Jacquire King Mixing James Bay
03h 01min
(55)
Watch Jacquire King Mix James Bay
Grammy Award Winning Producer, Engineer, and Mixer, Jacquire King, has worked with some of the world’s most influential artists in every role you can imagine in a recording studio. From being an acclaimed recordist to mixing and producing multi-platinum records (9X in the case of Kings Of Leon) by superstars like Kaleo, Modest Mouse, Kings of Leon, Tom Waits, Norah Jones, Buddy Guy, Cold War Kids, MuteMath, Melissa Etheridge, and James Bay.
In this puremix.net exclusive, Jacquire King recalls the session for James Bay’s “Let It Go” and breaks down each element of the song; discussing the decisions he made as the producer while he creates his mix with expansive detail on his approach to topics such as:
- Mix architecture and routing
- Reducing track counts and removing extraneous tracks
- Reference meters
- Mixing acoustic and electronic percussion elements
- Polarity and phase relationships to ensure the speakers are “pushing” and not “pulling”
- Gain staging the 2 bus
- Eq'ing the 2 bus
- The importance of automation to add movement to your mixes
Once you have seen how Jacquire approaches this well-crafted song, download the actual stems and practice what you have learned.
Watch Jacquire King mixing James Bay's "Let It Go", only on puremix.net
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Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 01:19 - The Rough Mix
- 04:24 - Song Background
- 06:14 - Mix Architecture and Routing
- 13:59 - Reference Meters
- 16:52 - Bass
- 18:35 - Programming
- 24:35 - Bass Polarity
- 27:21 - Bass Compression
- 30:20 - Drums
- 31:19 - Parallel Drum Compression
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Guitars
- 10:28 - Vocals
- 13:04 - Plugins vs. Analog
- 21:11 - Vocal FX
- 29:32 - Vocal Reverb
- 34:05 - Building The Stereo Bus
- 39:35 - Gain Staging Into The 2 Bus
- 44:31 - Creating The Gain Structure
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - The Bass Bus
- 06:47 - Tweaking The Guitar Bus
- 08:58 - Keyboards
- 15:35 - Tweaking The Vocal Bus
- 22:46 - Piano
- 24:21 - Comparing Mixes
- 27:16 - Eq'ing The Mix Bus
- 32:47 - Background Vocals
- 39:43 - Percussion
- 42:52 - Kick/Snare/Bass Bus
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Automation
- 18:38 - Vocal Rides
- 21:02 - Final Mix Bus Tweaks
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |
00:00:00
Hello pureMix folks,
this is Jacquire King.
00:00:03
I'm coming to you from my studio
in Tennessee, south of Nashville.
00:00:08
Today we're going to look at a song
I produced by James Bay,
it's called "Let It Go."
This song was mixed by Michael Brauer
and I was not the primary
engineer on this,
so,
although I participated
in the engineering,
the engineering styles
are a little bit different.
00:00:27
This is kind of neat,
it's just this song
that I'm going to sort of be
digging through the tracks
a little bit more in depth
and showing you some things.
00:00:36
And I've never mixed it,
other than some rough mixes
and I'm familiar with it in that way,
so it's going to be fun for me
to kind of get in here
and have a look around
and make a mix from it,
and just discuss
the elements of it with you.
00:00:58
So let's start by just playing
the mix flat, no effects,
just routed to the Stereo Bus
with some mixing architecture in it,
but we don't have any parallel stuff
going on right now.
00:01:09
There shouldn't be any EQ
other than the sounds that are as they
are meant to be in the production,
so let's just listen to it from the top.
00:01:17
There won't be any reverb or anything on
the vocal. Let's just hear the raw tracks.
00:04:08
I love this song. It's such a great song,
and the way that it works...
00:04:11
I mean, it's a beautiful song
focused around a really cool
and interesting guitar part
that basically carries the mood
and rhythm of the song,
and a really great vocal performance
that we put together.
00:04:24
A little background that might be
interesting just to sort of tell you...
00:04:28
or fun memories for me,
is that this is the very first song
that James and I worked on together
on the very first day
that we were together in the studio
when we were doing pre-production.
00:04:38
He'd come into town here in Nashville,
we made this record at Blackbird.
00:04:42
We were doing pre-production — I had
a private room at Blackbird at the time —
and he played the evening before.
00:04:47
This was kind of a very new song for him
and he was eager to show it to me,
and he played it...
00:04:54
he had a performance
at 3rd and Lindsley the night before,
so it was really cool
to actually see him perform the song
and get a sense of it.
00:05:03
So we started with this,
and the guitar part,
this main guitar part that we hear
was recorded on that very first day
when we were just trying to establish
what the song could be,
find the tempo, and sort of
lay the foundation for it.
00:05:18
We did that and the little keyboard
that you hear
that comes in at the first chorus,
and then, over the days
that followed in the studio,
we sort of built up the programming.
00:05:27
We sort of made
a very simple arrangement
so that the song
felt like it was growing
but that it just built
and built and built,
because the programming comes in
after the first chorus,
the bass comes in
in the second pre-chorus,
the very simple drum performance
waits until the second chorus.
00:05:44
We had recorded harmonies
earlier in the song
just to sort of keep the song
building and growing.
00:05:51
Before we talk about
the individual elements
and sort of start to listen to tracks
and make some decisions here,
what I'm going to do
is I'm going to pick
and choose some elements.
00:06:01
There was a lot of...
00:06:03
The style of the recording on this
was to sort of set up a lot of things
and record a lot of tracks
so that decisions could be made
down the road,
so we need to kind of get into
a little bit of that.
00:06:17
But let me first just explain to you
a little bit of the mix architecture here
and how that works
and how I've got it set up.
00:06:23
I try to keep it pretty simple
and don't do things that are,
like, too extreme
or too many parallel paths,
unless it feels like it's
a really necessary thing.
00:06:31
I try...
00:06:32
at least in my own productions
I try to rely on,
you know, solid recordings and intention.
00:06:38
And then, if I'm mixing
somebody else's stuff
and I feel like I need to do
a little bit heavier lifting,
I'll sort of make
a little bit more elaborate setup.
00:06:47
I mean, sometimes
I have to do that for myself,
so we're going to start simple
and see what happens.
00:06:51
This is also not a...
00:06:53
dynamically it's not a
super-demanding song,
so hopefully we can kind of keep it simple
and keep this flowing and fresh for you.
00:07:00
The bass elements:
there is a DI, an amp,
and then a second DI that has a little bit
of an amp-simulated sound.
00:07:07
They are all routed out Bus 1,
which goes to their busing fader,
so I assigned
all of these elements of the bass
to a common Bus,
and I will put treatment
on that common Bus.
00:07:19
We have some EQs in place,
but they're not active.
00:07:22
They are in place
to begin to do some work.
00:07:24
And then that Bus will be sent to 67-68,
which represents the Stereo Bus,
which is an Auxiliary Input
where I have what we will use to EQ
and compress,
and a little bit more EQ,
and a little bit of
peak-stop limiting,
and then that is fed
over here to this track
where we will record.
00:07:49
We will print the mix
back into the session,
the Output is Bus 69-70,
this is the Input.
00:07:54
The Outputs here are 31-32,
it's like that because of the way
I have my system setup,
which is a 32-Input and Output system.
00:08:04
1-16 is a Burl Mothership
which I use for the primary record paths,
or if I'm putting something on the desk
I use those as my primary Outputs.
00:08:13
17-32 is an Avid HD I/O,
I use that in a hybrid situation
for hardware Insert/Sends
I might do in the computer
because the delay compensation calculation
is very accurate for that,
and also, I use the digital
facilities connectivity of the HD I/O
to feed Lightpipe to my headphone system.
00:08:35
And then, on 31-32 there is an AES cable,
a digital line that feeds my 2192,
so if I were printing an analog mix
back into the rig
I'd be using 31-32 as the Inputs.
00:08:48
We're just monitoring the Output here
through the 2192,
so that's why this is assigned to 31-32
and not 1-2,
because 1-2 would come out the Burl
and that's not what I'm doing.
00:08:59
There's a rough mix on this track
that was done when we finished recording.
00:09:03
This is the rough mix that existed,
that was sent off as a reference.
00:09:07
Okay, so back to the routing.
00:09:09
So what we have here is quite a lot of it.
00:09:12
All these tracks,
all the stuff here to hear.
00:09:18
Quite a bit for such a simple song.
00:09:20
These are all of the programming elements.
00:09:23
They are all routed
to a common programming Bus
that right now shouldn't have
anything on it, and it doesn't,
so we'll instantiate some EQ,
maybe some compression to do
a little parallel compression, we'll see,
but I like to have a Bus for each
specific instrument Group so that I can...
00:09:39
once I make an internal balance
I can treat them with EQ and compression,
and then feed that to the Mix Bus.
00:09:46
So moving along here
we have the drums,
and like I was saying,
there's quite a lot of drum mics.
00:09:53
We won't use them all, we'll pick
and choose and we'll get into that.
00:09:56
I already know that these mics got fired
when we were recording.
00:10:00
They're just still there
and they're just turned down.
00:10:02
We will get those out of the Group
and make those inactive first.
00:10:06
And then all that stuff is routed to 3-4,
and then we have two Buses
set up to receive 3-4,
and the reason I do that is so that
I can place the same EQ across them
but so that I can do my parallel
compression in this fashion.
00:10:21
I'll do it on 'drum buss 2',
we'll pick a compressor and put it here
and blend it in.
00:10:26
This 'K/S/B Buss'
is where, at some point after we get
some things going with the drums and bass,
I will do a special parallel-blended Bus
for the kick, snare and bass.
00:10:38
This is the main guitar part
that plays the whole song,
it's two different amplifiers.
00:10:42
The loudest one is on the left.
00:10:44
This one on the right has a delay
and sort of a different sound
that kind of paints it in stereo imaging.
00:10:49
We sort of did that
from the very beginning.
00:10:51
A lot of times I'll do that in the mix
where I'll have a single guitar track
and I will create
a counterpart effect for it
to kind of give it
some space and dimension.
00:11:02
That was done as part
of the recording process,
and I specifically did that because
I knew going in
that the guitar was going to
carry the song
and it was going to be the main element,
so I wanted to kind of create
as much of an atmosphere
and a specific feeling
right from the beginning.
00:11:22
Not only as part of the production
and presentation of the song,
but also to put forth the effort
in the beginning
so that when James was playing the part
that he was feeling like he was
listening to something surrounding him
and it's not just one
sort of simple guitar sound.
00:11:42
There's a little guitar figure that plays
in the intro and the turnarounds,
and it comes a few times in the song,
that's what that track is.
00:11:49
And then we have
some delays here and reverb
that are set up to be sent to,
if so desired.
00:11:55
Then there's a guitar Bus ('gtr buss')
that these feed on 5-6.
00:12:00
This is the PSP Vintage Warmer,
I love this for guitar Buses.
00:12:05
It's a very useful
and powerful compressor.
00:12:07
It really helps in getting up
the average program level.
00:12:10
That's what it was designed for
and it is amazing at it.
00:12:13
This is that little keyboard,
we called it La Duca,
it's a funny little organ that I have
that was made in the late '60s
as a little student piano.
00:12:20
If you can find one, let me know.
I would love to have a second one.
00:12:24
Like I said, it enters at the chorus
and it plays the choruses,
a piece in the bridge, and so on.
00:12:28
And then we have a piano part
that comes in at the very end
which I have highlighted.
00:12:32
Those are routed to a Bus, 11-12.
00:12:36
The EQ should be flat. It is.
00:12:38
And then we come to James' lead vocal.
00:12:41
We will swap this compressor out,
but I just had this compressor on there
to give us a little bit more of a finished
feeling while we're listening to the song.
00:12:48
So you see that the track
is feeding Bus 7.
