Inside the Mix: Zac Brown Band with Andrew Scheps

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Hello children, welcome back to Flux Studios.

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I'm Andrew Scheps and today we're going to do something a little different.

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In the past I have done some demonstrations of how I would mix the song, or actually mix the song.

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And today we're gonna look at a song I've already mixed, and just deconstruct the mix and figure out what I did and why, along the way.

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We're working with a song called 'Young and Wild' of the Zac Brown album, Jekyll + Hyde, which has done pretty well. It's exciting.

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The title of the album is very indicative of the content.

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The Jekyll and Hyde concept was that Jekyll and Hyde are only two totally different people and on this album Zac is about 17 totally different people.

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There is a full-on Rock track that he did with Chris Cornell.

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There is a big band track with Sara Bareilles.

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There is a reggae track.

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There is a full-on super Pop dance track.

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There's all kinds of stuff but what we decided to do is use the song Young and Wild, which is a little more traditional, a little more in Zac's wheelhouse.

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This is very much about the Zac Brown band.

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It has a lot of background vocals with the different members of the band.

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It has the fiddle, it has all the elements that are sort of the trademark of the Zac Brown band without straying to far outside of what people would normally expect.

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So, this is the actual session.

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And this is the session where I printed the mix.

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At the bottom of the session, on my 'Print' track are 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. So, we obviously had four rounds of comments before the mix was done.

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R5 is my final mix and this would be the file that was sent off to mastering.

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So, this is exactly what is on the record.

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I don't think mastering really change anything too much.

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Certainly nothing substantive.

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You should get a really good picture of what's on the record from looking at what we're gonna do today.

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The first thing is...

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I'm not gonna spend a huge amount of time talking about my templates and the way I lay out sessions.

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This session is already laid out.

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I spent a lot of time in the other mixing videos talking about track layout.

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The big thing is that the tracks go in certain order and they are the certain colors.

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I'm just gonna walk you through what's in the session.

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And you'll see that my colors are already in, we've already imported from my template, obviously.

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And this was done a few months ago so there might be somethings that were imported from my template before my template got to be what it is today.

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So, there might be a few unfamiliar things, I don't even know but we'll discover along the way as we look back at this mix.

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So, before we start tearing this apart we're gonna listen to the mix, and you'll notice my 'Print' track is in Input, so we're listening to the session live.

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And just to double check that everything came up ok, I actually checked this against the printed mix and it does phase out, all you hear is a little bit of reverb and delay effects which of course wouldn't phase out when you check the mix.

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So, here we go from the top.

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Alright, we just played up to there then obviously we get another verse and a chorus.

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It's a pretty traditional song structure.

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There is a bridge which we'll have a look at later because it has a couple of elements that aren't in the rest of the song.

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But that's the basic structure. We're just gonna play you some of the rough mix because what this will show you is exactly what the session was like when I got it.

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And this mix was in the session then.

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This sessions were incredibly well recorded and well put together and there was a lot of time taking on the production.

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So there's a lot of automation in the session when I get it.

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A lot of routing, a lot of processing.

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So the mix is pretty far along.

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But let me just play you just that much of the song from the rough mix.

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Then we'll go through and look at what I did and then you'll get a chance to A/B that later on.

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Alright, no surprises there.

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You see that all of the sound effects and the little sort of gimmicky things that are part of the production are already in there.

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What you will probably notice if you A/B those two is that they are very similar in terms of the aesthetic but hopefully the final mix is just a lot more of everything that's going on.

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So, it sounds a little more finished but everything that sticks out, sticks out a little bit more.

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Let's have a look at what's in the session to get a better idea of what's around here.

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And then we'll see how I did what I did.

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We start from the top, there's and acoustic drum-kit.

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Lots o microphones.

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Four toms which have been cut so only the tom hits are played.

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We've got two microphones going into a kick bus.

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No, that's actually a parallel.

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Like I said before, this section was quite complicated when I got it.

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There's a lot of processing that was already in the session.

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This kick smack is on a send from...

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Here we go! Send from the original kick track.

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And this is a parallel compressor just o the kick drum.

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But this is their stuff, I'm gonna show you all their stuff before we get to my stuff.

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We've got a drum-kit.

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I don't think there's anything else that's really that interesting.

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They've got a couple of interesting microphones on it just to give it a little character.

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Then, down here at the bottom are their Auxes that collect the drums. That's one that's the whole kit.

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And they've got a parallel drum smack which is parallel compressor for their drums.

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So they obviously watched some of my mixing tutorials and they are already down the path that I'm going to take them event further.

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Then we see a lot of the stuff from my template here.

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It's the same stuff that's always there.

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So, there you go.

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Here we have some programed drums, we've heard this drum loop on the intro, as well as a lot of extra like kicks and snares, little 808 hits and things like that.

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It's the same drum color but it gets it's own VCA because it helps me while I'm mixing to separate the programmed drums from the live drum.

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Nothing too crazy here.

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Then we get down into percussion.

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The tambourine loop, some live percussion.

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There's the good shaker, you can see it right there, that's the good shaker.

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As opposed to the bad shaker.

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Then we see from my template, I've got my percussion Aux and VCA.

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Just like I normally would.

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Then here is a group of tracks that are not in every session, these are all just sound effects.

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These are sweeps that are part of the way the track is built.

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And then below them are a lot of the sound effects.

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And they are color coded just so I can find them, these colors don't mean anything in particular to me.

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But because they're colors I don't normally use I know that I've got some elements that aren't part of every song that I mix.

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So there isn't a color that normally goes with it and I can find them quickly.

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We've got two sets of sound effects.

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Quite a few of them.

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Then we're finally out of drum and sound effect land and we get down to the bass.

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Very straight ahead, there's a bass DI and a bass amp.

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And there's a second set of tracks there's a little bass overdub.

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Now we get down into the guitars.

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There are quite a few guitars, there are quite a few guitar players in this band.

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And that is one of the things about this band.

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There are 8 people in the band.

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And they are all pretty amazing musicians.

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I've seen them live and it's ridiculous what they pull off.

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And without a lot of gimmicks and as far as I can tell, without anything pre-recorded.

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And hearing them warm-up before the show was astounding.

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Six part harmony in a rehearsal where nobody could hear anything, an upright bass, couple of acoustic guitars and a banjo.

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And it was ridiculous.

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They can all play, they can all sing.

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And for me, while I was mixing, that was something that I really wanted to keep in mind.

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I wanted to be able to hear the band, not just Zac witch the backup band.

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You need to hear all of the individual voices and all the individual musicians.

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So, you got a lot of guitars.

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You got Clay here then Coy.

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Zac then Hop. Some more Zac.

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A lot of guitars going on.

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But, they're all just different shades of green, so I can find them.

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All of these Auxes, within the guitars are from their original sessions.

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You can see, there's a lot of detailed work when I got.

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Then we get down into string land.

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That's all labeled fiddle.

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But there are basically two types of string parts on the song.

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There's the pizzicato part which you heard in the intro and then there are more traditional bowed strings which are in the bridge. And it's still fiddle.

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It's still just Jimmy playing along with the band and some overdubs to go along with it.

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It's very much still the band but it acts like Jimmy and the band when he's play pizzicato and string section when he's playing legato.

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So, we'll check that out later on.

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Then we've got some keyboards.

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Rhodes and glock.

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The glock is just in the bridge so we'll talk about that when we talk about the bridge.

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But the Rhodes is a pretty major part of the groove.

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And then we get down to some of the normal stuff.

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Lead vocal.

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There's the bounce of some of this vocal effects.

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They have created some very specific delay effects so they went ahead and bounced that.

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And then are a couple of extra effects tracks.

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And then little bits of the vocal are either copied or doubled and those are going into some delay FX and things like that.

