Start to Finish: Matt Ross-Spang - Episode 11 - Mixing “That’s Love” Part 1
46min
(16)
After two days of tracking at the Legendary "Sam Phillips Recording" in Memphis, Tennessee, Matt Ross-Spang, Eli "Paperboy" Reed, The Hodges Brothers, The Masqueraders, and Ken Coomer have created two soulful songs that are ready for the mixing desk.
In this episode, Matt and Eli pull up the multitrack for "That's Love" and create the final mix.
See how Matt Ross-Spang:
- Breaks down his philosophy on hybrid mixing
- Explains how he preps his sessions for mixing
- Shows his technique for processing the drum kit as a whole, instead of individual microphones
- Sculpts the bass guitar for the perfect amount of clarity and body without stepping on the kick drum
- Explains why gain staging for fader resolution can help when you start to automate
- Explains why voltage peaks can cause clipping before your meters show you, and how he deals with them during the mix using his Spectrasonics V610s
- Blends in his Fairchild 670 on the 2 Bus
- Tries his Fultone tube tape echo on the vocal
- Patches in the plate reverb at Sam Phillips Recording
- Sets up a parallel compressor on the drum kit and explains converter offset and how to compensate for it
Join Matt Ross-Spang, Eli "Paperboy" Reed, The Hodges Brothers, Ken Coomer, and The
Masqueraders inside the legendary Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis, TN, for an incredible recording event, from Start To Finish. Only on pureMix.net
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:35 - Having The Artist Present
- 01:38 - Session Setup
- 04:32 - Drums
- 11:08 - Bass
- 16:18 - Organ
- 17:59 - Bringing in The Vocal
- 20:24 - The 2 Bus Chain
- 32:51 - Slapback Echo
- 36:50 - The Plate Reverb
- 40:32 - Parallel Compression
00:00:00
Hey everybody,
day 2,
yesterday we tracked
and overdubbed two songs,
today we did a couple vocal things
and now we're gonna
mix these two songs.
00:00:09
And we'll show you how we do it.
00:00:34
So, I will say, the first thing
most important thing as mixing,
I love having the clients here.
We got Eli Reed,
singer artist here on the couch.
00:00:42
What's up?
I can't tell you how
much more I enjoy mixing
when I have the artist here.
00:00:49
Everything that I love about music,
whether it's the songwriting, the playing,
the producing,
the engineering, recording,
it's because we all get
to be in a room together,
we all get to work together,
we all get to feed off
each other's energy.
00:01:00
And as you guys now, mixing is kind of
when you get to play the instrument.
00:01:04
And so it's really great to have
instant feedback,
whether it's good or bad,
I love when
I wanna try something crazy and
look back and Eli
is either excited
or pissed off.
00:01:13
It's rewarding to know that right away
and have him jump in and grab faders too.
00:01:17
And he likes to do all the fade outs.
00:01:19
So, we have a lot of fun when we mix.
00:01:21
And I can't stress enough that,
if you can have the client there,
to me, that's the best part,
it's always have the client there.
00:01:27
It's privilege he stayed,
down from New York
with us one more
day to mix together.
00:01:32
So, I recommend always having
the client there if you can.
00:01:35
Let's see what we did in Studio A.
00:01:37
The first thing I always do,
I don't really care about color codes,
this is also because I
track with so little tracks,
if you look,
most these tracks we actually hide.
00:01:46
We recorded 24 tracks and I
recorded every track going in
so there's a bunch of blank tracks here
but we got probably
under 12 tracks here minus the FX.
00:01:55
I don't really color-code because
honestly we don't have that many tracks
for it's hard to look at.
00:01:59
If I get mix projects
that are a lot of tracks
I will usually just sum them
down instead of color coding
because by the time I
color code all of them
I probably could have
finished most of the stuff.
00:02:08
But also, I am in a different world here.
00:02:10
I don't do templates.
00:02:13
I don't have a strict
way of doing things.
00:02:15
I'm not precious about any
part of the recording process.
00:02:18
So, I kind of just go by
how I'm in the mood that day, how I feel
and what I think the song needs.
00:02:23
I love mixing on analog,
as you can tell by this
big beautiful console,
as you can tell by this outboard gear
and all the tape machines in here.
00:02:30
It's my favorite thing to do
to be hands on.
00:02:33
I know that sometimes, I also will say that
I track a specif way,
I track with the finished goal in mind.
00:02:40
So I'm building the mix as I go,
I want it to sound done
when the artist, such as Eli,
comes in the room.
00:02:44
I want him to get a sense of like
it sounds like a finished record.
00:02:47
Not like what we're
gonna do to it later.
00:02:50
So I make a lot of
commitments to tape.