00:12:53
In the mixing architecture
that I'm setting up
I will send the Output of the track here
to this Bus,
and the compressor and EQ
will be placed on the 'vocal buss'.
00:13:03
And the reason I do that
is so that I have the opportunity
to automate the volume of the track
into the compressor if I so desire.
00:13:10
Like, if there's a real quiet
or intimate moment
and I want to get more level
into the compressor,
I like doing it that way.
00:13:18
You could Clip Gain the file up,
that works sometimes,
but I like to be able to manually ride
the level into the compressor.
00:13:28
We will do the actual overall
vocal automation and rides
on the 'vocal buss',
which is post-compression,
and that is what feeds
all these different effects
which are here,
and I'll go through that for you
when we get there.
00:13:42
And then,
I think we're down to the last
but not least,
which are all the harmony parts.
00:13:47
Here is a vocal reverb set up for them,
and they are assigned to Bus 13-14.
00:13:53
Here is that Bus,
no processing on it as of now.
00:13:57
So we kind of went over
the Mix Bus real quick.
00:13:59
Bus 71-72 sends over to this Auxiliary
Input that I have that says 'Meter'.
00:14:06
What I use that for is some VU meters
that I have set to -9.
00:14:12
Basically what I'm looking at,
the Pro Tools rig is calibrated at -18,
so by making this adjustment it basically
means that it's adjusted to -9 in a way.
00:14:21
And I have found through experimentation,
I've tried -6 as a reference level,
-12,
but I find that
when I mix into this
and I use this as sort of a little bit
of a visual reference
and sort of a thing to check,
that if I've got this up to about 0,
my program level,
I'm printing something that's pretty hot,
but it's not so hot that it doesn't leave
room for the mastering engineer,
it has dynamic content,
and it works really well for me
as a reference for metering.
00:15:02
And then following that
there is a Waves PAZ Analyzer.
00:15:08
One of the benefits of having the analyzer
after the meters being turned down
is that we're not feeding
a crazy amount of level into the analyzer.
00:15:22
So the frequency display
is visually in a more usable spot for me,
because if this was bypassed...
00:15:32
It gets up towards the top,
and especially if you're dealing with
really loud program material,
it's not as good of a visual reference.
00:15:39
So I have those there.
00:15:40
I use the VU meters
sort of in the beginning
when I'm establishing
my gain structure as a reference.
00:15:45
I'll probably check it at the end
just to know what's going on.
00:15:48
The reason I'm using
the peak-stop limiter
is to sort of help me
accumulate some volume,
but I'm using it at -0.50 dB
so that what I print over here
is not clipping the Output converter.
00:16:01
When you're clipping
the Output converter...
00:16:04
you know, it's not the end of the world,
but it's not the best sound.
00:16:09
You're putting yourself
in a dangerous zone, let's say.
00:16:11
We will see that this mix
is going to clip a little bit internally.
00:16:14
That's okay,
as long as it's not all the time
or too heavy,
as long as we don't really hear
an artifact from it.
00:16:21
I don't want to send this printed file
to the mastering engineer clipping,
I don't want to listen to it
clipping the Output converters.
00:16:29
We are in a day and age now
where volume is coming down,
which I'm really thankful for,
so that's what that is in place for.
00:16:38
Let's start getting into the mix.
00:16:40
Let's dig a little bit deeper
and get familiar with these elements
and make some choices.
00:16:44
My instincts tell me that I don't want to
use all the tracks that we have available
for things like the drums,
but let's kind of go through here
and see what we see.
00:16:52
So let's just look at the bass
real quick here.
00:16:55
We're just going to listen to each element
on its own real quick.
00:17:00
He starts out in the pre-chorus
playing high up on the neck,
and when the chorus comes, he goes down.
00:17:05
It's like he really settles and hits.
00:17:49
And I feel like I want to remove
this element here,
the one called 'Sauce',
because like I said, it's like
a secondary sort of amp simulation.
00:17:57
I think it just sort of
sounds a little soft.
00:17:59
Let's go boldly,
let's take it out of here.
00:18:01
The first thing we should do
is modify the Group
so we don't get a bunch
of annoying messages
telling us every time
when I change something
that there is something hidden
that's part of the Group.
00:18:11
Boom! Gone.
00:18:12
All right. Let's see about
balancing this real quick.
00:18:24
That's a good place to start
just while we're working here
with these other elements.
00:18:27
I'm going to mute
the elements that we're not
going to listen to right away.
00:18:35
The programmed elements are very...
00:18:37
There's a lot of them that make up
the sound of the programmed elements,
but it's used very quietly.
00:18:43
It's a very complicated picture
that's painted with all of it.
00:18:46
We'll probably do a little bit
of rebalancing internally,
but it's kind of set close to the way
I want to feel it anyway,
but let's just sort of highlight it
and focus on it for a moment
because it won't be that loud
in the mix ultimately.
00:19:14
I'll just kind of skip ahead
and show you some different parts of it.
00:19:30
That stuff is performed.
00:19:32
Ian Fitchuk played drums on the project.
00:19:34
He did a little bit of stuff,
I think he did this tambourine
that's here,
and he definitely played
this bit of stuff that's in the bridge.
00:19:47
The snares and the tambourine
that play the backbeat
were played at Blackbird.
00:19:51
We used the chamber,
which you can kind of hear,
and then there's a big marching drum
that he played with a mallet.
00:19:56
The rest of this stuff was organized
with Eric Darken and myself,
he is a fantastic percussionist
here in Nashville.
00:20:10
Okay, so you got to hear
the programming a little bit.
00:20:12
Now, a lot of times
I use the Massenburg EQ
on a lot of things.
00:20:17
You'll see it is going to make
its way onto a lot of stuff.
00:20:19
I like it for some corrective EQ
because it's a little bit more surgical.
00:20:24
By saying it doesn't have a personality,
I don't mean that as a knock.
00:20:27
It doesn't have, like,
a significant color or flavor,
which I like that about that.
00:20:32
It sort of maintains the beauty
of the sound that is recorded.
00:20:36
It does have a quality to it
because of how it is designed
and how great and accurate it is,
and the sort of double-sampling math
and everything that's kind of
going on inside it.
00:20:46
To me, it almost makes things
that it's put on sound better,
more focused, more forward,
more kind of put together,
so that's why I use a lot of it.
00:20:55
It has a very unifying quality sound,
but I use it for small,
corrective EQ gestures.
00:21:02
I don't feel like that's what we need
on the programming Bus right now.
00:21:06
I'm going to put a compressor on here
that I like sometimes
for the parallel Bus,
it's the Manley Variable Mu.
00:21:14
This is a really good emulation
of the actual unit,
and what I like about this
is it has a Mix knob.
00:21:20
Not always do I like to do
parallel compression this way,
but I like this compressor
and it will work well for this situation.
00:21:26
Let's sort of experiment
with an EQ as well.
00:21:31
I like the high frequency on this thing.
00:21:33
So we got that in place.
00:21:35
Let me make an overall Group.
00:21:43
I'm turning these all up so that I can get
a little bit more compression to happen,
and then I'll turn either the Output
of the compressor down, or the Bus.
00:22:47
Cleaning up a little bit of the midrange,
and giving it a little bit of bump
on the top and bottom.
00:23:25
I'm just sort of setting this up.
00:23:26
I had to turn the Threshold
all the way down to get it to activate.
00:23:29
I sped the Recovery up,
the Release time,
because there is so much, like,
detail and stuff going on there
and I don't really want it
compressing it for too long,
I just want to control
the transients a little bit.
00:23:40
And I sped the Attack up to kind of
grab things a little bit quicker,
and the Mix knob
feels pretty good right there.
00:23:53
It really brings that kick drum forward
and all the sort of low end stuff.
00:23:57
I'll bypass this EQ real quick.
00:24:10
It might be a little bit loud
for what we want in the end,
but that's okay, we'll get there.
00:24:14
Let's listen to the programming
with the bass for a second.
00:24:35
Something I want to show you real quick.
00:24:37
This was something that I actually
determined when I was setting this up.
00:24:40
The way I was hearing the bass,
I needed to flip the polarity of it.
00:24:44
This happens a lot with...
00:24:47
...guitars and basses and stuff,
just because
when you put a different pedal in line,
sometimes it flips the polarity of it,
so it is something you kind of
constantly have to be paying attention to
and be aware of and checking it.
00:25:02
Now, what I mean by the polarity
of the bass on the Group
versus the individual elements,
these are both set to be in agreement,
so let's listen if I change one.
00:25:22
They are obviously not perfectly in phase,
but they're in good agreement together,
so the difference here is that
the bass is pushing the speaker.
00:25:31
The attack amplitude,
the beginning of the waveform
is pushing the speaker,
not pulling the speaker.
00:25:38
It helps present the sound
and clarify it and put it
in front of the speaker.
00:25:44
The polarity, the phase relationship
between the elements is important.
00:25:48
Obviously, on something
that's multi-miced,
or multi-inputs
that are combining for a sound,
they have to be in agreement,
but then, that sound also needs to work
in the correct polarity.
00:26:00
Now, it's a choice.
It's not an absolute.
00:26:02
Not everything has to be working
to push the speaker.
00:26:06
It's not a hard and fast rule.
00:26:08
For me, predominantly,
that's the sound that I like.
00:26:11
I don't want my bass instrument
and my kick drum instrument,
working together in tandem at times,
to be hitting at the same time
and one be pushing the speaker
and one be pulling the speaker,
because it kind of has
a nullifying effect.
00:26:27
And unless they have the exact same
relationship every time they're played,
that relationship of push and pull
is going to change
and you will chase your tail
trying to figure out
how to get things to sit properly
and to EQ properly
and get their low end to glue together,
so this is something
that I care a lot about
and I'm kind of a little bit
of a fanatic about it.
00:26:49
Now I'm going to change the polarity to
as we had it recorded.
00:27:06
Sitting here what I'm hearing is that
the bass comes forward and gets deeper,
and it's working better.
00:27:12
Hopefully you can kind of hear
the same thing.
00:27:14
We'll come back and review that
once we have the drums in
and I can give you an example
of what I was just talking about,
about the push and pull of the speaker.
00:27:21
A lot of times I use a Distressor
on the bass,
which I think is great.
00:27:25
I feel like trying something
a little bit different today.
00:27:28
What I'm trying to control here
is a little bit of how dynamic it is
because we didn't go crazy
compressing it to "tape," Pro Tools.
00:27:37
This is kind of a clean bass part,
so I really want it to be very articulate.
00:27:42
But the thing that I'm trying to
manage the most
is the dynamic of it,
so I'm going to go and use something
that's a little more
tried-and-true for me.
00:27:51
This is similar to a Distressor,
I like to use it on bass.
00:27:55
Let's set this up.
00:27:56
I'm going to change the Ratio to 3:1
so it's a little bit lower.
00:27:59
I'm not trying to blow it up, I'm just
trying to get a little bit of control.
00:28:02
Let's adjust that. I'm probably going to
need to manage the Input and Output
to get the gain set right,
and then I'll adjust
the Attack and Release
so that it's not hitting it too hard
and compressing it for too long.
00:28:29
The first thing I'm doing
is adjusting the Attack time
so that it's letting enough
of the transient through
but it's grabbing it and settling in
and kind of helping with that dynamic
without softening it too much
and taking the articulation away.
00:28:54
On purpose I set the Attack
a little too fast.
00:28:57
So what you hear is
you hear the articulation,
you hear the compressor kick in where
it gets a little quiet after the attack,
and then the sustain gets kind of loud.
00:29:11
It's kind of pumping
a little bit too much,
and I want to take it the other way
so that once the compressor kicks in
it's going to sit on it too long
and then in the next attack
it is going to be damaged
by how long it's taking to release.
00:29:35
So now we'll find the middle ground
that sounds really pleasing
to the rhythm of the song
and the tone of the instrument
and the way I want to feel it,
and to make sure that this dynamic control
that I'm giving it is flattering
but also transparent, you know?
