Start to Finish: Vocal Production & Guitar Solos with Vance Powell

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We're here, this morning with young Tyler Bryant.

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- Hello! And..

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we're going to comp some vocals that we did last night.

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Here we got 6 takes so we're just gonna move through this process of listening, track per track, line per line, basically, build a comp, and then listen to it, and..

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kinda go down that path. Tyler will inject comments throughout the process, as he tends to do..

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- Sure. What do you normally say? - Hey, can we listen to that line, again? And then what do you say? - Hey, there's one spot.. And then what's right after that? 'IT SUXX!' - Yeah, yeah! - SUXX!! *laughs* So, ok, here we go! So this came from take 3 here's some of the other ones.

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- Overshot! Yeah.

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Timing.

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- 'When it comes' is cool from that..

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then it goes sharp! Ok, let's build a little..

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and let me make this a little bit bigger..

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So I'm gonna cut on the 's' there..

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A great thing about comping vocals, few things to know: 1) 's' have no pitch..

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So they make really nice things to do crossfades on.

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Because they have no pitch.

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Now we're gonna move on! Ok, let's take that one.

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- I like it. Ok, cool.

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I'll come back and kinda clean all this up a little bit. Tops and tails and things.

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There's two different ways to comp vocals, 1) is..

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the way we're kinda doing it now, we're gonna do it line by line, we're gonna listen line by line to make sure each line, we like it.

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Then, we're gonna listen to like a whole verse and make sure it sorta makes sense.

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The other way to do it is listening take by take and to do that sometimes, what I'll do, or most of the times when I do that, is..

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to put the lines, each line on a grid.

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So there'll be a line and then there'll be a set of boxes for each take.

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And then I'll put different things in those boxes depending on what I think of it. I'll put a little checkmark if I like the line.

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I'll put an 'X' if I don't like the line.

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I'll cut the checkbox the box in half.. if I like the 1st part of the line, but don't like the second part of the line.

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It's a weird little thing and what happens that way is, often, when you listen with the artist, they're not maybe.. I mean: Tyler is, quite a bit..

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different than other people.. in more ways than one! but..

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a lot of times the artist doesn't have the patience to just hear a line at a time, whereas I can kinda do that really easily.

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They wanna just hear the take and feel the flow, so..

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That's one way to do it.

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I do both of 'em, both ways, it just depends on what and how the best way to possibly do it.

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You know, this doesn't bother you, right? - I prefer to do it this way and getting it line by line and then going back and listening to it and go: 'does anything feel unnatural?' like.. does the flow not feel quite right, here..

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It's just one of the things, you have to just feel it out with the artist..

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and I know that Tyler.. we like to do it this way, so..

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Ok, let's keep going! Pretty good, lemme back up, here.

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When I am comping, and I have multiple comp track lanes open if I like something, I'll just take and select it, and cut it.

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I'll just cut it in Pro Tools so I know 'ok, this is a possibility.' This whole little section here, I might like.

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- I like that one! Like that one? I like how it's overdriving.

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On 3, you really finished the word.

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We like 3..

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All right, let's take it! - Yeah! - A couple of different rhythmic options, there..

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'it seems' or just 'seems I don't', kind of a preference thing..

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Still kinda possible..

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line split, here..

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- Pretty cool! What do you think, you like? I'll do this where I'll just throw these tracks up you know, not worrying about the edit or anything with them, I'll just throw them up together and see if they work.

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And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

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The nice thing about you know, kinda doing it this way, once Pro Tools finally got edit lanes was that it's easy to see where these came from.

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So here's.. does that..

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Let's do a 3 and 7 split, here.

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I think that's good.

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I am not a big fan of tuning but I am not afraid to use tuning to make a good performance great.

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I like it in very, very, very small instances..

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and I use something kinda weird, I use Waves Tune.

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I kinda like it.

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I don't know why, but it seems to make sense for me.

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I know, everybody in the world uses Autotune, but I don't.

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I'm gonna just check this out and see where we're at.

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I thought maybe he might have just slid he's still in the note range, here.

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But it just slides a little bit sharp.

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All I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna loosen it up a little bit..

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the transition speed..

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so that it's a little closer to what he originally did.

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Like this.

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Not quite as sharp..

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Pull up this little note, here.

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Let me see what this sounds like..

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You know, the great thing about that is: that note wasn't sharp..

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it was just 'sharp-ish'.

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It was heading towards sharp.

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So, for me, that's all I would ever really tune, one note, one little piece of a long stretch, something that pushes up against the edge and often I don't even care, I don't mind that..

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There's a lot of people around that will tune every vocal to straight lines and they'll make it perfect that's not really my vibe, and I don't think that's really, you know..