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But basically, there's one Lead Vocal and then you gotta a bunch of vocal FX.

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Then...

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We get down into the background vocals and again, this is where you really see the members of the band.

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We've got a little 3 part harmony set here with Clay, Jimmy and Hop.

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I believe all tracked at the same time together.

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They do this a lot when they track in a room, they sing so well together.

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This is one set.

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Then we got another set down here which is used in the intro and then again in the outro.

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It's Clay, Jimmy, Hop and Zac.

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Zac is actually muted in here because I think they just decided they didn't want his voice as the background and lead.

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So, they are sacrificing a note, but that's OK.

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So you notice there's no Lead Vocal in that spot but they decided to go with the group of guys, no including Zac and then Zac come in as a new voice in the song.

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And then at the end there's some extra cascading background vocal parts which we might not even listen to.

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There's some FX and a little overlap.

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And that, I believe, are all of the tracks.

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Then you'll notice here some tracks you might recognize from my template.

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And then there are some FX tracks here.

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These are all from the session that I've got.

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And then below that we have all of the Auxes that are in my template.

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So, some of this should look super familiar to any of you watching the other mixing tutorials.

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And some of it doesn't look anything like the other songs.

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Except that the track order and the color coding is similar.

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OK, now that I've given you the really brief tour of the session I wanna go back through so you can get a good idea of what was sent to me.

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And what I added.

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Because I think from listening to the rough and then to my mix you can hear that element-wise it's identical.

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I'm really just mixing what was there.

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And there's a concept that I've used inside my head and also when trying to explain how I mix.

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This concept of black boxing things.

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And what it means is, taking what I'm given and using it as if that is the way it was recorded.

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Period.

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So, it doesn't matter if the sound of the kick drum is one track of audio or it's 2 tracks of audio with a parallel compressor on it and a bunch of plug-ins.

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To me, it's the kick drum.

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And that's all it is.

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And as we move through the session, you'll see that I do leave quite a bit of their stuff alone.

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Including the arrangement.

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I told them very early on that I'm fine having a session that's a little bit messier because I can decide for it, I'm good with Pro Tools, I know what stuff looks like.

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I'm not gonna get confused by having a bunch of stuff in the session that's muted.

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One of the first things you see in the drum tracks is there are tons of muted regions.

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Some of this is just cleaned up tons.

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If he doesn't hit the toms, mute it.

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I do that quite a bit, it's manual gating basically.

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And just keeps cymbal bleed and rumble and things out of the drum kit until he actually hits the toms.

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But there are a couple of other things like kick drums that have been moved, turned off and turned on.

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There is some automation on plug-ins going on.

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Some which I've done, some they've done.

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Basically, the reason is because, you can see over here, there's even some extra audio at the end of the session.

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These arrangements were very fluid while they were working.

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Zac is very creative and would walk in, sing a part and then they would end up rearranging the bridge.

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Or they tried with the looped intro then tried with the drum-kit going back and forth and finally making a decision.

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But that decision, for the most part would hold and every once in a while they'd say: 'Hey, look, if you look at the drum tracks, these tracks have regions that are muted from this part to this part.

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Could you turn those back on and turn off this other track?" And this was a very easy way for me to follow the trail of breadcrumbs that they left from the original tracking through to the final arrangement.

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And that really allowed us to be fluid while we were mixing.

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It wasn't a whole lot that changed but there were some things.

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So, it's good to actually leave some of what they did to get the session ready behind because then it was very very quick to make the changes.

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Basically, all of the plug-ins on these drums are from them.

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I don't normally use a Q8.

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I don't normally use an REQ 6.

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It's just not one of the EQs I go to.

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I know from looking at this that these are their plug-ins.

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The H-Delay, the SSL.

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So, it's a lot of the standard sort of plug-ins, EQs, compressors but this is stuff that they had done while their were tracking and then building the song from the overdubs.

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And, this is a perfect example of me just black-boxing.

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I went back to the kick drum, had a listen to it.

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Let me take these plug-ins off for a second, I think you can guess what they are.

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There's a live kick and there's kick sample.

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I thought, well, that sounds really good but I love lo-fi and I love using that on kick drums so I thought, 'let me just hear what it sounds added to their kick'.

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Taking their kick like a black box, putting a little bit of lo-fi on it and let's check out what that sounds like.

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Just happier with it.

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So, my usual drum treatment is to put a lo-fi on kick drum and I would normally do a bunch o EQ but this kick actually sounded really good to me.

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So I just left it alone.

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And I'm sure that the thought in my head when I didn’t EQ it was, 'Well, I'll always come back to it if I have to.' As it turned out, I didn't have to.

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If we look at the snare, it's very much the same type of thing.

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And if we look at their plug-ins, they have an SSL.

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Now, one thing that's interesting, as I scroll back through the session you notice this last insert, on Insert E, is bypassing and coming back in.

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So, let me disable it for a second.

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And you see, I've got a little bit of lo-fi, .4, a little bit higher than kick, that's normal for me.

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So here's without.

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OK. It's still a little lacking.

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So what I did was normally I have a send that is set up going to a Devil-loc.

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And, I'm not exactly sure why I decided to put it on the track.

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And to be honest, this might be something that they've played with and not kept.

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And then I decided to go ahead and sort of finish the thought.

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So, I'm using the Devil-loc which is a very distorted compressor.

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But you see that the mix is on 4.

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I'm keeping the original snare drum and then blending this in.

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This is technically a parallel process but it's just for the snare.

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And I think the reason it's on the track is that, if we look at the bypass, it's green, which means it's automated, and I'm gonna use my usual Ctrl+Cmd+Click to show me that automation playlist.

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And you see that it is ON for quite a bit of the session in choruses.

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But where the snare plays in that second verse, I turned it back OFF.

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So here's the second verse which should be exactly what we just listened to.

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And here is in the first chorus, just as an example, with that Devil-Loc on.

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Obviously it's louder but it's got a lot more ring to it.

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You hear the snares rattling when the kick hits.

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It's just a way of me getting a little more excitement out of the snare without having to do anything that is automating in a place where it can keep me from working on the drums later.

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I'm not doing mute automation which is hard to see sometimes, which I hate.

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So, it's just a very quick way for me to get a little bit of extra body on the snare just in the choruses.

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So, that's our snare with and without the Devil-loc.

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And I really like the sound of it and it might have worked in that second verse but I think what we'll find out is it was just too dirty.

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And we're really trying to dry up that second verse.

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Then going back though the drum-kit, there's not a whole lot else that I did, you'll notice there are a ton of plug-ins in this first set.

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Some EQ1 to just do some high pass.

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There may have been some phase.

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This all in the session as I got it.

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And I didn't bother messing with it.

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Come down to the overheads.

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I believe that this is theirs.

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This is an SSL EQ and then it's followed by one of my signature EQs which is an EQ3 getting rid of harsh mid-range.

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So, let's go to the third chorus and have a listen to the overheads without this EQ.

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It keeps the hi-hat bleed and also that ride cymbal just sounding a little more teeny.

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It actually brings up the top end by sucking out some of the mid-range.

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So rather than making it super bright which would really change the character of the kit, I made the decision to suck out some of the mid-range which would allow that top end to come through.

00:21:07
Excellent decision I might say.

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Then looking at the rest of the kit, there's very little going on.

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Again, another mid-range seek and destroy EQ.

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The close room, which I'm not gonna even bother going through.

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It's just the exact same thing.

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Sucking out a little harshness, let's you use more of the top end.

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And I believe I did it again on a microphone Dave called 'Hot Carl'. Don't look that up.

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And this is more of a close microphone.

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It's sort of a lo-fi microphone.

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Which is a really cool sounding microphone, it adds some of that loop quality to the drum-kit.

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Which is what glues it to the song.