That it just sounds like a well-played,
well-recorded instrument.
00:29:52
I mean, it is well-recorded,
it's just, now we're finessing it
into the place we really want it to sit.
00:30:18
Cool! That feels good to go.
00:30:20
Let's now jump over to our drums
which come in in the second chorus.
00:30:25
Let's listen to only the drums
for a moment,
let's throw in the parallel compression,
talk maybe a little bit more about the EQ
that we're doing on the overall thing.
00:30:32
Before I get too deep into deciding
what the drum balances are,
I'm going to kind of comb through this
and see if I actually want to use
all these tracks.
00:30:41
For me,
having fewer mics to create the sound
helps it be more defined.
00:30:47
The more microphones you have,
the less defined it is.
00:30:52
It's a little bit washier and softer,
and it's also much harder to focus
and combine the different
elements of space
with a lot of mics.
00:31:05
You know, when we record drums, we put
a close mic on just about every element,
and then we also capture
these ambient pictures,
but you can easily, easily overdo it,
and good mic placement
on the drums is critical.
00:31:19
Okay. Like I was saying,
there are two Buses for the drums.
00:31:22
They're going to get the same EQ,
but we're going to make Bus number 2
our more compressed parallel sound.
00:31:32
I like the 33609 for drums.
00:31:34
It's great for, like,
slide guitar parts, piano.
00:31:38
It was created as a Mix Bus compressor.
00:31:41
In this case we're going to turn
the Threshold way down.
00:31:46
It currently is the compressor
that we have on the Mix Bus.
00:31:49
Maybe we'll change that,
maybe we'll go with an SSL,
but for right now,
we will try this on the drums.
00:31:56
I'll turn the Recovery down a little bit,
I'll use a fast Release,
just a little bit of Gain bump there,
and there we're going to turn
the Ratio up.
00:32:03
Certainly for this parallel compressed
sound that's sort of sticky,
a little blown up aggressive sound
that we want,
we need something
that's a bit higher Ratio.
00:32:12
Let's see what that gives us.
Let's turn off the uncompressed Bus.
00:32:30
I tend to like 3:1.
00:32:31
It's a good average between
enough compression and not too much.
00:32:35
Now we got something going on there.
00:32:39
Let's listen to these elements.
00:32:41
We've got multiple mics on several things:
we've got a kick drum mic that's in
and a kick drum mic that's out,
and then this kick
which says 'Kick NEVE' is...
00:32:52
When we were recording I wasn't feeling
enough sort of gut punch on the kick drum,
so I took the output of the mic pre
and EQ that's on the kick drum,
it went to tape, and then I multed it
into another mic pre and EQ
and kind of pushed
a little bit of sound on that
to kind of get it to crunch.
00:33:08
I'll just show you what that sounds like.
00:33:14
When I say crunch
I don't mean that it's distorted,
it just sounds a little more saturated
than this mic.
00:33:24
Right?
It has a little bit more tone and sustain
to kind of fill this out.
00:33:40
I don't remember exactly
what this drum setup was.
00:33:43
Sometimes it sounds
like it could have been...
00:33:47
sometimes I put a larger
sort of marching drum,
a resonant drum in front of
the kick drum that is being played
and mic that.
00:33:55
That maybe what it is.
00:34:02
It kind of feels like that to me.
00:34:04
Anyways,
you're definitely hearing
the outer head of the kick drum.
00:34:08
There's a lot of sustain and warmth to it
that these three mics add up.
00:34:21
In this case we will keep all these
because they kind of make
a pretty complete kick drum sound.
00:34:26
I don't think any one element
stands on its own,
so let's check out the snare drum.
00:34:36
We have two microphones on the top.
00:34:39
One is a 57
and one is a 451.
00:34:42
They are taped together
so that the capsules
are at the same distance
from the snares
so they are very phase-coherent.
00:34:49
The reasoning there is,
when the drum is played more delicately
the 451
gives you a little bit more detail
and a little bit more capture,
and if the drum is hit hard
then you can kind of rely on the 57
a little bit more.
00:35:04
So let's see what we want to do
as a blend here.
00:35:17
I like this one.
00:35:28
I don't feel like we need this mic,
so we will get rid of this one.
00:35:32
I feel like this first
snare drum mic is fine.
00:35:53
I don't really feel like we need
the snare drum mic underneath.
00:35:56
It's not being played so hard
that we really need that,
and...
00:36:00
...if we were to use it,
because of the microphone
that is underneath the snare drum...
00:36:05
You have the mic on top,
you have the mic underneath,
you need to correct their polarity
so they are together,
so they are seeing the drum
the same way,
but it can be tricky with the microphone
that's underneath the snare
because it's very close to the kick drum.
00:36:19
You can have a microphone like that
in agreement with both elements,
so if you're going to use
an under snare mic
in a mix and so forth,
you need to gate it
so that you're not getting that leakage
and it's only appearing
where the snare drum is being played.
00:36:39
I don't think it's necessary
in this particular scenario,
so we won't use it.
00:36:44
I don't know if there's even
a hi-hat played.
00:36:46
Let's listen.
00:37:03
Okay, so it's all ride cymbal
and I don't know that we're going to
need it in the picture.
00:37:07
We'll hang onto it
in case we need it
to sort of help paint the image,
give it a little bit of leakage,
but we've got these tom mics that
are probably going to help us do that.
00:37:16
So we have a floor tom and a rack tom.
00:37:18
I pan things audience perspective,
so that's why the hi-hat
is over to the right
and the floor tom is over to the left.
00:37:26
So, I like it that way,
maybe because I did a lot of live sound.
00:37:30
When I'm painting the picture
of a performance of a record
and I'm presenting it,
I like to visualize it
with the ensemble in front of me
and I want to hear the drums
the way I'm seeing the drums.
00:37:41
Now, that assumes
that it's a right-handed drummer,
but
there seems to be a habit of
panning it drummer's perspective,
which is more often
than the other way, but anyway,
that's what's going on there.
00:37:52
We've got the toms
and we'll quickly listen to those,
which are going to be playing
in this same chorus.
00:38:13
Okay. So we have multiple overheads.
00:38:17
Here we have...
00:38:18
this is a mono overhead,
and then we have the stereo overhead.
00:38:21
Let me see if I can tell you what we did.
00:38:24
It's been a minute.
00:38:43
It seems like it's an R88 over the kit.
00:38:56
Let's listen to the whole drum kit.
00:39:13
Let's turn off...
00:39:17
...these elements
that we haven't listened to yet.
00:39:19
So we have the kick drum mics
that we've chosen,
the snare drum mic
—I'll probably turn that up—
the floor toms,
and then we have these three overheads.
00:39:28
We're just going to check those out.
00:40:01
I'm hearing a resonance in the drums
that I would probably want to EQ out,
so instead of doing that,
I'm going to do that.
00:40:08
All right, so we got some close rooms,
let's hear what those sound like.
00:40:19
I like those.
00:40:20
They are a pair of ribbon mics
spread pretty far
in front of the drum kit,
down low, I believe.
00:40:26
We'll just double check.
00:40:31
Actually,
that's what these might be.
00:40:35
Let's listen.
00:40:40
Yeah, they sound farther away,
so those are the microphones down
and this is something
closer to the drum kit.
00:40:46
I like that.
00:40:47
Now, here's another mono drum mic.
00:41:00
It's adding a nice tone.
00:41:02
This is the chamber.
00:41:17
Just adding a little bit of detail
and the sustain of a more ambient space,
and then we have one more.
00:41:42
These two microphones, this 'Room 87'
and this 'Mono Drum'
are doing a similar thing tonally.
00:41:49
I feel like the 'Room 87'
is giving us something
a little bit clearer,
so let's just switch back and forth.
00:42:08
I still like that.
We'll just use a little bit of it.
00:42:16
Let's modify...
00:42:21
We're going to do this Group,
we're going to modify the 'Drums' Group.
00:42:28
I'm taking out the 'Mid Rooms'
and the 'Mono OH 77',
and the 'Snare Alt' and 'Snare Bottom'.
00:42:40
We need to also modify the 'Snare' Group.
00:42:51
Boom.
00:42:53
Got our drums down.
00:43:30
I like my drums to have
a nice stereo image,
but I'm going to bring it in a little bit
just because of the...
00:43:36
the guitar parts that I know
I'm going to have very wide
and sort of spacious.
00:43:41
I want the drums to feel
a little bit more in the middle.
00:44:00
This rack tom has quite a lot
of open ring in it.
00:44:03
Let's sort of address that real quick.
00:44:40
That helps it a little bit.
00:44:42
Let's put a little bit
of articulation and point on it.
00:44:52
Which is tricky because
it was played with a mallet.
00:46:10
I'm just EQ'ing one side
so that I'm very distinctly
hearing the EQ,
just kind of get
a little bit of that out of there.
00:46:18
I'm going to do a little bit
of high-pass as well.
00:46:35
And once I've got that established,
I'm going to copy it
by dragging it over to the other side.
00:47:07
I'm just balancing my kick drum elements.
00:47:16
I'm going to go over here and look at
what my kick drum is doing.
00:47:27
It seems to be getting up to what might be
an appropriate volume to build off of.
00:47:32
Okay, so let's put a compressor
on the snare drum.
00:47:34
I'm going to speed the Release up
so that it's not sitting...
00:47:38
like, not compressing
for too long of the duration.
00:48:29
Okay, so I had to bring the Input way up
to get it to go into compression,
so I've got to back the Output down
considerably.
00:48:47
I'm just trying to get
a little bit of dynamic control.
00:48:50
This isn't helping the attack
sound a little bit brighter
because I'm letting
a certain amount of it through.
00:48:55
I just want a little bit more
articulation.
00:49:23
And the sort of very warm tone
that the drum has, which is nice,
I'm kind of controlling it a little more.
00:49:28
I'm kind of, like, pulling it back in,
letting the transient speak.
00:49:31
I mean, it does lose
a little bit of the sparkle,
but I'm okay sacrificing
a little bit of that
to have a more dynamically
controlled and shaped sound.
00:49:39
Now, as you can see,
the polarity is flipped on the snare drum
because if we listen to the kick
and snare together...
00:50:06
I feel like the snare drum is reflected
kind of combined with the kick drum
a little bit better.
00:50:15
It sounds like this mic that is
on the inside of the kick drum
needs a little bit of compression itself
because sometimes when it's hit harder
it sounds very aggressive and pokes out.
00:50:25
Let's try this dbx 160 for that.
00:50:29
We don't need a huge Ratio,
we don't need a lot of compression,
just a little bit of control.
00:51:06
We don't need a lot
of these 'Chamber' mics,
but what's happening is
I'm turning them down to such a place
that the fader resolution
is going to be pretty poor down here
if I want to do any sort of
automation on them.
00:51:16
Maybe I won't,
but I'm just mentioning
that what I'm going to do is,
I have these down at,
like, almost -30,
so what I'm going to do
is go up here to my plug-in,
and let's turn this down
a little bit.
00:51:29
We'll just turn it down -18,
and I can just drag this over there
and repeat it
so I can bring this up close to 20 dB.
00:51:46
I've turned these down to a place
where I feel like it's combining well
the way I want to hear it,
contributing to the drum sound,
and if I do want to do some automation,
the fader resolution
is at someplace decently...
00:51:56
because if it's down here
and I'm making a little move,
it's like 10 dB,
versus here,
if I make a little move,
it's like 3 or 4, you know?
so I will have a better opportunity
for control and finesse.
00:00:00
We've been fooling around with that
stuff, I think we got a good start.
00:00:02
Let's actually now listen to
the main deal in the song
which is this beautiful guitar.
00:00:15
I turned off the second part real quick,
so what we're listening to is this.
