Tracking is complete for The Weird Sisters "Live And I Learn," and it's time to mix!
In this episode, Vance Powell sets up his SSL console and outboard gear while getting a starting point for the mix while explaining his entire process.
Watch as Vance:
Calibrates his parallel busses on his meters
Adds his GML 8900 parallel bus to the lead vocal
Adds a TG1 Limiter to the drum room mic
Adds his Morley House compressor to the knee mic
Adds Distressors and 550a's to the kick and snare
Dials in a Retro STA Level and a DBX Subsynth on the bass
Inserts a Vari Mu and Massive Passive on the acoustic guitars
Adds a Looptrotter Monster2 across the electric guitars
Explains when he reaches for his hardware 1176 compressors instead of the plugin
Discusses how he uses the 32 busses of his SSL console to add his outboard gear to the mix
This is your chance to join Nashville legend Vance Powell and The Weird Sisters at the world-famous Blackbird Studio and watch them craft "Live And I Learn" from Start To Finish.
00:00:23 The first thing we need to do is
do a little bit of line up of our
parallel buses.
00:00:28 Just the main parallel buses on the desk
I like to put the VU meters
at around -7.
00:00:34 It requires me lean over
here and look at them here.
00:00:37 The VU meter is up here at -7.
00:00:40 Now I'm gonna route
channel 32
to the first parallel bus
I'm gonna test which is the GML 8900.
00:00:51 The GML 8900, the settings
I don't ever really change them.
00:00:55 We didn't use it in the mixing (tracking)
so I know they're correct.
00:00:58 And what I'm going to do in the GML
is I'm just going to add this track in
to get about 2 dB of gain.
00:01:04 So, from -7 we're gonna go up to -5.
00:01:08 So there's the left side.
00:01:10 And there's the right side, perfect.
00:01:12 We're gonna mute it.
00:01:14 And then we're going to go to
25-26 which is my first drum bus.
00:01:18 That's the 33609 up here.
00:01:22 And I'm going to add that in.
00:01:25 So that it gives me about 1 dB of gain.
00:01:29 One dB.
00:01:34 -6.
00:01:36 Cool.
00:01:36 The next one is the Fatso bus.
00:01:40 OK?
And we're going to do this, same thing.
00:01:45 Fatso, up there, just doing a little bit.
00:01:47 I'm just gonna add about a dB back in.
00:01:51 Here.
00:01:55 There we go. Cool.
00:01:56 And then the last one
is the 33609 band bus.
00:02:02 And we're gonna do the
same thing, 1 dB back in.
00:02:10 So now those are done.
00:02:12 I can mute this horrible
1 kHz tone that's blasting out
to my desk,
that you all didn't hear, luckily.
00:02:21 And then I can start looking at
mixing.
00:02:25 I like basically to put these
meters on the top of my screen
and then put the edit window below it.
00:02:33 I'm gonna put this on the top.
00:02:35 I try my best to see all of them
which I just about can do, I think,
if I spread this all the way out.
00:02:41 Nice big screen.
00:02:43 And then first things first, if you notice
all the faders are at zero,
my faders are at zero everywhere,
all my parallel buses are off.
00:02:51 There's no EQ anywhere,
no inserts anywhere.
00:02:54 And I'm just going to hit
play and see what happens.
00:03:29 Alright, cool.
00:03:30 So,
if I go to
the vocal here,
I'm just gonna add the parallel bus in
so you can hear the gain that happens.
00:03:54 Just a little bit of gain.
00:03:56 Part of this strange thing
about the GML 8900 is
nobody really knows how to make them work.
00:04:02 Except for George.
00:04:03 I've found that certain
settings that I've
grown to use
doesn't really do a whole
lot of gain so to speak.
00:04:12 Or compression.
00:04:13 But it does catch a
little bit of peak limiting.
00:04:16 And because the unit is a peak limiter
and an RMS compressor together
just a little bit kind of goes a long
way and it gives me a little extra gain.
00:04:26 There really isn't another piece of
gear that kind of does this like the 8900.
00:04:31 And I can't actually say enough about it,
I do use it when recording a lot
of acoustic instruments, banjos, mandolins.
00:04:39 Anything that has a lot of
peak energy
but needs to sort of be tamed
down and not pump and be weird.
00:04:46 I just really love it on
vocals I just love what it does.
00:04:50 What it adds is just so good.
00:04:54 Kind of my story.
00:04:55 So I'm just going to listen on here.