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really what you want. - We actually had an experience where we made a record and the producer tuned every single thing.. but he would have Autotune on..

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while I was singing the vocal and so I would be singing and I would hear my..

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I use vibrato when I sing and I would..

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I would hear.. I would just hear it jumping and jumping.

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And so I finally got to a point where I said I am not gonna sing anymore.. I can't..

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I can't do this.. we're not making the right record, here.

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And so, I called Vance and I.. we had never worked together and I go: 'do you use Autotune?' and he goes: 'If you pay me A LOT extra.' *laughs* and I was like..

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that's exactly what I wanted to hear. We're coming over, let's make an album! *laughs* Ah! I remember those days! - Yeah! That was fun! Something's kinda cool about that! That one's the most in tune..

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- I like the 'gives' on my first one.

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Yeah, me too. - The first instinct was cool.

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I like this whole line. - Cool.

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Diplomacy! Crazy, when that works.

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I'm also not a fan of like, a lot of takes.

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I kinda think that you know, if we can't take it in 5 or 6 takes, we should start again.. like..

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do something else for a while! - Yep! And it's happened, we've done..

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we've done takes and just, thrown them away because just the night wasn't right.

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You know, or whatever! And, you know, that's part of making records, you just have to kinda like make sure that you know, the singer, is in the right headspace, most of the time, when I work with an artist who's singing I kick everybody out.

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Kick everybody out.

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Because, really, it comes down to, whether it's a, whether is a rock, hard rock or metal song, or a ballad or a country song, or whatever, the singer's singing something that they wrote, it's something close to them, so so, you know, it's..

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very personal, and a lot of singers are really great about it, they can sing in front of a whole bunch of people and sing badly and good and well and bad and try different things.

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But I find that most of the time the real risks are sort of taken between the artist and I. We can just talk about it and: 'Yeah, man! Try that note.' And if you hit the wrong note, if you squeal or somebody does something weird, there's not a bunch of band guys, standing around, watching and laughing..

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Something about the timing of that that's cool.

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All but 'hits', here..

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I kinda like the way you did 'hits', here.

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- Yeah! And instead of this sort of..

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Instead of this sort of harder one.. - Aggressive one, yeah! It's a little more laidback.

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Maybe it's this..

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- I like it! I got another one, here.

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I like that one better.

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Ok, this I'll be from here..

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A guy from here..

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..and then this guy from here.. we'll throw these together, badly.

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- I like it! Me too! Once I get this comp together, like this, This is just my rough comp..

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I'm gonna take these tracks, I'm gonna solo them..

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and listen to him in solo.

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Make sure that I have all the crossfades correct and there's no weird consonants and stuff.

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We're getting ready to do some background vocals with Noah Denney, bass player in the band, I changed a couple things for Noah, I changed the mic pre, we have used a 512c for the vocals, which is what we used on Tyler.

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We're gonna be using my 1073..

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Two reasons: 1) we need the 512 for the overdubs we're gonna do here in a minute..

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so we just swapped, trying to just you know, make things go smoothly.

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So we're gonna do some background vocals here, we're gonna start with the Noah's hard parts and then we're gonna move to Noah's easy parts..

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which, to me, they're all hard, but..

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here we go! All right man, here we go, all right? Man, that sounded great! - Lemme grab that last one, again.

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Just the very last 'aftershock'.

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Let's check on that. - Cool! You like? - Yeah, I am good at. T, you good? - Yeah, sounds good, man! - Cool! Let me take a look real quick, hold on! Let's get the first one! - I say I'd do a better second one, too.

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Ok let's do the first two. - First 'stops', first two.

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I think those were definitely better.

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Yeah let's get 'still'.

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All right? - Do it to me again! Yeah, man! - Cool! All right, cool, I like that! - Alrighty! All right, cool, do you want to just go on and get all these choruses of this guy? And take them out of the way? - Yeah let's do that.

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Get that 'still', real quick. - Yeah.

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Yes? - Yeah! You gimme one second, all right? - No prob! So, on 'still', 'world goes still', we're gonna look at this as a possible Vocalign thing.

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I'll be a little bit weird 'cause it's a stereo track, but we'll see.

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Ok great! That's awesome! - Cool! Cool, next! - Yeah? This was a good..take.. That's fine.

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Yeah, I know. - He did it so animated! You know.. - Love it! *my heart stops!* - It's pretty fast on that.

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Like we do live.

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We'll figure it out.

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That was pretty cool, man.

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- Play it one more time! - Yeah, I'm alright with that 'stops', I think..

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did 'heart' sound a little wonky? - Yeah. Let's get it! I'll take that. - Cool! - Uhm..

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- Yeah let's get 'world goes still'..