00:00:33
I'm going to listen to the vocal
a little bit too while I'm doing this.
00:01:00
I just want to check in
with the vocal real quick
just to see what the balance and
relationship is going to be between them,
because they are the song.
00:01:08
Obviously we need to do a little bit of
treatment to the vocal, we'll get there.
00:01:11
I want to just spend
a few minutes more on the guitar.
00:01:13
It's nice that we have this secondary amp
with the effect that I was talking about,
kind of creating some space.
00:01:19
I think I want to add
a little bit of reverb to it.
00:01:21
I want to use...
00:01:24
...the BX20.
00:01:43
That's sending off that second amp.
00:01:45
Let's hear it just on the main amp.
00:02:02
I like sending it off the effect amp
because it's a softer sound,
it's a little bit quieter when he's
moving his hands on the strings.
00:02:10
We're not going to be sending
that to the reverb,
because if you heard it
there for a second,
it was like you suddenly get this big,
loud bloom of reverb, which I don't want.
00:02:17
I'm just trying to paint a little bit more
of atmosphere here.
00:02:56
It's pretty subtle but it's just adding
a little bit of glue.
00:03:01
But now, let's see
what it's like if we add
a little bit of delay to this main part.
00:03:07
We've got 21.
00:03:09
Let's make it kind of soupy and vibey.
00:03:27
Our tempo is 74.
00:03:50
I'm going to try something
that's half as much.
00:04:12
I like what that's doing.
00:04:13
I'm going to turn the reverb off
and just let you hear that delay.
00:04:19
Very short, it's just kind of putting it
over there on the other side.
00:04:25
Rolling a little bit of the top end off so
it's just kind of making it a warm sound.
00:04:34
Let's quickly check the balance
of the secondary guitar.
00:04:44
That...
00:04:45
I definitely want to kind of get it
participating in this stereo field.
00:04:50
I have this set up to have reverb
on the delay that I'm sending
from this guitar.
00:04:56
Let's A/B that versus sending it
off the effect amp.
00:05:14
By sending the reverb off the effect amp
it's just kind of giving us
a too undefined...
00:05:19
I like it happening the way it is
as opposed to from the delay.
00:05:22
And we got this other delay
available to us here.
00:05:25
What is that? Bus 29.
00:05:26
Let's send this to Bus 29.
00:05:38
Let's try a different delay,
let's try something
that is a little 'tapier'.
00:05:43
A different vibe here.
00:05:54
I'm turning the Wet Solo on
so it's not a parallel sound.
00:05:57
There's no dry signal in it,
I just want the reverb Return,
so that's the first thing I'm doing.
00:06:02
That's something to pay attention to,
like, the AKG,
it comes up factory with Wet Solo.
00:06:08
The Space Echo does not,
so it's something to kind of be aware of.
00:06:12
If I was putting the Space Echo
directly on a track
and I still wanted to hear some
of the dry signal, that would be great,
but I'm using this simply
as an effect Send and Return.
00:06:46
The Space Echos are like multi-tap delays.
00:06:49
They have a tape loop, they have
heads in different positions,
and so the different mode selections
give you different combinations.
00:06:55
I'm kind of just listening
to see maybe what's interesting,
because not only do they come back
at different times
but they come back at different volumes,
and you get these kind of, like,
weird, cool rhythmic things that happen,
so I'm just sort of seeing
what's available.
00:07:31
In my mind, it seems like
it's going to play well
with the recorded amp delay effect.
00:07:37
Let's see.
00:07:49
It kind of helps give it a little bit
of stereo interplay and life,
more than just in the one spot
that it's sitting.
00:07:56
Let's see if we send that delay to the
reverb, if that does anything for us.
00:08:07
I don't like it, it makes it undefined.
00:08:09
It's not needed or useful.
00:08:11
I'm making some decisions really fast,
I think you should do that.
00:08:15
I'm kind of going a little slow because
I'm trying to think about explaining
every little single thing
I'm thinking and doing,
but if we can make decisions
quickly and move along
we kind of keep up
with the speed of creativity.
00:08:27
Sometimes you have to go slow
and figure some things out
and work it out,
but don't get hung up.
00:08:34
When you sort of do the majority
of the problem-solving
and you feel that at least you've got it
at a manageable place,
move on and do something else.
00:08:41
You will benefit
from not overfocusing on it,
and you'll start to think about
other things, including other things.
00:08:47
Often the way I approach
making records and mixing
and being creative is,
obviously I'm paying attention to
what needs to happen to move forward,
but I'm only
dealing with things
in sort of a secondary fashion
when I have a feeling,
when it's sort of raising its hand,
or waving a flag and saying,
"Ah, I don't feel right.
It's not the right thing,"
and then I'll go address that.
00:09:12
So I like to try to keep
that mindset going when I'm mixing,
just like, "Okay, that seems
sorted enough."
I made the improvement
that I felt I needed to make on it,
so I'm moving on.
00:09:39
Cool.
00:09:41
It seems like that delay
is a little bright,
so I will roll some top end off of it.
00:09:46
The Intensity is the Feedback
on the Space Echo,
so I'll just turn up a little bit
of repeat and see what happens.
00:09:55
I'm going to turn the Reverb up a bit
and see what happens.
00:10:09
Cool with a lot of reverb on it.
00:10:10
I'm going to have to turn it down
in the blend,
but that's okay.
00:10:14
It's kind of cool.
The tone of that reverb is really cool.
00:10:16
As it sustains,
the way the frequencies change,
it becomes smaller in the tail.
00:10:20
It's kind of a neat thing.
00:10:22
I feel like it matches the tone
and the brightness
and how pokey this part is,
that we're pairing it with.
00:10:28
Let's jump onto the vocal.
Let's work on that
because these are the stars of the song
and that's all that's really going on
for the first minute or so.
00:10:37
Just a little side thought for you:
when you're mixing songs like this
where elements come in slowly
and where you're going to have
something big and dynamic
happen eventually in the arrangement,
you've got to be careful
to not make
these types of elements
—like the vocal and the guitars— too loud,
because what's going to happen is,
if I've got them loud
and I've got my Mix Bus processing
participating too much
when those drums and the bass kick in,
they're going to obliterate it
and it's all going to come up hard.
00:11:11
I have learned that lesson in the past
where I'm feeling really good
about some things,
and then we have these
other things that come in
that need to be strong,
that need to be rhythmic and punchy,
and they just totally blow up
the work I've done before.
00:11:25
So I'm thinking of that
as I'm getting ready to start to put
these elements together.
00:11:30
As I start to do that,
I'm going to go quickly check and see,
before I get too far down
the road on these,
that the volume that I have these at
and the volume that I will want to pair
the drums and bass with them,
I will take a look
and see what's going on,
and listen to what's going on
with my Mix Bus.
00:11:47
I'll make sure that I'm not going to
screw things up for myself.
00:11:51
So,
this kind of song,
even though in some ways
it's in sheep's clothing,
it can be a little dangerous.
00:11:59
Okay. So this is the vocal track.
00:12:01
We're not going to keep
this compressor here, as I said before.
00:12:04
Let's just start out with it sending
to the 'vocal buss'.
00:12:09
Let's pull up an EQ.
00:12:11
A lot of times I like using a Neve EQ
on the vocal.
00:12:16
It was recorded with a Neve pre.
00:12:18
The microphone that I used on it
was my Sony C-37A,
which is a tube mic.
00:12:24
It's, like, the Japanese answer
in the '60s to a U47.
00:12:28
We used an LA-2A as the compressor.
00:12:30
So it was a Neve 1081 actually, no EQ in,
to the Sony C-37A,
LA-2A,
to tape.
00:12:38
So now we're going to see about actually
putting some Neve EQ on it.
00:12:43
I have a Blue Stripe 1176
that I love for vocals when I'm mixing.
00:12:50
We're mixing all ITB, so because that's
kind of my go-to in the analog world,
I'm going to try the CLA,
and I'm going to try the Universal Audio
and see which one I like better.
00:13:01
Both of them sound really close
to what I have.
00:13:03
It makes me think about plug-ins
versus their analog equivalent,
what they're emulating.
00:13:09
Not all things are created equally, okay?
Some plug-ins are great emulations,
very usable in very much the same way
that their analog equivalents are,
but they're not always the same thing.
00:13:21
When you're mixing In The Box,
like we're doing today,
they are almost...
00:13:26
Mixing on an analog desk
with all-analog gear,
or in hybrid,
or all In The Box,
they're a little bit different animals.
00:13:33
You can't just think that you're
going to use the same tool
in the analog realm
as you might In The Box.
00:13:39
I don't think mixing In The Box
or mixing in a hybrid or analog,
that one is better than the other.
00:13:45
The 1176 emulation that I have
that's, you know, the UA Bomb Factory,
which every one of you are using,
it behaves very similarly
to its analog equivalent
but it's not the same thing.
00:13:57
It's not always going to give you
the same result,
so you need to almost know
their personalities
in the different realms
in which you are using them.
00:14:05
So let's see if we can get one to work.
00:14:28
He sings very quietly in the verse,
so let's go to the chorus
and see about getting...
00:14:32
see what we can have
as a compressor setting.
00:14:49
All right, that's something that can work.
00:14:51
Putting the vocal in with the guitar,
the guitar is, like, very loud.
00:14:57
I think it's too loud,
so let's just turn this down a little bit,
I'm going to turn down its friend.
00:15:03
I'll go back and sort of
fine-tune them in a minute,
but they're a bit loud.
00:15:38
I just want to try something.
00:15:40
I feel like there is such a wide
dynamic range in what's going on
with what the recorded vocal is doing
and how it's hitting the compressor.
00:15:48
I want to put, like,
a tape emulation on the track
just to see if it helps glue it together
a little bit for me.
00:15:54
Some of these are under Harmonic.
00:16:10
So what I'm doing is,
there are different Tape Formulas here,
they have different sounds,
and there is the Tape Speed too,
which will also have a different sound.
00:16:18
The way that they capture
the frequencies and play it back,
they are different
for different Tape Formulas.
00:16:23
The tape machine needed to be adjusted
to kind of give you a playback
that was representative
of the information you put on it,
but in that, they all have
sort of an individual sound,
so I'm just kind of seeing
what these different Tape Formulas
sound like,
see if any of them are useful.
00:16:59
Well, I think my instinct is right about
this being maybe a useful approach.
00:17:04
I was hearing something, I was wondering
if I could demonstrate it to you
by watching the meter.
00:17:09
With the tape emulation,
the compressor is responding
a little bit better to my ear
by having that additional sound
and saturation.
00:17:17
It's controlling the sound
a little bit more evenly,
it's a smoother sound.
00:17:21
So watch as I bypass
the tape machine in and out
that the compressor
is doing a better, active job,
and also listen to it,
but you want to have the meter up there
as also a little confirmation.
00:17:56
Just with the J37 on there
it's focusing the sound,
pushing it forward,
the compressor is liking it better.
00:18:03
Yeah, let's go back
and do a little bit of EQ.
00:18:07
I'm just kind of starting
with a general setting I know I like.
00:18:44
Okay, that's very cool,
I like that quite a lot.
00:18:47
So what I'm doing EQ-wise
is I'm opening
the top end up a little bit.
00:18:52
There's a very strong midrange present,
and this is, like,
fixed at 12 kHz, it's a shelf,
so I'm just kind of lifting the air
and the breath,
opening the voice up a little bit
because I didn't EQ it to tape.
00:19:03
I'm kind of listening around for one
of these midrange boost bands
to give it a little bit more
forward articulation,
so I'll switch that back and forth
in a second.
00:19:12
And the bottom is a shelf,
and I'm kind of wanting to lift
the low frequency,
the chesty sound of the voice,
and lift it up.