00:02:52
Doing that,
when I get to the mix stage,
often times I've already
kind of built the mix enough
where I don't need to do much
but do a little rides and stuff.
00:02:59
So I try and keep it like
I always felt it like that.
00:03:02
I build the mix as I go
and that way I don't start
with the drums for two hours
when I start mixing.
00:03:07
And I'm not in the same head space
so they don't always sound the same.
00:03:10
So I try and keep that excitement of
what we felt on day 1
always building in the Pro Tools mix.
00:03:15
We had the mix on the console in there,
so coming in here
I've got just a couple things
to get back to where that was
but I have my rough mix to reference
so I can do that rather quickly.
00:03:25
Normally I would break
this out onto the board,
I feel like today
we made so many great
commitments to tape
that all I need to do is a couple
automation rides in Pro Tools.
00:03:35
So I'm gonna build this
mix quickly in Pro Tools
and do a couple things
with real analog gear,
maybe on individual channels
or on the 2-Bus
and if I feel like I'm not getting
the gel I want from summing analog
then I'll break it out
really quickly on the board,
and the beautiful thing about that is,
as I showed you on tracking,
I like for my mix
to be kind of there
with all the faders at zero
so there's not a whole lot of
regaining where I was at,
even if I break it out on the console.
00:04:01
So,
I'll kind of quickly play it,
if I feel like
I'm losing something
I'll go to the board.
00:04:06
And really, there's no rules,
there's no right or wrong answers to this.
00:04:11
It's kind of completely by feel guys.
You just gotta do,
if you feel like
the way tracked it needs some more love
then I'll send it through some other step
but Eli and I felt really great about
what we had in there.
00:04:24
So I'm gonna see if it feels great in
here just bringing it up and we'll adjust.
00:04:27
So what I've got right now,
everything is just coming out through a Bus,
in the box, and we'll see what we do.
00:04:33
I love mono drums,
I record drums mono.
00:04:36
So the first thing I'm gonna do is
just put all this to one channel.
00:04:42
And what I'll probably do
is print this to a channel
so I just have to look at one
channel but we'll start like this.
00:04:47
And I'll kind of show you something
that I've been working on for a while here.
00:04:51
When we tracked the song,
if you guys watched the tracking video,
I kind of broke the rule of what I said
on the first song.
00:04:57
On the first song I said I
don't like to hit tape hard.
00:04:59
And that's true, I mostly don't.
00:05:01
On the second song Eli had a really
kind of dirty
funky track that I wanted
to be aggressive on.
00:05:07
So I overloaded the channel preamps
to get the snare really distorted,
to get the vocal distorted.
00:05:12
And doing that it hits the tape
a little harder.
00:05:14
So you'll kinda see here
I hit the tape harder,
except I didn't want to hit
the kick drum too hard
because I didn't wanna loose
the impact of the kick drum.
00:05:22
So what I'm gonna do is clip
gain up the kick drum just a hair
to get it like the other ones.
00:05:26
And I might clip gain them down
a little bit to give myself
some headroom.
00:05:30
The cool thing about Burl converters,
which is what we tracked on
and what we're gonna mix on,
is of all converters out there,
they're the ones
that you can hit a little bit harder
and be OK.
00:05:40
They got these big fat transformers
on every channel and so the
harder you hit
the more color you get.
Obviously at some point it gives up.
00:05:47
If I was tracking this on like an Apogee
or an Avid
I wouldn't be hitting it this hard,
I would save myself a little bit more room.
00:05:52
But the Burls, they kind of get
more tone out of them that way
so I was able to do that.
00:05:57
I like to change how I mix
pretty much all the time.
00:06:01
I used to EQ the kick drum a little,
I used to EQ the snare and
the overhead a little bit.
00:06:05
And I stopped doing that after a while
because I felt like
I was losing something.
00:06:10
So what I started doing is just either
putting all the drums to one track
or summing them and eqing just
the mono drum kit.
00:06:16
And I felt like just going a little bit
goes a long way,
I'll kind of show you a good
starting place you can do.
00:06:21
Of course, I didn't use any
EQ when I tracked these drums,
I thought they felt pretty good.
00:06:25
We're gonna bring these up.
00:06:37
So I clip gained the kick up,
I'm gonna gain it a little bit more
so I can have that fader at zero
and have the kick kind of where I want it,
I'm just gonna guess here.
00:06:44
I'll hit this a little less to tape then
I did the snare because I wanted
that snare to splat.
00:06:50
As you can tell.
00:06:51
So as I was telling you about
this Spectra Sonics, look at the snare.
00:06:54
See the transient on the kick drum
and then the snare?
Hitting that pretty hard
it just kind of
gets rid of some of the transients
but it sounds very musical.
00:07:17
I got my drums kind of there
and I'm gonna hit
it a little hard.