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When you have a drum loop for the intro and then you switch to a drum-kit it's nice to have some remanent of that kind of lo-fi sensibility mixed in with the kit.

00:21:57
But again, I sucked out a bunch of the mid-range.

00:22:08
Which when is just that kick/snare, it doesn't make a massive difference but what we'll find is that in the track, every time there is a big opened hi-hat or one of those cymbal hits, it just goes through and stays super super smooth which is kind of the idea of this drum-kit.

00:22:29
You hear, there aren't many fills, there aren't a lot of cymbals, and this is meant to have live drums kind of playing like a loop but there's enough live feel.

00:22:38
There are very few edits, all of the edits are just to mute things.

00:22:42
The timing is as played.

00:22:44
Great drummer, really kind of grooving with the song and keeping it sounding like a loop in terms of the part but letting the track breath.

00:22:51
It's a great sort of A/B with the loop.

00:22:56
There's one of the room track and then that's it for the actual drum tracks.

00:23:00
So, all of these drum tracks are going to a bus called DRUMS.

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And it's all caps so you have of yell it when you say it.

00:23:09
And that then feeds the mix-bus.

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Basically, they just popped and SSL compressor on the drum kit.

00:23:14
I'm fine with that, it sounds good.

00:23:16
I'm gonna keep it exactly the way they have it.

00:23:19
So again, this is the idea of black-boxing their drum kit.

00:23:22
I start from where they ended and then take my mix on from there.

00:23:27
Just try and have a bit more of what they're doing.

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Then the other thing they got is something called Drum Smack.

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And this is off of a send.

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This comes off of a few different tracks, comes off the overheads, some of the close rooms, and I'm gonna play you the second chorus where those microphones are playing and you'll hear what's doing.

00:23:54
So, it's kind of subtle but it's doing exactly what all of my usual parallel drum compression would do which is, it's lengthening the kick and making it a little more round, and the way I use the word round may not be the way you use the word round.

00:24:09
Round is a relative term that doesn't actually mean anything.

00:24:13
But to me it means that the kick has more of a shape to it.

00:24:17
Instead of the kick just hitting, it hits and then it blooms and then it gets small again right before the snare hit.

00:24:23
That's what their parallel compression is doing and I like it so I'm gonna keep it.

00:24:29
Then all I did to the drums other than keep what they've done and add a couple of lo-fis is added a couple of the sends that I normally use.

00:24:37
Let's go back and listen to the drums and I'm gonna mute the kick snare crush.

00:24:41
Which is my DBX 160 VU.

00:24:43
And the Fatso which is strangely the Fatso plug-in.

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And here is that same chorus without them.

00:24:59
So minus a couple of lo-fis, that's the drum-kit that they sent me.

00:25:03
And then, using my usual parallel compression on the kick/snare and then the kit.

00:25:09
And you notice the kit is being sent off of the Drum Aux.

00:25:12
It's one place as opposed to putting individual sends of every drum microphone.

00:25:18
I'm gonna leave them set at zero and follow main pan so there's no difference whatsoever.

00:25:25
And it gets the added bonus of, since the drums are in a stereo aux, if I decide to EQ them, which I didn't, that EQ would be reflected in the send to the Fatso as opposed to having some overall drum processing that didn't make it to the parallel processing.

00:25:40
So, anyway, now that you completely forgot what it sounded like, here it is with the kick/snare Crush and with the Fatso.

00:26:06
Alright, I think we're winning here.

00:26:08
It keeps the character, which is very very important.

00:26:11
But everything just sounds a little more exciting, a little bigger, and I little more energetic, which is always what I'm going for.

00:26:18
I'm not gonna actually go through every single one of these tracks.

00:26:22
What you'll see, if you look at the programming is again, lots of their plug-ins.

00:26:27
They have a sample of a big kick.

00:26:30
Which sounds like this.

00:26:34
But when I got it, it sounded like this.

00:26:39
Which is cool, but again, this is hinting at being a large kick with a lot of low end.

00:26:45
So, if I want a synthesized low end I love this Lowender plug-in, it's based on some of the old DBX sub boxes.

00:26:52
There's also R-Bass or Max Bass which are two different flavors of the same thing.

00:26:58
Which don't actually synthesise low end, they synthesize harmonics of what would have been the low end.

00:27:03
It's more of a psychoacoustic trick to make you hear low end when it isn't there.

00:27:08
In a lot of cases that can be great because you're not gonna mess with things down around 16 Hz but you make it feel like they're there.

00:27:15
In this case I wanted some 16 Hz.

00:27:18
Well, 19.

00:27:19
So, I'm gonna use Lowender to create a bunch of sub.

00:27:31
It just make it a little longer, a little bigger, a little lower.

00:27:34
Happy like that.

00:27:36
We'll quickly see a lot of standard stuff on here.

00:27:40
There's a snare drum sample that they're using.

00:27:43
This is their EQ and their reverb, just to get and idea of what's on here.

00:27:58
This is actually the same sort of idea that I have with my snare reverb, which I'm not using on this.

00:28:04
It gives you some stereo width and some length to the snare drum but without making it really sound like reverb.

00:28:10
So, they've done it with the sample into a reverb.

00:28:13
I would normally just take the snare drum itself and sent it in to my ambience.

00:28:18
It's actually just a very stereo reverb as it is.

00:28:22
But I chose not to use it because they were already doing that job with this snare sample.

00:28:27
That way, I didn't have to go through and do mute automation on the send to mimic the snare drying up and getting wetter the way they had already set up with the sample.

00:28:36
Other than that, there're just a lot of little programmed drum things here.

00:28:41
Hi-hats, stuff like that.

00:28:43
And then we get down into the percussion which is very straight ahead.

00:28:46
And all I really did here is my usual thing, of taking all of their percussion as played...

00:28:53
Take it into an Aux fader so I can add a little bit of Aphex to it.

00:28:56
Again, this is that vintage Aural exciter that I use quite a bit hiding way down at the bottom of the session.

00:29:03
And we're only hearing the Aphex process.

00:29:08
It just brightens up the percussion and makes it work a little bit better with the top of what's going on.

00:29:15
Here, might as well just go ahead and solo up the percussion.

00:29:26
And here's without the Aphex.

00:29:39
Just a little more present, a little more in your face.

00:29:41
But it's got, I always do this with my fingers when I hear that top end.

00:29:46
I don't know what that means but it's like, with the congas you can feel the fingers on the skins.

00:29:51
You sort of feel like you're more in the room with the percussionist, which I like.

00:29:55
The only other thing about the drum programming and the percussion, before I move on, is you'll see all this sends with an F on it.

00:30:04
These are all sends to that Fatso.

00:30:06
What it means is that all of the rhythmic elements are going into that Fatso.

00:30:11
Not just the drum-kit.

00:30:13
And it makes them all work together.

00:30:15
If I solo up all of our rhythmic elements, here is without the Fatso.

00:30:43
It's basically just more of everything but as I'm sure you've learned by now with all my shared parallel compression, what it does is it sort of, everything is louder but nothing steps on anything else.

00:30:54
Because whatever happens at that very instant is loud and pushes down everything else on the parallel compressor.

00:31:00
Then it comes right back up and you hear whatever is happening next.

00:31:04
So, it's different then just turning it all up and I don't think you can get the same sort of effect by directly compressing these elements.

00:31:10
First of all, they will have to go through one stereo compressor, and that would be it.

00:31:15
Which is just a little weird in your signal path to take all of the drums, the programming and the percussion and chunk them through and Stereo Aux just so you can compress them.

00:31:23
But that also, that interaction wouldn't be there.

00:31:25
You'd loose some of the uncompressed stuff.

00:31:28
So, if the kick and the tambourine happen at the same time, this way, the parallel compression gets turned down but both of those uncompressed signals are still there.

