00:00:00 This is Jimmy Douglas, how are you?
I am going to mix a record today
that was actually produced
by an esteemed colleague of mine,
ill Factor.
00:00:10 And the artist is Jared Evan.
00:00:11 The name of the record is
'Light Shine Through'.
00:00:14 I hope you enjoy what
I'm about to show you.
00:00:40 I'm gonna take you
through my whole process.
00:00:42 I'm gonna start with
a brand-new session.
00:00:48 'Light Shine Through'.
00:00:51 We're gonna basically go,
we're gonna import,
they sent me a bunch of stems.
00:00:56 This may be boring but this is what
I do all day.
What do you do all day?
It's fun.
00:01:04 We convert it.
00:01:08 We're going to open up all these tracks,
we're gonna see what they sent to us.
00:01:12 So I'm gonna try to make
head to tails of this, quickly.
00:01:16 First we're gonna narrow the view. Why?
Because it's something to do.
00:01:21 And then,
we're gonna look at all
these wonderful tracks here,
lots of stuff going on here.
00:01:28 We always keep our rough mix
kind of at the top, as a reference,
to see what they're talking about,
I'll have a quick listen.
00:01:35 I'm gonna go out of
output 15-16 so I can hear.
00:01:52 First thing I'm gonna do
is make a master fader
because there's a lot going on here.
00:02:20 So I'm gonna organize this and try
to get rid of a lot of the vocals,
I can see whole bunch over here, vocals.
00:02:26 Let's just turn them off for now.
00:02:30 Get them out of my way.
00:02:32 There's vocals everywhere.
00:02:34 I'm gonna rearrange a lot of these tracks
and I think I'll just kind of
do that quick. I'll drag
the Drum Bus up here.
00:02:42 Basically what I do is I drag all
the rhythm instruments towards the top.
00:02:47 It's a hangover from the analog days,
you can mix this stuff anywhere.
00:02:50 You don't have to necessarily find it
and have them in any particular place,
like it's a console or something.
00:02:56 It's just a habit that I've
developed over the years.
00:02:58 If you don't mind I'm gonna
continue doing it today.
00:03:01 So we can put this little
puzzle together here.
00:03:04 I'll take along anything
that looks like an instrument
and drums and all these good little
'Intro' samples,
and a kick. And I'll just keep
moving them all to the top.
00:03:14 There may be a more efficient
way of doing this
but it's the way that I
kind of learned how to do it,
it's the way my assistants as well
to do this to organize.
00:03:23 And when I pull them together
then I'll basically start to
go up and down,
keep looking for stuff.
00:03:28 And I'm not doing this audio wise,
I'm just doing this visual wise.
00:03:32 Which is also why it's
a good idea to label stuff
when you send it to people.
00:03:35 Because if you don't
they spend half the time
just going in and out,
looking for stuff and just like:
'What is that?
It looks like a big blur.'
Because it is a big blur
if it doesn't have a name.
00:03:46 So, I'm just gonna be dragging
a couple of these things up to the top,
like I said before,
when they are all hanging out together
we'll decide who I wanna
play with and who I don't.
00:03:56 It looks like we've got
some drums up here.
00:03:58 Let's see if what I'm saying is true.
00:04:03 So far it looks good.
00:04:04 They're pretty much drums
and I'm sure there's more drums.
00:04:07 There seems to be a drum bus here
and I
think maybe I'll just go on my own
and just turn theirs off for now.
00:04:15 And I see a little crash below it,
I'll move the crash above the drum bus.
00:04:20 We have some Addictive Keys,
we have some...
00:04:23 What do you think the 67-SFHU is?
Let's find out. Join me while we listen.
00:04:31 This looks like it's going to be
a swell.
00:04:35 It looks like a swell,
I said before it I heard it because
it looks like a swell.
00:04:40 That swell.
00:04:42 So we have a sum of these things.
What I'm gonna do
is I'm going to
quickly manipulate this,
move this around
because this is like task work right now,
I'm sure you guys
can be doing some other things while I'm
putting this together
and I will just
kind of put it together
and I'll show you in a moment
when it's a little more put together.