00:07:21
I'll show the EQ,
I'm just gonna grab something,
let's see, I'll just do a Neve for now,
because it's a got a gain
control that I can quickly gain.
00:07:29
So I'm gonna lower it.
00:07:37
Instead of eqing just the kick drum and
adding a little low-end on the kick drum
and then maybe eqing something
in the snare or the overhead
I like the Neve 1073 legacy
because
the EQ button is already pushed in
and it saves you milliseconds.
00:07:49
I've got bands here, 110 and 60.
00:07:52
So the cool thing about this is
if I click on 60 or 30
I'm gonna really just adjust
the fundamental of the kick drum.
00:07:58
I can bring up the
thickness of the kick drum
and I'll affect the snare slightly
but not so much.
00:08:03
If I do 110 I'm gonna be adding low-end
to the kick and the snare.
00:08:07
When you have it on the
whole drums as a whole
I feel like when you
EQ the drums together,
A, less EQ goes a long way,
and also it does
more to gel the drum kit together as one.
00:08:19
So, I'll do this and see what you think.
00:08:21
And at home try this and try
eqing your drums separately and then
just as one
and I think you'll see
a pretty cool difference when
you do it together.
00:08:28
Keep in mind every time you EQ
you're effectively phase shifting.
00:08:32
If you EQ individual drums you're actually
phasing your drums a little bit
and you're losing some
of that tight image
you worked so hard to
get when you recorded.
00:08:39
So let's see what we do.
00:08:49
OK, so that's 60 Hz.
I'll hit bypass and unbypass.
00:08:52
See what it does even to the snare drum
at that lower frequency.
00:09:07
That's pretty cool, I like what it
does to everything, let's try 110.
00:09:23
Now keep in mind I'm losing gain
because I've clipped the Neve down
just to give myself some
headroom in Pro Tools.
00:09:28
So you're gonna hear
a level loss
but hear the EQ difference,
it's pretty awesome.
00:09:58
Let's be real goofy and try 220.
00:10:13
I kind of like the 60.
00:10:14
Now, in the same consequence
of the mid-range band.
00:10:18
You've got all these EQ points,
like 1.6, 5, 3.2.
00:10:22
1.6 is great because it brings out
kind of the attack of the kick drum
and also gives kind of the
bottom part of the snare,
gives you more of the,
not so much the snare hit
but some of the 'krr' sound.
So let's see what it does.
00:10:41
Here's 3.2.
00:10:44
I really like the 1.6,
I don't what these dots are
but I'm assuming it's 1 or 2 dB.
00:10:54
I'll leave the top band alone for
now and just see what we do.
00:11:08
So, immediately, Leroy,
our wonderful bass player
plays with his thumb.
00:11:13
So you're not gonna get some of that
nice pick attack.
00:11:16
So I wanna add a little bit to
bring out the pick attack
and do one or two little things.
00:11:23
I do a little bit of filtering on the bass,
I like to give the kick drum the
more bottom part of the low-end.
00:11:31
I'll just roll off a little bit here.
00:11:43
One think about
filtering like that
it's kind of like
brightening at the same time.
00:11:47
You can think about rolling off the low end
as kind of turning
up everything else.
00:11:50
But by filtering that
you can kind of feel like
you're cleaning the bass or
making it a little brighter
instead of eqing other things.
00:11:59
One funny thing I learned
recently,
I was over at Royal Studio with
the great Boo Mitchel engineers
and they put a dbx 160, I saw a
piece of tape on it that said 'Bass'.
00:12:07
And I never thought of
this as a bass compressor,
I always used something slower.
00:12:12
This track Leroy really kind of steps on
and does some cool walk lines
so a little fast compressor barely
grabbing it I think will help
identify some of his notes better
and tame it.
00:12:44
So the dbx is real simple,
one thing I love about it,
you just have a 'threshold'
a compression and the output gain.
00:12:50
I don't wanna do too much to it
so I'm gonna do three on the ratio
and I just wiggle this so it's barely
moving the needle on some
of the bigger moments.
00:12:58
As you'll see, the great thing about Leroy,
he played on all the Al Green records,
you don't really hear him,
you just kind of feel him
until certain moments
where he really steps out,
you really hear him step out
on this song on the outro.
00:13:10
So I don't wanna squash him.
00:13:12
Leroy also
is beautiful with his dynamics.
00:13:15
When guys play with their thumb
they dig in
and they don't dig in for reasons.
00:13:20
So when you over compress
you're losing all of that.
00:13:22
I didn't compress him on the
way in the tracking.
00:13:24
So I'm just doing a little bit now
just to lock him a little bit
and by putting that
fast compressor on there
I feel like it really
kind of pokes through.
00:13:32
And then I'm just gonna do a little EQ,
probably around 800 or 1.5,
and this helps,
like I said, with the thumb playing,
for the bass just to poke
through a little bit.