00:31:38
So you get both transients.

00:31:39
In a straight compressor, whichever transient was louder would in effect turn down the other element.

00:31:45
It's a very different sound.

00:31:47
Let me just play for you again.

00:31:50
I'll go to the last chorus which is even busier.

00:32:14
Now that we're done with these pure rhythmic elements, we work our way down past the sound effects.

00:32:20
I'm not really talk about them a lot.

00:32:22
Only because they're very well put together. They're just some sweeps.

00:32:25
I'll play a little bit of them soloed.

00:32:44
So, sound effect stuff, you do hear them in the track.

00:32:47
What I really like about it is it just keeps it from being the guys in the room.

00:32:53
It's like, 'Oh, yeah, this is a record'.

00:32:55
Not, 'This is just a recording of us in the room'.

00:32:58
It's a very well produced song without this stuff.

00:33:01
But on first listen you might say...

00:33:04
'Hey, why is that stuff in there?' But I think that these are the details that make people remember Zac's stuff.

00:33:10
He's just very ambitious and he's constantly pushing it.

00:33:14
He won't settle from something that's just...

00:33:16
'Oh, yeah, that's us playing music and that's cool.' No, there has to be something about it.

00:33:21
I think even though this is one of the more straight ahead songs in the album, he really felt like he had to have some of these like bells and whistles, literally.

00:33:29
I didn't do too much to them at all other than put them into the Rear Bus which is my stereo unlinked compressor that's used parallel on everything in the song except the drums and bass.

00:33:42
And that's exactly how it was used here.

00:33:44
Once we start getting all the other instruments in then we'll talk about the Rear Bus specifically but I don't think there's much point now.

00:33:52
Next down in the session is the Bass.

00:33:54
Our nice bright blue, which always is.

00:33:57
Matt is a really good bass player.

00:33:59
Really good.

00:34:00
I didn't realize quite how good until I saw them live.

00:34:04
He's sort of ridiculous.

00:34:06
It's very straight ahead, there's DI and Amp.

00:34:09
All I did was a little bit of noise reduction which, I mean, this is something that will happen sometimes.

00:34:15
I think, if I go back a playlist this will be un-noise reduced.

00:34:28
And here's the playlist after Z-nosing it.

00:34:39
And you can hear there are a couple of edit clicks in there.

00:34:42
And that's why I always do this on a playlist.

00:34:45
If those clicks were sticking out at some point, I would have gone back and fixed them.

00:34:49
Obviously this bass note gotta moved a little bit.

00:34:51
I don't know why, I didn't do it.

00:34:54
It's nothing that bother me.

00:34:55
But I always do keep the unprocessed audio around.

00:34:58
If you're gonna change audio in a session, make a playlist, it's so easy.

00:35:02
No reason not to do it.

00:35:04
So I did that to both the DI and the Amp.

00:35:06
And what that gives me, with them together, is just a nice clean bass sound.

00:35:16
And by clean, I mean, it doesn't have a lot of noise all over it.

00:35:20
So obviously, that's still a little dirty but that's cool.

00:35:23
No plug-ins, they ran the bass through a Bass Bus.

00:35:26
And all of these plug-ins are their.

00:35:28
So, I'm not even gonna talk about them.

00:35:32
There you go, it has some stuff on it.

00:35:36
And then, strangely, the bass is actually going to the Rear Buss on this mix.

00:35:40
So, we'll listen to that later on, once we have the whole mix together and you'll really hear how that can totally change the Rear Bus works.

00:35:48
It gives you tons and tons of bass in the mix and you can change that obviously by re-balancing but it will also let the bass kind of drive the rest of the instruments.

00:35:58
So, interestingly that was my choice on this mix but it doesn't make sense to listen to it yet.

00:36:04
Before we move into the rest of the band let's just hear the rhythm sections.

00:36:08
I'm just gonna solo up...

00:36:09
Might as well solo up the sound effects since we said we're done with them.

00:36:13
So here's percussion, programming, drums and bass.

00:36:45
Alright, a lot of detail in the sound effects and programming.

00:36:49
The drums have a really cool kind of lo-fi vinyly feel to them which is that Devil-loc compressor as well as some of taking out the mid-range in those overhead microphones.

00:37:02
You get this nice grainier top end but no real presence on the hi-hat and cymbals which I kind of like.

00:37:10
And the bass is driving the chorus, so that's a very fine thing.

00:00:00
Alright.

00:00:01
Now we get to the mess.

00:00:04
We'll start with guitars.

00:00:06
I'm just gonna go ahead and solo up all of the guitars and I'm gonna play from the end of the intro into the verse and we'll get to the beginning of the chorus so you can kind of hear what the guitar arrangement is.

00:01:07
Alright, there's our guitar arrangement.

00:01:10
There's basically a main guitar in the verse and that's Zac's acoustic.

00:01:14
And then you've got the little comping chunk guitar up here which is Coy playing a rhythm track.

00:01:22
And again you noticed lots of muted regions.

00:01:25
This is the way they built their guitar arrangement.

00:01:28
Stuff is played, is put in place and then they decide: 'Well, no, let's not bring that guitar into...' And things like that.

00:01:34
These are all decisions they made.

00:01:36
With Coy you end up with just the chorus, which is the effect that they were using.

00:01:41
In the verse you have the chorus, just to be confusing.

00:01:45
And then, in the chorus, you have the verse. No! No, in the chorus you have the clean dry guitar.

00:01:50
So, very similar part, but a totally different sound. Here's what's going on in the verse.

00:02:09
Alright, it's the same guitar player doing the same type of part but it's on different sides, it sounds totally different.

00:02:18
But it's really doing the same job, it's adding some rhythmic propulsion to the guitars as a whole.

00:02:25
You've got Clay up here playing riffs.

00:02:32
It sounds great, as you can see there are no plug-ins on this.

00:02:36
It goes down to an Aux where there is a CLA-3A.

00:02:44
A LA-3A modeled compressor, that's from them.

00:02:47
And then they have a send off to the Clay Slap.

00:02:51
Which is just a delay down here.

00:02:54
Echoboy, really simple short slap.

00:02:57
This is what makes up that sound.

00:02:59
Again, I'm black-boxing the sound. That guitar sounds great, I don't need to do anything other than make sure that's the right level once I start balancing the guitars.

00:03:09
The other thing is, when there's a guitar arrangement this complicated with these many pieces in it, I'll tend to leave the panning exactly as I get it.

00:03:20
Unless something occurs to me.

00:03:22
I'm not gonna go through and double check their panning.

00:03:25
I'm gonna assume that they spent way more time on the panning than I ever would in my five minute check.

00:03:31
I might solo up the guitars the way I just did and listen through a section and hear that there's sort of a nice stereo spread and interesting things are happening and not everything is on one side.

00:03:41
But that's it, then I'm gonna trust that they've done everything that needs to be done.

00:03:46
And if I hear something later on that bothers me I will hunt it down and figure out why it's bothering me.

00:03:50
And then decide if the whole guitar needs to move or not.

00:03:53
But for the most part, they did a really good job putting this together.

00:03:57
So, just working though the parts in the chorus you've got some more riff guitar up here.

00:04:07
Which, within the context of the guitar arrangement...

00:04:17
You don't hear it as much of a lead, it's a really sort of intricate counter melody to all of the guitar parts that are going on.

00:04:24
I really like it.

00:04:25
I like the balance.

00:04:26
Again, that's a reason for me not to mess with the panning because it's interacting with a lot of other stuff.

00:04:32
Then we've got Hop's guitar down here, just in the choruses.

00:04:41
Real kind of straight ahead combo sound a little bit of distortion, and this is the continuation of Hop's guitar from the verse.

00:04:48
So, I'll play you the end of the verse into the chorus.

00:04:58
So, two totally different parts panned differently.