00:19:22
I'm doing this to shape the sound
of the voice a little bit,
but also, by pushing the low
frequencies up a bit like this,
it's also making the compressor react
and sit on the sound a little bit more,
giving me a little bit more
dynamic control,
so I'm doing it for the sound
of the voice, the tone,
but then also to sort of make
the compressor behave in a certain way.
00:19:45
And then, because this
low frequency thing is a shelf,
I need to clean up the bottom end.
00:19:49
I don't want it to be too rumbly
or too many plosives
and stuff from the voice.
00:19:53
Let's listen again.
00:19:54
Let's switch the midrange and see which
is a better choice for the articulation.
00:20:12
The 3.2 is a little bit duller
and it's kind of bringing
sort of a nasally,
sort of midrangey distorted quality
out in the voice.
00:20:20
It's not that flattering.
00:20:22
4.8 is just kind of opening things up
and putting the vocal forward.
00:20:26
So now that I've got it set, I will...
00:20:28
Let's do this,
let's leave this guy out here,
bring this up.
00:20:34
We can observe how the EQ
is influencing the compressor
while I'm taking it in and out
and listening to the EQ change.
00:20:50
So you can see when the EQ is in
what I was talking about,
about the low end.
00:20:54
It's sort of keeping the compressor
in compression longer
because of the tone and the note
that's sustaining when he's singing,
so it's helping with the dynamic.
00:21:02
So we got that stuff.
00:21:03
I don't feel like we need to do
anymore processing at the moment
in terms of, like, EQ
and compression and tonal shaping.
00:21:11
Let's add some of the effects
I have set up.
00:21:13
This 'vocal dolby' thing
is to add just a little bit more
brightness and articulation
and a sort of sturdy,
forward feeling to the voice.
00:21:21
The arrangement is really sparse
so we may not need this.
00:21:23
Sometimes it's really helpful
when the music is dense
to make sure that the vocal
stays focused forward.
00:21:28
I'm achieving that by using
an Aphex Aural Exciter
instead of a Dolby A unit.
00:21:33
A Dolby A unit was a process in which
the analog signal was dynamically
frequency-expanded
to record it onto tape that way,
and then it was decoded
to sort of turn that hyped
high frequency stuff down,
and the subsequent result
was the tape hiss and the noise floor
was also turned down on playback
so we got cleaner-sounding
analog recordings.
00:21:54
This does a similar thing because it's,
like, exciting the upper frequencies.
00:21:58
I'm sending a lot of compression to it.
00:22:01
This is on Bus 22 right here.
00:22:04
We're going to turn it up.
00:22:27
Without it, in the upper midrange,
it sounds a little hollow.
00:22:30
This is kind of filling in a little bit
of a hole there in the upper midrange,
it's just kind of making a nice addition.
00:22:48
I'm being kind of aggressive
with the signal
in terms of the compression
that I'm sending into it.
00:22:53
I don't want another element that has
too much dynamics in it for the voice,
so I'm just kind of smashing it
and compartmentalizing it,
sending it to the Exciter.
00:23:08
I've got a de-esser after it
so that when it's hyping up
the really high sizzly frequencies
that are going on in the voice,
that it's not overdoing it,
that it's not overcontributing to that,
so I got a de-esser knocking it down.
00:23:19
I don't yet feel like James' vocal
needs a de-esser put on it.
00:23:23
So far, I'm happy
with what's going on there.
00:23:25
Okay, so then the next thing I want to do
is there is a MicroShift.
00:23:31
Just a little bit of pitch widening,
a little bit of detuning
that widens the pitch center
of the vocal
just to give it
a little bit of thickening.
00:23:39
Let's sort of check that out,
and that is on this Bus.
00:24:13
It kind of creates
a little bit more texture
and spreads the vocal out a little bit.
00:24:18
It just makes it feel a little bit richer.
00:24:20
Let's see if we detune it
a little bit more.
00:24:32
Right about there feels good,
just a little bit of detuning.
00:24:34
We're not trying to make it
too wide of a thing.
00:24:37
When I did it really wide
it didn't sound very pleasing.
00:24:46
And then this is where you focus
the frequencies.
00:24:48
It's focused in the lower,
more tonal part of his voice
where the fundamental notes are.
00:25:01
Right in there it feels pretty warm,
so, okay, moving along.
00:25:04
The next thing we have
is a bit of delay.
00:25:07
I have two delays set up.
00:25:09
You know, I've pulled this in
from sort of a common template,
so, as you may see me
mix more than one song,
you're going to see me
starting with a similar approach.
00:25:17
It doesn't mean that I'm going to
necessarily use it
the same way every time
on every song,
but it's there, it's available to me,
it's set up so that I can
check it out and be creative.
00:25:26
It's a way to sort of speed up
the creativity.
00:25:28
We'll turn this one off for the moment.
We'll just actually do it this way.
00:25:32
And that's sending off 23.
00:25:46
That sounds a little too distinct.
00:25:48
I'm going to go to a Space Echo,
it's a little bit softer
of a delay sound.
00:25:57
The reason that I'm going to experiment
around and look for different...
00:26:01
They call it Style.
00:26:02
I want to make sure that we give James
the best style possible.
00:26:05
But basically what it is is,
all these different types,
these different echo emulations
have different frequency responses
so that the echo is going to
present itself in different ways
and you're going to notice it
at different times based on the frequency.
00:26:17
Even though the actual time
may be all the same,
if it's 100 ms,
it's going to feel different
in the way that the frequencies respond
to that numerical value.
00:26:52
Okay, so I kind of went
through them quickly.
00:26:54
The Tube Tape one is the one
that it feels like it thickens it
without it sounding
like a distinct delay,
and it's also not...
00:27:03
It sounds like it's enhancing
the vocal and thickening it,
it's not...
00:27:07
Some of the other ones
that we went across,
like the Cheap Tape,
because I think it's emulating
cassette tape,
it's a very limited frequency response
and it was just sounding...
00:27:19
It was kind of muddling that midrange
that we are sort of helping
with the 'dolby',
the MicroShift to kind of
thicken it and widen it.
00:27:28
It was sort of working against us
in that way.
00:27:41
Cool, it's giving it this nice
little thickening sound.
00:27:43
Let's see what this other delay could be.
00:28:12
That dotted 16th
sounds like it could be useful,
so let's kind of dial this in
a little bit more.
00:28:17
I feel like I want a little bit more...
00:28:21
...regeneration, more repeats.
00:28:23
Let's check out our Style.
00:28:50
So the Cheap Tape here
kind of sounds cool.
00:28:54
Just maybe in a small measure later on.
00:29:03
Um, maybe not.
00:29:27
I'm torn, I'm just going to
put it on Tube Tape
and we will leave it
hanging out for later.
00:29:32
So we're supposed to get
to some reverb.
00:29:36
One thing I do sometimes is
I have two reverbs,
but I send to the second one discreetly
off of the MicroShift.
00:29:44
So let's turn that up first.
00:29:46
We've got the AKG sitting here,
let's see what we think of that.
00:30:02
I don't like it.
00:30:05
I'll try this.
00:30:23
That's kind of cool.
00:30:24
I get a sense of space
but it's very transparent,
it feels very natural
to what's going on,
so I'm kind of digging that.
00:30:42
I'm not really feeling like there's
an abundance of reverb right now,
but it's creating a little bit of space
around the vocal.
00:30:58
And because we're sending it
off the MicroShift
it's a little bit of a chorus effect
that's going there,
so it makes it even blurrier
and kind of swim around
a little bit in a cool way.
00:31:07
Let's see if we want to use
the same sort of reverb
directly on the vocal.
Probably not.
00:31:13
Since we've chosen that
for that other sound,
let's switch this up.
00:31:17
Let's try the UA 140.
00:31:30
So what this is here, A, B and C
are three different plates
that were emulated
and modeled for this plug-in.
00:31:39
An actual reverb plate,
it's a physical thing.
00:31:43
They all sound different.
00:31:46
There are some that are really sweet
and some that are not as sweet.
00:31:48
Some are darker, some are brighter.
00:31:50
It's just kind of the way they got
put together and how they sound.
00:31:55
Some plates become famous
because they are at famous studios
and they get used on lots of records
and they kind of train our ear to...
00:32:03
Just like, "That's what
a good plate sounds like."
That's part of what happens
when you listen to records
that get made by talented people
in the same place
and they use some
of the same equipment.
00:32:12
We sort of get trained
that that's what a good sound is.
00:32:22
I'm liking the B plate a little bit more,
it's a little bit darker than the C plate.
00:32:26
A little bit cloudier
but not in a way that I feel like is...
00:32:29
...hurting me.
00:32:46
This one comes up Wet Solo,
like I mentioned before.
00:32:48
I'm lengthening the decay time here.
00:32:51
You can do it by just grabbing
the indicator,
or you can use the plus and minus
to increment it.
00:32:56
I am going to add some pre-delay to it.
00:33:20
I changed my mind.
00:33:31
We sort of addressed all this stuff,
got it set.
00:33:34
This vocal delay here
is also sending to that EMT
that the MicroShift is sending to,
but I don't think we need it
so I'll get rid of it
so it's not confusing me
or anybody else.
00:33:45
Let's do what I was talking about.
00:33:46
We got a little bit of the vocal sound,
now let's go to where the drums are.
00:33:53
Let's put our bass back in.
00:34:03
Put the programming in as well.
00:34:05
Let's look at what our Mix Bus
compressor is doing.
00:34:18
All right. Before I get this
going too much,
I'm just curious…
Let's just throw this over here,
put it on standby for us,
and see about auditioning
a different compressor.
00:34:29
I kind of feel like I might want to hear
an SSL compressor on this mix
as opposed to what was there,
so let's just see.
00:34:39
I'm going to turn
the Gain Make-Up down a bit,
I'm going to turn the Threshold
all the way up for the moment.
00:34:46
I want to push as much level of the mix
into the Stereo Bus
before I get any compression action.
00:34:51
The Ratio is 2:1, very low ratio.
00:34:54
I'm not trying to, like,
have the compressor make my mix,
I'm trying to have the compressor
help me glue the mix together.
00:35:00
I'm going to speed the Release up
so it's as fast as it can be,
and I'm going to take the Attack
and make it as slow as it can be.
00:35:05
This for me is a pretty standard
setting for an SSL,
I think it's a common approach
for many mix engineers that use this,
but I couldn't definitively say
that everybody uses it just like this.
00:35:59
I'm just sort of listening here,
I kind of got that set up.
00:36:03
I'll put this Neve back over here
and check it out.
00:36:16
Since we're not at the present time
using the Pultec,
let's just pull it off of here
and put the compressors on there
so we can A/B them a little bit easier.
00:36:25
I need to put this limiter back.
00:36:54
I'm just trying to get them set up
so they are a little bit more
on equal footing.
00:37:12
I far prefer the SSL in this case.
00:37:16
So, looking at where I have
the Threshold set,
it indicates to me
that I don't have enough level
going into my Mix Bus.
00:37:23
And another indication now is,
if I look at my Mix Bus,
there's not a lot of level here.
00:37:31
So,
let's open the Threshold up.
00:37:35
Let's now figure out
how much we need to turn
sort of the programming and drums up
to kind of get the compressor
to be active,
and then
we'll take it from there.
00:37:48
This is where mixing this type of song
is a little bit tricky,
but we'll solve it.
00:39:35
So I just want to spend a minute here
trying to clarify
why it is that I'm concerned
about the level that's coming
into the compressor
and why my first move
is not to lower the Threshold
and turn up the Gain Make-Up
on the output of the compressor.
00:39:52
Yeah, I can make it louder
and I can make it compressed
by simply adjusting these two things:
I can lower the Threshold
and get the compression to happen,
and I can get the record level up
by boosting up my Gain Make-Up.
00:40:04
If I do that with this compressor,
my mix is very much going to just depend
on the sound of this compressor
because I haven't yet created
the proper gain structure to use it
the way that I know I should.
