box
versus, you know, in the hardware realm,
but
equally powerful,
and certainly lots of fun for us nerds.
00:33:42
Mixing on a console,
mixing on an SSL or a Neve,
there's always some kind of shortcoming,
there's always some kind of,
like, "Man, I wish I had..."
And
in the days of big budget records,
you just, "Oh, I wish I had a GML.
00:33:54
Hey, Design FX, can you send a GML over?"
or, "Man, I really wish I had this",
or, "The EQ is not cutting it on this",
you patched something else in.
00:34:03
You have to turn around and say,
"All right, what do I have left?",
and you use whatever you have left.
00:34:09
I remember mixing a record
on an SSL 9000 J,
in
maybe 2004,
and I hadn't mixed on one in so long,
I was so excited, like,
"Oh, cool! Mixing on an SSL again!"
and I went to EQ the drums and, like,
"Man, these EQs sound terrible!
These are awful!"
And I turned to the assistant and said,
"These are not as good
as I remember them being",
and I was like, "Oh!
I got my rack of Tonelux over there!
Put those on all the drums!"
And then, all of a sudden
I'm over here EQ'ing
and, "Oh, that sounds really good!"
And then the SSL EQ
helped a little bit in some other areas
if I needed something else,
some other additions
or subtractions or whatever,
I could go there, but,
you know, you have to budget
what you have in the rack
in the old days,
like, "I only have one Pultec",
or, "I have one 1176.
00:34:54
What's important enough
that it's going to get the 1176?"
Now,
I mean, I can't even tell you,
there are sessions where I've had
thirty 1176s!
Is that a good idea?
I don't know. It works,
and I think at the end of the day
that's what's the important thought
with regard to all this technology
and things we can play with.
00:35:13
Now that we've sort of examined the vocal,
the main, main part of the song,
the main thrust of the song,
its accomplice is the acoustic guitar.
00:35:21
It's a very delicate part,
so there's a lot of things
we had to do to it in the end
to make it stand up to this big vocal.
00:35:28
The first of them
is to have its own little
parallel compressor.
00:35:32
If we start at the beginning of the song,
let's hear it without the acoustic
guitar crush track (ACO Crush).
00:35:52
Super-dynamic,
it gets really tiny
and then it goes really loud
and then gets really tiny.
00:35:57
How can we control that
without ruining that dynamic?
Parallel compression,
that's always our friend.
00:36:05
In this particular case
I've done a couple things.
00:36:08
I've got this parallel bus,
just sending at unity gain, post-fader,
going into an EQ first
because I don't want
any of this low end stuff compressed,
and I don't want any
of this squeaky high end stuff,
like any kind of finger noise,
I don't want that to be part
of this compressed sound,
so I've cut those out.
00:36:25
I want this sort of midrange focus
that's going to allow
the bass to hold down the low end later,
the piano,
and then to have these other elements
that come in later,
the violin, the cello,
to have their top end space.
00:36:37
And then we've gone and used a Fatso
as the parallel compressor.
00:36:42
If we listen with the parallel compressor,
this is what we have.
00:37:00
Again, you can be pretty relentless
with that parallel compression.
00:37:04
It's hitting pretty darn hard,
but it's not ruining
the dynamic of the original track.
00:37:10
It just sort of thickens it up
and makes it, you know,
bigger,
but without losing
that really pretty
emotional performance
that he's played here.
00:37:20
Here's again with no parallel.
00:37:52
It's the best of both worlds.
00:37:54
It's not compressed, but it is,
and it's loud,
and we like loud.
00:37:57
This is the sort of modern ethos.
00:38:00
Again, just briefly,
let's just run through these
other plug-ins
I'm using on the dry track.
00:38:05
I'm using the EQ III as,
just like a clarifying EQ,
I cut out some of that low end nastiness.
00:38:11
And I think
the EQ III that comes with Pro Tools
is fantastic and sounds great.
00:38:15
It doesn't sound like anything really.
00:38:16
It's a perfect utility EQ
for just about anything,
and I've sort of substituted that now
with that FabFilter Pro-Q2
because it sounds even better.
00:38:25
There's nothing wrong
with using this EQ all over the place.
00:38:29
I got a little bit of API going on here,
adding some top end
and some presence in the 3 kHz range.
00:38:35
I've also added a little bit
of low-cut filter here
and
we have the Pultec
adding more top end still,
so obviously,
my mic choice for this recording
was not the best.
00:38:48
I think I used an RCA 77,
which is a beautiful-sounding mic,
but not a ton of top end, so,
I've had to sort of
fix my mistake in this regard.
00:38:58
And then finally
another little surgical EQ
helping to take out
these little problem frequencies,
boosting a little bit of midrange
to give it more of that finger sound.
00:39:09
Let's play it without anything.
00:39:23
Arguably, that was a pretty good sound.
00:39:25
It's a pretty sound,
but for a pop song
it wasn't the greatest
when it came time to mix.
00:39:30
We can put this guy in,
and we can put this guy in.
00:39:46
Prettier, right?
And then we can add this guy.
00:39:49
And who doesn't like a Pultec, you know?
And then we can add
my final clarifying EQ.
00:40:12
That last one had the most effect
of any of them, I think.
00:40:15
It made it even gentler
and more emotional-sounding to me,
and I'm really glad I got to do that.
00:40:21
Here's the pile of effects...
00:40:22
Actually, do we have anything?
Oh, so we just have the 480,
which is a sample
of a real 480,
and what did we use on that?
So we have Altiverb
doing a 480 thing,
just a Large Hall
to go on that acoustic guitar.
00:40:37
Wonderful reverb program.
00:40:39
Here's with the reverb.
00:40:58
Now we have that vibe going.
00:41:00
We got the reverb going
on the acoustic guitar
and the lead vocal,
and we've sort of set the tone
for the song.
00:41:06
It starts out with just that acoustic,
the vocal joins him,
and that sets the mood for the whole song.
00:41:12
Let's move on.
00:41:13
What is the next thing
that comes into the song?
I believe
we got a kick drum
and some piano.
00:41:19
The piano plays a big role in this band.
00:41:22
Jere is a really wonderful writer,
and he's a great player.
00:41:26
He is a drummer primarily,
but he plays a mean piano,
he wound up playing
everything on the record,
and yeah, he's got a really great feel.
00:41:33
These parts sort of...
00:41:35
again,
because of this emotional ride
we want to go on
it starts really simple,
really sparse,
and then the pace picks up later on.
00:41:43
So here's the first piano part.
00:41:44
I'm going to play it from midway
through the first pre-chorus.
00:42:25
That's the first one.
00:42:27
You'll notice that it's panned in
a little bit,
so the piano comes in
and it doesn't get super-wide
and gets this super-real big piano sound,
it's like,
"I'm a little piano
and I'm just going to come in here
and bring things up a notch",
and that's cool.
00:42:42
He just wants to stay back there,
so, not important,
but you can feel the weight it adds,
and it starts this journey,
it starts bringing things up a little bit.
00:42:50
Piano, really simple,
again, a little bit of that
sort of medium Hall
or whatever we had on there.
00:42:58
A little bit of compression.
00:42:59
Let's solo that guy up
and hear what he sounds like.
00:43:02
Let's take all this stuff off.
00:43:03
The Trim, I think, is just balancing
the left to right balance,
so that's not really important.
00:43:16
Obviously, really simple part.
00:43:18
Not a whole lot to it,
but I just wanted
a little more beef out of it.
00:43:21
First thing was I went with a compressor.
00:43:38
Pretty straightforward,
you know, beefing it up again,
making those notes longer,
more sustain-y
behind that little
guitar thing that's happening
and the vocal melody.
00:43:48
And again, SSL EQ
because it's one of my favorites.
00:44:07
So it's just adding a little brightness,
a little beef in the low end
to help bring that home,
and then, what do we got here?
Then just a little clarifying EQ again
from the FabFilter.
00:44:20
We can hear all that together.
00:44:29
And then we can add the reverb.
00:44:38
And now we can hear everybody together,
all four... all the three elements:
vocal,
acoustic guitar, and piano.