00:05:01
Much like Coy's guitars are panned differently into very different sounding parts.

00:05:07
But these are the people in the band.

00:05:10
So, it's important for me to know that these are both Hop.

00:05:12
I love the fact that the stuff is labeled with the guitar player's name.

00:05:15
Because it makes a difference. If you're building an arrangement you can decide that each guitar part has a personality or you can decide that the guitar player has a personality.

00:05:25
In this case they haven't really worried too much section by section, whether Hop's guitar stays on one side or not.

00:05:30
They're moving it around to do what's best for the music.

00:05:33
And that's great. And that approach works really well on this song.

00:05:36
But there are certain songs where you might decide it's more important that Hop kind of stays still than he move because that can be distracting.

00:05:44
The listener will often sort of construct a world in which the mix is taking place.

00:05:50
And, if something moves, it sort of breaks the spell.

00:05:55
And you're no longer listening to the song, you're listening to the mix.

00:05:58
Because why did that guitar move from one side to the other? So, unless it's the most awesome effect in the whole world I'll generally stay away from it.

00:06:05
They've built their guitar arrangement by doing that.

00:06:08
But I think the difference in level between those parts sort of gets around any idea that you might have something that would distract from listening to the song.

00:06:16
And then Zac's acoustic, down here, is a kind of a rhythm part.

00:06:21
And then it turns in to more of a strummy part I believe in the chorus.

00:06:33
In this case, they've been sure to keep Zac in exactly the same spot.

00:06:38
It actually works out pretty well because Zac is going to a mono bus.

00:06:42
Which is collected down here on the Zac Acoustic Guitar Bus.

00:06:46
And then that is panned 10 left.

00:06:48
End of story, done.

00:06:50
Now, this automation, I believe they had put in the session.

00:06:56
Again, I don't automate a whole lot until the very end.

00:07:00
What that also means is that I can leave their automation alone until the very end of the mix process.

00:07:06
I can leave the automation on that acoustic and if it works for me, I'm done.

00:07:10
If it doesn't work for me then I've gotta back track, get rid of it, but sort of keeping in mind what they were trying to do with their automation.

00:07:17
In this case, I just left it alone.

00:07:20
And I think all I did, since it's a different nylon guitar, they have put some EQ on it for one section of the song.

00:07:34
Now that I've found the long lost automation, you can see that in the second half of the lick section, which is an instrumental, this guitar comes in and it's EQed, it's not drastic EQ but it is EQed.

00:07:47
And then when we get back to the chorus the EQ drops out.

00:08:05
It's not a drastic EQ but it's sucking out a little bit of the boom and accentuating the top end.

00:08:11
Now, looking at this, I can't remember if I did this or they did this but basically what they are doing, or what I'm doing, or somebody's doing with this EQ...

00:08:19
It's the equivalent of a volume ride but if you just push this guitar up in this section, what would happen is the boom in the guitar would start to overtake some of the other things.

00:08:30
So, it's a combination of level by pushing up this top end.

00:08:35
But compensation for that extra level of this guitar by sucking out a little bit of the body.

00:08:40
It's just gonna make the guitar feel the same but all of a sudden jump out.

00:08:44
We'll find out later when we've got most of the instruments back in.

00:08:47
But this guitar is a little bit of a feature in the second half of this section and then drops back to do it's normal.

00:08:55
'I am the acoustic guitar player in the song playing the chorus' bit.

00:08:59
As opposed to 'I am the focus guitar, check me out'.

00:09:01
So, it's a subtle EQ thing, but it works.

00:09:04
I'm gonna take credit for it, let's say I did it.

00:09:07
They'll let me know if I didn't.

00:09:09
That's our guitars.

00:09:11
You do see that they're all going to the Rear Bus, which again, you'll hear the magic of the Rear Bus a little later.

00:09:18
Then the fiddle tracks take up a lot of room in the session but basically, there’s not a lot going on.

00:09:25
If we solo up the fiddle...

00:09:29
It's just harmonized pizzicatos.

00:09:37
Alright, and later in the song, basically the same thing.

00:09:52
Alright, then we have a little bit of a rhythm part later on.

00:09:56
You heard a little bit of the legato.

00:10:00
I don't remember why this is in but I think it was just to have a little burst of some strings.

00:10:06
Let's listen to the section and see if we can even hear it.

00:10:17
It's in there, it's tucked it but it's kind of cool. This is obviously something they did just to fill in the hole.

00:10:23
It's very much like the way they did their arrangement with all of the sound FX and the sweeps.

00:10:28
Anytime there is any chance to add to that dynamics of the song, they do it.

00:10:36
It's just great perseverance to have things as tweaky as a little tiny fiddle part taken from a section you decided we do not want the legato fiddle at all but hold on, what if we had that tiny little chord.

00:10:49
Someone had to even remember that it was there.

00:10:52
When we get to the bridge, however, these play the part of a string section.

00:11:21
And then we're right back to our pizzicato but with a little bit of the legato thrown in.

00:11:37
So, they’ve taken care of all this processing for me.

00:11:40
I really didn't do anything.

00:11:42
These plug-ins are all theirs.

00:11:44
A little bit of EQ, One knob filter.

00:11:49
That's on that extra rhythm part.

00:11:52
And some Renaissance X.

00:11:55
CLA vocals on the strings.

00:11:58
That's actually working out quite well. They sound really nice.

00:12:02
A little bit of EQ, this would be me saying they got a little bit harsh.

00:12:06
And then, this is the reverb that they chose, it sounds great.

00:12:10
What happens a lot when I'm mixing is I get lots of sessions with plug-ins that I don't have.

00:12:15
I might or not have heard of them.

00:12:17
But I just don't own them.

00:12:20
I believe that Valhalla reverb was actually purchased while mixing this record.

00:12:25
I'll hear it, I'll get a demo and hear the plug-in and go: 'Oh, that's amazing'.

00:12:30
And because it's a one-off and I'm not in the middle of like, 'I budget some money for plug-ins' Like, I just gotta some work, because I'm mixing a song, and I can spend U$150 on a plug-in and then, 'Oh, it sounds great'.

00:12:40
And it's exactly the reverb they were using so no one can question it.

00:12:44
It's a great time to buy a plug-in. When you get some work and something comes in with the plug-in that you've never heard of, if it's awesome buy it right and there.

00:12:52
You can usually talk yourself into spending that money while you're getting paid.

00:12:56
If you wait till the end of the session or when the demos run out you're not getting paid anymore and you won't buy it.

00:13:01
That's my little tip for buying software.

00:13:04
It's a terrible tip. You're just gonna spend money.

00:13:07
So, again, these strings just go to the Rear Bus.

00:13:09
They're gonna interact with everybody and do their job but they already sounded really good.

00:13:14
Last but not least before we get to vocals we've got a couple of keyboard parts.

00:13:19
One of which isn't actually a keyboard. First there's the Rhodes.

00:13:37
So, you have to realize that the Rhodes is playing the whole song.

00:13:41
As are the guitars.

00:13:43
No single guitar plays the whole song.

00:13:45
But the combination of all of them do.

00:13:47
When I was making sure that the Rhodes was OK I was doing it in the context of the Rhodes and the guitars.

00:13:54
I don't know that I really did anything to this except spread it out a little more.

00:13:59
So, it was a stereo Rhodes to begin with.

00:14:02
And I'll go back to just listening to the Rhodes.

00:14:04
Here's without the stereo width.

00:14:27
So, it's a little subtle but what will happen is with the guitars, it will just help separate it a little bit.

00:14:33
So, here's with the guitars.

00:14:56
You can hear it's not subtle anymore.

00:14:58
It's the difference between the Rhodes kind of being on it's own and in the middle and not really interacting a whole lot or really playing with the guitars and, more importantly to me, starting to hide behind the guitars.