00:13:41
One thing I pretty much never do
is add low-end to a bass guitar.
00:13:45
If you record it properly
there's so much low-end there.
00:13:48
I feel like I'm just not good enough
to EQ the bottom of the bass.
00:13:51
Every time I do it I
feel like it's too woofy in it
and I'm constantly playing with it.
00:13:54
So I'll just add a little
bit of mid-range here.
00:14:02
Here's at 800.
00:14:13
By itself it may not sound great
but we'll double check that
at the end of the mix
and see if it helps us a little bit.
I have a feeling it will.
00:14:19
I'm gonna do some quick things here
and just move the vocal down,
I like to have all
my rhythmic stuff
and harmonic stuff happening in here
so I'll move the piano down
by the guitar and the keys
and I'll put the horn and
background vocals down here.
00:14:32
I had no idea what his bass line was.
00:14:34
And I'm listening to it
and it's so badass.
00:14:38
You just feel him and then you hear him.
00:14:49
I'm gonna do a couple things here,
I'm gonna add FabFilter
and part of this is just
I'm literally lowering
the gain, you could do the clip gain
but I just want get myself where
I get fader up high at zero,
we hit everything, like I said,
really hard on this to tape
so I could get the sounds I wanted
but now I wanna bring them back down
just so I have headroom in Pro Tools
because you always wanna leave yourself
some headroom here.
00:15:11
And what I'm just gonna do is also
check the low-end filtering.
00:15:15
I love FabFilter,
it's one of my favorite plug-ins,
I think it's great for cutting,
it doesn't really have a sound
so if you're looking for a tonal
quality to your EQ
FabFilter will not be
the way to go I would say
but if you wanna do
surgical or just simple
EQ points without really
affecting your sound
it's a great way to go.
I highly recommend you go to natural phase,
it's sounds the most natural to me.
00:15:38
If you A/B it really makes a difference.
00:15:41
So, on the electric guitar I know there's
not gonna by anything below
90, 80 Hz so I'm go and get rid
of some of the the low end rumble.
00:15:51
Same thing with the piano.
00:16:19
I'm adding the B3 now,
the lovely Charles Hodges,
he's amazing.
00:16:23
I miked this with the AEA R88.
00:16:25
And what I'm gonna do
is put this to a Bus
simply because it's funnier to
move one fader than two.
00:16:31
Now I commit it.
00:16:33
I use the ribbon because I like
what it automatically does
to the bottom and the top.
00:16:37
We had it about halfway down the organ
and it really helps you from getting
too much motor noise, stuff like that.
00:16:44
It's not too shrill.
00:16:45
I don't like it when the B3 is too shrill.
00:16:48
Let's do this real quick.
00:16:52
And I'm gonna
gray these 'Ss' out so I can just hear it.
00:17:38
One thing I'm gonna do,
I usually do B3 mono,
while we're tracking this I knew we had
the electric guitar
and that we're gonna do something
on the right
and Charles does this amazing swirls.
00:17:48
So part of what's cool when
you mike it in stereo,
you mike the B3 right
without phase issues
as much as you can with the Leslie,
you can hear him sliding and I'll go
around and that will pan across the thing.
00:17:57
So it's a nice little movement and
motion that's gonna happen here.
00:18:00
I'm gonna bring in the vocal quickly,
I think it's important to add the
vocal as soon as you can.
00:18:21
So, our B3 is hot,
I'm gonna do the same thing
with our FabFilter, mostly this is just
to turn the level down a little bit.
00:18:27
We got room to go.
00:18:29
We're gonna do about
6 dB because that was hot.
00:18:32
And also, I'm planning on probably
putting a hardware insert on the 2-Bus,
I'm kind of planning ahead for that.
00:18:42
So, a couple things on the B3.
00:18:44
I don't really want anything too low here,
I don't wanna muddy
my beautiful low-end so I'm gonna roll this,
some basic stuff, off the bottom.
00:18:51
and actually, a little bit of the top,
a like my B3 to be a
little bit more mellow.
00:19:19
The first time we
had the Masqueraders
so I have a background
vocal mike out there.
00:19:23
I left it on for this because you
never know when a room mike is cool.
00:19:26
So let's check that out.
00:19:34
Good end to the song.
00:19:40
We get the vocal in there,
we actually have a new vocal on this
so I'm gonna hide this cause I've
got enough room sounds anyway.
00:19:50
Now, Eli and I are both
massively Mitchel fans.
00:19:54
As you can see I like hard panning.
00:19:56
Most of those records the
horns are on the right
so I'm a Memphis man and the
horns are always on the right.
00:20:15
Alright guys, I just spent about
two or three minutes there.
