10 Home Studio Production, Mixing & Mastering Tips - Warren Huart: Produce Like A Pro

hello everybody hope you're doing marvelously well in this episode we're gonna do 10 production mixing and mastering tips so we're back again please as ever subscribe a hit the notifications bell please download the cheat sheet somewhere up here and of course down below there it's gonna have all ten of these tips now as you know these days we are producing engineering mixing and writing songs all at once and to be honest that might seem like a novel approach you know when you've got your laptop and you're building a track and you're writing it and then you've got a singer with you or another instrumentalist that might seem you know something pretty novel but frankly some of the greatest albums ever made were done that way whether it be the Beatles turning up to the studio with a few half-written ideas just matter who it is some of the greatest albums of all time were actually written in the recording studio so if anything now we're in this incredible place now where we're just a laptop or a tower or whatever you have and just your little eye oh now we have all these virtual instruments and all these incredible ways of recording we have creativity coming out of our ears so let's get stuck in to what I believe are ten incredibly valuable tips on producing engineering mixing and mastering your music so number one your workflow now this is quite a simple thing where I am I'm blessed I have tons of inputs I have tons of mic breeze and all kinds of fancy things and loads of microphones so with 40 inputs that I have available I can leave things permanently patched in so whenever I get creative I want to run in and play a drum part within seconds I'm playing a drum part and I'm recalling it but I want to do that with a bass I've got a DI and that's split out to an amp and it's permanently plugged in and I just going to record and off I go now for you if you only have one two four six or eight inputs on your IO that isn't as easy but it can be that's where patch are worth their weight in gold if you get a patch Bay would say maybe 24 ins-and-outs you could have your eight Mike's on your drum kit always set up you could have a DI for a guitar and or bass you give an analogue keyboard inputs you could have multiple different vocal coming in and all you have to do is have a patch cable that comes out of that patch Bay and plugs into the front or the back of your eye oh and it's just going to be patching things so my drums could be one you know one two three four five six seven eight inputs go into record go and play now I want to bring the vocal into input one I unplug the kick drum mic I plug in the vocal mic on my patch Bay and boom ready to go anything that can increase the speed of your workflow is going to be a massive saving grace when it comes to the analog world having things coming up on a patch bay can really really help you not to mention of course running external compressors or eq's or whatever else you might have but literally just four mics can save you hours of work and frustration when you have an idea and your drum mics aren't set up number two organized your da W create a template not only for mixing with production as well this session here and this is an early session so it's not even finished the vocals on it are a different lyric but you can see I basically have my drums set up here at the top and then I have a bass line which is actually a virtual instrument is vacuum I have some guitars I mean this is a little scattered I didn't organize this before to show show off to you but you can see it's like drums bass guitar there's some you know some swooshes and some crashes there followed by some synths and some other guitars all the lead vocals are together here there's three tracks of lead vocals because it's overlapping there's the lead vocal effects that I printed then all of the backgrounds are together these are all backgrounds here and I've got some other swishes and bits and pieces and since which I would have done at the end and then of course the mix down the bottom now the reason why I'm showing you this is just to say most of that is in my 10 at least 60% of it the drum mics come in boom kick snare hi-hat Tom's overheads all in one go the bass which normally would be an electric bass would have a DI and an amp input on my template just going to record but if you have addictive drums trigger superior drummer ez drummer one of those have it in your template ready to go if you have a favorite bass synth that you like have that ready to go if you have a virtual guitar amp that you really love have that ready to go build your own template some of you might remember that when logic first came out with those amazing templates there was a period of time when it seemed like half the songs on the radio sounded like they were just using those templates so you can see many people have thought this way and in your da W may have templates already to go however you're going to want to always customize it for your particular workflow but templates aren't always just about mixing they're also about recording number three don't focus too early on sound design look if you go back to my session over here there is some sound design stuff going on and these are the kind of things I'm sure you all do [Music] has an actually an explosion in there's a reverse symbol all of this stuff it's great but I added that later on in the day you know working on this song I wanted to add these elements to give the choruses kind of impact you know that explosion on the downbeat you know I did this riser here great things but if I'm sitting there before I figured out the arrangement of my song