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- I guess Noah will do the the book ends.

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- One more! - Close! Yeah! Again! 'Still'.. get 'still'.

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- Yeah! Yeah, we're gonna look at it.

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Gimme a second here. It's a little wobbly in the pitch, you know.

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Humili-o-tron! - Humili-o-tron! 500! All right and then.. next..

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you have the other little line, right? - Let's get the big 'aftershock' and Noah will do it then.

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Yeah? - Yeah, I remember that! Ok, now the next line is the the wiggly one, right? - Yeah! I'm gonna be singing probably way softer.

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So this is really kind of another track, right? - Yeah we could put it on the other track, the the middle lines.

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If you own it, too.

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Well let's get this one line, here.

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I'm gonna check that, that was creamy.

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The other line, - So, I go..

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*sings* that's the other line, I see.

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- Right. - Would you solo the lead vocal for me? We're gonna listen to something, real quick..

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*mumbles* Yeah, super cool.

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I was just listening, Noah, because you go up on '-ter' and I go down, but it's cool! - Yeah, it's neat, though! - You like that, or you want me to match it, exactly..

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- Try one where you match it exactly, just to see.

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- Yeah, so what do you add, when? - Cool, yeah, let's do it! Better? - I like it better just because it doesn't seem to take you away from the lead vocal, as much.

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All right, we're gonna keep this one.

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Let's do the 'cause of you, 'cause of you'! Pretty good singing there, Noah! - Thank you, sir! Yeah, let's listen! - Yeah.

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- Last 'you'. Last 'you'! Last line, very last note. - The easy one! Yeah.

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- That's nice.

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- Cool! All right, that worked.

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Ok so now, let's get let's get the other lines, right? - Yeah.

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One more time on the first one but we like the second one.

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Curious if these..

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if we should double these? So it may become a little bigger? You wanna double them, real quick? - Yeah! Here it comes! Let's just get this first one! - Yeah.

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Ok, second one! - Cool! Gimme a second, pitch is great..

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timing is a little wonky! But I can fix that real quick.

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A little Vocalign action, here.

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I think that'll work! - Thanks, yo! Ok, come on in! On this last track we've done this background vocal part for this little piece and then I was like.. it might be kind of really cool if we double these and split them out wide so..

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so the 'aftershock' part with the Tyler and Noah are together in mono and then this background part, this the part that comes after it, spreads out wide.

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And it's like kind of nice and creamy and wide.

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So I had him do a double.

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And the great part about the double is that you know, you really want it to be really tight, so you know, time is a little bit always of the essence, here and so..

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I had him sing it, the pitch was great..

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but the timing wasn't exactly perfect, so..

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I use a program called Vocalign Project.

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It was originally made from, best I understand it for spotting dialogue but it works really good for vocals and it allows you to take a piece, make that the map and then line up vocals off of that map.

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It's kinda cheating, but it always sounds good and it sounds nice in small doses, so..

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I really like it.

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The Sarge is still on, right? It's on? Ok, so let's swap the 7 with the Sarge.

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Just swap the cable out there.

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We're gonna one little thing, here.

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*sings* So let's try this, so we'll just..

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let's double the 'aftershock', let's put it through the amp.

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Ok.

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- Ok! Cool, let's hear what that's like.

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- Still buzzing? Yeah it's ok, it's just.. you know..

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It is what it is. - Just gain! - Yep.

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1/4" mic and some gain.

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Cool! Let's try it, all right? - Just the Ampex? Just the Ampex, yeah! This is a little up my range, Vance! All right, here comes Graham Whitford to the rescue! Come Whitford! The Grahamster! You better warm up, Graham! - Yeah.

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Nice warm up, dude! - That's it, I'm just gonna go for it and see what happens.

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Here we go! *laughs* Get the last one! Ok, gimme a second here, all right? Hang on one second, all right? - I love it! So bon-headed.

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D-Verb, dude! I went into the track and I did some editing to edit the top and the bottom of the track so that it's just basically him just singing the note and then cutting off..

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and then..

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I opened a plug-in, this was just the lovely old D-Verb.

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I went into the Hall patch, it's about 60% mix, and then I selected an area that I wanted, and I hit 'Reverse'.

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So that's gonna process, that's an Audiosuite, it's gonna process it in reverse.

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And so..

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basically what it came out sounding like, was this: So, I thought this might be cool if there was some sort of under layer, under this chorus, 'cause Tyler and I were talking like maybe the 'aftershock' are not quite big enough.

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We could have Tyler do the double but it's just a little bit too high and they're getting ready to go out on the road so we don't want to really blow his head off..

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And we could have Noah do it but you know..he's singing a whole bunch in it, so..