00:45:02
It's all feeling really good.
00:45:04
The next thing that happens
is the...
00:45:07
I think the kick drum comes in here,
we have a little sort of light kick drum.
00:45:11
This was actually added during the mix,
this bass drum part,
because we were playing the mix,
probably in the third or fourth
revision of the mix,
or something like that,
and I don't remember whose idea it was,
but it was like, "I want to hear
a little something in the low end,
a little thump-y thump",
so I found a bass drum
and we flew it in here.
00:45:30
Let's again hear it from the middle
of the pre-chorus.
00:46:09
We've gotten...
00:46:10
how far through the song?
Roughly a third of the way
through the song,
and there's exactly four elements, right?
So now we're about to hit
the first chorus,
it will be a major scene change here,
so, a lot of things happening.
00:46:21
First of all,
the vocal is going on to a separate track
because he starts belting out
this 'home at last'
sort of theme line refrain.
00:46:31
I'm using the same plug-ins
as on the verse vocal,
but I'm affecting things
just slightly differently
because it's a different register
in his voice,
these are different dynamics,
a different emotion,
things will change a little bit.
00:46:43
The piano I've split off to another track
because it's playing a very different part
from those whole notes
that are in the verse,
so I wanted to treat that
slightly differently.
00:46:53
We've got another piano part coming in,
we've got the acoustic continuing,
and we've got the first
of these big bass drum and tom sounds.
00:47:01
Let's just check out
what the vocal is doing here,
and see how that...
00:47:06
how that changes.
00:47:22
The first thing you'll notice is
that chorus echo
that sort of leads off into the distance
to give it pause,
because on the first chorus
he only sings it once
and then it sort of pedals for a moment
and goes back to the verse,
so how do we fill up that space
and be even more ethereal
and sort of let it hang, like,
we just went somewhere,
and now we're going to
bring it down to the verse.
00:47:42
So that's the reasoning
behind that sound,
and I did that
probably with an EchoBoy
because I'm lazy.
00:47:50
Yes, so another EchoBoy,
Digital Delay modeling kind of thing,
a little Saturation,
top end cut down,
and quite a bit of Feedback.
00:47:58
It's just, again,
giving it that sort of...
00:48:00
that 'hang in the air' feel,
just like, "Okay, we're about to do
something else",
and then the next verse will drop.
00:48:05
So this is sort of one of my go-to tricks,
sort of set something up
to create a little bit of anticipation
for that next bit.
00:48:13
All the other plug-ins are the same,
doing about the same thing.
00:48:16
I think the settings are almost identical.
00:48:18
Well, maybe
a little more top end.
00:48:20
Here's the verse EQ curve,
and here's the chorus.
00:48:24
The chorus just got a little brighter.
00:48:26
It's another one of my tricks
to make the chorus a little more exciting,
is you make whatever is
the predominant instrument or vocal
just a hair brighter,
and it will be like, "Ooh!"
Brighter is always
more exciting, you know?
That's just a given,
just like louder is more exciting,
so, you can make it a little louder,
a little brighter,
maybe a little more echo,
a little more something,
and it'll give you that kind of next stage
in the takeoff, if you will,
like the rocket has multiple stages
to get it into orbit,
you're taking the second stage now.
00:48:55
Oh, this has a little something
extra on here.
00:48:57
Because he's pushing hard,
he's got a little pinch in his throat
in that upper register,
so I've pulled out
some business up here
at 6.5 and 15 kHz.
00:49:05
There was just some resonance happening
that I wasn't happy about.
00:49:08
So let's hear that real quick
with and without.
00:49:11
So here's without that.
00:49:35
So those two notches really helped tame
that kind of shrill part of his voice
in this section.
00:49:41
The de-esser is the same,
probably not doing anything.
00:49:44
A little 's' in there.
00:49:45
But other than that,
pretty much the same
as the verse vocal.
00:49:50
See this level.
Yeah, maybe a little more reverb.
00:49:53
We can feel maybe that.
00:49:54
Crush is still happening.
00:49:56
Oh! We got the plate happening now,
so it's a little more expansive perhaps.
00:49:59
Let's hear again that transition
from the second pre-chorus
into that chorus.
00:50:04
Pay attention to where the vocal is going,
what's happening to that.
00:50:30
The reverb is hanging out,
the delay is hanging out,
it's just taking a pause
before we plunge back into the next verse.
00:50:36
It's kind of cool.
00:50:38
The other things that are happening here,
we got another piano,
so this is like a mono
crushed piano,
just playing some bass bombs,
that kind of Beatle-y trick.
00:50:47
They did a lot of really simple
left-hand octaves
in the bass part of the piano.
00:50:52
Let's add this back in.
00:51:04
Two piano parts happening there,
that sort of triplet feel
giving it a little momentum,
and this big boom,
big bass thing,
so let's hear those individually
and see what we have.
00:51:21
That's going to become an instrumental
theme throughout the chorus,
that's sort of the rhythm of things.
00:51:27
And I've gone wider in the chorus
than I was in the verse.
00:51:31
The chorus gets brighter,
the vocal gets wetter,
the piano gets wider,
busier,
and then we have this other piano
joining us here as well.
00:51:45
I love this trick,
I use this piano bass thing on...
00:51:49
probably too much,
on nearly everything I produce, certainly.
00:51:52
I use some kind of low end piano thing
to add weight to a track.
00:51:56
Even if you just have a keyboard
or a crappy sample,
you can distort it, you can crush it,
and do something really interesting.
00:52:02
The point is not to hear it
necessarily, but to feel it.
00:52:05
So let's put these two pianos
together in solo
and see how they interact.
00:52:16
It's not only providing a lower end
extension of the piano part,
but it's providing like a
center imaging kind of thing,
so,
it's kind of a cool trick.
00:52:24
I usually use an SM57
or, you know, any kind of crappy mic,
I just stuff it right in the
sound hole of the piano
and then I just smash it
with whatever I have.
00:52:31
Probably an 1176,
that's my favorite
compressor for that sort of purpose.
00:52:36
Push all the buttons in and smash it up.
00:52:37
It's really fun.
00:52:39
The next element that comes in
in the chorus
is these
tuned bass drums
that help, again,
add weight to that downbeat of the chorus.
00:52:48
And then these toms also come in.
00:52:51
The use of percussion with The Lumineers
is very nontraditional.
00:52:55
There's lots of stomps and claps,
and, you know, sort of...
00:52:58
we wanted it to be heavier
than their first record,
so we did a lot more, like,
thunderous percussion on this record,
so, these toms made a lot of appearances,
and these tuned bass drum kind of things
were used on a few songs.
00:53:11
Let's hear the same thing,
like halfway through that pre-chorus
going into the chorus
and feel what these are doing.
00:53:32
Pedaling at the end of the chorus
is even more prescient
because now we have
this big explosion at the top,
and it's like it comes from this fffdown to an mfreally quickly,
explosion down to this little quiet thing,
which leads us back into the verse,
and some other new elements will come in.
00:53:48
Let's step back for a second,
we can play these toms real quick.
00:53:51
These are fun.
00:53:56
I think it was Simone, the producer,
and Jere, the drummer,
playing drums in the room together
at the same time,
so I think, yeah, we got an individual mic
on each of their sets of toms.
00:54:05
I think each of them hit two toms,
and then a room mic out there.
00:54:10
And these are just sort of, you know,
just a little corrective EQ and a gate
to make them a little punchier-sounding.
00:54:16
And then they go through a bus
with another little corrective EQ
and some smashy compression.
00:54:23
Let's hear it without this stuff
on this bus here,
and without the EQ or the effects.
00:54:30
It's not terribly exciting by themselves,
but we knew we were going to blow them up.
00:54:35
We can put all this stuff back on.
00:54:40
A little tougher-sounding still,
and then we'll throw them
into that space that we love.
00:54:47
Major weight behind what's happening here.
00:54:49
And then, on top of that
we have these tuned bass drums,
which I'm just rolling off the top end of,
and then distorting them
with this Devil-Loc.
00:54:58
Let me play them for you
without anything on them.