00:05:13 Normally how I would work,
without speaking to you all,
would be, I would hit play and I would
just start muting and listening things
but I wanna go little bit slower here.
00:05:23 The first thing I'm gonna do is,
I'm not going to get to the vocals yet,
I'll kind of keep those off.
00:05:28 And a just want to sort of
listen to a little bit of the band,
see if I can
find anything that's cool happening,
like in the drums or anything like that.
00:05:39 Let me just kind of
work on that a little bit.
00:05:54 What I just did there was I just added
my TG 1 limiter
to the room mic.
00:06:02 That really sounds good there.
00:06:14 So here's with it.
00:06:18 And here's without it.
00:06:25 Kind of,
you know.
00:06:44 OK, so there's that
little knee mic of mine.
00:06:49 Now, I have this compressor.
00:06:51 Kind of an interesting thing that was made
called the Morley House.
00:06:57 It was brought to me,
I tried it out and I really liked it.
00:07:00 Now I've got a couple of them,
so check this out what it does.
00:07:22 This is without it.
00:07:26 And here it is with it.
00:07:35 Let me see if I can find the balance.
00:07:54 It's pretty cool with it in.
00:07:56 And it's kind of not as cool with it out.
00:08:10 So that sounds really good,
again no EQ or anything.
00:08:12 I do have on the kick and snare
Distressors.
00:08:17 Which I pretty much always use.
00:08:20 And then after the Distressor
is a pair of 550A,
which we're going to zero out here.
00:08:27 And I'm just going to add them in and
kind of get them balanced up here.
00:08:32 Just to be clear,
the Distressor
the EMI compressor, the Chandler,
and the Morley House is all on an insert,
nothing parallel is engaged at this point.
00:08:42 So let me see what the kick and
snare Distressors sound like now.
00:09:09 That's the kick Distressor.
00:09:11 No EQ yet.
00:09:12 So let's hear what the snare sound like.
00:09:31 Now the first thing I love is that
this lengthens the snare out a little bit.
00:09:35 Even more.
00:09:36 I just love the sound of that
ringing Keplinger snare.
00:09:40 Check it out.
00:09:52 It's pretty great.
00:09:53 Now let's just add a hair
of EQ on using the 550s.
00:10:16 Alright,
that's pretty awesome.
00:10:18 That's all the EQ I'm gonna do right now.
00:10:20 So now let's see what
the electric bass is doing.
00:10:34 Ah, let me explain something.
00:10:36 So in my session
you're gonna see
that there's a bass track,
here.
00:10:42 Bass.
00:10:43 And then there's a bass amp.
00:10:46 Now, I recorded both of these tracks
at the same time.
00:10:51 In so what I like to do here,
this is just a DI,
and then I'm in fake an
amp with the UAD SVT.
00:10:58 The cool thing is this means
there's no time difference between them.
00:11:03 And it was easier to do this here
without setting a whole bass rig.
00:11:08 To be honest with you,
I just kind of really
liked way it sounds.
00:11:11 I am using a little bit of the LA-2A,
here.
00:11:19 So I'm gonna tweak that a little bit.
00:11:37 I have a parallel bus for these.
00:11:40 I have a Retro Sta Level.
00:11:43 And I have a dbx 500 subsynth.
00:11:48 I pretty much use them
always on the bass.
00:11:50 And we've kind of balanced them out
so let's see what those
are like when I add them in.
00:11:58 Here's the Sta Level.
00:12:06 And here's the subsynth.
00:12:13 The subsynth is really subtle.
00:12:15 And you'd have to have
big subs to really hear it
but it's pretty cool when you do hear.
00:12:39 Now another part of this
track is this synth bass.
00:12:42 Now
I wasn't originally sure if we
were going to use it as a bass
or as like a synth part.
00:12:49 And then as we were
kind of working it out
it felt to me like it's
more like a synth part.
00:12:54 Especially when we put the
cool PCM 42 on it.
00:12:57 So let's take a look at those tracks.
00:12:59 And they're right here at 11 and 12.
00:13:19 I gotta be honest with you,
I think that's a brilliant sound.
00:13:23 So let's see how that fits in here now.
00:13:26 I'm going to mute
everything else,
all the other band stuff.
00:13:31 And just see what it sounds like in here,
no guitars just bass and bass,
so to speak.
00:13:59 Also, one of my favorite frequencies
in the whole world for bass
is about 800 Hz.
00:14:05 I don't know why,
I just like the way it sounds.