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we got Graham in there and - This is what Graham does live, so..

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Yeah, he's just blowing it out singing it live.

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So, you know.. *laughs* we'll just kinda see if we can make this bigger.

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And the backwards thing just adds a little bit of of pre-tension to it..

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it gives a little stutter-y sound and I have an idea for something, a little processing here in a minute, after we get all this, then I'm gonna do it.

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That's kind of the deal.

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Exponential Audio Nimbus.

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We're gonna do some guitar overdubs here..

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Tyler and I both like to sort of be in the room here when we're doing them..

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We like to be in the room together.

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That's how we actually like it.

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And..

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part of that reason is that sometimes I will do things that will sort of feed into what he's doing and we can talk about and it's right here in front of our face.

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That's the good part. The bad part is that it gets pretty loud, in here.

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Not as loud as it's gonna get out there..

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and that's the interesting part. So what we're doing is we're taking a pair outputs out of Tyler's pedalboard.

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And then we're driving them into the inputs of a pair of API 512s.

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And then those 512s they patch into my mic lines, I have a pair of mic lines returns, so they're flipped around, they go the other direction.

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They come out of my snakebox out in the studio and they go to a pair of reamp boxes that are phantom powered.

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And there's a phantom power box out there that supplies phantom to them.

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Those reamp boxes then go to two amplifiers.

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So, how we came up with this, was..

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I have a little thing..

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So, there's a pair of boxes that are made by Neutrik, one of them is called the Minirator, and it allows you to set a tone and a level.

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So I set a 1k tone at -12.

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So -12, that's about what a guitar pedalboard comes out with.

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We take that -12, we stuff it into the 550 or rather 512, sorry! And then we go down to the other end of the line and..

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out of the line on the other end we plug in the companion piece to it..

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the Minilizer. We put the Minilizer in to the reamp box so we make sure the reamp box is putting out -12.

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By either adjusting the level at the reamp box, or adjusting the level, here.

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That means, whatever we put in, is exactly what goes to the amp, no gain, but yet is all balanced, and all line-driven and everything's cool and all our guitar cables are very short.

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I'm driving two amps out there right now, one is a..

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little JMP 18W Marshall.

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And the other one is Mike's '63 Fender VibroVerb ..probably my favorite amp in the whole world.

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Same patch as before on the guitar..

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The mics, they're patched into the BA-11As and they're the 48 and 57.. 48 and 57..

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And they're gonna come up here on the desk and what I'm gonna do is actually I'm gonna combine the two amps.

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I'm gonna combine one amp on to Bus 18 and one amp on to Bus 17.

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I'm gonna put a track up here we're gonna do a little solo, here.

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First, actually we're gonna do this a little entry guitar line, that's a intro line.

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Why 2 amps? Well, because each one has a radically different tonal character.

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Therefore, when I put it up in the mix one side I can EQ slightly different than the other side and they can fit together in mono like this, instead of sort of hitting on each other by being the same amp or the same type of amp.

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I want them to kinda tonally fit together, like this.

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So, a couple things I'll do is I'll actually boost and cut EQs in..

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in the same areas, in other words like, one amp may be a little darker, but might have a little 5k peak and the other one might be brighter but actually has a 3k dip.

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or a 5k dip, that kinda vibe where the 2 of them fit together.

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So..

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we're gonna show you, this is the VibroVerb, hold on..

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This is the VibroVerb..

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Obviously you can hear the reverb..

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and this is the Marshall.

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All right, Mike, can you patch something for me please? On Bus 19-20.

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Can you patch the 1176s so, 19 out, 1176..

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Pro Tools in 20.

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So let's hear..

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we're gonna listen to each microphone, here, across the spectrum..

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and these are just the starting sort of levels..

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starting ideas, here.

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Ok, this is the 48.

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On the VibroVerb.

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I'm gonna get a little more gain.

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Pretty classic sound. Ok, here's the 57.

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When you combine them..

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Ok..

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Here's the 48 on the Marshall.

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A little more gain..

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About the same amount.

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Pretty dry..

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and then here's the 57, real classic..

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combining them..

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keep going..

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All right, so, interestingly..

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One of the 57s was out of phase..

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in that arrangement, so..

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Cool! This will be a lot better, now.

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The thing I just asked Mike to patch up is a pair of 1176s on a Bus.

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So, what I am gonna do is I'm gonna have a uncompressed, guitar bus.

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And a compressed bus.

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And basically the difference will be, between them..

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'cause I can change the input here, in Pro Tools.

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Ok? Cool!, So...

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Now, lemme show the differences between them.

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All right? So, this will be the uncompressed.

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This is Bus 17-18 straight off Pro Tools.

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Obviously not as dynamic.