I got the balance
back to how I felt like it was in Studio A,
everything is kind of sitting
in the general spot,
I'm gonna do some automation.
00:20:25
One of the first things I like to do
really quickly early on
is see if I need anything on the 2-Bus.
00:20:30
I don't do much compression,
I really never EQ the 2-Bus,
but I have a little chain I've been
working on lately that I really like.
00:20:37
As I brought this Pro Tools up
you saw I did the FabFilter,
I'm gaining a few things down.
00:20:41
That's strictly so I have my faders
right about zero
so you have maximum resolution for rides,
if you get too low
and the gain is really hot
it's really hard to make
minuscule rides that I like to do.
00:20:51
So I try and keep all the faders
right about there.
00:20:55
So, one of the cool things about Pro Tools
is called the 'Hardware Insert'.
This is a great way to integrate
your outboard gear into a digital world.
00:21:02
It's just like patching
something on the patchbay.
00:21:04
I've got a 2-Mix set up
on my patchbay
on the output 17-18 in my Burls,
they're going to these V610
made by Spectra Sonics,
they're kind of the mastering version
of their 610 that I love so much.
00:21:17
Directly coming out of the
Spectra Sonics V610 I'm
patching my Fairchild 670 copy.
00:21:23
It's made by a guy named
POM Audio in England.
00:21:25
He hand makes this,
even hand makes the knobs.
00:21:28
This is pretty cool because it's loaded
with the original Fairchild transformers.
00:21:31
It's a newer tool I have.
00:21:34
We used it in tracking,
we used in Eli's previous record.
00:21:37
Actually I got it the day we started mixing
so we had to bust it out.
00:21:41
It has a couple cool features,
it's got a full bypass switch,
it's got a side-chain filter
for the compression signal.
00:21:49
It's got a parallel mix section.
00:21:51
I'll show you guys this section,
it's pretty cool.
00:21:53
It does it in a beautiful way where
there's no phase-shift
so it's pretty amazing,
at least I can't hear it.
00:21:59
And I have a couple mods where if I
put in on three on the time constant
I can actually dial in my own time.
00:22:04
So I'm gonna kind of play
with this for a second
and see if it helps
or hurts the mix,
if it doesn't help we
won't put it in there.
00:22:11
Like I said, a hardware insert,
I've got it on 17-18.
00:22:14
You can actually label this
in your I/O
and it makes it super cool
and easy to recall.
00:22:19
So here we go, 17-18,
we're going in the V610.
00:22:22
I'm gonna bypass the Fairchild so
I can just hear the V610 at first.
00:22:25
To demonstrate what this V610 does
I'm gonna do a simple thing here
and make sure I'm pretty fairly
locked in my left-right.
00:22:33
My drums are mono,
I'm gonna put just a quick
signal tone generator
on here and I'm gonna double check
that I've got my left-right
pretty close here.
00:22:43
So, see that. It's analog gear so you
can have a little bit of fluctuations.
00:22:47
This V610 is detented
so we're off just a little
bit like a tenth of dB or so
but we'll be OK.
00:22:54
So I kind of trick that.
00:22:57
I'm doing
ratio wise maybe 2:1
and a fairly fast release.
00:23:04
So, super fast attack, super fast release.
00:23:06
And I'm barely tickling it.
00:23:08
But like I said, the Spectra Sonics,
I could show you, recording wise,
you can do this if you have a
Spectra Sonics 610, they used to do this
to demonstrate how fast they were
but enough gain to be a mike pre.
00:23:19
If you plug a 57 into one of those
drop the 57 on the ground with the speakers
wide open, they won't blow your speakers.
00:23:24
It's so fast it tracks
the waveform of the pop.
00:23:27
And it won't let it go.
00:23:29
If you've ever recorded tambourine,
it's one of the hardest things to record,
even if you're ten feet back with
the mike pre barely up,
it will this kind of clipping sound
even though your levels are all way low.
00:23:41
Those are peaks
and they're big voltage peaks
to your mike pre.
00:23:45
The guy who invented
this compressor in 66
thought that was one of the
worst things about audio,
this voltage peaks swings,
so he built a compressor
that's so fast it will nab those peaks.
00:23:56
Like I said it's about 50 nanoseconds.
00:23:58
You can literally put
a really hot microphone,
U47, U87,
a foot or two away from the tambourine,
if you have that thing before your mike pre
it will grab all those peaks,
you can turn your mike pre up
and you won't have any of that
weird tambourine clipping sound.
00:24:13
You can always try it with keys,
anything kind of high-pitched rattly
will clip really fast.
00:24:18
Really big fast transient stuff.