00:15:11
There are a few guys in the band who are awesome keyboard players but none of them are know for being keyboard players, they're know for being these multi-instrumentalists who play mostly things that have necks and strings on.

00:15:22
So, the idea that the Rhodes is a main instrument is really important but I really wanted the guitars to carry the show and strangely just spreading it out a tiny bit really helped tuck it in.

00:15:32
Again, this is without.

00:15:56
It's just that weird combination of, it's easier to actually hear the Rhodes through the guitars but at the same time it works better with the guitars.

00:16:06
Not night and day difference but to me something that will actually really help make the mix work.

00:16:13
We didn't talk about the Glockenspiel, it happens in the bridge.

00:16:16
I'll just solo it up so you can see what it is.

00:16:22
It's a Glockenspiel. Fantastic.

00:16:25
That's all we need to say about that.

00:16:27
Alright, moving on to the lead vocal.

00:16:30
Zac, great singer, great sounding voice.

00:16:33
They had already done a lot of work.

00:16:35
They've got some plug-ins on his voice, they've got EQs, they've got more EQs, they've got some compressors.

00:16:41
They've got some more EQs and compressors.

00:16:45
Basically, again, I black box this.

00:16:47
I just said: 'You know what, the vocal sounds good, I'm gonna leave it alone'.

00:16:52
And then treat it as if that is the mono vocal track I've got.

00:16:56
Now there are also some bounced FX which I said we'd check out.

00:17:05
And there's some little delay sends.

00:17:13
They've built a lot of the vocal FX for me but the vocal itself sounds like this.

00:17:26
I have exactly the same tracks I always bring in from my template.

00:17:29
I've got a pretty straight ahead lead vocal track which just has a little bit of EQ, some Phoenix and a tiny bit of compression.

00:17:38
And that's parallel with something that I'm not using in the intro, which is the Pultec 'crank a bunch of 8K, get rid of the low end' into an LA-2A which is set like a de-esser.

00:17:51
This is basically building a 3 band compressor and bypassing the bottom band and the top band.

00:17:59
I'll put this 3 plug-ins up on the screen together.

00:18:04
This is the order of the 3 plug-ins.

00:18:07
Get rid of a bunch of low end add a bunch of 8K.

00:18:10
Then go into a compressor which is set to only look at the higher frequencies.

00:18:15
This is gonna look at that 8K range and it's basically gonna crush the 8K vocal.

00:18:21
Then you go back into another EQ, add back all the low end that you took out and get rid of...

00:18:27
Oh, in this case I left all the 8K that's in there.

00:18:31
Every once and awhile I get rid of some of the 8K that I added.

00:18:34
But that's not the case here.

00:18:36
And what that gives you is a very sort of poppy sound.

00:18:40
So here is the chorus with the Pultec muted.

00:18:43
I'm gonna mute it after I hit play because it's automated, otherwise it will come right back on.

00:19:08
It just feels a little more crushed and a little more mixed.

00:19:11
It has sort of a sheen to it which is what you get when you over-compress the vocal.

00:19:15
But by using this as a parallel effect, first of all, it sounds different but in the context of the song it's still gonna sound like Zac.

00:19:22
Because I never loose this uncompressed version of the vocal up here.

00:19:26
Just another parallel process.

00:19:28
And past that, they already had some FX on him.

00:19:32
Which I left in the session.

00:19:34
That's these Auxes down here.

00:19:37
There's verbs and plates and some lead delays and things which I never even looked at.

00:19:43
I think they spend so much time setting this up why would I mess with that? If it sounded bad or too wet for me, I would go ahead and try and reverse engineer what they've done and figure out how to fix it.

00:19:56
But I feel like, if they spent that much time on the lead vocal, if I can, I will make the mix work with whatever they've given me.

00:20:03
And then add my parallel stuff on top of that.

00:20:06
And a little bit of my FX as well.

00:20:09
I'm using my usual vocal crush, which is an 1176 all button in.

00:20:13
Parallel.

00:20:15
This goes into the Rear Bus, which we still haven't got to.

00:20:18
And then into the Aphex which is exactly the same Aphex we used on the percussion earlier just for a little bit of extra top end.

00:20:24
So if I get rid of the 3 sends that I added here's that verse going into the chorus.

00:20:43
Alright, now we're gonna add the Vocal Crush, the Rear Bus and the Aphex.

00:20:49
And here's the Vocal Crush 'all buttons in'.

00:20:51
Super slow attack, super fast release.

00:20:53
A good amount of gain.

00:21:07
Alright, you can hear, it just comes alive.

00:21:09
It's got a lot more energy, it's more present.

00:21:12
And I think that's the general theme of everything I did in this mix.

00:21:16
Everything is just more of what it was.

00:21:18
It's all bigger, it has more low end, it has more top end, it has more depth, it has more attack and release.

00:21:23
It has a little more of everything.

00:21:26
How do I do this? You might ask.

00:21:29
There are all the little things I've shown you on the individual instruments but the huge component of this is the Rear Bus.

00:21:35
I've mention a few times: 'Oh, that's sent to the Rear Bus. This is sent to the Rear Bus'.

00:21:40
Before I get to the background vocals let me just give you a quick tour of the Rear Bus.

00:21:44
So, let me solo up the bass, the guitars, the fiddle, the keyboards, and I'll leave the vocal out of this for now, we don't really need to get into that but you'll see it when the whole mix is in.

00:21:59
Then I'll go down to my Rear Bus fader.

00:22:01
This is a multi-mono, which basically gives me two mono compressors that have same the knobs on them.

00:22:07
So I have unlinked stereo compression.

00:22:10
And it's an UAD.

00:22:12
Universal Audio 1176 AE.

00:22:14
It's their anniversary edition.

00:22:16
This an 1176 that never existed back in the day.

00:22:20
They built it, I don't remember which anniversary it was of the original 1176, but it's been around quite a while, so they made a special version in hardware then they modeled the hardware that they had built.

00:22:33
So, this is kind of the play of the movie of the Broadway show of the movie of an 1176.

00:22:41
But it just sounds a lot like the hardware 1176 that I used to use, some old crusty black faces.

00:22:48
And these settings at 2:1, 2:1 doesn't even exist on any other 1176.

00:22:53
But the attack being super slow and the release being sort of up here, near 5.

00:22:59
That's pretty much what I'll do on the hardware.

00:23:02
And now I'm gonna play you all of the instruments that I'd soloed up.

00:23:06
We can leave this open and see how much it's compressing.

00:23:09
We're not gonna hear the Rear Bus for a second.

00:23:11
And I'll do verse into chorus.

00:23:32
Now prepare do be amazed.

00:23:34
Now we're gonna pick up a lot of level with this as well.

00:23:37
It's a little bit of an unfair test but that's OK because I win.

00:23:59
Everybody is just interacting, everybody is a little happier.

00:24:05
Now, I'm going to take the bass out of the Rear Bus.

00:24:08
Because I said that normally the bass doesn't go into the Rear Bus.

00:24:11
And that's true.

00:24:12
The bass is gonna drop in level quite a bit but what you'll hear is the lack of interaction between the bass and the rest of the instruments.

00:24:20
The thing about that, specially in the verses is the fact that the bass isn't always playing.

00:24:25
So, listen carefully to the space between the bass notes as we listen to the end of the verse.

00:24:31
This is with the bass out of the Rear Bus.

00:24:46
I'm gonna put it in the Rear Bus and we're gonna pick up level but listen to the guitars.

00:25:02
A little hard to hear because so much stuff changes by putting the bass in there but to me you hear everybody getting out of the way of the bass and then coming back in. They kind of lay back.

00:25:12
Move forward, lay back, move forward.

00:25:13
And then once we get to the chorus, now everybody is just interacting the way they normally do inside this Rear Bus magic pool of compression.