00:40:18
The indication to me, because I had to
lower the Threshold to get it to work,
is that I'm not...
00:40:25
All of my levels
from my tracks to my mix
are not turned up
as much as they should be.
00:40:32
I mean, this is a delicate song,
it's kind of a quiet recording,
so I need to make sure
that I am optimizing
all of these different
components and levels,
because what I'm doing is
I'm doing parallel compression
along the way,
I'm accumulating volume.
00:40:49
That's the way you make a good mix,
is you accumulate volume.
00:40:52
If I do it all in one place,
then, in the mix...
00:40:55
I mean, it's just not...
it's not going to be as good.
00:40:58
I need to accumulate this volume,
and the way that I need to accumulate
the volume in this particular instance
is I need to go to each
component of the mix
and figure out how to turn it up
and make it more robust
and give that to
the Stereo Bus compressor.
00:41:13
So, it's going to take a little bit
of back-and-forth to do that,
but it's the right thing to do.
00:41:18
It's what I need to do because...
00:41:20
Listen, we'll just leave it
how it is right now,
it's a little bit all over the place,
but I'm going to put the vocal back in
and I'm going to show you right now
what that change will sound like.
00:41:34
So what I'm going to do
is I'm going to lower this Threshold,
I'm going to get the compressor to work,
I'm going to turn this Output up
to where I'm getting
a good record level over here
so we'll have an example
of what that is.
00:41:44
Then I'm going to do all this work,
and then hopefully we can remember it
and check out the difference.
00:42:22
So there we go,
we got that kind of turned up.
00:42:25
That's where we've been listening,
so let's just record a little bit
of what this is
so it will be easier to compare.
00:42:34
We're going to call this
'Let It Go-Mix.1'.
00:42:48
So we'll just record what we got going.
00:43:44
Okay. I think that's enough
for our example.
00:43:46
What I did just while this was recording,
just out of curiosity
for, like, a little bit
of a visual reference
for the printed level,
this is Michael's mix right here.
00:43:57
I was just curious
what they just sort of look like
next to each other.
00:44:03
They are similar.
00:44:05
So, okay,
so I'm using that as a little bit
of a measuring stick
of what...
00:44:12
what a good mix level for this song...
00:44:17
You know, we're fortunate that we got
a great mix of this song
that's already been done.
00:44:21
We haven't listened to it yet,
but I'm able to eyeball it
so I know that I'm sort of
in the right ballpark, level-wise.
00:44:27
Okay, so we have that saved.
00:44:28
We'll hang onto that, we'll revisit it.
00:44:30
We're going to jack this thing up
a little bit.
00:44:33
I'm going to go back
and turn the vocal off.
00:44:35
I know it's going to distract me,
hearing the vocal level not be right
as I get this other stuff together.
00:44:42
Let's undo this compressor business
for the moment.
00:44:49
We'll have to change it a little bit.
00:44:51
We're looking at...
00:44:52
...this, to this.
00:44:54
That's 15 dB.
00:44:56
I know that I'm not going to be
turning stuff up that much.
00:44:59
I'm going to set my goal at about
8 or 9 dB.
00:45:03
Let's see if I can get there.
00:45:04
We'll just kind of have
a little bit of Gain Make-Up.
00:45:08
So I think the goal will be,
if we can get the compressor
to do its job within this range,
we're probably approaching
what our sweet spot would be.
00:45:17
Let's go over here
and look at the bass.
00:45:26
This is almost up at 0,
I've got the Output up pretty high
on the compressor,
the Arousor for the bass.
00:45:32
I'm just trying to think about
how I can get this to happen.
00:45:51
It's dicey because
I already like my bass sound,
so I shouldn't mess with it too much.
00:45:58
We're just going to crank this Output up.
00:46:14
Let's manage the gain
a little bit this way too.
00:47:08
Well, I may not have recorded
in the best spot actually
because of where the drums are,
but it's okay.
00:47:15
I'm going to go and work these sections
and then we'll just kind of go back there
and compare the result that we find.
00:47:56
In turning this stuff up this way,
I'm starting to feel like some of the
internal balances are not quite right
so I'm going to adjust
a little bit of that.
00:48:13
Let's look at this a little bit.
00:48:41
What we have here is a compressor
that's really good at bringing up
the apparent volume.
00:48:46
You can use it in Single
or Multiband mode.
00:48:49
This Knee is basically the shape
and the onset of compression.
00:48:52
All the way down it's a very soft,
very gentle action.
00:48:56
As I increase this value
the Knee becomes steeper,
the onset of compression
is much quicker, more severe,
and so it helps bring up
the apparent level.
00:49:06
As you'll hear as I turn this up,
the volume will come up.
00:49:09
It will sound a little more compressed,
but the apparent volume will come up.
00:49:37
This is the Speed of the Release.
00:49:39
This is very fast,
and I don't want it to be too fast.
00:49:52
While I'm doing this
I'm just going to start mixing,
so it's going to be
a little bit back-and-forth
because this is kind of involved
and I'm hearing things.
00:49:59
We can no longer
kind of go piece by piece
because I'm trying to accumulate
this volume, kind of push everything up.
00:50:04
I kind of have to start mixing
a little bit
in terms of making some decisions
about some things,
so I'm going to be doing that.
00:50:10
I'll try and explain every little thing.
00:50:12
I don't necessarily need to tell you
that I just changed the panning,
I wanted to hear that guitar
a little bit more to the right,
but I'll try to remember
as I kind of go along here.
00:00:00
I'll go ahead and put
this sub bass thing in,
and what that is, it's getting its Input
from the Outputs of the tracks
that are also going to the 'bass buss'.
00:00:10
This is sort of a separate parallel Bus
that is just for the subsonic frequencies
that this is going to create
based off of this sound,
that it's going to synthesize
the low frequencies.
00:00:21
We're going to do that and
I like to compress that signal
quite a bit going in
so that it's very sturdy
and that the low end
that I'm accentuating, adding,
is not fluctuating a lot.
00:00:32
I want it to be a very constant thing,
as constant as it can be.
00:00:35
I mean, obviously,
or maybe not obviously,
but it's going to change
as the notes change
and the register changes
and where he's playing
and how thick some of the notes
come across.
00:00:45
And because it's going to change,
I want to try to really smash it
into a very small dynamic range
and just sort of make it very specific
and just sit in a good spot for me.
00:00:54
Let's solo these up
and take this out of solo safe.
00:01:07
I'm changing the Recovery time
and slowing it down
because the tempo of this song is slow,
but there's a lot of held
whole notes, half notes,
so I want to make sure
that the Recovery is not too fast,
so that the compression is not pumping
and it sounds consistent.
00:01:42
5 seems to be a good constant.
00:02:05
Let's choose some frequencies
based on hearing it
combined with the bass.
00:02:22
I like this, but I feel like this 60 Hz
is a little bit too heavy.
00:03:00
So what we have here
are different qualities
and tonal textures and properties
of what the Drive sounds like.
00:03:23
Clean 1 is good.
00:03:25
Let's turn this back down.
00:03:26
I just want to blend
a little bit of this in,
I don't really want it to be
too heavy-handed.
00:03:46
It kind of helps fill out the bottom end,
make the sustain a little bit richer.
00:03:50
I was thinking that maybe
I want to sort of play with the EQ
because sometimes it's very, very subby,
which is fine.
00:03:57
I feel like if I were to play
with this EQ a little bit
maybe I could get
something better to happen.
00:04:17
I'm just going to roll the top end off
because I don't need it.
00:04:20
Let's see if we boost
a little bit of 500 Hz.
00:04:36
I definitely want my equalization to be
happening before my dynamic processing,
so this is what's happening.
00:04:41
I'm not sure how this is broken up,
but I know that the EQ
and Presence control,
both EQ settings are before my dynamics
and that would be my desire.
00:05:01
So taking a little bit
of the low frequencies
away from what the subharmonic
synthesizer is seeing
is helpful in that when it goes
to those super-subby notes
that he's generating on the bass
that it's not overexaggerating that.
00:05:16
So I'm pulling a little bit of that back,
and then adding a little bit of this 500.
00:05:21
It's giving it a little bit more
of the middle rounder tone
so that the synthesizer
is seeing a little bit more
low frequencies
that are in a more usable area
to generate some sympathetic sounds.
00:05:39
I think it's helping and improving.
00:05:45
Okay, cool.
00:05:46
So we get the picture,
and now we're moving on.
00:06:01
I think we could use a little bit
of articulation on the bass.
00:06:17
It sounds nice giving it
a little bit of 4 kHz.
00:06:19
Let's see if we're getting anywhere here.
00:06:21
We're definitely getting louder,
which is good.
00:06:31
We're about 2/3 to 3/4
of the way out to our goal,
so let's keep working.
00:06:47
Okay. I got a little distracted here.
00:06:49
I didn't fully finish my thought on here,
on the guitar PSP Bus,
because I'm jumping around so much.
00:06:54
I'd like to just open up the top end
a little bit with this EQ on here
just because I can. Let's see.
00:07:09
So bringing up a little bit
of this high frequency shelf
helps give a little bit
of sparkle to the guitar
and pushes it forward,
and it helps with the
apparent volume of it.
00:07:17
On the back of this plug-in,
if you click on the badge here,
there's these Saturation settings.
00:07:21
I like turning up
these upper bands a little bit,
and a little bit of low end.
00:07:26
I don't really feel like we need
that much low end saturation
on this type of guitar sound.
I'm actually going to...
00:07:31
because it's kind of clean and pretty,
so I'm just going to back that down.
00:07:37
Reid Shippen is the one that turned me
on to using this plug-in on guitars
and schooled me on this,
so I like using this.
00:07:51
Let's just go to where that secondary
guitar part is playing
and make sure that it's balanced
and sounding good
with the way I'm setting this before
we get too far off in some other land.
00:08:29
Okay, so I brought
its volume up a little bit.
00:08:31
I also brought up its Send
to the echo that I created for it,
because as I'm pushing all this stuff up
and I've activated
this compressor on the Bus,
you know, it's pushing down
some of the background information,
and so now I sort of have to
work against that
to get it to kind of come back up
and live in the way
that I want to hear it.
00:08:52
Okay, so that's fine for the moment.
00:08:55
I think we still have a little bit of work
to get our volume accumulated,
but we're making progress,
so let's turn the keyboards on.
00:09:15
I'm just cleaning up the bottom end
a little bit on that with EQ.
00:09:18
I think a very good compressor
for this could be...
00:09:22
...this Variable Mu
I'm using on the programming,
so I'll just grab it
and bring it over here.
00:09:28
Let's hear it.
00:09:46
I'm not doing much compression,
but it's just helping me bring it forward.
00:10:00
I just want to hear this sound brighter,
so I'm going to...
00:10:05
Let's use an EQ
that we haven't been using.
00:10:08
It's a great EQ,
we're going to try the 550.
00:10:34
This is the high frequency
and low frequency shelf.
00:10:37
These default to bell curves.
00:10:39
I want to put it in shelf
and sort of open it up.
00:10:41
There's not a lot of information
up there in the top end,
so I've taken this top frequency
all the way down to 5 kHz,
put it in shelf,
and I'm boosting quite a bit
just to get that stuff to come up.
00:10:58
Just getting rid of
a little bit of bottom end.
00:11:00
Let's see if we throw a little bit
of 5 kHz in there, here too.
00:11:13
I like a little bit of the 3 kHz.
00:11:32
This is the keyboard with one delay on it,
and then there's another path
with a different delay on it.
00:11:36
Oh, actually, is this a double?
Maybe that's what it is.
00:11:40
Yeah, it's a double.
00:11:41
I really would love to have
a reverb for this,
so I'm going to create one real quick
and I'll call it 'Key Rev'.
00:11:51
And it's got to go out the same
Bus assignment,
we're going to throw it out 11-12.