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But a little bit more..

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close, and in-your-face.

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Let's do one thing, let me..

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split these busses, so..

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I'm gonna send the VibroVerb to both channels and the actual Marshall to both channels.

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Then I'll just try a little something different, here.

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And then..

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Let's see, that'll be there..

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Ok, maybe.. let's try this! Try that, Tyler! So we changed it so that the VibroVerb the bus routing, so that instead of it just being on 17 and 19, which is being the left side..

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it's on 17 and 18 and 19 and 20 so that's on the left and right side and then I did the Marshall then moved each mic, on left and right.

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So, basically now it's 2 amps..

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running..

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not really in stereo but with 2 different mics on each side instead of 1 amp on 1 side, 1 amp on the other side.

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So let's try that.

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All right, so.. you're gonna see me moving these faders around a little bit, from time to time..

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and basically what I'm doing is: I'm just..

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I'm just adjusting the balance between the two amps.

00:10:38
Each one of them has a completely different sort of tonal characteristic you know, the Marshall obviously has a very..

00:10:45
you know.. Marshall sound and the Fender has the reverb, so..

00:10:49
I'm just kinda manipulating those around, a little bit.

00:10:51
Let's see..

00:10:52
Where we're at.

00:10:53
And I'm going to use the compressed pair..

00:10:59
for this intro solo part.

00:11:01
So do you want to give it a try? Cool! I was just getting a balance and things, here..

00:11:44
you're gonna notice here, in the Pro Tools world that I'm..

00:11:48
probably gonna keep most of these takes.

00:11:51
I'm not a big fan of having tons and tons of playlists but while we were just figuring things out I'll keep a lot of those playlists because sometimes wrong things happen and they're cool.

00:12:01
Once we kinda get the idea I'll probably just we'll probably just punch things until we love it, so..

00:12:15
that's cool, what was that? - It's a Dizzy Tone.

00:12:17
Ah! The Dizzy Tone pedal! All right, here we go! Again! I love the whole..

00:13:00
I love the intro, I love the middle section, the end section needs to..

00:13:03
resolve it around a little bit back to the vocal, you know what I mean? Cool! Let's keep going here..

00:13:09
- You like that tone? Yeah, I do! - Okay! I love it! - I just kicked in a little..

00:13:56
vibe, there at the end..

00:13:59
I'm gonna have Mike patch some something that might make this really cool.

00:14:04
Mike, gimme..

00:14:07
we're not using Aux 4, right? Cool! Let's Aux 4 to that mult..

00:14:17
to a mult..

00:14:18
to the Moog Echoes..

00:14:20
We've patched a couple of Moog Echoes This is a 500-series Moog Echo..

00:14:26
I don't remember the number, but Moog makes these 500 Echoes and then the other thing that we've done, is..

00:14:33
I've done a couple routing patches and I basically routed these Moog Echoes not only to the guitar channels, in Pro Tools, but also to another bus of the desk.

00:14:46
And this is part of the thing that, you know, I'm not gonna be the guy who says 'you should have a desk to make records'.

00:14:53
Because you don't have to have a desk..

00:14:55
but these are things that are all really super-easy and super-fast that you can do, if you have a desk.

00:15:01
So I came out, Bus 27 of my console, I had Mike make a patch and he actually Bus 27 out into Line input 27 that actually just worked out, strangely! And this is gonna be the 'spin fader'.

00:15:16
And basically what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the output of the Moog Echoes to a bus I'm also sending to the guitars, and in parallel, sending that output to another bus..

00:15:27
that bus is gonna come back into the console where I'm going to feed that back into the Moog Echoes.

00:15:37
And that makes a really cool sound. It sounds a lot like this.

00:15:56
Much like turning up a..

00:15:58
a tape echo, just turning the repeat up.

00:16:01
But this is actually a little more complicated, because I can manipulate the signal.

00:16:05
I can manipulate the signal because I can add EQ to it..

00:16:08
take the low end out of the EQ and the top out..

00:16:11
so I get a midrange sort of signal.

00:16:22
Lemme just get this low end out, here.

00:16:25
One more time? I was adjusting the feedback path.

00:16:43
All this midrange that I added, in there..

00:16:46
is now in that feedback path.

00:16:48
The other great things about having this console is that I can use the VCAs as sends and return levels.

00:17:01
So, here's without the Moogs.

00:17:08
And here's with the Moogs.

00:17:20
So I'm in full control of it and fully controlling the sound as he's playing it.

00:17:26
And then, what happens is, we go this back and forth a little bit..

00:17:30
And..

00:17:32
we usually come up with something in-between that's pretty cool.

00:17:36
All right, ready? - Yep! Oh! Let me use the Pro Tools Control App on my iPad! Cool! So I manipulated..