properly or most importantly I hope you finished the melodies or whatever it is it's too early for me to be thinking that way I've done it where I've sat there and built tracks and made big splashes and explosions and sucks things down and spun them around and all kinds of crazy things unfortunately the singer comes in and says I don't like this melody is rewrite the chords that doesn't work this doesn't work and I've spent six hours doing cool things that ultimately get completely changed now occasionally you get lucky and they stay but if you're in a creative zone and you're producing a song and you're writing a song as so many of us are doing at the same time producing and writing it at the same time don't worry about those little tips and tricks the little tiny little fun stuff leave it to the end or leave it to a point where it becomes demands that it has to be in there like you really want that chorus to pop so you put in this riser and a swot there you go you put it in there for some impact maybe to inspire the singer but basically do not do it too early on concentrate on the bulk that the overview of the song itself number four too much time tweaking ah we are also guilty of this me in particular the thing I can think of which is a great example is not necessarily on compression in EQ and distortion and reverb and delay I've spent hours tweaking something only to find out it sounded like absolute dog poop I mean oh we've all done that the thing that I am want to illustrate is when you may be building an electronic drum kit or something and you want that snare and you sit there and you find this snare and you're like it's not quite right so you start boosting some EQ and then compressing it and then trying different sounds like compressors and then running a little delay on it and saturating in a bit and before you know it you're an hour into one stare one electronic snare when really you could have spent three four minutes and gone through other variations of that same snare or different snares and found the exact one you wanted we've all done it we've all gone down that rabbit hole we spent far too long tweaking things so if you are fighting with the bass sound the electronic bass sound or the electronic drum kit or whatever it might be to simply take time away from it and work on something different or throw it out the window and try a completely different kick drum sound bass guitar sound bass synth and whatever it might be try something different and just mute that and try something different and then compare it I would say frequent breaks you're gonna hear this come up a couple of times are a good thing anyway but when you find yourself obsessing about something for too long it doesn't usually end the right way at least not for me so avoid over tweaking number five monitor in more than one way this is a huge thing and there's a couple of reasons one of them is predominantly that not everybody is in a beautifully treated studio with incredible monitors that you know go down to 20 Hertz and up to 20 K most of us even these big gentle X behind me don't get the super super lows so a sub is handy with this or at least an acquired knowledge to know how much low-end different instruments have the reality is that no room is absolutely perfect and even the perfect rooms have other issues and you'll still need to monitor and check your mixes in other environments you can have these little tiny baby speakers like this that's great ear buds are great but a decent pair of headphones that you know really well is a godsend in an untreated room in a room that's got you know standing waves or is really super Bumi just put on the headphones it's nice to take a break and maybe listen to your favorite song something you love and know really well listen to how the low end is on that for instance then put your mix in and you'll be like oh goodness it will give you a great point of reference this is where we talk about all the time reference tracks come in handy but the reality is if you're just mixing make sure you're listening in lots of different environments and I know it's contentious and nobody's going to agree with this because there's a lot of talk about it but some of the biggest mixers I know still out to the car I listen to their music because many of us are in the car for a couple of hours a day I'm blessed to work very very close to my house but lots of people I know don't and they are driving to and from the studio they are driving at other times in their life and they're listening to music all the time every A&R guy I know listens to music in the car they listen during the day and then they get in the car and listen to demos and stuff like that so they know their environment so don't be afraid to do a car test as well it's particularly good for low end cars normally have a very enhanced over-the-top low end which is not a bad thing because if you put your mix on in there and the kick drum is blowing up your car speakers you know you're in trouble so the ultimate moral of the story is listen in many different ways listen on different speakers on earbuds on headphones that you know in the car just monitor in different ways so you're not just at the mercy of a room that's maybe not treated very well acoustically needs a bit of work and speakers maybe they only have five or six or even seven inch you know woofers that don't go that low so monitor in different situations number six use stereo enhancement plugins really sparingly so so we have one going on here it is so it's this synth it's a synth I sidechain to the kick drum I've got a little I'll comp there see what it's doing it's being sidechain from the kick drum it's a free little divergence here for