00:55:04
A little clipping on the input
when I recorded them,
but, you know, it's okay.
00:55:09
And I could put these guys back on.
00:55:15
So this Devil-Loc is doing quite a bit!
Let me just back up again
and take that Chamber off,
and just see what the saturation
has done to this sound.
00:55:27
Pretty aggressive.
00:55:28
This thing is another one
of my favorite little toys.
00:55:31
And then we can put that Chamber back on.
00:55:36
Just to make it even more thunderous.
00:55:38
So that's that Chamber number five again
that I love so much.
00:55:42
And one more time,
now that we've broken down these sounds,
let's hear the pre-chorus into the chorus.
00:56:02
We've taken these sort of
punchy percussive sounds
and then lengthened them
with distortion and reverb
to make it fill up that whole space
in this short chorus.
00:56:12
They get a lot more use later on
in the program.
00:00:00
We've come to the third verse now,
we had a double verse at the front.
00:00:03
We got the third verse coming up.
00:00:04
It's all the same characters,
but now we've added some low end,
we got the bass guitar coming in.
00:00:08
We've got a shaker
to add a little rhythmic step up
in the song,
and then we got
a four-on-the-floor kick drum.
00:00:14
The whole motor behind the band
is changing in this third verse,
and the pace really picks up
after that little pause in the chorus.
00:00:22
Let's open these up.
00:00:24
I think we got the bass drum happening,
we got the toms,
here's the shaker,
and actually let's keep the shaker muted
and we'll feel what that adds.
00:00:33
But let's open up the bass
and we'll see what it's like now
adding some low end
to the record.
00:01:24
So can feel the step
that the song took there,
you know, really simple bass part,
a couple little fills
to make
some interesting things happen,
but nothing super-complicated.
00:01:37
Really just legato,
simple playing,
but it adds this beef, this dynamic
that it just feels like,
"Ooh! This is going
somewhere again!", right?
The way I record bass
typically on my sessions
is I like it to have
a really fat, nice direct sound.
00:01:53
In this case, we had this Acme Motown DI
that had just come out.
00:01:56
It sounds wonderful.
00:01:57
And then I like to ideally have two amps:
one will be on the cleaner side,
no fuzz,
just note and tone,
and then I like to have a dirtier bass
that's got a little hair on it
so it adds
these upper harmonics
that will penetrate small speakers.
00:02:13
When I listen on earbuds, or NS-10s,
or, like, tiny little speakers
across the room,
you'll still hear that bass.
00:02:18
You may not hear
the lower octave of it,
but you might hear some
of the upper distortion,
the upper octave distortion
that's happening.
00:02:25
Let's solo up this bass
and I'll show you what's happening.
00:02:43
So that's all the sounds put together.
00:02:45
Let's break it down a little bit further.
00:02:47
I'll take the compressor and the EQ off,
and let's hear one sound at a time,
and we can talk about
how those come about.
00:02:54
So here's just the DI.
00:03:11
It's just clean, it's the tone
of that Fender P bass and his fingers,
nothing else.
00:03:16
Here's the first amp.
00:03:18
I think we had
two Ampeg amps.
00:03:22
Actually, we had three Ampeg amps,
so we sort of rotated through them,
so I'm not exactly sure
of this combination.
00:03:27
Let's have a listen and maybe
I can tell by listening to it.
00:03:36
And then, here's the second amp.
00:03:47
Just a little hairier on that one.
00:03:49
And what I'm looking for is, like,
from the DI you get that sort of pure tone
right off the axe.
00:03:55
With one of the amps
I want a nice, round, fat sound,
and the other one,
I just sort of crank it up,
crank up the gain a little bit,
or maybe even put a pedal in front of it
to get something really nasty.
00:04:05
On a song like this, it's pretty,
so I'm not really going for that sort of,
like, major fuzz tone,
but on a rock thing
I might make it, like, unrecognizable
so it's super-nasty,
and then just blend a little bit of it in
to get that grit
and the upper harmonics happening.
00:04:22
So in this case,
it's not a huge difference
between the three things.
00:04:25
The important thing when you're recording
two amps like this, and a DI,
is to make sure that the phase alignment
between the three of them,
the time alignment and the phase
alignment are all correct.
00:04:35
So, what I like to do
when you set those mics up
against the amp,
they have to be the same distance
from the speaker in both cases,
so I will put a click
through both of the amps at the same time,
record it,
and look at
the time difference
between them on the screen,
and then sort of adjust them
until it's right.
00:04:54
The other thing you can do,
and I do this on guitar amps
when I use two different mics
is I put a little bit of
pink noise through the amps
and I listen on headphones.
00:05:02
I flip one out of phase
through the preamp,
and then move them
until they are canceled,
and that works really well.
00:05:08
It's how I do guitars,
and it's the only way
to make that stuff happen.
00:05:12
Fortunately, in here,
I'm not summing them into Pro Tools,
so I can adjust things after the fact.
00:05:18
Not a big deal,
but I do like to get it
as perfect as I can on the way in.
00:05:21
You can see I put this Time Adjuster
plug-in on the DI
and set him back just a little bit,
216 samples
or whatever that amounts to
in milliseconds,
but it's not a whole lot.
00:05:32
And when you think about it,
if you're taking the electric
signal right off the bass,
and then you're sending it to an amp
out through air into a microphone,
the gap between the end
of the amplifier electrical signal
and the air that is pushing through
to get to that mic,
that's going to be the delay.
00:05:49
It's minuscule,
because it's, like, a foot at the most,
but it still adds up,
and sometimes that can be made better
with delay in the DI.
00:05:58
To get the bass to be nice
and long and full
I've compressed it a little bit
with an LA-2A plug-in.
00:06:03
There is a bunch of different
models of this.
00:06:05
This is my favorite.
00:06:06
Tonally, it sounds great.
00:06:08
It does what it's supposed to do.
00:06:09
We can hear it with
and without the compressor.
00:06:33
It evens it out a little bit,
levels it like it's supposed to,
makes it a little longer-sounding,
and then I think I just did a little bit
of corrective EQ here again.
00:06:40
Yeah, that pesky 450 Hz.
00:06:44
I'm probably right. Yeah, 400.
00:06:46
So let's hear it with everybody in again.
00:07:06
It's cruising along
a little bit now, right?
We're getting steam through the song.
00:07:10
The other thing we put in
is this cool shaker.
00:07:32
So it's not really a shaker.
00:07:33
It's this.
00:07:36
So, being creative,
nontraditional percussion again,
so,
we spent a long time
getting that sound to work
and then to figure out
how to make this groove with the song.
00:07:47
It adds just another element of locomotion
to that verse.
00:07:50
Check it out again coming from this
little break in the chorus,
and how that little tiny shaker
just right in the middle of the track
helps things pick up
the pace a little bit.
00:08:27
It's a little tiny sound,
but it's adding quite a bit
of information,
especially up top.
00:08:32
And you'll notice I did
a bunch of rides on it
to sort of make it poke out
between the vocal phrases.
00:08:38
It just sort of helps, like,
"Hey, I'm here.
00:08:40
There's something happening".
00:08:43
That's another one
of the fun things I like to do,
is get my hands on all the faders
and sort of help things move around
and help clarify who's important
at what moment
and, you know,
push whatever is important to the fore,
make it a little bit more obvious
when it needs to be.
00:08:57
The last things added to this third verse
after our short chorus
are a couple of
really rad violin parts.
00:09:05
So there's one that's providing
a little rhythm
that I've looped in the song,
and then there's a little counter-melody.
00:09:11
That's happening, so let's check these out
with everybody happening.
00:09:49
We've got these two rad little parts.
00:09:52
I've put them both through a little bus
and I'm sending them off to a plate.
00:09:56
I'm trying to consider them as one thing
even though they're not really,
but they're both in the right speaker.
00:10:01
That little counter-melody thing
has a Space Echo that I recorded
as the tracks went down.
00:10:06
I actually took a contact mic
and put it through a Space Echo
just to give it some kind of,
like, weirdness.