00:24:20
The V610 are really cool
when you listen,
check out what it does,
you're not gonna hear compression,
it's so fast you're never gonna hear
it pumping or anything like that
but it's just a nice kind of
glue that brings it all together
and your mastering guy
will really recognize
your headroom that's happening later
because you're getting rid of some
of those voltage peaks.
00:24:39
Listen how the track feels like,
to me it feels a little unsettle right now,
there's things that
need to be ridden,
there's things that kind
of poke out left to right
and then when we listen the V610
it still has the punchiness,
it almost feels even more punchy
but it also feels like things
are kind of more congealed together
where you don't need to do
as much riding
or things bouncing left to right
so let's check it out.
00:25:00
Without.
00:25:51
For lack of a better word I feel like that
glues everything a little bit together.
00:25:55
By doing that I'm not gonna,
I don't compress much anyways,
I didn't compress
any of this stuff going in,
except the vocal,
instead of compressing things individually
you can kind of do this
and it's like the drum EQ,
a little bit goes a long way so,
maybe a dB at 2 to 4 ratio
and it's pretty awesome.
00:26:15
And let's add the Fairchild now.
00:26:18
I was waiting for Eli to go:
'OK, I don't like that'.
00:26:42
And this really helped me
out when I first started,
like I said, it's knowing where your
headroom is knowing where your gain is.
00:26:47
Leaving yourself room to do these things,
I built the mix up knowing I was gonna
put something on the Mix Bus,
knowing these were gonna add
a little bit pieces of gain,
knowing that I'm gonna be right about
or I wanna be at zero on the fader,
where your fader is at
the natural position.
00:27:01
It will feed that compressor
just like I want,
I'm just tickling it,
and now I'm going into my Fairchild.
00:27:06
I've got the input on the Fairchild up
to about 1 o'clock because I wanna hit
the Fairchild to get some tube glow.
00:27:14
And I've got the threshold
barely on
because I really don't wanna
do any compression,
I'm just seeing tonally
if the Fairchild helps
and then I'll see if the compressor
tickling a little bit really is nice.
00:27:24
Now the cool thing, like I said,
about this compressor,
it's got a parallel mix knob.
00:27:28
So once I get my threshold like I like
where I see it kind of happening,
I'm gonna bring in the parallel mix
from dry to wet and you can see what it
does by just adding a little bit in.
00:27:53
Now you're gonna hear me slowly blending
the parallel mix
and I'll kind of find the spot I like
and then I'll play it A/B for you
and see what it sounds like.
00:28:00
I'll stay on the same spot.
00:28:24
So this will be 100% wet now.
00:28:33
And to me that's a little
too much compression
so I'm gonna back this
down to maybe about 3
because I like what happened there,
let's hear that.
00:29:02
Here's it without it.
00:29:41
So I think we're gonna stick with that,
I've got the 90 Hz on,
so I'm not really affecting the lower end
of the kick drum and the bass,
I'm just kind of getting
some more upper stuff.
00:29:49
So let's start with that
and see what happens.
00:29:51
While we're listening back
I heard a couple 'Ps',
we went through the RCA 77
without a pop filter.
00:29:56
The 77 actually has a natural pop filter
built into that beautiful grill cloth
so, it did most of the work
but I'm gonna roll just a little bit off
Eli's voice so we don't have some plosives.
00:30:11
I'll put it on the right vocal first.
00:30:32
I'm gonna drag over FabFilter
to the horns,
like I said,
just to bring the gain down a little bit
because I'm gonna ride this horns.
00:31:01
So one thing I'm gonna do now,
I'm actually gonna put a trim plug-in
just on the 2-Bus.
00:31:05
And why I'm gonna do this is,
I think I'm hitting the Spectra Sonics
just a hair hard
on these bigger sections and
I just wanna lower it
so I'm getting where I am now but only
on the bigger sections, let's try a 3 dB.
00:31:18
And go back to that 'Bridge'
because I wanna do some riding
so I know it's
gonna get a little louder.
00:31:32
Because I did that I'm gonna add just
a hair on this parallel mix.
00:32:02
Eli and I,
while we were talking about this,
we thought it might
benefit from some slapback
so I'm actually going to
group the vocals here real quick
and bring them down a hair
because they're getting hot.
00:32:20
Cool, and let's add a fader.
00:32:23
I'll make a track here.
00:32:25
And I'm gonna do a couple maintenance
things too, while I'm at it.
00:32:28
We had the plate reverb going
and they're set up as two mono tracks,
I'm gonna make my life easier
and make it stereo.
00:32:36
I'm gonna hide this.
00:32:39
And I'll redo this.
00:32:43
And I like to put my effects down here.
00:32:45
This is a rough mix,
I'm gonna actually move this over to our
2-Print section and just make it inactive
so I don't accidentally
unmute it and get phasey.
00:32:53
I'm gonna actually use some real
slapback echo here, I'm going to use
my Fulltone tube tape echo.