you but the kick drum is controlling the compression see that big flashing yellow light turn it off still doing it it's more exaggerated with this okay so we've got sidechain compressed sin then we got stereo width there it's set really wide but it's set really wide to get out of the way and the kick and the snare and it's only in one element in a mix maybe on the final mix I used it maybe twice on synth pads or you know other kind of other kind of instruments that are very very very fat and take up a lot of energy and they're just like huge fat sounds like that I will widen them just soli them so I can sit my kick and my snare and my vocal my bass down the middle otherwise I do not put it on my stereo buss I have known people to put it on the stereo buss that I respect and they use it sparingly just a wide and choruses ever so slightly I think Marc Needham used a bit of it on his mix if you watch the J Clifford mix if and if you've got that course you can see him using on that and that's on a very very analog recording so it can be used sparingly but use it sparingly when you have multiple instances of stereo widening and it's messing with the phase and the polarity it's fun to listen to when you're in the zone of mixing the song but take a break from it for a couple of days come back and you'll be like it'll just sound like it's out of phase and it will sound very Hollow so use widening plugins stereo enhancement plugins use them very sparingly number seven monitor at low levels now I don't mean like barely audible like is there something playing it doesn't have to be I think that's one of the confusions where people say monitor at low levels they say about 85 DB which is not terribly loud but it's safe to listen to for long periods of time now all of the best mixes I know they mix loud they mix quiet mimics loud the mix quiet but they don't listen for a long periods of time loud they'll crank a mix they want to be blown away they want to see if it's like pumping and they feel great about it for maybe 20 seconds and then they'll bring it down and they'll listen at a lower level especially when you're looping a section and you're working on a great detail you do not need to be listening to that super loud because you'll burn your ears out really quickly there's two things that listening loud will do number one is it won't help you mixing because the frequency bounce goes all over the place you'll find you'll turn your ears down you'll end up brightening a mix and before you know it you think it sounds great the rest of the world thinks it's the brightest thing they've ever heard number one the second thing is frankly you can give yourself hearing damage for long sustained periods of high volumes so be careful with that firstly it's can your mixers will suffer if you mix loud all the time but secondly and more importantly you will sustain hearing damage if you do it a lot so be careful your ears are your best tool they're better than any plug in any D aw any instrument you've ever heard of your ears are your number one tool number eight know your plugins this one's a good one for me I have to remember this because I started experimenting with new plugins before I really knew the ones I already had now what tends to happen is I go back to some old favorites and you'll see me using plugins quite a few of them have been around for a few years now basically because I know them inside out and I know what they do I know how to make them sound great I know what instrument to put them on and I know what levels to boost and cut I think one of the most difficult things is not necessarily as much about EQs and compressors but when you start getting into delays and reverbs and all that kind of stuff because most delay plugins now even the stock ones that come with any da W have many many different sounds many different emulations built into them and you can manipulate them even inside of the plug-in and if you want to do even more than that you could put a saturation across them some kind of distortion eq sidechain compression you can do all of these fun things with them and treat them so dramatically different just a delay that you have that's stock now don't get me wrong I love H delay it's one of my favorite plugins I love soundtoys echoboy is amazing these are plugins that are phenomenal but I'm just saying I know echo boy and H delay really well and I use them all the time but I've been using them both for many many years and there was a time I didn't know them very well luckily both of them are pretty easy to use but there's some very complicated especially that lots of the all-in-one plugins there may take you a while to learn to use however if you want to put in the time to use one of those multiple kind of plugins then great but you're probably going to find you're going to end up using that particular multiple one all of the time which is fine but you'll do that because you've spent so much time you've invested so much energy and learning that that before you know it every single channel has the same multifunction plug-in on it so get to know your stock plugins get to know all the plugins that you have really really well and then of course add to them please add to them there's so many great plugins out there there's nothing worse than having two hundred eq's two hundred compressors two hundred delays challenge reverbs you name it and not knowing them well you're better off knowing one or two of each of those plugins there not knowing two hundred and having to literally audition every single one by which stage your ideas your creativity will have gone out the window so learn what you have before you invest in anything else number nine number nine it's a reference