00:25:48
To do a real A/B I'd have to have two different levels to play the bass back at.

00:25:52
But you hear guitars just sticking out all over the place.

00:25:55
The bass just keeps everybody in check and really drives the song when it's in the Rear Bus.

00:26:01
Let's check out our background vocals and then we get to actually listen to everything all together.

00:26:06
There are two main sets of background vocals that we have to deal with.

00:26:09
One are called the 'I remember' because it's from the very beginning of the song, in the intro they sing 'I remember'.

00:26:17
These are 'TUNA', apparently.

00:26:20
These are Clay, Jimmy and Hop and I guess they've been tuned.

00:26:23
And they like to name them like they're fish.

00:26:25
So here are the background vocals.

00:26:31
And there was a track of Zac which has been muted.

00:26:37
And I think, aside from keeping his voice out, it actually feels kind of cool as just a three part, and not having the main part. I'm gonna make this inactive.

00:26:47
Just if while I'm wildly muting things I accidentally turn it back on.

00:26:51
So, I believe that this is basically the panning they gave me.

00:26:55
I think I made them a little bit wider.

00:26:57
It's on 70 and 81 instead of probably in the 50s or 60s.

00:27:01
But the idea is that this is an ensemble of live singers singing together.

00:27:05
The treatment on them is minimal, they go down into 'I remember' Bus which has their plug-ins on them, again.

00:27:13
Renaissance X and another Valhalla reverb on an ambiance.

00:27:17
It's not nearly as big as that string reverb we had.

00:27:20
And then I take those backgrounds down into...

00:27:23
This is an older version of my template, I didn't have the Pultec chain that I just showed you on the lead vocal, available for the background vocals yet.

00:27:31
I just hadn't done that yet.

00:27:33
The plug-ins I use on the background vocals...

00:27:36
I put in an EQ3, this is just a high-pass filter to control some o the low-end in the microphones and then I've got a little bit of, it's not a notch filter but I'm taking out some 3.5K basically.

00:27:49
Which for me is a frequency that tends to ring.

00:27:52
Specially on cymbals and vocals.

00:27:54
And these particular vocals must have had a little bit of that going on.

00:27:58
They just felt harsh when I listen really loud.

00:28:00
And one of the things that is important to me is that people can listen to my mixes loud.

00:28:05
I think that's when there are a lot of fun.

00:28:07
And that also really engages the listener to listen to music if they can listen to it loud.

00:28:12
So, getting rid of harsh mid-range frequencies is something I often do.

00:28:17
When I'm dealing with drums I'll actually make sure they aren't there.

00:28:20
With other instruments, or with vocals, I wait until I notice that they're there and then I go ahead and take care of them. That must be what happened here.

00:28:27
It's not drastic, it's 4 dB, but it's enough to actually fix something that must have acted like a problem.

00:28:33
Then I have a Pultec, I'm adding a little bit of low end and a little bit of upper mids.

00:28:38
This is well above the mid I was taking out.

00:28:41
Just adding some shape.

00:28:42
And then a little bit of Phoenix.

00:28:45
Let me play you this group of background vocals with and without.

00:28:49
This last plug-in here is just a little bit of gain through a L2.

00:28:54
Not much going on there, I'm gonna leave that in because otherwise it's not gonna be a fair A/B.

00:29:02
Alright, here's with my pool of magic.

00:29:09
So, a lot o apparent gain coming out of this.

00:29:13
And a lot of that is the Pultec and the Phoenix.

00:29:16
That's what you get.

00:29:18
So, it's a lot more present, a lot more in the room, which I like.

00:29:21
Very quickly, there's one more group of background vocals which are used in the choruses.

00:29:28
Not that extensive.

00:29:39
So, those are getting the exact same plug-ins that the other ones are.

00:29:42
All the background vocals are going into my background Aux.

00:29:48
That's basically it. It's again, three part harmony, they're not as widely panned because now they're in chorus that has a lot more going on.

00:29:55
So I want the vocals to be a little more of a package.

00:29:57
Plus, they're not singing lead at this point.

00:30:00
In the intro they are.

00:30:02
In the chorus they are harmonies to Zac's lead.

00:30:05
A little more of a smaller stereo package.

00:30:08
But they're still very tight.

00:30:09
You can hear how well they sing together. It's kind of ridiculous.

00:30:12
And then at the very end of the song, there is this track here.

00:30:23
Which they went ahead and bounced for me.

00:30:25
I'm not sure exactly why they decided to.

00:30:27
I think it's these tracks up here.

00:30:29
But there are also some effects that go with it.

00:30:35
So, just some short delay, I like it.

00:30:37
I left it, there's nothing else to do.

00:30:40
These backgrounds kind of went as is.

00:30:42
Down here, on the sends, you'll notice that in the intro, I'm turning off these three sends.

00:30:51
And then once we get to the chorus, they are back on.

00:30:53
So, in the chorus, I'm sending to the Aphex, which you've seen before, I'm sending to the Rear Bus, which we've just checked out and saw how unbelievably awesome it was.

00:31:03
And I'm sending to some vocal reverb.

00:31:05
In the intro, I am not.

00:31:07
And then, in the beginning of the chorus, do I turn them on right away? It looks like the Rear Bus comes on early.

00:31:16
That's just straight automation.

00:31:17
But they're all one by the time they start singing on the chorus.

00:31:21
So, the intro is much dryer and more present, and a little more natural sounding without the Rear Bus and the vocal reverb.

00:31:28
But then, once we get to the chorus, the track has a lot more going on.

00:31:32
So, in the track, they probably don't feel hugely different.

00:31:35
I'm gonna throw everything in and we'll listen to the chorus.

00:31:45
I'm gonna play that again, just focus on the background vocals. Here's the intro.

00:31:50
I'll play you a longer run here.

00:32:00
In the context of the song, to me they actually feel very similar, but there's a lot of automation turning off those sends, making it work.

00:32:09
And that's the difference between what you can hear in solo and what you can't.

00:32:14
When you listen in solo they sound totally different, you listen in the track, all of the extra instrument that are going on the chorus just eat that reverb and eat that extra compression and the compression is needed to make them sound as present as they do in the intro.

00:32:29
So, that is basically it. What I'm gonna do, very quickly, is I'm gonna go through, I'm gonna leave a lot of the smaller plug-ins that I did but I'm gonna take out a lot of the big broad stroke stuff that I did.

00:32:42
I'm gonna take out the Kick/Snare Crush, I'm gonna take out the Fatso.

00:32:46
I'll take out this Devil-Loc on the snare.

00:32:51
I have to remember to put it back in.

00:32:54
I'm gonna take out the Rear Bus.

00:32:57
And I'll take out, I guess I'll leave the vocals alone, they're gonna be a little loud, but that's OK.

00:33:05
Here's the mix with my little tweaks but basically now, all you're gonna hear is the effect of my 2-bus processing, which is the next thing we're gonna talk about.

00:33:16
So here's the end of the verse going into the chorus.

00:33:39
Alright, that makes me sad.

00:33:41
Which is good.

00:33:42
Because now I can make myself happy again really quickly by turning this stuff back on.

00:33:47
And I think all we've got left is the Rear Bus.

00:33:51
If I remember correctly.

00:33:53
Here's that same spot.

00:34:16
Everything is just more present now, things are moving around, it's interacting.

00:34:20
And more importantly, it's sounds more like a record.

00:34:24
I don't even know exactly what that means but it sounds more like a record.

00:34:29
And less like a rough mix.

00:34:30
And their rough mix was great.

00:34:33
Let's listen to that same spot on their rough mix just to go back to where they have left the track.

00:34:53
It's not that dissimilar to my mix without all of those parallel chains but I think what you really hear is, it sounds good, but it doesn't sound like something you would hear on the radio or coming out of the car next to you, or something like that.