00:18:24
Tyler played this part, great of course..

00:18:27
and then I manipulated the Moog Echoes So that the initial hit does not have all the echoes but then the whole thing sort of swells.

00:18:35
Let's solo it! ..and listen to it! How about that? Humili-o-tron! Meh, it's guitar though..dude.

00:18:41
You know..

00:19:16
I like that. Are you part of that? - Can I do it one more time, just for good measure? I'm just gonna watch my timing, a little bit.

00:19:22
Ok! Here we go! I like the tone a lot! - Did you like.. spin it in or something? Yeah, I can do that! Gimme..

00:19:36
Gimme that! - How can we get feedback? So hit that..

00:20:21
Ok, hold on! This might be really cool and wrong and awesome! Cool! It's so crazy out of control, that..

00:21:03
let's see what we've got going on, here.

00:21:05
Maybe it's gonna get cool, here.

00:21:45
Well, fun! - It's kinda interesting, uh? Yeah! I like it, let's get the back half, right? Just the solo part? - Lemme hit it! Uh, now, there's a..

00:22:35
We should be just going to the solo, now..

00:22:38
get it out of the way? - Yeah! And then we'll do these other couple little fills. Ok, cool! - We'll figure out what the sound is gonna be, for the solo..

00:22:58
I can try the same tone, if you like! You wanna try it? See how does that sound? You know..

00:23:17
Have you..

00:23:18
did you play my Ace Tone? Your Ace Tone? Hold on, lemme check this out. See what you think.

00:23:25
It's a fuzz, probably..

00:23:27
like sort of a Dizzy Tone - Let's try it! The Ace Tone Fuzz Master? - Does it have a battery in it? No, it's got batteries in it.

00:23:39
It just sort of like..

00:23:40
Do you need a cable? You wanna put it here? - Yeah, I'll put it there. We got a little shorty.

00:23:45
We got a shorty..

00:23:47
You got a little longer? You can gimme that white one, if you want it.

00:23:50
Oh yeah, that's cool.. that'll work.

00:23:58
- Such a shorty, Vance! Yeah, I know! It's how I'm made! Says 'God made me!' Play a little bit, I'm gonna change the Moogs, here.

00:25:07
- To get the octave I have to play above the 12th fret! *laughs* - That's great! Cool! All right, here we go, are you ready? - Yeah! All right, you ready? - I like the sound but I don't think it's right for the solo.. It's not! - It's cool! - I was gonna say, the only thing that might make it cooler is the wah, is that midrange tone.

00:27:22
Nice! What did you say, Graham? It's an Ace Fuzz, the Fuzzmaster? - I think it's fun! I just gotta get something badass, that was not it! So, I think I have to this make shorter, dude. - I think so, too! - It's too long, even for me to solo over.

00:29:00
All right, we're gonna make it shorter.

00:29:02
- But, can I just do.. can we..

00:29:04
cut it completely out and then I lead into it? You know what I mean? Like, can I..

00:29:10
that way I am not playing into something and I can just sort of free into it? Sure, hold on! - I think..

00:29:17
I was thinking about this, last time: The best spot to maybe cut in would be the *sings* 'cause I can even do that *sings* sort of with the solo sound and then it cuts in the big band, *sings* Ok, so..

00:29:32
what I was gonna do was sort of do this kind of a thing..

00:29:48
and then *sings* right there..

00:29:52
you know what I mean? - Ok! Is that what you were saying? - I was saying..

00:29:57
just..

00:29:58
move the back half of the song into space..

00:30:01
Oh, into space!? - Into space! And let me lead into it and then we just move it.

00:30:04
Oh! I get it! All right! Oh yeah, sure! I get it! Now I get what you're saying! - I mean, just an idea, I'm definitely open..

00:30:19
for whatever.. I love everything about it! All right, young Tyler? - Yes? Let's kill it! That was pretty cool! I definitely dug the end! - Can I do a couple of endings? Yeah, just the end of the solo? - Yeah, just for..

00:31:59
maybe like 3..

00:32:01
You got 'em! Ok! Pretty good! - It should be shorter! Yeah, I think so! - Yeah? I think so! - You got it! Even shorter? Uh, you're getting there! - Getting there? I think you'll have to go the wah go to the wah a little.. - Little sooner? You can punch me on that! Yeah, I'll punch you right there.

00:34:33
That was pretty cool, man! - Lemme try one more, Vance! There you go! - Something like that! There's a few things here I wanna talk about in the track.

00:35:23
When we cut the track, yesterday, and the way the..

00:35:27
Tyler and I, the band and all of us really enjoy working is, cutting everything live.