00:11:58
We'll see where is
an available Input to it.
00:12:01
20.
00:12:03
I'll assign the reverb.
00:12:06
Let's try the AMS.
00:12:18
Let's put it on a Plate.
00:12:32
This is the way this works, you just
have to select predelay, decay time,
and then you can adjust it here.
00:12:41
So we're going to send
this to 20.
00:12:55
So I'm choosing this reverb because
it's a very nice-sounding digital reverb,
it has a very clean, open sound to it,
and
I don't...
00:13:05
Sometimes it's good if you're making
sort of a more old-school record
where you're trying to emulate
or imitate the sound
of where they maybe had
one echo chamber,
one plate.
00:13:17
They just had very limited resources,
they would put the same reverb
on a lot of things,
and that's cool, but it's a sound.
00:13:25
I'm looking for everything
to sort of have a distinct space,
its own flavor.
00:13:30
I want the keyboard to be
focused and forward,
and I want to create a space around it,
but I'm choosing the AMS
because of the quality of the reverb.
00:13:41
It's a very clean, transparent reverb,
and so it's kind of creating
this halo of sound
that actually sits behind
as opposed to maybe one of the plates
that's a little bit cloudier
and feels a little bit more forward.
00:13:54
When we're mixing we're just working
in two dimensions, L and R,
and we're having to fake
the third dimension, the depth.
00:13:59
And on the keyboard,
picking this reverb
and spreading it out this way
is my way for this particular thing
to create that third dimension.
00:15:33
So I'm noticing as I put the vocal back in
that some of the percussive elements
can be a little bit too loud,
so before I try and overdo it
and try to get the vocal level,
I'm addressing some of those flags
that have been raised.
00:15:53
I know we spent a lot of time
looking at this before.
00:15:56
I feel like
the vocal is sounding
a little harsh in this,
so I'm going to just try
the other compressor that I have.
00:18:26
I was going back and forth
and I was feeling like
they both had admirable qualities,
but they weren't a complete solution,
so I thought,
"Well, let's listen to them both
maybe doing less of a job individually
and see."
Maybe we're getting somewhere,
and now it gives me the thought
that maybe I should try one other thing
as a secondary compressor.
00:18:45
I'm going to try an LA-2A.
00:20:47
What I'm doing here is I'm turning up
the level to the tape emulation.
00:20:50
With a higher record level
it's going to saturate a little bit more,
it's going to tame the transients
a little bit more.
00:20:55
I don't know why I didn't do it earlier,
but I am now.
00:20:58
Because of the combination that I'm doing
it seems to be better controlled
and more focused,
but it's getting a little bit brighter
and a little harder-sounding,
so that's why I kind of went over here
and backed off a little with this EQ.
00:21:08
I'm curious now.
Maybe if we change this.
00:21:31
Yeah, actually taking it down to 3.2
and backing it off so there's
just a hint of it seems to be good
because we're getting
a lot of that midrange presence
from hitting the tape a little bit harder,
and then the compressor
combination I've selected.
00:21:44
I'm going to listen to this
a little bit quieter
on smaller speakers.
00:22:11
And I'm speeding up
the Attack on the 1176
to help me control
some of that midrange,
to get the compressor
to grab a little bit sooner,
grab a little bit more
of those transients.
00:22:41
That's an improvement. Okay.
00:22:43
So what are the last elements
that we need to look at here?
We got a piano at the end.
00:23:00
We recorded an upright,
very dark-sounding,
but the coolest part of the sound is...
00:23:12
Put it through a Leslie speaker
and you'll hear a little bit of the crunch
of the tube amp and the distortion,
but that's what that is,
it's a Leslie speaker.
00:23:54
I'm bringing the Leslie
effect in a little bit
because it's all the way wide
right now.
00:23:59
The guitars are covering it up
a little bit, so if I bring it in
it's going to be able to fill
that little bit of space that I have.
00:24:21
Let's do a quick experiment
before we do that,
let's switch it in and out of Input.
00:25:18
There are some differences.
00:25:20
Some of it obviously has to do
with all the tonal and level changes
I've made along the way,
but what I'm hearing is,
I mean, I know the sound
of that SSL compressor.
00:25:32
Even though the levels are different,
I hear it as not being as glued together
by making the compressor be the glue.
00:25:37
It's just doing so much
of the work to be the glue,
especially when I'm having to use
that much Gain Make-Up,
by turning it up I know that it's
giving me a little bit of a dirtier sound.
00:25:47
I do notice between listening to
the two different balances
that I feel like my bass is a little hot.
00:26:42
This guitar seems a little loud.
00:26:46
Let's listen to the beginning of the song.
00:27:10
So I just adjusted the two
obvious things I was hearing.
00:27:13
We're just about ready to start
the automation.
00:27:16
I want to go and visit our Mix Bus
and engage some of this EQ
before we get rolling.
00:27:23
I'm going to
put a little bit of a smiley face
on this thing.
00:27:29
Let's listen to what this sounds like.
00:28:35
I put the Pultec in.
00:28:37
It kind of opened up
the top and bottom,
just a little bit of a smiley face.
00:28:41
I was going to wait
on the Curve Bender.
00:28:43
It's a little bit of a more subtle EQ
that I'm going to push
into the Bus compressor.
00:28:47
The Pultec is after.
00:28:49
I'm definitely going to save
the Massenburg EQ.
00:28:51
That's just there in case
once I've kind of got the mix together
as a little final review
if there are any sort of very small
little touches I want to do.
00:28:58
I'm feeling that now that I've put
the smiley face on it
the vocal is suffering just a little bit,
so I'm going to EQ just a touch with this
and then return to it later.
00:29:18
I'm just relieving
a little bit of the sub thing.
00:29:21
What I've added low end-wise on the bass
with the subharmonic synthesizer
is good for gluing things together,
but also, in my end result
I need to be careful
to not have too much
subsonic frequency in the mix
going to the Mix Bus compressor.
00:29:38
You know, we're accumulating the sound,
gluing things together with EQs
and parallel things and other tones,
and we have these sort of
final stages of EQ,
so I'm just clearing up
a little bit of the subs.
00:30:10
Just adding 0.5 dB here
at 2.8 kHz
to kind of help bring
the vocal back forward
and help the guitar a little bit.
00:30:18
Let's just see if there's
anything I can do here
at the bottom that's not related to
what the Pultec is doing after,
just to sort of maybe warm
the bottom up a little bit more
and kind of help with the tone
just going into the compressor.
00:31:07
That's not the perfect solution, but I've
been liking a little bit more of the 91.
00:31:11
We're just going to roll with it
for the moment.
00:31:13
That might be something
that will sort of get sorted out
in changing some balances,
and maybe I'll address it with this later.
00:31:20
And one final little move I'm going to try
is I'm just going to take this
all the way up to the top.
00:31:25
I changed the low frequency,
the 91 Hz, to a bell curve,
and now I'm going to leave
the top in a shelf
and just sort of open it up a little bit
and see if it does any benefit.
00:31:52
So, going back and forth here,
listening between 16 kHz and 20 kHz,
and what we have is that
there's a lot of midrange content
and low frequency stuff.
00:32:02
There's not as much high end,
there's not cymbals
and distorted guitars or whatever,
there's not a lot of bright
information happening here,
so the 20 kHz shelf
wasn't reaching down far enough
to make a difference
to where it seemed usable.
00:32:16
So let's listen, and I'm just going to
switch the whole EQ in and out now
and we will hear the difference.
00:32:36
It's gluing stuff together,
it's helping me out,
pushing better tone
into my Mix Bus compressor.
00:32:41
Let's just... Oh!
You know what we haven't done?
We got to get these
background vocals in here
and then we can start
some automation.
00:32:47
Okay, we don't have anything
on the background vocals Bus
so let's just throw a general EQ on here.
00:32:52
We're going to roll off some of the lows.
00:32:55
Let's just throw this 1176 on here.
00:33:38
I'm not sure if this is
our ultimate compressor,
but I want to do something else
just in the same way that we treated
James' lead vocal
with a little bit of tape emulation.
00:33:48
I do know that I like using
the Studer sometimes
for a little bit of
background vocal love.
00:33:54
I'll try a couple tape formulas.
00:34:30
Cloudy.
00:34:37
The 900 is kind of midrangey.
00:34:39
The GP9 seems to have a good presence
but also a nice tone.
00:34:54
Let's just try this.
00:34:56
The UA one.
00:35:30
Let's do this, let's...
00:35:32
Let's turn this down a little bit.
00:35:35
Now I can turn these up.
00:36:00
Good stuff happening there.
00:36:02
We'll just go with this plate.
00:36:04
Let's see, 33 is our
background vocal reverb Send,
we're going to put this on everybody.
00:36:33
It's kind of dark
and not really happening.
00:36:36
Let's go with a reverb
that we know we like,
we'll just go with
a little bit of a cleaner,
clear reverb.
00:37:05
I think I like this Hall.
00:37:33
There is the decay,
the high and the low,
it's just basically 0
equaling 4.5 seconds.
00:37:39
I'm shaving a little bit
of time off the lows here
by turning it down,
and I'm bringing up the highs.
00:37:46
I don't want too much of the muddiness
of the room sound to sustain,
I kind of want the sort of brightness
to last a little bit longer,
so that's why I'm adjusting that.
00:38:21
We're starting to smash this
a little bit too much.
00:38:31
Let's just check all the other spots
and make sure we're not going to
oversaturate this tape.
00:39:15
Okay, so what this is telling me
is that I'm not going to be able
to just set-and-forget
my Bus settings here
for these background vocals.
00:39:23
I'm not just going to be able to
automate my group fader here,
to ride the vocals for the mix.
00:39:28
I'll have to also do
some internal individual stuff,
so I'm just trying to find the place
where it's sort of optimized
for what seems to be
the loudest and the quietest stuff
so that I know it's pretty close to what
I'm going to need to blend into it.
00:39:41
Let's see, what have we not
paid attention to?
This stuff in the bridge.
00:40:24
And this tambourine was pretty loud.
00:40:36
We got our percussion reverb here
but I haven't really felt
the need for it yet.
00:40:46
This is what's really loud, the snare.
00:41:17
Doing that reminded me that
I haven't done this Kick/Snare/Bass Bus
that I described to you
and I haven't used this drum reverb
and I kind of want to do
a little bit of that on the snare.
00:41:27
Just to kind of glue it,
glue it into things,
and we'll also put it
over here on the toms.
00:41:36
So let's quickly listen to where
those drums are with the snare drum.
00:41:57
Cool. It's just giving it
a little bit of reverb tail.
00:41:59
And this reverb...
00:42:02
I think I'm probably using
an Ocean Way room,
or Cello,
which is now EastWest.
00:42:09
A little bit of the toms.
00:42:10
Let's hear it with all the drums.
00:42:22
It just helps marry the close mic
of the snare drum
to the ambience that I've recorded
on the other mics.
00:42:27
Let's go to where the toms
are being played.
00:42:45
A little bit more from this too.
00:42:52
All right, so the
Kick/Snare/Bass Bus,
the Input is on 8.
00:42:56
We're going to turn this...
Well, we might want this Decapitator,
but let's turn it off for a second.
00:43:02
I'm feeding a Fairchild 660
and what I'm going to do
is I'm going to create an Aux Send
from the 'bass buss'.
00:43:10
We're going to send it to 8.
00:43:12
The starting point will be -6.
00:43:17
I don't have a kick drum Bus,
so I can't just send it from one source
with the combined sound.
00:43:23
I don't know that I need it on that
super-low frequency Kick Out.
00:43:26
I'm just going to
intuitively use
the Neve thing that I did.
00:43:31
I'm going to do this at 0
because this is a little bit quieter,
so I want to make sure
that it's nice and loud in the mixture
and then I'm going to also send this
from the snare drum.