00:35:09
It just feels like: 'Man, that's a cool song.' Once you get to the point where it feels like a record that's when it feels somehow special.

00:35:17
And, not all records should be like this, but a record like this, I feel like there's gotta be something about it sonically which you don't necessarily understand.

00:35:28
Like, this is a band and you hear that it's a band, you hear the different guitar players.

00:35:32
But there's something about it that isn't what you would hear if you were just standing around in a room listening to these guys play.

00:35:38
And that's what makes it special.

00:35:40
It's captured for the record.

00:35:42
Part of it is having all the little sound FX and things like that but part of it is just the way the mix is finished off.

00:35:48
Again, I'm back in input so this is where we are right now.

00:00:00
So, the last piece of the puzzle is my 2-Bus processing.

00:00:03
Obviously there was not 2-Bus processing on the rough mix that I got or there was some that I decided to get rid of.

00:00:11
So, I've completely replaced wherever was on the rough with what I'm using here.

00:00:15
I'm just gonna go through each plug-in, show you what it does, tell you what it does.

00:00:19
And play you what it does.

00:00:20
First in the chain, and you might noticed if you watched some of my tutorials, these were in a slightly different order.

00:00:26
It's just a different version of the template from a different point in time. The template is ever changing.

00:00:31
First thing in the order is an UAD Fairchild emulation.

00:00:36
I also use the PuigChild for this.

00:00:40
They're both software emulations of a Fairchild 660.

00:00:45
It's and overbuilt compressor and what that means is that it was built so that every time in the circuit design you might have one transformer there are two.

00:00:54
Any time there should be one tube there are two.

00:00:57
There's lots and lots of circuitry and miles of wire inside one of this.

00:01:02
I'm not using it for the compressor at all, I don't actually like the way a Fairchild compresses most things.

00:01:07
I've got the threshold all the way down, which bypasses the compression, I've got the mix at 50% so we're only blending in some of this but what I'm after is the sound of the transformers which are just huge coils of wire so what they give you is kind of a lumpy slow response.

00:01:24
A little bit of a slow limiter.

00:01:28
But at the same time they also give you a high-pass filter down around 15 Hz and a low-pass filter up around 25K.

00:01:35
That's just the nature of what coils of wire do.

00:01:38
So, I'll play this with and without.

00:01:40
Hopefully you will like it better with.

00:01:42
Here's without.

00:02:07
A little brighter, a little cooler, a little happier. We're gonna leave that on.

00:02:11
Next in the chain is something that I almost always use, the Neve 33609.

00:02:17
And basically this is a compressor that is exactly like or is supposed to exactly like the 2264 compressors that were in my console.

00:02:27
It's a compressor I got very used to the sound of and has a very specific sound when you set to this 100 ms release time.

00:02:34
It's not right for every mix but it's right for a lot of mixes.

00:02:37
So, here is the chorus without this compressor.

00:03:05
Again, it's a good thing so we're gonna keep it in and move on to the next part.

00:03:10
Which is, this Brainworx EQ.

00:03:13
The Brainworx EQ I'm actually using for two totally separate things but it's all within this one plug-in.

00:03:20
The two main components of this are a mid/side EQ.

00:03:23
Rather than equalizing the left side and the right side, You can EQ the mono section, which is what's happening in both speakers, so anything panned to the center.

00:03:32
And the stereo section, which is anything that's happening in one speaker or the other but not both.

00:03:37
Anything panned off to one side, or reverbs or overheads, that kind of thing.

00:03:43
And all I'm doing is adding a high-shelf.

00:03:45
So, this is a very gentle EQ, it's 1.3 dB at 8K.

00:03:50
And that's it, I'm not touching the middle, I'm just brightening up the sides.

00:03:54
And then the other thing I'm using is a stereo width control.

00:03:58
This will just push the mix a little bit wider.

00:04:02
And it does it with some phase tricks, there are lots of good widening plug-ins.

00:04:06
The Waves S1 is great, the Air Stereo FX is great.

00:04:11
This happens to be built into the same EQ that I'm already using on the mix so it was just a great place to go.

00:04:17
It sounds different than the other ones.

00:04:19
It tends to be a little bit cleaner too, which I like because I'm pumping the entire mix through it.

00:04:23
I'm not just trying to widen the Rhodes like I did with the S1 earlier.

00:04:26
So, here's without.

00:04:52
I like that a lot, I love that extra top end.

00:04:55
I feel like Zac's vocal is really starting to pop.

00:04:58
And I like the widening.

00:04:59
Specially because there's so many very stereo delays and sound FX and things like that.

00:05:03
It just makes them even wider.

00:05:06
Things being wide is a big feature of the mix.

00:05:09
Second to last but not least is a Pultec EQ.

00:05:12
This is basically your classic happy face EQ.

00:05:16
I add bottom and I add top.

00:05:18
I'm adding plus almost 3.

00:05:21
Which, this is not decibels, it's just from 0 to 10, I don't how many dB this is. In the manual I'm sure it says.

00:05:27
But I'm adding 100, and this is a shelf down here.

00:05:31
And then I'm also adding even more than that of 10K.

00:05:37
This band up here is not a shelf, it's actually a parametric band and you have a bandwidth control here.

00:05:42
By making it this broad, it starts to act like a shelf, specially when you're up at 10K.

00:05:47
It's not adding as much up around 20 as it would if it was a shelf but it's adding quite a bit of top end.

00:05:52
Here's the chorus without it.

00:06:18
There you go, now the top end of everything has really come up and it sounds mixed.

00:06:24
As opposed to just sounding like a bunch of tracks put up at a really good balance.

00:06:28
It's really starting to feel like a mix.

00:06:31
And that bottom end is really pushing the bass forward and letting it help drive the mix.

00:06:36
And the last thing on this chain, very simple Massey L2007 mastering limiter.

00:06:42
It's an awesome transparent limiter.

00:06:44
It's L2 style where you only really have a couple of controls.

00:06:48
You've got release control which I always leave at the default.

00:06:52
You've got four different modes and you should listen through the modes.

00:06:55
But basically I've got a half dB threshold with just under 0.18 dB output.

00:07:03
It keeps the red lights off and it's adding about 0.36 dB of limiting to the final output.

00:07:12
Because we're in a floating point mixer it's actually overshooting a little more than that.

00:07:16
I'm getting a little more limiting than that.

00:07:18
But it's basically just keeping things in check and keeping the red lights off.

00:07:21
I'm not gonna bother playing it to you without because then we'd be clipping and all kinds of things would happen.

00:07:25
And, there's no real point.

00:07:27
Basically, it's not adding a massive amount to the sound but it's that final little bit of glue at the end.

00:07:33
Alright, we've been through everything that's going on in this session and I think what we've learned, is first of all, Zac can sing.

00:07:41
Second of all, the band can play.

00:07:43
Third of all, as a production team they and along with their engineers can put together a record.

00:07:49
This was really well put together and really well thought out.

00:07:52
There's a lot of care taking in the guitar arrangement as well as in the processing that they chose.

00:07:58
So, this is a great example of me realizing that I already had something that was really good.

00:08:06
And I just needed to turn it into a record.

00:08:08
And I think rather than the reaction being: 'Hey man, this sounds a lot like our rough, wouldn't you just master it?' What they loved about it was that it was true to the rough in so many ways but sounded like a record.

00:08:22
And sometimes the real talent in any sort of creative endeavor is understanding what you don't need to do and what you shouldn't do along with what you should do.

00:08:31
So, given that, what I'm gonna do is play you a little bit of the rough again and than a little bit of my mix.

00:08:38
And you'll hear all of the similarities but hopefully you'll also hear how far it has actually come.

00:10:49
Et voilà!