00:14:08 I might turn up on the DI a little
bit more 800, a little more 800,
I already did it once.
00:14:22 The other thing I'm gonna
do is roll some top end of.
00:15:04 Alright,
that's pretty darn cool.
00:15:06 Now, I'll add these acoustic guitars in
in the verses.
00:15:09 Alright?
I do use the Pro Tools control app
and I pretty much only use it
for this.
00:15:16 I know there's probably
other programs that would
work here
but
this works really good for just
a page
of memory locations.
00:15:26 We'll go to the first verse and
there's some acoustic guitars here.
00:15:38 I love how he's hitting that
hard and it's a little out of tune.
00:15:41 That low string, it's a C, so.
00:15:44 I do have an insert here, an insert path.
00:15:48 And that insert path
runs through my good friend Ivana Manley's
very new
Massive Passive.
00:15:56 So let's see what happens
when we add a little bit of this in
just to get a little more chunky,
chunky, I don't know,
to the acoustic.
00:16:22 I gotta be honest with you,
I don't need any EQ here,
that sounds really great.
00:16:26 A little bit gain being
made up back here
in the Vari-Mu,
but you know,
we're mixing, so it doesn't really matter.
00:16:33 Obviously, I turn the Vari-Mu off and
on and it will be a different gain,
but I kind of like it.
00:16:37 I can bring the faders down to
where it feels good in the mix.
00:16:40 Just like I did with the bass.
00:16:42 The next thing on our list
is the electric guitars.
00:16:45 So let's take a listen to what
these two electric guitars are.
00:17:01 Pretty cool sound.
00:17:02 A little while back,
I guess a couple years ago at NAMM
I ran into the guys of Looptrotter.
00:17:09 First of all, the gear is bright yellow,
which means you can see it pretty easy.
00:17:13 And they were kind of like:
'Hey,
we'd love for you to try out the Monster'.
00:17:17 They're all Polish guys,
they are from Poland.
00:17:20 And I had just come back
from doing a record in Poland
that had all this Looptrotter gear.
00:17:25 And I was like yeah you
know I tried it out in Poland.
00:17:29 In Gdansk, where the studio is.
00:17:32 And...
00:17:34 They were like:
'We're gonna send you one.'
And I said: 'Don't send me one,
I don't have money.'
It was Christmas time,
NAMM is always in January.
00:17:42 I was broken.
00:17:43 'We'll send you one,
if you like it you can buy it.'
I was like OK.
00:17:47 So they sent it to me
and to be honest with you,
it's really big.
00:17:52 Yellow
and I didn't at the time
think that I really loved it.
00:17:56 I tried it on my 2-mix
and I didn't like it at all.
00:18:00 And so then it got
passed around a little bit,
my friend Reid Shippen
had it for a little bit.
00:18:04 And then it came back
and at that that particular moment I was
mixing a record that I can't remember now
but I remember
that I wanted to try it on some electric.
00:18:13 So I was like:
'Let me try that on electric guitars.'
And man
I fell in love with it and
ended up buying it.
00:18:20 So
I had to make room
and it's a big old thing.
00:18:25 The thing that makes it so
cool really is the tube saturation.
00:18:29 The compressor kind of sounds
like an 1176,
in my opinion, it's very 1176 like.
00:18:35 But just adding
the tube saturation in,
it's really great.
00:18:40 So let me show you what happens here,
there is a little bit of gain
but that's just because it's kind of like
an 1176 and you have to
add some signal, you have to turn up to a
point to the point you get it to compress
but I've kind of got it all the way down.
00:18:55 So, yeah,
it's just I had to add some gain.
00:18:58 But check it out.
00:18:59 We'll go from the top.
00:19:08 And you can see,
it's not really doing a lot of,
I mean, a lot of compression,
just a little bit.
00:19:13 But something about that tube saturation
signal just really make some bark.
00:19:18 So check it out on the track here.
00:19:38 Just...
00:19:39 I know it's louder,
I know louder it's better
but even if I add the gain in
something about the harmonic
structure of it is what I love.
00:19:48 And again, no EQ.
00:19:50 This is how I recorded it,
which is awesome.
00:19:53 And that's, in a way,
how really it should be.
00:19:55 So this would all be the
things I would be listening to.
00:19:59 I would be listening to
parts and how they fit together
and what kind of processing I want.
00:20:05 I've already listened through,
maybe not with you guys,
but I've already listen
to this track tons of times.