00:10:11
Everything else is fairly normal,
and, to quote a friend of mine,
it's like, "You got to have something
stupid in every song",
and so I thought
this would be kind of a silly thing to do,
and it's super-subtle
in the overall landscape,
but it just provides some kind of...
00:10:26
just some funkiness and weirdness.
00:10:27
Let me show you this one part again.
00:10:30
That little counter-melody is really fun.
00:10:36
And then the loop's little rhythmic part.
00:10:44
So nothing fancy,
but again, it just sort of amps up
the energy in this third verse,
so let's play the chorus
into the third verse one more time.
00:11:35
And then yet another element comes in
in the middle of this pre-chorus.
00:11:39
And again, these were
very thought-out
as to where things were going to come in.
00:11:44
So we get into this pre-chorus
and then we have a cello coming in,
and that's another
sort of identifiable sound
for The Lumineers
with Neyla, the cello player.
00:12:18
A subtle kind of thing,
just another legato part
delineating the chords,
but still adds a little weight.
00:12:24
And it comes in in an odd place,
but it feels right
and that's why we sort of
left it like that.
00:12:30
So nothing fancy on the cello, you know,
just a little bit of low end added
to make it a little thicker-sounding.
00:12:37
A lower mids kind of thing,
700 Hz
is a nice frequency for cello, it seems,
and a little compression,
and then another little bit of brightness
and corrective EQ.
00:12:49
Let's just solo this up real quick
and we'll take everything off of it
just to explore the space.
00:13:02
Pretty cello in a room,
it's a nice sound.
00:13:05
Let's just add this EQ a little bit.
00:13:07
We have
used this sort of gentle
Pultec kind of thing.
00:13:11
I'm actually doing a lot of boosting.
00:13:13
I don't remember my thought process
behind this necessarily,
but, adding a little bit
of low end at 100 Hz,
a little 700 Hz,
a little 1.5 kHz.
00:13:22
You know, sort of all the
food groups of the lower end of the cello
just to make it sit nicely in the mix.
00:13:36
A little compression
to even things out some more.
00:13:45
And some more corrective EQ
just to sort of lop off
that low, low stuff
and make it a little more present.
00:14:01
And then let's hear that
come in with the band.
00:14:24
If I had to do it over again,
I'd probably make the cello
a bit louder there,
but that was sort of
the committee decision,
where to put it.
00:14:30
But it comes in on sort of
an emotional line,
'Angela it's a long time coming',
so it's like, you know, what?
And then it leads us into the chorus here
in the next part.
00:14:40
Let's play it from where we are
into this next chorus,
and we'll hear it with the instruments
that we have going so far,
and then we'll see what else
is supposed to happen here.
00:15:26
This chorus already sounds
a bit more rocking
than that first chorus,
and that's intentional.
00:15:31
The first chorus is like,
it's a bit of a pause, a bit of a tease
into the refrain of the song,
and now we've got a full-on chorus
and there's more people happening,
more instruments playing,
we've added the bass
from that last verse,
we've got that little percussion thing
to give it a little handshake
kind of business,
we got the toms, we got the bass drums,
the same pianos as the first time,
the same sort of vibe.
00:15:56
Clearly louder.
00:15:57
You can see that it's louder.
00:15:59
Wes is wailing on the vocals,
we've got these little cello
things happening.
00:16:02
These are really fun.
00:16:03
Again,
simple and thought-out.
00:16:06
So here's this cello addition.
00:16:13
Very orchestral
and simple and effective,
so check it out with the track
now that you've heard it in solo.
00:16:25
It's really subtle,
but it adds a little thing,
a little more, you know,
ensemble kind of vibe.
00:16:30
Let's see, we have a violin thing
going on here too,
which I don't remember what it's doing.
00:16:41
If this was a rock band that would
probably be an electric guitar part,
but since it's not,
it's sort of a folk pop band,
we've got a fiddle doing it,
which is kind of cool and unexpected.
00:16:50
Still with that Space Echo on it,
which I really liked.
00:16:53
So check it out in the track
now that you've heard it by itself.
00:17:11
A subtle locomotion kind of effect.
00:17:14
It pushes things along a little bit more.
00:17:17
You can see again in my automation
that it is sort of being ridden up
in those spaces between the vocals.
00:17:22
Let's listen one more time.
00:17:42
It plays a small role in the chorus,
but it's a pretty fun little part.
00:17:47
The next major sort of thing
to come in for this chorus, I think,
is these little background parts.
00:17:53
Let's solo those up,
and then we'll listen to it
with the full band.
00:18:04
Another simple part,
a bizarre, ethereal kind of thing.
00:18:08
We spent a few hours
getting that sort of envelope right.
00:18:12
The way Byron sang it
is right there,
and we had to cut it off
to make it a little more uniform,
sort of not call attention to itself.
00:18:19
He sang that envelope
and we had to double-track it
and get it just right,
so check it out with the full band.
00:18:45
It's sort of a harmony to Wes's lead vocal
but in a really bizarre way,
and that's, again,
another one of the themes for this record,
is doing things in a nontraditional way
and that was a really fun part to make.
00:18:57
We've got a full rocking chorus
with all sorts of new things in it.
00:19:00
Now we go into this bridge
that sort of drops down ever so slightly,
and then builds back up
to the final sort of crescendo.
00:19:07
So let's play it
from halfway through this chorus
and see what happens in the bridge,
and then add the next new bits.
00:19:41
Immediately you can tell
the bass drops out,
the bottom end of the record drops out
to give us a little bit of, like,
an 'off the cliff' moment.
00:19:48
The piano drops down to be much quieter,
the vocals, everything drops down
just a little bit
to give us room to come back up.
00:19:55
So again, a performance
and arrangement commitment
to making that happen
rather than having to do some kind of
post-production effects
and massive volume rides
to achieve that effect.
00:20:05
It also speeds up here,
we got a little bit of a
ramp-up on the click track here.
00:20:11
Another sort of effective thing.
00:20:14
The bass goes away, and what comes in?
We have these handclaps
that come in
in the bridge here,
and that's pretty cool.
00:20:21
It adds another sort of ramping effect.
00:20:23
So again, from the same place.
00:20:25
Check this out.
00:20:52
It really starts to kick off there,
you can feel this energy building
and the release is when it drops
into that chorus,
but I won't let you get there yet.
00:20:59
Claps,
another sort of element
that The Lumineers
like to use quite a bit,
but in a different way this time
than the 'Hey Ho' kind of vibe.
00:21:08
The other thing that comes in
and it only happens, I believe,
in this bridge,
is this little...
00:21:14
what Jere calls his piano bee,
it's like a bee in the bonnet,
it's something that's flying around
doing something that's not the focus,
but it also does this thing
where it's just flying around
being its own little bad self
somewhere in the corner.
00:21:26
He sort of coined that term
and I enjoy that quite a bit.
00:21:29
I'll solo this so you can hear
what's happening,
and then you'll notice it
when we play the whole track.
00:21:53
So now that you've heard
this thing by itself,
maybe you'll notice it in the track
and sort of feel what it's
doing over there.
00:21:58
It's not overly complicated.
00:22:00
We did this same sort of idea
in a few other songs on the record.
00:22:03
Completely different sound,
completely different context,
but that same sort of, like,
just some person over there
playing the piano
in a nontraditional sense.
00:22:33
It's just sort of helping
in that crescendo,
just a little more bizarre energy
over on the left speaker there.
00:22:39
I love hard-panning stuff like that.
It's really fun.
00:22:42
I just tracked that as a normal sound,
and then we added this little
Echoplex plug-in.
00:22:59
I recorded this in a sort of normal sense,
I probably compressed it
and EQ'ed the piss out of it
just to make something interesting,
and then in the mix
I added a little bit of Echoplex
to give it some more flavor.
00:23:10
I made it a little brighter.
00:23:11
It's sort of what I do
to everything, I think.
00:23:13
Cut off the bottom end to let it not fight
with the other piano tracks.
00:23:17
You know, an effort to make
something, again, nontraditional.
00:23:19
That guy over there playing
with a weird sound
and a rhythm that's counter
to everything else that's happening,
but also helps to build this energy
that's now going to carry us
into this last chorus.