00:05:00 So now,
we're here, I got a little bit
further along with the session,
I was able to color code
a couple of things,
not many but just enough to kind
of give it an organizational fashion.
00:05:11 I found some tracks that
weren't doing anything at all,
they had nothing on them.
00:05:15 So I took the liberty of
just kind of get rid of them.
00:05:18 I have the superstition
about just erasing stuff.
00:05:21 Even though it looks
like there's nothing there
so I'll just make them
inactive and put them away.
00:05:26 You never know because you always
get that call where somebody goes:
'What? You didn't hear that track?
It had the little (noise) on it.'
I'm like...
00:05:33 'And it's gone now!'
So...
00:05:37 So we're gonna get rid of that track.
00:05:41 So it's not in our session anymore.
00:05:43 So now we have the drums.
00:05:48 I'll take the liberty of like,
maybe color coding,
a little color of...
I use this on my drums.
00:05:53 It's already blue.
00:05:55 But I'll make them purple today.
Nice they are.
00:05:58 And so now we can see that,
we have the bass next.
00:06:00 It looks like and audio track
with nothing on it.
00:06:03 I'll expand the waveform to all of this.
00:06:06 A little dead guy,
I'm gonna throw him away.
00:06:08 I said I don't throw things away,
so what I'm gonna do is make it inactive
and hide him.
00:06:15 You never know,
there might be something under there
that just might a little airplane
noise or something like that.
00:06:22 There you go.
00:06:23 We have the bass,
we have the drums,
we have some guitar stuff,
we have some sample stuff.
00:06:28 See this hi-hat,
it's has to come up here.
00:06:31 So I'm still kind of
reorganizing some of this stuff
but I'll start mixing as I go
because this kind of stuff makes me
crazy.
00:06:39 And I can mix as I go.
00:06:41 Like, here's the drum bus,
which I'm not going to use
today but I'm gonna
have it hanging around.
00:06:46 So I'll make it inactive.
00:06:48 One of the ways that I mix,
I'm gonna explain to you
how I do this and I'll see if
I can explain it very simply.
00:06:54 I'm using the output of 15 and 16.
00:06:58 Why does two numbers?
They're just arbitrary
numbers in my system.
00:07:03 I don't really use those two outputs
for anything.
00:07:06 I have a DAW which has
independent outputs
and 15-16 I've decided to dedicate as
those tracks that I
actually monitor through.
00:07:17 And if you notice,
I'll turn off the rough mix,
so it won't double up,
and I'll play it.
00:07:24 There is the kick.
00:07:26 There is the hi-hat.
00:07:30 So that would work out fine
and I guess, if I was
to bounce this mix to disk,
I would use 15 and 16, bounce to disk.
00:07:37 But that's not how I use the system,
the way the system is,
I return everybody
to 1 and 2, which would be
the normal output of your DAW,
or most people's DAWs,
except for, I leave
the rough mix or the basic top signal,
I leave that
on 15 and 16,
which we were hearing before.
00:07:56 Because I use outboard gear, a lot,
maybe not a lot
but I use a little,
even one piece,
I have to come out of the box
to go back in the box.
00:08:05 That's the
penalty for having
to go out of the box,
for getting to use some of the nicer,
different sounding stuff
you have to back in.
00:08:14 And you also have to do it real-time.
00:08:16 You can't bounce to disk at that point.
00:08:18 So now, what I do is I listen
to do input of this particular track.
00:08:22 Which I have taken out of
my 1 and 2
and then I go into a Neve channel strip,
which actually came from my console,
a Neve VR.
00:08:33 That ends to getting a big
analog sound and I can get that
distortion, just that whole
channel strip thing
going on really nicely.
00:08:41 And I go out of there and I go into a box
called the BetterMaker.
00:08:45 And that box is an
analog box that is digitally controlled.
00:08:50 And then I return then all
into Pro Tools In 7 and 8.