00:35:32
Obviously, you saw that we tracked everything with guitars live..

00:35:37
those guitars are in this track, they're they're the root base point of that track.

00:35:42
As we were playing yesterday, as the band was playing, I was definitely hearing: "ok, there's some overdubs, we're gonna go here, Tyler had something he already planned, that they were playing live..

00:35:52
but every time we go into any sort of overdub situation, every time we go in, or I go in, there's always that thing that we're looking for, that..

00:36:02
that little thing that makes records sound like records.

00:36:06
Sometimes it's percussion, sometimes it's a guitar line playing a drone-string thing to a track or who knows? Sometimes it's a keyboard part, sometimes it's just the vocal, you know, some background vocals.

00:36:22
Or a really cool hook or some sort of thing.

00:36:25
And I think we go we go into like records like these, we kinda like we listen to the track and we hear the little things that we wanna fill space I like space, but this is a rock track, this thing is big and loud we don't want it to sound wimpy anywhere.. so, we were doing overdubs, we knew we had this intro line..

00:36:49
which is this line, here.

00:36:57
We knew we had that..

00:36:59
so, we put this little piece on the front of it, to just bring in an intro, I'm feeling that when I'll mix, this is gonna be I'm gonna have to tweak on this a little bit, to make this work..

00:37:12
I may make that really weird, but..

00:37:14
but - for now - it's totally cool.

00:37:17
Yesterday, when we were recording, there was a track I knew I wanted Graham to play another track, another part..

00:37:24
so we did this chorus-guitar just..

00:37:27
basically the same thing that Graham was playing in the chorus double..

00:37:34
Now, Graham ends up being in this world that sort of I like to live with, with Tyler and Graham, Graham lives on the right, the funny thing about this is, when the play live..

00:37:46
Graham plays on the left, but Tyler plays in the middle, so..

00:37:51
I just sort of like Tyler on the left, you know, to quote my friend Jack White "in the driver's seat," and Graham on the other side Tyler can sit in his car and drive down the road, hear his solo come out of his knees, and Graham over on the other side of the car.

00:38:05
Or vice versa, it's kind of a..

00:38:07
funny way to put it, but..

00:38:10
I kinda like that, so..

00:38:11
Graham has a part that he's playing, here.

00:38:18
And I thought: "you know what? It would be cool if Graham just doubled that." So we did this double, Graham..

00:38:23
Chorus Double, here..

00:38:25
Overdub..

00:38:35
And that's pretty heavy because it's a stereo track of sorts, it's the same amp but it's 2 mics, left and right and then Graham's playing his part and Tyler.. - I do harmony coming in. Yeah! It's harmony.

00:38:52
So with all 3 of those tracks in, that makes the chorus totally big enough, especially when Tyler does the harmony.

00:38:59
There was a couple little things that we did, we didn't do these on camera, because everybody everybody took a little break, and we realized: "oh! We forgot a couple things!" So, I wanna talk about those, it's just a couple little guitar lines in the turnaround.

00:39:15
First of all, let me play the turnaround, here.. turnaround guitar..

00:39:26
So it's just that little riff, that's a little turnaround, there, so what we did is, we did a little overdub, here..

00:39:32
that, we had a kind of a fuzz tone thing going on, it sounds pretty cool.

00:39:43
I put the dbx sub synth on it.

00:39:46
The dbx 'disco boombox subsynth'. So, when you take that, you put it in the track, comes out of the chorus, this big huge chorus and what was happening was, it was getting kinda small in this turnaround, well, not anymore, so check this! So that turnaround guitar just sort of fades out, in the verse.

00:40:26
So just to be a heavier little part, just so we're gonna elevate that turnaround.

00:40:30
Then when we come up the chorus, again, the chorus..

00:40:33
again is doubled by Graham and then there's a little solo riff, before the solo, so..

00:40:39
that's that little part that we took, played the fast part and cut it into this, so that's this part.

00:40:51
So we thought: 'Well, we need to make it a little big bigger'..

00:40:53
so, we took the same turnaround guitar track that it's a little bit of a different sound, and added it to this.

00:41:06
Ok? So, putting that together, now..

00:41:17
And, just on those hits, there's those heavy chords and then the solo we edited and chopped and cut, and moved..

00:41:24
and got the breakdown part just exactly what we wanted.

00:41:50
He could have played it, that way..

00:41:52
We could have mapped it out and put a tempo map in..

00:41:56
could have done all that, but.. man..

00:41:59
I gotta be honest with you, it wouldn't feel as cool and natural even though it's all cut together and spliced together and moved around in pieces and parts..

00:42:08
it still wouldn't feel as natural if we would have been playing to a click.

00:42:13
We did play the fast part to a click.