00:20:11 And
I've listened through the
track normally if I was mixing it
and it wasn't something I did
I've listened to it several times
I made sure I've got plenty of
vocal gain over here, I made sure that...
00:20:23 you know, I made sure they're all the parts.
So that's what I want to do now.
00:20:26 I wanna go to some parts.
There's a Clav
part that we recorded over at Blackbird.
00:20:32 That is really cool, we did just
a little overdub right at the top
with the Clav and I
put this track in stereo
but the Clav I'm just gonna
pan a little bit to one side
just to give it a little
something in this first verse.
00:20:46 Here's the Clav, I don't expect doing
anything to it other than just turn it on.
00:20:50 I think it will be great.
00:20:55 Now what I did there,
here in Pro Tools,
the first night
is I just put a little Echoboy.
00:21:05 So there's just a little Echoboy patched,
it's in stereo
it's an 8th note and
an 8th dotted note.
00:21:11 That's the tracks.
This is sort of the stereo,
I made it go mono to stereo here
and just these two hits.
00:21:21 This is just a little tasty
thing at the top of the Intro.
00:21:29 Super cool.
00:21:30 Then
it goes
to another track,
I split this into two tracks.
00:21:34 So now we have the Clav.
00:21:42 And probably what I would do here,
just tame this a little bit,
with an 1176.
00:21:48 Again the UA Blackface 1176.
00:22:00 Cool.
00:22:00 I'm just gonna get it
in here and then now
I'm gonna leave it in the track,
I'm gonna play this back out of solo.
00:22:07 And see if I can get this track
to just have the right level here.
00:22:39 I like what the 1176 did on the Clav
in the rhythm,
so I'm going to do the same thing
on the Echoboy track.
00:22:51 And I'm gonna do it
after the Echoboy,
so that it compresses
that Echoboy signal.
00:23:08 So after I put these
1176s on here,
for the Clav, I should explain.
00:23:13 I have 1176 over here,
I do.
00:23:17 Why aren't we using them?
Well, in fact, I am using them.
00:23:22 They are
permanently patched to
inserts 19 and 20.
00:23:28 So that's why I'm not using them.
00:23:30 The other reason is,
to be honest with you,
the UA 1176,
I have all of them I need and more
here in my computer.
I have a couple of Octo cards
and they just sound fantastic,
they do exactly what I want.
00:23:46 So, often,
even though I have one right here,
I won't reach for it
because, for this track,
this little Clav part
is just in the verses.
00:23:57 There's no need to use
my 1176s over here for that.
00:24:01 And I love these and they're fantastic,
but normally their patched to my desk
on 19 and 20 because
a lot of times I'll do
guitar 1 and 2 on 17 and 18.
00:24:12 3 and 4 on 19-20.
00:24:13 I use the 1176 for those.
00:24:15 And so that's the reason
why I'm not using the hardware,
I'm using the plug-in.
00:24:19 That's kind of like how
I like to mix.
00:24:23 The other thing is
if I put it in the plug-in up
and it doesn't exactly do
what I want it to do
but it's really close,
then maybe I'll try out the real ones.
00:24:35 Because the real ones
definitely have a certain mojo,
these two attack and release,
in a way the attack and release
aren't quite the same, they're analog.
00:24:44 And so that's cool, that can make a
cool shifted left and right thing
that the plug-in doesn't.
00:24:50 That's a good reason for that.
00:24:52 One more thing on the Clav part.
00:24:54 I don't really want to use a lotta of EQ
and I want the Clav
to just kind of sit in,
it's only used in the verses.
00:25:01 So the stereo Clav part,
it's a mono track,
it goes into a delay
that makes it stereo.
00:25:07 I do have a wide box.
00:25:10 It is a Bedini Audio Spatial Expander.
00:25:13 They are either really cheap
or really expensive.
00:25:17 It depends on where you get them.
00:25:19 They are a dumb box,
it's all pin three hot,
if you open it up it's all made of epoxy.
00:25:24 There's a long story there,
get it on Wikipedia, you can look it up.
00:25:28 I've talked about it
before but just look up
the Bedini Audio Spatial Expander.
00:25:33 It was a box made to take mono
television and turn it into stereo.
00:25:37 Basically, there's two ways of
doing that, one is comb filtering,
making a bunch of combs with an EQ.
00:25:44 And then the other
one is doing a left minus right
and adding that into the stereo mix
which basically destroys the center
and makes the stereo really wide.