00:08:55 As you can see right here.
00:08:57 You will hear the result of
everything I'm doing through there
and I'll give you an example.
00:09:02 Notice the green light is on,
the input.
00:09:04 And so I'm listening to the input.
00:09:10 If I do it at the master
fader you'll see...
00:09:15 And I'm now I'm going to actually
put it on output and you'll see
on input there's nothing
because the master fader is down.
00:09:28 So much for the mix system.
00:09:30 That is the system.
00:09:31 And that's basically a
part of the chain that I use.
00:09:33 And I every now and then I'll throw
an extra piece in there.
00:09:36 Maybe I'll throw a little
widening in from my summing box.
00:09:40 And let's begin.
00:09:44 First thing I start with is the drums.
00:09:46 And as I mentioned earlier,
I chose not to use the drum bus
that was given,
I can always get that later,
I can always check it later
if I'm having problems with the drums
not sounding right to me,
I'll use their drum bus, perhaps.
00:09:58 But I'm gonna try to do
my vision of what I think it is.
00:10:01 And the first thing I
always start with
is really kind of level,
more than anything else.
00:10:05 Let me just get rid of a lot of this other
instruments,
you have to travel through this with me.
00:10:18 So now that we have the
session slightly in order,
it's not maybe all the way in order
but it's good enough
to be in to work and see
how I wanna turn things off
and just hear differences of various
items.
00:10:30 I think I'll get rid of most of the vocals
for now.
00:10:34 Just for now.
00:10:35 We're gonna play the
drums a little bit here
and see what I like about them,
see how I feel about them.
00:10:51 I'll start with the kick,
it's just some place to start.
00:10:53 I don't know where
I get that from
but it's part of the anchor
for when I'm building.
00:11:22 So what I'm gonna try is,
I don't even know what
the vocals are doing,
I'm gonna do something that sounds
pleasant to me aesthetically.
00:11:29 This is audio.
00:11:30 When I put the vocal in I'm gonna
hear the difference of what it's gonna do,
I'm just gonna duplicate the track
and then I'm going to actually
try a couple little hard mutes here
just to see what it will sound like.
00:11:52 And we'll just live
with that for a minute
and we'll see what that
actually ends up being.
00:12:03 Let's have a listen to this here.
00:12:05 This is like a little loop.
00:12:08 It sounds OK, nothing to do here,
nothing really to do.
00:12:16 I would probably normally
add some bottom to a kick
but that kick sounds pretty round,
pretty fat,
there's no reason to do
what I don't have to do.
00:12:30 Little crashes.
00:12:32 It sounds like the drums are kind of
put together nicely.
00:12:38 The closed hi-hat...
00:12:40 the little...
00:13:08 Once again, I'm going to actually
try a little
arrangement thing.
Now, understand,
I haven't really heard the song
so this isn't fair
but these thoughts I'm having right now
I probably won't have later
when I hear more information.
00:13:21 I'm gonna try to just follow my instincts.
00:13:34 And once again,
I'm just gonna do the beginning.
00:13:37 I'll copy and paste and if
I really like it, I'm just gonna leave it
because I don't wanna forget those ideas.
00:13:43 They may not be unique
at the moment they work for me but then
the thing about mixing for me
is as I keep going on
I keep evolving into other thoughts.
00:13:51 And in some of those I never
get back to my original thought.
00:13:54 Let's put the bass in here
and see what happens.
00:13:56 Maybe that will change my idea.
00:14:24 I kind of like that, actually.
00:14:26 I kind of like the way
it moves against that.
00:14:28 I'm gonna get bold here,
we're going to maybe copy and paste this.
00:14:33 So I'm gonna change the tempo to
the tempo of the song, which is 84.
00:14:38 And...
00:14:39 there we go.
00:15:01 OK, cool. So that's that one,
we're gonna go do this one.
00:15:37 And I'm looking for that
tom roll that I just heard.
00:15:43 It's inside the loop.
00:15:44 So it's gonna be a little
more difficult to raise.