00:23:30
Now that you know
what it's doing by itself,
let's hear it with the track
and check that out.
00:23:53
So we got this really beautiful
crescendo here,
everybody is contributing to it:
instruments, vocals,
all this stuff.
00:24:00
Let's take a look at my automation here
and see
if there's anything severe happening
in that department.
00:24:07
Not really.
00:24:08
A little bit of buildup in the bass.
00:24:11
The claps are doing their own thing,
sort of...
00:24:15
they crescendo naturally,
the way everyone clapped on that one.
00:24:19
Yeah.
00:24:20
Nothing terribly assisted from me.
00:24:22
You'll see there's a lot of automation
that sort of helps me feel
like I'm doing something
to be perfectly honest,
but it does add this little bit
of bounce and lilt to things
that maybe the compression
took away a little bit
in the interest of
smoothing things out,
and then I sort of unsmooth things,
if you will,
in a manual way.
00:24:41
The last chorus
clearly is louder than everything else
and that's the idea,
so you want to build this, again,
this emotional ride through the song.
00:24:49
So dropping into this very loud chorus,
everybody is now full-tilt, rocking out,
I mean, as much as you can
in this sort of song.
00:24:58
The piano is going full-on,
the bass is getting
a little more aggressive,
the acoustic is louder,
everybody is louder.
00:25:05
If we step back and look at my automation,
I mean, yes,
everything is made louder decibel-wise.
00:25:11
The last chorus is significantly louder,
but it's not only what I'm doing,
it's what the band did
when we recorded it.
00:25:16
We had this arrangement in mind,
it was intentional that everything
is a little louder in the end.
00:25:21
Now that we've heard this bridge
and this buildup
into this loud last chorus,
let's hear it again and we'll go
through the end of the song
to see how this sort of
emotional ride ends,
and then we'll step back and add in
the rest of the elements that happen
in this last chorus.
00:25:36
They're not a whole lot,
but they are important.
00:26:46
So we end up where we started,
with just the vocal
and the acoustic guitar,
so it sort of bookends the whole song,
and to come out of a massive
orchestral arrangement like that
into just a guy and his guitar
is, you know,
is a little shocking,
and from the technical perspective,
it's a little challenging
to sort of keep that energy
and volume up, and not lose...
00:27:06
you don't want the floor
to completely fall away.
00:27:08
I mean, to a certain degree
you want it, of course,
because that's what's happening, but,
if you're listening in the car
on the highway
and there's all this noise happening,
you don't want the song
to just suddenly disappear,
and then you're like, "Why is there
15 seconds before the next song starts?",
so, you sort of have to balance
that energy drop
with a volume consistency
to keep things interesting
and the energy going
to get to the end of the song.
00:27:33
We've heard this last chorus.
00:27:34
Same stuff as the previous chorus.
00:27:37
And then we've got a couple more
interesting things happening
that up the ante even more
for this ending thing.
00:27:44
Another bass drum coming in, I think,
that adds another
sort of element to things.
00:27:49
Let's see what this guy
is doing on his own.
00:27:58
We add that to what the drums
are already doing.
00:28:01
Let's see what that does.
00:28:25
Pretty powerful!
There's a lot of stuff going on there,
there's energy in the top end,
there's energy in the bottom end,
locomotion going on with the shaker
and all the little bits like that.
00:28:35
Lots of fun.
00:28:36
And then there's one more part
that comes in.
00:28:38
This is actually probably
my favorite sound
on the whole record.
00:28:42
We were trying to figure out
what was going to hold the backbeat down
in this last chorus.
00:28:47
To back up for one second,
this song is slightly different
than many others on the record
in that we sort of built
a lot of this track
in the percussion department.
00:28:55
We had this acoustic guitar,
and the vocal, and the piano,
and they were like,
"All right. What is really the arrangement
going to be behind that?",
and so,
a lot of these drums were sort of
put together
from things that we played for this song,
but the arrangement kept changing,
and it was like, "All right,
let's just do it like this".
00:29:14
And
we had a thought of, "All right,
what's this backbeat going to be?"
and we had a photographer in the session
shooting photos of the band,
and he was in the vocal booth at one point
and I heard this shutter click
in the background
and I was like,
"That's kind of a cool sound.
00:29:29
Can you step up to the mic
and let me record that?",
so I got a bunch of samples
with different shutter speeds, so,
sometimes it was a flam,
like on and off with the shutter,
and other times he would open it
and then close it manually,
so I had the open and the close sound.
00:29:44
So I sorted through all these samples,
found the ones that I liked,
and I made a little backbeat
out of the camera shutter,
so this is what it sounds like
by itself, and then I sort of
freakafied it a little bit.
00:29:57
I'll turn all these effects
and plug-ins off.
00:30:04
It's like a finger snap,
but a snare drum at the same time,
and then, you know,
sort of messed things up a little bit
with FilterFreak,
cut off the top end
and made it a little meatier,
did some Input saturation here,
and whatever I did with this EQ.
00:30:20
Yes, so again, just sort of emphasizing
the upper mids,
cutting off the extreme top and bottom,
and then the Neve
gives it a little more presence.
00:30:29
So, here's with the EQ.
00:30:36
Kind of a fun sound.
00:30:37
And then, what did we put on it?
We put some Room
to get it in the vibe
with the rest of the track,
and then I added these echoes.
00:30:51
Sort of a slap,
and then I added this other thing,
another stutter echo.
00:31:01
Again, adding to the locomotion
and the sort of chaos of things
in this last chorus.
00:31:06
Again, just EchoBoy's things
with a Repeat,
a specific number of Repeats
on each time.
00:31:12
No Feedback, as you can tell it exactly
how many echoes you want
at what interval you'd want them.
00:31:18
A really cool mode on that echo.
00:31:20
And then the other one is a Waves H-Delay,
just a short delay
with a little bit of Feedback,
just, again, to make it
something interesting.
00:31:28
More interesting than the shutter
is going to be on its own.
00:32:03
Really fun jam going on at the end,
all these little elements
that keep building and building
and building
throughout the song.
00:32:09
And again, really thought-out,
planned meticulously,
decided, if you will,
as to what's going to happen when,
so that's sort of the result of
the whole pile of things
that we came up with for this song.
00:32:24
The other thing that's happening
in this last chorus,
again, takes it to that next level,
is this other cello part comes in.
00:32:31
Let's see what this guy is doing,
or gal, as the case is.
00:32:40
Like another orchestral type thing,
like a bit of a march
happening from that cello,
and the fiddle is contributing
this as well.
00:32:59
And if we add yet another violin part...
00:33:11
That octave violin part at the top,
and again,
brighter is more exciting in general,
so adding that little...
00:33:18
another bee in your bonnet
way up top there
is going to make
something else interesting
and pull your ear toward it,
add to the energy of the track
to get things going even more.
00:33:28
Let's hear it from the bridge
into this chorus
now that you've heard
all of these disparate elements
that join us in this last chorus.
00:34:23
You know, you can feel
all those little elements
doing just their little
tiny contributions,
but it adds up to a big last chorus.
00:34:31
Two more things in the vocal department:
those little background vocals,
those high harmonies
that Byron is singing,
whereas in the first time they come in
in the second chorus
they sort of swell in,
we sort of wanted to
undo that a little bit,
and as it turns out,
in this last chorus
I rode them up at the beginning
and pulled them down
to sort of counteract
that swell a little bit
to make them a little bit more audible.
00:34:53
With that in mind,
just listen to what he's doing back there
and check this out.
00:35:11
You know, he's more recognizable
at the beginning of his crescendo
rather than the way it was before
because there's a lot more
stuff happening.
00:35:19
We need to counteract that a little bit
and make him a little more present,
volume-wise,
at the beginning of that part.
00:35:25
And one final thing we added
was another vocal part from Wes.
00:35:29
We'll solo all the vocals together.
00:35:31
I hate soloing vocals.
00:35:34
What can we do
to make this interesting?
Yeah, let's just solo all the vocals
and all the fiddles or something.
00:35:56
One more time through this last chorus.