00:32:58
'Slapback'.
00:33:01
Now, one of the things that I love
is when all the FX are going together,
you can sit here
and put just a slapback on the guitar
then do another slapback
on the vocal, blah blah blah,
but all the old-school records,
they all fed into the same thing.
00:33:14
And it really makes a difference
so we're going to do that.
00:33:22
So, I'm gonna set the slapback echo,
also I screw up guys,
the way we got this routed for Puremix,
for you guys to hear,
this is the easiest way for us to do it
because I don't have an AES card,
is I've got our
2-Mix basically coming out
of Bus 21-22
and now I've got a Master
Fader for Bus 21-22
and printing back into a new track
because I'm using
analog gear on the 2-Bus and also,
I'll show you why I do it this way.
00:33:47
What I'm sending,
up here at Out 9-10,
that is my send to you guys at Puremix
so, the B3, when I put it to an Aux,
I didn't assign it to Bus 21-22.
00:33:55
We were hearing it but it was
coming to you, I screwed up
you guys should fire me off this mix.
00:34:01
I told you're gonna learn what
not to do and you just learned it.
00:34:03
So now let's add slapback echo.
00:34:05
You've got it on 'Input 20'
so I'm gonna turn on my Echoplex
and see what we've got for
some slapback.
00:34:16
I love about a 15 ips slapback,
I love this Fulltone so much
I kind of know where that is,
it's usually right about 5 here.
00:34:24
I've got 100% wet but just one repeat.
00:34:27
So I just want a simple slapback
and I'll adjust this time a little bit.
00:34:30
Let's see.
00:34:58
So, one thing to keep in mind,
when you're doing this in 'Input'
you're actually hearing,
you know, some delay compensation.
00:35:04
So
it's not as fast
as it would be if I printed
this and listen back,
so it's a little bit longer
because I'm on 'Input' mode.
00:35:13
It's something to keep in mind
when you do some of this things,
there's a delay
for monitoring like this in 'Input' mode.
00:35:46
I'm gonna tighten it up to make
it just a hair faster for myself.
00:35:51
I like it dry.
00:35:52
You like it dry, that's fine,
that's totally fine.
00:36:11
You just like how present
everything is right now.
00:36:13
I'm with you 100%.
00:36:15
So, the great thing about
having the client here is if I
put that slapback on the mix
I would have to recall already.
00:36:21
But since he's here
we can keep going.
00:36:23
So I love it.
00:36:24
So we're gonna keep the slapback fader
in case we wanna send something else.
00:36:28
I'll kill it in the vocal
and let's go back to
our plate that we had going.
00:36:37
I need to move it because
we've given Fab those outputs.
00:36:51
So, all I'm patching guys is I'm doing
digital sends to analog FX.
00:36:58
So, I've got plate back
in the tracking room
to 5-6 now.
00:37:02
So,
I can put sends on any fader
and send to a real plate reverb
and have it coming back to us in Pro Tools.
00:37:09
There's a lot of things that
digital does really good,
there's nothing like a real chamber
or a real plate, there's just
something magic to it.
00:37:15
So, I'm gonna put this back a little bit.
00:37:18
And keep it low.
00:37:38
So let's keep going here,
I'm just gonna do a little FX things,
and we're gonna play and
go completely by feel here.
00:37:43
This seems what feels good.
00:38:04
One thing I'm gonna do
is darken this plate.
00:38:07
I like when the reverb
is a little bit darker
and they kind of just feel like
you feel them more than you hear them.
00:38:13
Actually I'm gonna do this with
the DSP cause we're in 'Input' mode.
00:38:16
The first thing I'm gonna
do is some filtering.
00:38:19
And I'll kind of play with this
and you can really hear
in the mix if you guys
darken or filter your reverbs
or do thin them,
boost a certain frequency,
you can really hear how it
settles in the track differently.
00:38:31
And a lot of times I'll just throw up
a simple delay if I wanna
pre-delay this thing
a little bit.
00:38:38
I'll usually start around 9 ms
but I might not use this at first.
00:39:07
So just by rolling that slope and moving it
to about 5 kHz where the slope starts
I don't have a lot that top plate
and it feels nicer to me,
it feels like it fits
more in the track.
00:39:16
Not as noticeable but
you feel the depth to it.
00:40:02
I'm still hearing a little bit of the pop
so we're gonna move the filter
just a little more maybe towards
90.
00:40:07
Real gentle.
00:40:10
On the vocals.
00:40:13
We just brought the guitar down
because it was
overpowering a little bit
but we wanna have that more
as a rhythmic thing.
00:40:18
I love the drums sound,
I love the way they’re sitting in the mix.
00:40:22
I've got the mix great now where we are.