00:15:46 Because I kind of like it,
I would like to have more.
00:15:49 I'll find a way to raise it.
00:15:56 Select that to hear...
00:16:09 I like that.
00:16:46 The noise track. Nice, nice, nice.
00:17:33 Most of these sounds sound like
they're pretty much processed already
and they're pretty much thought about
and they pretty much fit like a glove.
00:17:40 So there's no need...
00:17:42 They are all samples and
part of what samples are to me
is usually they have a sound
which kind of sounds like it's already
put together,
like it's been thought about,
it's been glued together
and
just to go changing things
for the sake of changing things
does not make a mix.
00:18:00 So I'm just going very slow,
like I said, I'm adding a piece
at a time to see what's going on,
to see how I can help it.
00:18:07 And I'll take a quick moment
to peek in on the rough mix.
00:18:22 So far a winning.
00:18:23 It sounds like
we're actually doing a little bit
more than the rough mix had.
00:18:28 It sounds a little drastic but one of
the things I didn't mention earlier is
on my summing bus I have a widener on
which maybe that
makes a little difference.
00:18:35 We can have a peek in
and we'll have a listen.
00:18:38 We'll see how much that
does make a difference.
00:18:46 That makes a drastic difference
and in this case we also have
a bus EQ.
00:18:51 The Bettermaker.
00:19:00 The kick still has a nice little
round punchy sound to it,
that didn't lose anything,
it's just you're getting other
frequencies that we're hearing
that are enhancing the whole basic mix.
00:19:11 Also,
the kick itself came in
and everything came in at zero.
00:19:16 I'm raising the kick considerably
and I'm also raising
a hi-hat considerably.
00:19:22 I thought I lowered the
snare but I guess I didn't.
00:19:25 Oh! And the bass is also
a lot louder as well.
00:19:29 And I would assume I guess
I like bass and kick.
00:19:31 That's what I come away with.
00:19:33 That's how so far we are leveling
to see the difference between
what's going in and
what's going out.
00:19:40 The setting on my Bettermaker,
which we talked about earlier,
it's an analog EQ
digitally controlled.
00:19:48 And part of what it can do is
you can actually hit it a little harder
than you can with a lot of
digital EQs.
00:19:57 First of all, it's set up in two
different sections.
00:19:59 It's set up into one section is like
to emulate the Pultec
and one section emulates a Massenburg EQ.
00:20:07 And I'm kind of using
it on the Pultec side.
00:20:09 It's a lot cleaner than
a Pultec I must say,
but it still gives you
a lot of that grit.
00:20:15 I'm using the 60 cycles side of it.
00:20:17 Here you can change your frequencies
and I'm kind of using the 60 cycles.
00:20:21 And I'm kind of boosting a little
on the hefty side,
3.2.
00:20:25 And then, on the high side,
I'm using 6 kHz.
00:20:29 And I'm just boosting that about 4 dB.
00:20:31 It has a bandwidth just like
a nice Pultec would have.
00:20:34 And now I'm using a little bit
of a wider bandwidth.
00:20:38 And the sound, once again, we can check.
00:20:47 It adds a little bit of that aggressive
wide but yet still clean tone to it.
00:20:54 As everything is gonna be fed through it
it's gonna be changing its
character as more things
are being demanded to
be heard at the same time.
00:21:01 I'm gonna move one from there
and I'm gonna see
what else I can add to this
to boost the song.
00:21:09 We did the little...
00:21:10 Already... I see another tom to be fed.
00:21:15 There you go.
00:21:16 Nice, nice, nice. OK.
00:21:25 The bass to me sounds a little cinematic,
a little hairy on the edges.
00:21:31 Too bright with top stuff.
00:21:33 I'm gonna just put a little filter
across the top
just to calm it down a little bit.
00:21:38 And I'll take the 'Micro',
we'll just give it a little
haircut on the top.
00:22:15 It's not exactly doing
what I thought it would do
but we'll come back to that.
00:22:32 Oh, nice piano!