00:36:28
Just another high harmony
in that right speaker
to elevate things even more,
and also to note,
I had forgotten about this,
is that a lot of the things
that we've added here
sort of double up in their tempo
halfway through this chorus,
so we have a double chorus
that comes around twice.
00:36:43
So for example, like this cello
which is just playing eighth notes
in the first half
switches up to sixteenths in the end.
00:37:07
If we play it from the first half
to the second half
you'll notice the energy picks up again
and in a little, subtle way.
Check it out.
00:37:54
So now that you've seen
all of these secrets,
all of these little tiny things
that add up to this
massive last chorus,
I think it will be interesting to listen
from the front of the song
to the back one more time,
and now you'll hear
all these little tiny things
jumping out at you along the way,
and,
you know,
it's interesting to listen
with that technical ear
for these little pieces
that are flying around
and helping things move
from a small, vulnerable emotional state
to, like, this proclamation at the end,
and then back to this little tiny thing
at the end for the outro.
00:38:29
Let's back up to the beginning of the song
and play it to the end
with our new knowledge.
00:41:54
There you have it.
00:00:00
As you can see
on the screen here,
there is a lot of automation,
so we should talk about that
for just a minute.
00:00:06
In a nontraditional
sort of song like this,
as we've discussed
throughout this program,
it started with the acoustic
guitar and the vocal,
and so,
adding these things,
adding all these elements
to the new sections as the song builds,
there's just a number of ways
of thinking about this stuff.
00:00:25
There's a lot of people
who will just get a static balance,
and then that's their mix.
00:00:29
I did that when I first started out,
and I was always just like,
"Well, what's the next thing?
What do I do to make this
sound like a record?
This sounds like a balance to me,
this sounds like a rough mix".
00:00:39
And you hear of Led Zeppelin records
and the Stones records perhaps
being, "Okay, this is the balance
and you print it",
but there were only four instruments,
five instruments max
playing on those records,
so,
and not to disparage the people
who made them or the bands,
because certainly, those are some
of the greatest-sounding things
in the history of recording.
00:00:58
At that time, that's how
records were made,
now, because of the
technology we have,
you know, working on a console
with automation,
working in Pro Tools or any kind of DAW
with infinite automation
of every parameter
you could possibly imagine,
what do you use that for?
To what end are you working
with all of these knobs and faders
and possibilities?
To me,
we are using all this stuff to sculpt,
again, going back to that
emotional journey through the song.
00:01:30
I mean, there are pop songs that come on
and stay on,
and go like that to the end,
and that to me is boring.
00:01:36
I don't like making
records like that,
you'll never hear a mix that I do
do that.
00:01:40
My stuff comes on and it goes somewhere,
like, it is very intentional
as to where it starts
and where it ends up,
and I figured out
over the course of the years
how to sort of contain that
a certain amount
and make it get there
without being 30 dB louder
at the end of the song
than at the beginning.
00:01:58
Sometimes it's unavoidable
if you start with a mouse
and it becomes an elephant at the end.
00:02:02
Part of that is...
00:02:04
there's two components:
there is the automation that I'm using
to help that envelope
and that journey,
and then there's the bus compressor
that's sort of helping
contain that a little bit,
and by pushing into that
bus compressor a bit
and getting that on the mix
as early as possible,
you're able to use those two things
to help balance
the desire for this
emotional and dynamic journey
and to keep things within...
00:02:31
within a certain boundary, so to speak,
because again,
you don't want it to be on the floor
and then on the ceiling.
00:02:37
You want it to sort of be
somewhere in the middle,
but also, you know,
get to be loud
and get to be quiet,
but not completely go away.
00:02:45
I remember being in the car
listening to a certain record
and I forgot that I put it on
because it was so quiet
for two minutes
that it was inaudible
under the road noise,
and I had it pretty loud,
and when it finally came back,
it scared the crap out of me
because it was so loud!
And it's like,
was that really necessary?
It's kind of ridiculous,
so I try to keep mine
within a certain range,
but...
00:03:08
but still try to manage that dynamic...
00:03:12
keeping the dynamics happening,
keeping the emotional
roller coaster going.
00:03:15
To that end,
we have the stereo bus
processing over here.
00:03:19
So as I was saying during
the template video,
I use the summing bus over here.
00:03:23
I get my stems coming out into the bus,
and then,
at the end of it we have all this stuff.
00:03:29
The drums
are going through the API 2500,
and then the Manley
Massive Passive equalizer.
00:03:35
And the stereo bus
is going through the Smart C2,
the Curve Bender,
and the NTI.
00:03:42
Now,
because it's a fairly tamed song
as things go,
the bus compressor is not doing a lot.
00:03:48
I think in the last chorus
it may be hitting
2 dB of compression,
but of course, in the beginning
it's hitting none.
00:03:56
The bounce of that compressor
is also helping,
you know, imply energy into the song.
00:04:01
That's sort of how I feel
about what it's doing.
00:04:04
My attack is 10 milliseconds
and the release is 100 milliseconds,
so, the second slowest attack,
and the fastest release
just to get out of the way.
00:04:14
The ratio is at 4:1,
the threshold is at, I don't know,
-14 or something like that,
no makeup gain.
00:04:22
This is my go-to setting.
00:04:25
Believe it or not, I use it
on almost everything I mix.
00:04:28
If I'm going to have a bus compressor,
it's most likely the C2.
00:04:32
I think it sounds really wonderful,
the top end stays open
unlike a lot of other compressors
that sort of darken things up a little bit
when they get to squeezing.
00:04:41
This one stays very transparent.
00:04:43
I keep it in Stereo Link mode
for the most part,
sometimes I take it off.
00:04:47
There's not really a lot
of rhyme or reason to that
other than convenience, honestly.
00:04:51
And because I'm mixing here all the time
at mostly the same volume,
I wind up almost always
at the same threshold.
00:04:58
That moves maybe plus or minus one click.
00:05:01
If it's swinging wildly,
there's something else wrong in the chain.
00:05:05
The Curve Bender,
because of its germanium transistors,
adds this thickness to the mix
without slowing things down,
the slew rate is pretty quick still.
00:05:14
I usually go
with a dB at 50 Hz
on a bell curve,
and then the top end
I usually go with 12 or 16 kHz,
and really only a click or two,
0.5 dB or maybe 1 dB at the most.
00:05:26
And then, on this particular song
I've got a click of 1.8 kHz
just to sort of help make that midrange
poke out a little bit.
00:05:36
For some reason I like that on this song.
00:05:39
But yeah, really great-sounding EQ,
the bottom end sounds unbelievable.
00:05:43
I really, really like it.
00:05:44
And then the NTI, I think,
just has a click of 2.5 kHz shelf
and a couple clicks of Air.
00:05:51
The recording, overall,
felt a little dark
when I got home
to the room that I know so well,
and so I wound up
putting a bit of zing on top
with the NTI.
00:06:02
And then we went to mastering,
Bob Ludwig mastered it up in Maine,
at Gateway,
and he didn't have to add any...
00:06:09
He really didn't do anything.
00:06:10
I mean, the whole record is almost flat.
00:06:13
He would add maybe
a tiny little bit of bottom end,
or...
00:06:17
I don't think he ever added any top end,
maybe one click on a couple songs,
and...
00:06:22
and that's about it.
00:06:23
And then he just made it, you know,
loud, as they do,
but he was really happy with the mixes
and that was
like a sort of bucket list day,
was to master something
in person with Bob Ludwig,
and then he said he liked it, so,
that validated my existence on this planet
as far as I'm concerned.
00:06:40
That was a really good day.
00:06:41
If you're wondering about
the combination of these two EQs,
they play very different roles for me.
00:06:47
Like, this,
this is a tone EQ,
like,
the tone that it imparts on the low end
and the high end with this shelf
is a sound, you know?
It's not necessarily...
00:06:59
I don't think of it necessarily as an EQ.
00:07:01
This goes on very early in my mix,
and almost always in this setting,
minus the midrange.
00:07:08
I don't always use this,
but early on when I'm getting
my drum sounds
and getting the vibe
of the record together,
this goes on and stays in.
00:07:18
This guy
visits when I need,
like,
brightness without a sound.