We've got some effects going
and Eli and I are pretty happy,
we're gonna do some adjustments and talk.
00:40:27
Once I get all that done I'm
gonna start riding this thing
and it's gonna be done.
00:40:31
I've got the EQ, I think, right,
which you guys saw just a little bit.
00:40:35
And I wanna do a parallel compressor.
00:40:37
I wanna the parallel compressor
not so much for compression
but more
kind of distortion and stuff.
00:40:43
I'm gonna use the 610
Spectra Sonics compressor
which is great for compressing,
it's also great
to saturate and overload a little bit.
00:40:51
By doing that I just want the drums
a little bit trashier.
00:40:53
We overloaded the preamps
like I said, when we tracked,
to get a sound,
I just wanna be a little
bit more aggressive with it.
00:40:59
I'm gonna put this on
as a 'hardware insert'
just so I can hear the whole kit together
after the EQ
and then, if I like, I'm gonna print this
to a second track on Pro Tools
so I can blend it in.
00:41:10
It's important to
make sure you're eqing stuff first
if you're doing an analog piece
of gear and you're printing it
because if I eq the drums after this
there will be a slight phase shift difference
that would bug me, I would hear
and I would know.
00:41:23
So, I'm gonna mess with this for a second.
00:42:29
So by adjusting the release on this
I can get more kick drum
bottom or more attack
through this compressor.
00:42:35
It's kind of a really cool compressor,
and I'm hearing it
come basically what you would
think of 100% wet right now.
00:42:40
Soloed it sounds like
a little over the top
but when we blend that in
with the regular drums it's gonna
give us just a little bit more
weight and
saturation, which I think
is what we're gonna want.
00:42:51
So let's just see.
00:43:12
So here's without
the compressor.
00:43:45
So we're not hearing a lot of pumping
because the compressor is so fast.
00:43:48
What we are hearing is kind
of some more saturation,
the snare is splatting a little bit more
and that's where I kind of wanna to see
if I blend that in if that's gonna help
this drum kit a little bit.
00:43:57
This is all to me really subtle stuff
because I really love the way it sounds.
00:44:01
So I'm gonna print this
and I'll blend it in
by doing this.
00:44:07
So one thing I wanna do real quick guys is,
when you print this, I've got stuff on the
2-Bus, we've got plug-ins going.
00:44:13
If your converter,
which is only a certain
amount of converters
do automatic delay compensation,
you never know what's gonna happen.
00:44:20
So I'll print a 1 kHz tone
or I'll do white noise depending
if it's really frequency dependent.
00:44:25
I'm gonna put this at the
beginning of the track
on the kick drum, just on one channel mono
and I wanna print the
parallel I'm doing,
I should probably name the track,
call this 'Drum Para 610',
so I know.
00:44:38
I'm gonna print this for that tone
and I'm gonna double check
and line up the tones so
there's no phase shift.
00:44:47
And while that's printing I usually turn
the speakers down and just give myself
a hear break for a second.
00:44:52
I know the sample difference
on my converter right now,
it's 17 but I just showed you
how you can measure yourself
and look so you can
kind of see the difference.
00:45:01
And the you go up to nudge
and go to samples, and I know mine is 17
so I'm gonna pop that in.
00:45:05
So I moved mine 17 samples
so now I'm gonna take the
hardware insert off the drums,
because I think I've got it where I like.
00:45:12
You're kind of guessing a little bit
because I'm doing this as a parallel,
so I'm gonna bring this down
and kind of blend it in.
00:45:20
I routed this to print
so I'm gonna put this back.
00:45:49
It kind of makes
the bottom snare almost like,
the snare, to be more splatty,
and we'll see if we like it or not,
I'm gonna listen to the track for
a while and see if it helps.
00:46:18
Even though it's cool
I don't really like it,
so we're gonna take it out
and just leave it like it was.
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Software
Outboard Gear
Matt Ross-Spang is a Multi award-winning engineer, mixer, and producer. His first brush with greatness began at only 14 years old when he received 2 hours of studio time at Sun Studios in Memphis, TN, for his birthday.
He went on to intern at Sun Studios when he was 16 and learned what it meant to bring recording back to its roots. Matt now operates out of the newly renovated Studio B at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis, TN, which he now calls “Southern Groove.”
Among the many incredible entries in his discography, Ross-Spang was hired in 2016 by Sony Records to mix 18 previously unreleased songs by Elvis Presley from his historic 1976 sessions from the Jungle Room at Graceland.
Known for his unique taste and ability to preserve old school recording techniques and bring them into today’s music, Matt Ross-Spang has worked with some of the world’s most cherished artists from the most legendary studios in recording history.
John Prine
Al Green
Margo Price
Elvis Presley
Eli “Paperboy” Reed
Mary Chapin Carpenter
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