It's got that
sound of the day where it's kind of
muddled, not too bright,
clear but yet the same tone, it's got...
00:22:44 It just sounds like
that tape type of sound,
that's not real tape,
that's the modern way of
trying to sound like tape.
00:22:52 But it sounds really good and it sounds
very competitive,
it's a competitive sound.
00:22:56 I'm not gonna do anything to it,
I'm just gonna leave it.
00:23:20 I changed my mind,
I'm gonna put a little bit
of mid-range EQ on there.
00:23:23 I want that piano to
poke out a little bit.
00:23:25 So I'm gonna just go grab
Mr Joe Meek,
one of my favorite
little boxes to play with.
00:23:48 Just what the doctor ordered.
00:23:50 Just enough. And I'll also
raise a little bit of the level.
00:23:53 So now he's in there so
we've got a little something going on.
00:24:05 Nice ambiance sound for the background.
00:24:08 Once again,
I'm just gonna leave that alone.
00:24:27 These two sounds go together very nicely
so I will look at them as a pair.
00:24:33 Wait, I heard a cymbal.
00:24:39 I'm going to guess that they kind
of ganged together a lot of the FX.
00:24:44 That's what that is,
it's the same sound Jimmy
through some reverb
and couple of other things,
I'm guessing.
00:24:51 So I don't know what the label
of a 'Big Room' is but it's probably
a ganged-up sort of FX box.
00:24:58 And at this time you can actually
take the time to call someone and say:
'Hey, what was that supposed to be?'
Or you can use your ears and go:
'You know what,
it fits very nicely, let's move one!'
So, with that keyboard
I'm gonna see what
happens if I would to add
a little bit of
delay to that keyboard.
00:26:02 Like an 8th note delay or something.
00:26:05 When it's on its own
it's there and it's kind of flat,
let's see what we can do with that.
00:26:10 So, I could have put it on the channel
but I sometimes like it through an Aux
I like to send stuff around.
00:26:15 It's easier to manipulate
the ins and the outs.
00:26:18 When to go a wet/dry situation
you're losing some of the initial signal
so it changes what you thought you had.
00:26:26 You can good with it but
sometimes, if you just have an Aux,
you have what you have and
then you have what you're adding.
00:26:34 So, that's my choice for this moment.
00:26:36 And what kind of delay do we have here?
Something very simple.
00:26:41 How about a little Mod Delay?
Let's try that.
00:26:44 It's as simple as simple is.
00:26:47 There you go.
00:27:02 Let me hear it alone.
00:27:10 Of course you leave the FX 100% up
so that it stays that way.
00:27:14 And over here we're gonna look for that,
the 8th note.
00:27:28 Clear as a bell.
00:27:30 Also, if you just put it on
a separate track
you can then pan it different places.
00:27:43 So let's live with that for a moment,
it may not be necessary,
but it was something to do
and it actually sounds pretty good.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Jimmy Douglass (also known as The Senator) is an American four-time Grammy winning recording engineer and record producer, whose prolific career has spanned more than four decades.
During the 1980?s, Douglass continued to hone his engineering skills while also taking on the role as producer. He engineered and produced established artists including The Rolling Stones, Slave, Odyssey, Roxy Music and Gang of Four.
Presently, he continues to display his versatility by remaining current while drawing from his years of experience. Douglass is best known for bringing unconventional techniques into the studio and encouraging artists to transcend genre restrictions. He is credited with bringing a raw edge to sound and specifically bringing a heavy funk bass sound into rock music. His hard work and immense talent has carved a place for him among some of the most respected engineers and mixers in the world.
Amazing tutorial. It would be great to learn a little more about Jimmy's outboard chain - is he using the 8816 for summing or is he just using the widening effect?
PauloYate2904
2022 Apr 17
Great step by step to understand in a practical way. Thank you!!
tomowen101
2021 Oct 16
why dont you have the next video in the series ready with access to play? or am i being stupid because this is the most simple and logical thing ever and my eyes are probably to blame..