00:25:53 This is like audio heroin because
once you do it you want more of
it because your mix, which is here,
suddenly his way out here.
00:26:01 The problem is when you hit mono
it just disappears.
00:26:05 And if you're listening on an iPhone,
like an older iPhone,
and you send the song to the artist,
and they're walking on the
street in NY and they go like:
'I don't hear my guitar at all.'
That's because you've put
it in the wide box and it's,
you know,
eliminating it.
00:26:21 But used
sparingly
it's really cool.
00:26:26 I'm going to show you what
the wide box does real quick
or the BASE as we call it, the B A S E.
00:26:33 All your BASE belongs to us.
00:26:35 For those of you Internet nerds.
00:26:37 So let me solo this up.
00:26:40 And I'll play
this little Intro part
which is the only part that's
really going to come out in stereo.
00:26:46 and then I'll play it with the BASE on.
00:27:01 OK, cool. That's just stereo,
here's with the BASE,
which is on buses
23-24.
00:27:06 Boom.
00:27:07 Boom.
00:27:08 And boom.
00:27:09 Now the cool thing about
having a desk with 32 buses
is that I can have 32 things
coming back from my console
off these buses. And that's
what this whole row up here is.
00:27:21 And you can see they're labeled,
this is the BASE.
00:27:23 I don't need to have a bunch
of Aux Sends, I can just send it
and it ends up like this.
So, here's with the BASE off.
00:27:55 One interesting thing is,
because it uses both comb filtering
and
left minus right,
frequencies are different in each side.
00:28:04 It has a mono knob,
you can turn up the middle.
00:28:08 I don't ever use it,
I have stereo width wide open
and then the outputs wide open
and the input kind of down a little bit.
00:28:14 It goes in stereo, it comes out even
more stereo, if you can imagine that.
00:28:19 So now let's listen to this
with the wide box, the BASE on.
00:28:22 And this will just be
this little intro part.
00:28:42 Here's with it off.
00:28:51 I gotta be honest with you, it's cool.
00:28:54 This is cooler.
00:29:08 One thing that's really cool,
I don't know if you've noticed,
is here on top of my desk
I have a TC Electronics Clarity M.
00:29:15 Now this Clarity M is
being fed a digital signal
off a Universal Audio 2192
that is connected directly to
the output of my monitor fader
and my monitor fader
comes out, goes to the 2192, it's wide,
and 2192 to the input of
this Avocet monitor controller.
00:29:39 So everything that comes through
my desk goes through the M.
00:29:43 One of the cool things about these
is that they have a correlation meter
and they have this great phase meter.
00:29:49 The phase meter is super fun
when you've got
something like our key bass.
00:29:54 So this is the sub-bass or synth bass
and then you'll see correlation here
and you'll see the actual
Lissajous pattern
of the left and right.
00:30:14 That's pretty awesome.
00:30:15 Now check out what happens here
with our little wiggly parts.
00:30:33 And what I love about this is that it
starts out sort of in correlation,
in phase, left to right,
and then it just
slides to out of phase.
00:30:42 which is kind of cool to me.
00:30:44 Now we've got this basic rhythm
there there isn't anything else
in the basic rhythm in the
verses, except for these things.
00:31:10 There's a mono track
of Clav here.
00:31:15 Right here, as you can see.
00:31:16 And that Clav,
I do have it panned just a little bit.
00:31:19 The great thing is
anything near the middle
the wide box doesn't
do anything to
except for the weird
little comb filtering,
it kind of makes the
Clav sound pretty cool.
00:31:41 I think it sounds great.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Vance studied electrical engineering in Missouri and started his career in live sound as a front-of-house engineer. In 2002, he moved to Nashville in order to become studio manager and chief engineer at the legendary Black Bird studios in Nashville. In 2006, he co-founded Sputnik studios along with Grammy-winning engineer Mitch Dane, still in Nashville.
Vance Powell has won 6 Grammy awards working with rock artists such as The Raconteurs, Kings of Leon, Jack White, Pearl Jam, The White Stripes, The Dead Weather and more.
Powell's domain of expertise is definitely mixing and producing rock music. As shown in his pureMix videos, Vance likes to experiment and create new fuller and exciting sounds using all kinds of pedals, echos, analog outboards and plug-ins. Vance was used to recording to tape and definitely has an analog approach that makes him commit to fewer good sounding tracks rather than piling up takes in Pro Tools.
His goal is to make something new and warm that fits the band's vision with upfront snare drums and powerful guitars. Rocking.