00:07:24
This is just like a really transparent
open top end.
00:07:28
The shelf on this 2.5 kHz
is basically, like, making
everything nicer to me,
and then the air
makes it nicer still
because it's even further up.
00:07:37
And the...
00:07:39
a great thing is we have plug-ins now
of both of these EQs,
and they both sound really good.
00:07:43
For the UAD version of the Curve Bender,
for example, there's a bunch
of presets that I made,
and one of them is my bus EQ,
so if you have that
or if you want to demo it,
try it out and you'll see
what I'm talking about.
00:07:53
You'll hear and feel
what I'm talking about.
00:07:55
This thing adds
some serious weight to the bus,
and I love it.
00:07:59
And then there is a...
00:08:01
the NT... or the...
00:08:02
I guess NTI is now called Maag,
and they make a EQ4 plug-in
that sounds really nice.
00:08:08
I use that a lot.
00:08:09
Actually, I've got it on some inserts
on this session, I think,
but if I were to mix In The Box,
I would do exactly the same thing:
SSL bus compressor.
00:08:17
I mean, it's similar to the Smart.
00:08:19
Curve Bender, NTI/Maag EQ.
00:08:21
All those tools are available
if you're In The Box.
00:08:24
And when I do stuff completely In The Box,
I go to the same things
because it's familiar
and comfortable-sounding.
00:08:30
So for the sake of comparison,
let's hear this last chorus
without any stereo bus processing.
00:08:35
It will all be gain-matched
so you'll get an idea
of what's actually happening,
and then we'll start it again
and I'll put things in one at a time
and I'll show you what's happening.
00:09:06
So now we'll put
just the bus compressor in.
00:09:29
And then we'll add
the Curve Bender.
00:09:32
Pay attention particularly
to the bottom end
and the super top end.
00:09:57
So you really feel
what that's doing in there,
it's like serious weight
on that stereo bus.
00:10:02
And now,
I'll play along
and then I'm going to pop in this NTI EQ.
00:10:07
So let's just get acclimated
to what it's doing first,
then I'll pop it in
and you'll hear what this guy is doing.
00:10:43
I mean, obviously,
it's making it a lot brighter,
but you can hear what it's doing
to the groove,
it's bringing out those elements
of, like,
locomotion that I call,
like the shaker
and those echoes and stuff like that.
00:10:54
So, you know,
there's a number of aspects
that that EQ helps.
00:10:58
And again,
I get those guys on
as early in the mix as I can,
and then it makes life easier
for everything else that you've got to do.
00:11:05
You're not fighting with,
you know, having to make
everything bright individually.
00:11:09
It's like,
this just sort of helps across the board
and that's sort of how I...
00:11:13
that's how I think about my stereo bus
processing in that aspect.
00:11:16
So I think the only other
piece of hardware
that I'm really using on this mix
besides the summing bus
and the stereo bus processing
is the drum bus.
00:11:23
So it's sort of backing up a moment,
but,
let me play you the drums
in this last chorus,
because it is the most involved,
and I'll bypass
the compressor and the EQ,
and then put it back in again.
00:11:36
Here's...
00:11:42
Here's the drums
with no hardware processing.
00:12:14
The compressor is not doing
a whole lot to the drums.
00:12:18
It's hitting a couple dB on the meter,
but my 2500 is special
because it's got a blend control on it
that I had Paul Wolff put on there, so...
00:12:27
They copied this on the plug-in.
00:12:29
If you get the API 2500 UAD plug-in,
you'll get the blend control on it,
but I don't think
there's any other hardware
that has this on it,
and I'm really happy about that.
00:12:38
So, I run it pretty much generically
at 50/50, Wet/Dry,
so it's just sort of a final stage
with my drums,
I have just a little more control
over those guys.
00:12:48
We'll leave that in, and then we'll
come over to the Massive Passive.
00:12:51
And over here,
this thing, again, is just another
weight kind of addition.
00:12:56
I'm going here for my low end
for the drums,
the midrange, and the top end,
so again, it's sort of...
00:13:03
it's the nicerizer box,
it's making everything really nice
and fat and thick and full
and bright and exciting.
00:13:10
So,
I'll play this for you
four bars without it
and then we'll pop it in.
00:13:29
You can hear again that it's adding, like,
some major weight,
some excitement and whatnot
to the entire drum kit.
00:13:37
Now, sometimes,
depending on what the song is doing
I'll add the bass into that bus
so that the whole bottom of the record
is dancing by itself.
00:13:46
It's hitting the compressor
probably a little bit harder
on a rock record,
and then it just sort of becomes
this subset of, like,
solidity in the bottom end,
and that's a really fun sound.
I like that a lot.
00:13:57
Now that we've come
to the end of the mix,
we've played it back,
everything is happy,
we got the bus compression on,
the EQs, and all that sort of stuff,
the client is happy with the mix,
I wind up printing back
into my Pro Tools session
through my Burl A-D converter,
and we have a track right here.
00:14:14
If you watched my template session,
you saw that I have a tape track also,
but this record I did
before I got my tape machine.
00:14:22
There's no tape on this album,
it's all just straight-up analog stuff
into a nice A-D converter
which sounds wonderful.
00:14:28
I wound up printing this to a track
as you can see.
00:14:31
I playlist all the different versions.
00:14:33
You know, we go through
different iterations of changes
and then trying different versions
like vocals up, vocals down,
etc.,
and then we arrived at the final mix,
which is 'Mix 6'.
00:14:45
I print a few different versions
so in case we go to mastering
and something needs a little...
00:14:50
you know, a little louder vocal,
even for one word,
we can cut in that mix with the vocals up,
or the vocals down, for that matter.
00:14:56
And if there's anything
I think might be an issue,
if I'm unsure about something
or if there's anyone in the band
who has a question about, like,
"Oh, is the bass loud enough?"
and everyone says yes,
but that one person might not be sure,
I'll print a 'bass up',
or, you know, a 'kick up',
or whatever might be in doubt
in the room at that time.
00:15:13
So these are the sort of
typical ones that I print:
the main mix, which is 'Mix 6',
vocals up, vocals down,
in this case we did a 'BASS UP'.
00:15:20
I always do an instrumental.
00:15:22
I do a lead vocal a cappella
and a BV a cappella
in case there's like a bad word
that needs to be bleeped out or whatever,
or something else fixed.
00:15:30
And actually, what's not on this list
and I always have to do
for major label stuff
is do a TV mix.
00:15:36
So we just print one
without the lead vocal,
but with all the background vocals in,
so in case they want to
do something on Top of the Pops
or some TV show
that does...
00:15:45
basically they have to sing to a track,
it's possible,
or if they license the song
and it goes in a commercial
and they want to put a mix
without the lead vocal
but just with the hook melodies
or whatever,
we can accommodate those
with the different mixes,
and then you're able to edit it,
chop it up, loop things, whatever,
without having to recall the mix
and edit the whole damn thing
and start all over again, so,
I can deliver all those
different mixes to people
and they can sort of do with them
what they like.
00:16:12
Now, after I print the mix,
so we have 'Mix 6' here,
and then we have this track below it.
00:16:17
You can see it's much louder
and I denote that
with an exclamation point
to say, "This is Mix 6, and louder",
and that's what I send out to
clients to listen to at home,
to listen to in the car or whatever,
so it's, you know, my little
faux mastering thing
that I just take my mix
and put a limiter on it
to make it a bit louder
and "competitive"
with something you might hear
on a mastered record.
00:16:42
To make this loud mix
I use FabFilter Pro-L.
00:16:44
I think it's a fine-sounding limiter.
00:16:46
A few mastering friends of mine
use this as well.
00:16:48
This is sort of my generic setting,
and the amount of volume I'll put on it
will vary from song to song
and album to album.
00:16:55
The guys in the band here
liked listening to things loud outside,
they wanted it to be competitive
with their last album
which was mastered by Bob Ludwig also.
00:17:04
To create those files
that I can export as MP3s
and 16-bit WAV files,
I copy the track down
and then I use these settings
as an AudioSuite function
to make this loud mix.