00:42:16
I say click, Caleb had it in his rhythm watch puts in his ear, puts his headphones on, over them..

00:42:22
so, he was the only one getting the click, that's how I like to work, I don't want the band hearing the click 'cause inevitably someone will be playing with the click.

00:42:30
This, if we had done this on tape this would have been easy to cut together.

00:42:34
Not easy..but it would have been an edit.. you could have cut these butted this pieces together.

00:42:40
There's not much else going on here, there is a little riff that we did at the end, you guys saw that, now a lot of vocals or background vocals to speak up..

00:42:50
I'm gonna just put this in a view..

00:42:53
here, a little bit of a smaller view..

00:42:56
you can see the whole session, if you notice, it's not very complicated.

00:43:01
It's not a lot of tracks, and that's kind of how I like it. If we go, to the mix window..

00:43:06
You can see that basically I trimmed the tracks down a little bit to just give me some headroom for the vocals, before we mix..

00:43:13
but basically, they're all flat.

00:43:16
there's no plug-ins.

00:43:18
There was a couple plug-ins that I fooled around with, yesterday..

00:43:20
when we had the placeholder solo..

00:43:23
so I'm just gonna get rid of those, we don't need them, they're turned off and there's a little reverb plug-in on the backwards 'aftershock' thing, which is pretty cool..

00:43:32
I'm gonna just leave it on because that's an effect.

00:43:35
I don't expect this song to take very long to mix.

00:43:38
I mean, if this takes more than 3 hours or so, I'm you know.. I've missed the boat.

00:43:43
And I'll need to start over.

00:43:46
I'm gonna build a little set of tracks at the end of this session..

00:43:51
that are gonna be our mixdown tracks.

00:43:54
And so..

00:43:55
What these are gonna be, there's gonna be one stereo aux input track, and two..

00:44:04
two.. stereo audio tracks.

00:44:07
These are on everything that I do.

00:44:11
One of them, the Aux, is called the 'Heater'.

00:44:14
Then, the next two tracks are going to be 'Aftershock..

00:44:22
Rough Mix..

00:44:24
and then, this wacky geek thing that George Massenburg turned me on to..

00:44:32
that's the year.. first.

00:44:34
The month and then the day.

00:44:37
Why do it this way, at the end of the file? Strangely enough, computers don't do math quite the way that we do.

00:44:47
Unless you tell them to do the math.

00:44:49
This title is ASCII, it's a code..

00:44:54
Zeroes have more weight than other numbers..

00:44:59
so, if you put it in this mode and you go to sort them by the title, if the next day is the 28th, they'll actually sort in order.

00:45:10
It's a little bit bizzarre but it actually does work. So 161027 and then the word 'Heated', that's gonna be this first mix I'm gonna explain, in a second.

00:45:21
Let me copy that.

00:45:23
And then the second track will not be heated.

00:45:26
This first track, is going to be bussed, to a track called the 'Heater'.

00:45:33
Its input is going to be my 2192 converter, the next two tracks are gonna route to my Burl B2 output here, Burl.. B2..

00:45:45
the first track, this one here, is gonna get routed from the 'Heater' Bus, the second one is gonna come from the 2192 then on the 'Heater' we're gonna instantiate Tyler's favorite plug-in, the L2.

00:46:02
This is my setting for delivering heated mixes to the band.

00:46:06
I add 7dB of gain and I set the out ceiling at -0.1 I never change this, it's never ever, ever any louder.

00:46:13
What I'm gonna do here is mute these two tracks, put them in input and you're gonna see, when I play back the track, what level comes in..

00:46:34
I'm gonna go to the top of track to the end of the track, I'm gonna scroll down to the 'Heater', I'm gonna make a marker then I'm gonna call it 'Rough Mix..

00:46:46
then hit Selection and Zoom, I'm gonna hit 'OK', I'm gonna put these in record, this..

00:46:53
I'm gonna hit play..

00:46:54
and I'm gonna walk away for the night! So this would be the rough mix, the reason why I am doing this rough mix, now..

00:47:02
is that, when I get mixing, at some point, I may wanna hear what I was thinking, and what it was the night before..

00:47:10
normally it wouldn't be the night before, it would be maybe..

00:47:12
weeks back! And sometimes you..

00:47:16
you put things into your mix patch and it doesn't..

00:47:19
you don't beat the rough.

00:47:21
So then it's like: 'ok, hold it! I have to stop and be smart, 'cause I am not beating the rough mix.' And that happens! So..

00:47:30
I'm gonna print this, it's gonna just print and then tomorrow, we're gonna mix this! You guys wanna listen to this? All right, cool! - Nice! - Killer, man! - Oh, I love that! That's cool!