for anybody you know that one number nine don't be afraid to high-pass super low frequencies the reason why I bring that up is because most of us are even on these speakers here like ago these gentlemen are phenomenal I love them the ten thirty twos I've been using them for amount of years when I moved to Los Angeles in the mid late 90s every single studio in town bar none had a pair of either ten thirty twos or ten thirty ones and a pair of NS tents every studio and it was great we would travel from one studio to another and we would know how our mixes sounded when we were sat between the speakers in the perfectness listening position it pretty much translated from one studio to another it was a wonderful thing now of course everybody is building powered speakers so they have a lot of competition but the longest time they were the industry standard however without a sub I could still miss low low frequencies the thing about twenty thirty forty Hertz in a lot of instruments is is absolutely meaningless it's great to have 40 to 60 Hertz in your kick drum it's phenomenal and some super sub bass sounds it's even better to have going lower but tightening your kick drum taking 20 Hertz and below off actually makes your mix feel louder feel more punchy and you'll be surprised your kick drum will feel like it has more low-end in it because it's focused 40 to 60 Hertz low-end as opposed to 20 and 30 so even though you don't hear those frequencies through your five six seven eight inch speakers it's really about creating a great mix that doesn't have a lot of mud down there and more importantly isn't taking away a lot of energy for your mix because low frequencies take a huge amount of volume out of your mix believe it or not you know it's easy to make something sound loud when it's high mids etc so consequently sculpting your low-end will really really help you now of course if you don't have a sub and you only have small speakers use a frequency analyzer on individual channels and many plugins these days actually have frequency analyzers built into the EQ so you'll see those super lows that you don't need so it's a big tip it will really really help you and it will create a lot of clarity for the low end and your mixes will benefit massively from it numero ten this one's another big one don't overdo your master buss processing we've all been guilty of this myself in particular there's this tendency to treat our master buss as they fix it of every situation which to a minor extent can be there's a lot of videos I've been watching where it's like clean up your mixes and then they just do big EQ dips in the low mids on their overall mix we all know and if you've been watching you know the channel for a while now you'll know that it's really putting a band-aid on a gaping wound you're better off going in and taking out low mids of the instruments that I've got it building up rather than annihilating the whole of the bus and removing it generically across everything that's something for a mastering engineer to do and only in extreme cases so try to mix as you go on individual tracks on buses etc before you get to the master buss so you don't really want a ton of plugins on there however some gentle compression just to change some transients a bit of EQ bit of boomin fares as they say maybe a little extra 60 some 10 or 12 K lift something to open up the top and something to reinforce the lows is not going to be an issue and it's very typical with pretty much every single mixer I've ever worked with when they're using hardware like Paul Tex or they're doing it in the box little boom and phears goes a long way and even a little limiting is okay it's okay to tame those stray transients that are going absolutely nuts but once you start getting into the 3 4 5 6 7 8 DBS worth of gain reduction across multiple things you're not doing yourself any favors and you really are stopping yourself from learning how to mix as well because everything is just being annihilated you're going to be become a much better mixer by leaving that till the very end and leaving it very gently it can be on there but just leave it very gently every mixer I know has an SSL buss compressor or something like that and some EQ we all mix through that but we don't uh Niall ate it in a perfect situation you would actually master your track on another day or several hours later or whatever it might be you would take a break from it you would take your two-track final mix and then master that that is the best possible solution however I do understand we all have time constraints it's happened to me many many times I've got to print that mix and I've got to get it off to a client and I've got to impress them so I will get a little aggressive on my master buss it does happen however be careful don't over process it because you can get really wrapped up at that stage and remember that's the last stage that's the stereo mix stage that is the end of your mix so if you overdo it there it can be pretty fatal so I thank you ever so much of course you can download the cheat sheet somewhere around about here please download the cheat sheet thank you ever so much for watching I really appreciate it have a marvelous time recording a mixing and of course there's have some discussion about these 10 points this talk some more about that please give me your experiences I really appreciate it and have a marvelous time recording a mixing [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 123,590

Keywords: Home studio tips, Home studio production tips, Mixing Tips, Mixing Trick, Mastering Tricks, Master at your home studio, Home studio mixing

Id: lRTRiaoNMpo

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 18 2018