00:43:41
This I can afford to
turn down a little bit,
let's just make this -6.
00:43:45
If we put these in Pre-fader...
00:43:48
Let me put all these in Pre-fader.
00:43:53
Let me mute this.
00:43:55
I think this is going to
kind of work for us.
00:44:00
I'll solo safe these things.
00:44:10
Okay, so I've got it so we can
just hear this soloed up.
00:44:14
The bass is very loud.
00:44:19
Because I know I've already got
this kick drum sending at 0,
what I'll do is I'll go over here
and turn this bass Send down in the blend.
00:44:32
The snare drum could stand
to be louder in the blend.
00:44:42
The kick drum could be louder.
00:44:48
I'm creating a little bit of a blend
directly to this.
00:44:52
Let's see, let's get it to compress a bit.
00:45:08
I'm just creating a sidechain
parallel Bus for those three elements
to kind of help glue them together
and make them impactful.
00:45:14
In this type of mix,
this type of song,
this maybe is not as important
or as useful
as in something that was
a little bit more impactful
and high-energy,
a little bit louder volume,
but I've got it in the session,
I've talked about it, I'll show it to you.
00:45:28
This is a technique that you can try.
Maybe it will be useful for us or not.
00:45:31
We're going to find out real quick
and then we might bail.
00:45:43
I'll give it a little extra crunch
and punch.
00:45:54
I don't mind the way that sounds.
00:45:56
Let's get this all back together for us
so we can hear it blended in.
00:46:03
I'm going to take these off of Pre-fader
just in case I do any automation.
00:46:09
I want the Send level to follow.
00:46:36
Just chilling out the sound
of the Decapitator a bit.
00:47:03
I think it's helpful.
00:47:15
I like it.
00:47:19
Okay, great.
00:00:02
So, we're going to start
some automation.
00:00:04
I'm just checking to see that the
only thing that I'm going to be writing
is volume automation.
00:00:08
I'm going to put all this stuff
in 'auto touch',
we're going to save
our progress to this point
in a different session.
00:00:19
Let's automate
some of this guitar stuff first.
00:00:34
Okay, so we need a little bit
of separation here.
00:00:40
Just so I can see what's going on
for some visual cues.
00:00:44
We're going to start from the beginning
and start with the guitars
and just go with how we feel.
00:01:17
I like the sort of shape
and feel of what I did.
00:01:19
It's just a little loud,
so I'm going to turn it back.
00:01:59
So sometimes I'll go over
a certain little section
or a thing that I'm automating
because I'm just kind of getting a feel
for what the performance needs
and how I want to sort of affect it
with the volume rides and automation,
so sometimes I'll go over something
and then I'll erase it and undo it,
and then start again.
00:02:16
It's a little bit of a rehearsal.
00:02:18
When I start and stop
and start and stop
and keep looping over the same thing,
that's kind of what I'm doing.
00:02:23
I'm learning what it is
that I want to execute,
and kind of practicing
and then I'll do it.
00:03:03
I'm just riding the guitar parts,
but then, the delay that's sending
off of the secondary part
that comes in in the intro
and the little turnarounds,
I'm sort of pushing some
of the delay tails up a little bit.
00:03:14
And I also want to do this delay
a little bit here in the intro.
00:03:40
I want to get to automating
the vocal really quickly,
but I already know
that where this guitar is,
the main guitar is on the left,
it's going to be a little bit loud
at this stage of the game.
00:03:51
I don't want to, like, have to
turn the vocal up over top of it,
so I'm going to bring it down
a little bit.
00:04:09
That's pretty close,
but now what's going to happen is,
the other amp that's part
of this performance and sound,
I'm going to leave it where it is,
and so what's going to happen is,
where we've had
this really dominant part on the left
and it's got its complementing part
in the intro on the right,
by pulling down the main
guitar sound on the left
that I have balanced a little bit louder
for the overall of the song,
the guitars are going to
kind of settle down
but they're going to feel spread out
nicely across things
and the vocal will just sit there,
right in the middle,
and my attention is not going to be
overly drawn over here to the left.
00:05:38
And then sometimes,
when I'm making automation moves,
I'm just going to quickly let go
of the change
and let it reset to the basic
balance that I had.
00:05:47
It's not going to hurt me
just to let it go every once in a while,
"Let It Go."
It will just sort of be reestablished
to where my starting point is.
00:05:58
I'm sort of noticing that at times now
this second amp with the effect on it
that's happening over on the right,
I want to push it a little bit at times.
00:07:07
This delay that...
00:07:09
that has some interesting sort of
modulation that's happening,
it's kind of cool because it makes
this sort of vibrating tone and sustain,
but it's kind of bumming me out
at this one spot.
00:07:20
It was cool where I was pushing it up
because there are these little...
00:07:23
[swishing sounds]
kind of things that were happening
that are cool and very interesting
in creating a cool atmosphere.
00:07:47
And so where I've made this adjustment
turning that amp down a little bit,
I'm going to turn up the delay
that's on that side
and kind of fill that space
that's coming directly from this guitar.
00:08:12
Cool. This seems a little bit loud here.
00:09:54
Keyboard.
00:11:12
I'm letting the direct sound
come in strong at the top of the section
and then shifting its balance
more towards the reverb,
so it's like it gets your attention
but then settles back
and becomes more atmospheric.
00:11:24
I'm just kind of jumping ahead
and doing this in the choruses
because I'm anticipating that I'm
going to want this feeling every time.
00:11:31
And then if we need to adjust it
around whatever comes next, we will,
but I just want to kind of
follow through on this thought.
00:12:35
Cool.
00:12:37
As the song went on
and as more things came in
and there were more things
for this keyboard to compete with,
I wasn't making it as wet.
00:12:44
I was leaving the drier
a little bit stronger.
00:12:46
But here in the end,
when that piano comes in,
I'm anticipating that I'm going to want
to turn the 'keys buss' up,
so I balanced this keyboard
that we've been working with down,
underneath the piano,
because I'm going to bring it back up
as I raise the group for the piano.
00:13:01
I do know that this Leslie sound,
I want to try to hear
a little bit more of it.
00:13:06
And I'm not quite loving this EQ setting.
00:13:13
That's probably good.
00:13:19
This may be a little bit much. Okay.
00:13:22
Let's see if this helps me at all.
00:13:24
All right, let's turn this group up
for the piano's sake.
00:13:51
Almost.
00:14:40
This EQ is not [inaudible].
00:15:47
That helps. I sped the Attack up
on the Bus compressor,
and made it a little bit more
of the parallel compression sound.
00:15:53
I don't think that's really
going to hurt the other keyboard,
so let's get back to where we were.
00:15:58
We'll worry about this keyboard
in the bridge later.
00:16:10
I'll do some automation
on our complementary guitar.
00:17:23
I'm just going ahead
and grabbing all these sections.
00:18:00
When we get to this last section,
the same as...
00:18:03
I turned down that paddy keyboard
that plays in the choruses.
00:18:07
I sort of underplayed
this guitar a little bit
just so that the part is there
but the feel of the focus changes.
00:18:13
It feels familiar, but it's not
dominating your attention
and letting some other newer elements
speak a little bit better.
00:18:20
That's the beauty of doing
automation this way,
you can kind of add some feeling
and hope that you get all your compression
and EQ and stuff right
and it's just going to work
for the whole song.
00:18:28
I should probably finish this guitar.
That would be wise.
00:21:02
Okay. So, I have...
00:21:05
...pretty much automated everything,
touched everything.
00:21:07
I've been moving around a lot
and I'm not a hundred percent sure
that I have all the transitions
and stuff just right,
so what I'm going to do
is I'm going to listen to
the majority of the song,
I'm going to play with the Mix Bus EQ
because I have a feeling I may want to
look at how I'm treating the low end
and, you know, see what we see,
and then we'll finish this thing up.
00:21:32
It's sounding really nice.
00:24:36
It's feeling great to me to that point.
00:24:39
Obviously you saw me change
a bunch of things about the low end,
sort of working a few things
against each other.
00:24:45
I thought the Curve Bender
sounded better at 70.
00:24:48
Not only did it sound better at 70,
but 0.5 dB more of it
was beneficial going into
the Mix Bus compression,
so that led me to
pull the Pultec back just a little bit.
00:24:59
I was experimenting with warming up
the sort of very low mids,
just sort of under the fundamental,
and then, in doing that
and sort of playing
with the bottom end that way
I felt like the bass got
just a touch muddy in this area,
so I cleaned that up.
00:25:14
It's sounding very nice.
00:25:15
Let's take it from the bridge out.
00:25:18
I'll listen
and see if there's anything else to do,
but I anticipate
that we are approaching the finished mix.
00:26:57
I think it sounds pretty great.
00:26:59
I pulled up the analyzer there at the end
just to sort of have a look at it,
the frequencies are all looking
pretty balanced
and I don't see anything
that indicates there's something
I'm not hearing,
so that's good.
00:27:12
It's a nice little security blanket
check there at the end.
00:27:14
It's been a wonderful experience,
I've really enjoyed doing this.
00:27:17
I would like to thank James Bay
for his song
and the opportunity
to share this with you,
Michael Brauer for his original mix
of this song,
it helped me put it out there
in the world.
00:27:29
I hope you got something out of this,
I have enjoyed spending this time.
00:27:33
I hope to see you again soon. Thank you!
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Software
- Altiverb 7
- BF-76
- Dyn3 De-Esser
- Empirical Labs Arouser
- EQ III 7-Band
- Massenburg Design Works EQ5 AAX
- Mod Delay III
- Pro Subharmonic
- PSP Vintage Warmer 2
- Soundtoys Decapitator
- Soundtoys EchoBoy
- Soundtoys MicroShift
- UAD 1176 Rev A
- UAD AKG BX 20
- UAD AMS RMX16
- UAD API 550A
- UAD Chandler Limited Curve Bender
- UAD dbx 160
- UAD EMT 140
- UAD EMT 250
- UAD Fairchild 670
- UAD Fairchild 660
- UAD Helios 69
- UAD Manley Variable Mu
- UAD Neve 1073
- UAD Neve 33609
- UAD Precision Limiter
- UAD Pultec EQP-1A
- UAD Roland RE-201
- UAD SSL G Bus Compressor
- UAD Studer A800
- UAD Teletronix LA-2A
- UAD Trident A-Range
- VUMT Duo
- Waves Aphex Vintage Exciter
- Waves CLA-76
- Waves J37
- Waves PAZ- Analyzer
- Waves TG12345
Award-winning Producer, Engineer, and Mixer, Jacquire King, has worked with some of the world’s most influential artists in every role you can imagine in a recording studio. From being an acclaimed recordist to mixing and producing multi-platinum records (9X in the case of Kings Of Leon) by superstars like Kaleo, Modest Mouse, Kings of Leon, Tom Waits, Norah Jones, Buddy Guy, Cold War Kids, MuteMath, Melissa Etheridge, and James Bay.
To date, Jacquire has received several awards for his meticulous attention to detail and unique approach to creating records that withstand the test of time.
His discography is well-known for the variety of music encompassed from the past 20 years. When you see Jacquire’s tutorials on pureMix, you will have the chance to sit next to a true master at work, who strives to enhance the artist's vision and serve the songs he helps deliver to the masses.
Kings of Leon
Tom Waits
James Bay
Modest Mouse
Buddy Guy
Norah Jones
James Michael Bay is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. In 2014, he released his single "Hold Back the River", which has been certified platinum, before releasing his debut studio album Chaos and the Calm. The album went to number one in the UK and number 15 in the US.
Let it Go
CLICK_HEREMusic CreditsLet it Go
By James Bay
James Michael Bay is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. In 2014, he released his single "Hold Back the River", which has been certified platinum, before releasing his debut studio album Chaos and the Calm. The album went to number one in the UK and number 15 in the US.- Artist
- James Bay
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