00:17:17
And then I'll export it
as a 16 bit/44.1 kHz file
and an MP3, so,
some guys like getting
an email to their phone,
they can listen to it on earbuds,
and, you know, want to hear it
as the...
00:17:29
the audience would hear it,
as their fans would hear it,
as an MP3 through earbuds
in their iPhone, unfortunately.
00:17:34
And then, for the guys
who are way into it,
who are into hi-fi stuff,
they might ask for the
16 bit/44.1 kHz WAV files,
and I put those up on a server
and they can download those
at their leisure.
00:17:46
The thing about this little
faux mastering thing,
it's very contentious,
a lot of people get, you know,
overzealous with it
and get things too loud
and then it just doesn't sound very good.
00:17:55
The thing is to make sure you're A/B'ing
your loud mix
to your regular mix
and make sure you're not losing anything,
that you're not ruining your mix.
00:18:05
Check that out,
make sure it's still cool-sounding,
you're not losing your dynamics
you worked so hard to put in there,
you're not losing your transients
that you worked so hard to make,
and you're not losing
the emotion of that track.
00:18:17
It's possible to get it loud
without losing too much of those things,
but you really have to remain
aware of that,
and listening, of course,
is the only way to understand
what's happening to that,
so really keep an ear out for that.
00:18:29
Make sure you're not ruining
your mix by doing this,
particularly
when you're doing demos.
00:18:34
A lot of people make their demos
screaming loud
so they'll get to cut here in Nashville
or people will love what they're doing,
and that's just a really dangerous
slippery slope to fall down
because then everybody else
after that demo has to make it
just as loud.
00:18:49
It's not an ethical thing to do,
it's not a constructive thing to do.
00:18:53
It makes everyone's life more difficult,
and as you can tell
from the things we talked about
in this video
and in my template video,
I'm all about making life easy, so,
make my life easy.
00:19:02
Don't make your demos
and your rough mixes outrageously loud
so that the next guy mixing the song
has to make it even louder.
00:19:10
It just takes away from the whole
experience, makes things difficult,
so keep an ear out for these things,
make sure you don't ruin your own mix.
00:19:17
So, it was really interesting
coming back to this mix of 'Angela'
almost exactly one year
from when I did it,
and a year is a long time in a career,
and you learn so many new things,
so many new processes, ways of thinking
that reflecting back on this mix
I found it was surprising.
00:19:36
You know, this mix in particular,
this record with The Lumineers
was really a collaborative project.
00:19:42
I tracked the record with them
in Upstate New York,
we spent six weeks doing that,
and then all the boys came down here
with the producer, Simone Felice,
and we hung out during the mix,
and everybody was here
listening in the control room.
00:19:55
We had three different sets
of speakers here:
we had their boombox
at their Airbnb place,
we had the car they were in,
so we had all these different
places to listen to
and those sort of
scenarios
fed into
like a major consensus.
00:20:11
Everything was a sort of consensus thing
and everyone was really
on the same page on this record
and was pushing to the same place.
00:20:18
There were very few
arguments or disagreements on things,
it was like, "Hey, what do you
think about this?",
"Man, I was thinking the same thing!"
and, you know,
we'd move the ball forward
as a team.
00:20:29
And it's rare these days
to have the artist in the studio
with you when you're mixing.
00:20:35
I mean, I don't allow anyone here
while I'm actually mixing,
but it's like, "All right,
I got something to play for you",
and everybody comes in,
someone different will sit in the chair,
we can sit back there,
everyone gets used to how
things sound in here.
00:20:46
And, you know,
we sort of pick things apart,
like, "Well, you know,
this little thing here",
and we have these little ideas
that everyone brings to the table,
and it coalesces this mix
into something that everybody involved
was really happy with.
00:21:00
And, you know,
I hear little things here and there
that I would change,
and maybe this could be louder
or that could be quieter,
but then I think, like,
it's the vision of the band, you know?
And it's like, yeah, the cello
could have been louder,
but then it would've been like,
"Hey! There's a cello over here!"
and the cello sort of needed to just,
you know,
get in there slowly and gently,
and just sort of make a minor statement
and not like, you know,
this massive orchestral thing.
00:21:25
And, you know,
the thrust of that, as I said
at the beginning of the video,
was making this vocal that's just God-like
and bigger than life and all that,
and I think that we
achieved that pretty well.
00:21:35
The album has done really well,
people have commented a lot
on how nice the vocal sounds
in particular.
00:21:41
I got a lot of emails
about the vocal sound,
so, now you know what I've done.
00:21:44
Nothing fancy, nothing crazy,
nothing unobtainable,
so, I hope that
by dissecting this mix,
which I've never done before,
this was a really exciting process for me,
I hope that by dissecting this on a video
you guys can find some inspiration
to try some new stunts with your mixes
and some new processes
and sort of open your mind's eye
towards some new ideas
and new concepts,
and, you know,
get out of the technical a little bit
and get into the emotional,
get into the music,
and, you know,
by having that template we talked about,
it makes it much quicker
to get to that creative place
than to have to set up a mix from scratch
every bloody time.
00:22:23
So, you know,
once you find the way
that you like to work,
make an express train to get there.
00:22:30
It's so much fun,
you get to the creative part
of mixing so much quicker
and with so much less aggravation,
and it's just...
00:22:37
if you can't tell, I get
really excited about this stuff,
and I hope you guys do too,
so, it was a pleasure
taking this thing apart
and I'll see you later.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Software
- Audio Ease Altiverb 7
- Avid AIR Stereo Width
- Avid DYN3 Expander / Gate
- Avid EQ3 7-Band
- FabFilter Pro-L
- FabFilter Pro-Q2
- Sound Toys Devil-Loc
- Sound Toys EchoBoy
- UAD 1176LN
- UAD API 550A
- UAD EL7 Fatso Sr
- UAD EMT 140
- UAD EP-34 Tape Echo
- UAD Fairchild 670
- UAD LA-3A
- UAD Neve 1073
- UAD Precision DE-ESSER
- UAD Pultec EQP-1A
- UAD SSL E Channel Strip
- UAD Teletronix LA-2A
- Waves C6
- Waves Doubler 4
- Waves H-Delay
- Waves REQ 6
Hardware
- API-2500
- Chandler Limited Curve Bender
- Manley Massiv Passive EQ
- NTI EQ3
- Smart C2

Ryan Hewitt is a Grammy winning engineer, mixer and producer with a credit list spanning all popular genres of music.
Ryan found his love for music and recording working along side his father, famed remote recording engineer David Hewitt.
After earning a degree at Tufts University in Boston, Ryan moved to New York City to work at Sony Music Studios. Opportunities then took Ryan to Los Angeles where he began working with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rick Rubin. This led to Ryan engineering and mixing the Peppers’ multiple-Grammy-winning double album, Stadium Arcadium.
Rick and Ryan have continued to work together on a number of projects with artists such as Angus and Julia Stone, Brandi Carlile, Lady Gaga and Johnny Cash, as well as three albums and three live DVDs for The Avett Brothers.
Blink 182
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Lumineers
The Avett Brothers
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

The Lumineers are songwriters Wesley Schultz (vocals, guitar) and Jeremiah Fraites (drums, piano). They are joined by cellist and backing vocalist Neyla Pekarek, who became a part of the group in 2010. Their irresistible anthem “Ho Hey” took the world by storm in 2012, followed by a second #1 single “Stubborn Love” and their third charting single “Submarines”, all carrying them on a journey from the Grammys to the presidential iPod, from the top of the charts to the Hunger Games.
Angela
CLICK_HEREMusic CreditsAngela
By The Lumineers
The Lumineers are songwriters Wesley Schultz (vocals, guitar) and Jeremiah Fraites (drums, piano). They are joined by cellist and backing vocalist Neyla Pekarek, who became a part of the group in 2010. Their irresistible anthem “Ho Hey” took the world by storm in 2012, followed by a second #1 single “Stubborn Love” and their third charting single “Submarines”, all carrying them on a journey from the Grammys to the presidential iPod, from the top of the charts to the Hunger Games.- Artist
- The Lumineers
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