5 Quick Saturation Mixing Tricks - Warren Huart: Produce Like A Pro

[Music] hello hope you're doing obviously well we're going to do five saturation drinks please subscribe please hit the notification bell and you'll know when we've got a new video coming up and of course you can go to produce like a pro comm you can sign up for the email list and get a whole bunch of free goodies you get free drum samples and some extra videos and some sessions and all kinds of fun stuff saturation is pretty darn impressive you can use it to do something pretty obvious now what it will do is it will control peak levels because of course if you've got things like drums with huge dynamics they can appear to be loud in one way because the transients are super loud like this listen to these drums here now the snare sounds great it's got some good snap to it but let's just say I want to take that live snare top here it's a little choked it's cool that's a tiny bit choked and it doesn't have a huge amount of energy to it but if I just go and say get to get Decapitator for instance good old friend Decapitator and just put a little bit of Drive on it [Music] now it appears to be louder why don't we check our peak value so this is without it it's peaking pretty heavy pick it at zero because that first initial transient with the EQ I've gone it is like slamming right at zero so let's now put the Decapitator on it turn it off back on it feels louder but the reality is if I set my peak limiter with a Decapitator on the actual peaks themselves are 6.9 DB down so it's like nearly 7 DB quieter on that initial transient so what does that tell us that tells us what saturation does it's remarkable so there you can see me using on drums you could use it on any of the drum elements itself it's nice on the snare top in this instance listen to it looped with them without take it off back on it's not that subtle I mean I could bring it up to really really bring home the point but the obvious thing it's doing is its keeping the characteristic of the snare drum but it's sucking in that initial transient so it's actually making the energy higher in the hole of the drum if we were to just print that snare drum [Music] okay that's with the Decapitator on let's let's now print it with off and your see the difference turn off the Decapitator cut we'll zoom in on these two now and you can see the difference is pretty pretty dramatic like go here for instance look at the amount of energy contained in this top snare with the Decapitator on it's the whole snare is thicker it's more inherent and on this one down here it's just like you can just tell there's not as much energy and that snare it's pretty remarkable the differences so saturation is your friend there you can see it on it on a snare drum working wonders now you might say while we're at it but Warren I see a little bit more bleed in that's in the snare drum from the kick well there's a little tricks for that we'll get to some advanced compression techniques we'll do some five compression tips okay but so there you go a great great tip on the snare and of course you can apply that absolutely anywhere right so we've seen what saturation does it's fantastic it tames transients it gives more energy more perceived volume to the actual signal itself because we're not just looking at peaks and one of the biggest things that I we've debated or had been debating about is those peak values because people are talking now about what level they should be printing their mix is that well if you've got massive Peaks all over the place you're not going to have the Headroom to be able to give the mastering engineer something can really work with marshaling engineers tell me quite often this thing they call fishtails where where they get these transients and this kind of this look and it's usually from kicks and snares but sometimes it's from bass guitars let's look at the bass guitar here's my bass guitar sound it's coal and if you know the way I do bass guitar the DI is all the low-end you see all the high ends wiped off it and the opposite is true of the app that's why I'm putting some personality now we can go a little nuts on this let's have a listen to just the amp and it's we can look at the the peak value as well it's a minus 3 one I [Music] bet if we take off a couple of DB of that peak with some saturation we'll get some amazing results so let's go to harmonic but I am going to go a little nuttier because I actually want to bring out some more personality so loads you're gonna think I'm crazy but here we go so [Music] that's immediately so much better so let's match the levels I mean two peaks - seven five so it's already significantly quieter let's bypass it clear the peaks listen look at that so it sounds louder and fuller actually turn the level down but more importantly listen to that there's a little bit of noise in the track which I can deal with we could put a gate on afterwards but there's more high end there's distortion in it and which I like now put the two together with the D I take it off alright so we're gonna get a bit let's put a little bit more low on it back on [Music] I really like it let's put it in with the drums what I like to do and you can do from here is get a gate when you're dealing with distortion on noise or whatever like that this sounds that doesn't have a gate built into it so I'm doing a quick gating trick here so we can just go and get any generic gate like this we can key it from the DI so we'll take 19 is the gate in we'll take the di soon it from 19 [Music] now if I take the distortion off put it back on that little grit little tiny grit that's coming out of it is just giving it a bit more personality so you get a little bit more of the base I'm just bringing the icon on the gate up [Music] once you put everything in there you don't hear the distortion you don't hear it sounding distorted you just hear it sounding fuller [Music] so you can see what's happening with saturation here we're choosing to use saturation on the snare drum we're choosing it to use it a little bit on the bass guitar and what is it doing it's like incrementally improving things I'm cherry-picking things to improve I don't want to go along and distort every single track but do I want to add saturation to two things here and there to improve them heck yes and that's really what's going on here with the snare drum and the bass guitar so on the piano this just tries something fun let's go and find a different Distortion I really like the futz box as it's called and you've probably seen other people online using it and talking about it so let's go and pick it up what is cool about this is it's a little bit more than just a distortion now you can add distortion here in fact that's pretty freakin awesome so that's the default saturation one that we're putting on the piano what I like about that is this actually maintaining some of the transients that papapapa it's actually [Music] it's pretty awesome what so what it's doing is it's it's evening lie all the sound again like I did with the snare it it's it's making it a little less piano a here's the original put it on now see the volumes gone up it gets it more personality it really does it's pretty into the mix beautiful I mean it's miraculous what that saturation is doing it is bringing things forward it is allowing it this particular one I'm a big fan of the MACD SP because it like I said it it seems to be quite magical that it's splitting the difference I think I think that default settings have a little bit of high-end boost which allows some of that translates to still be heard but the whole signals getting fatter and bigger as well it's a really special plugin but yeah we try to sands that stock with Pro Tools Decapitator obviously you have to buy I highly suggest you try this bass guitar it's great I mean it's a it's a must on bass guitar for me but here on a piano you can see that exciting stuff it's doing number four let's go to somewhere really really obvious and what would that be well that'd be like taking a DI okay so obviously a slide dip slide di here's the amp record aversion [Music] now I'm going to kind of do a double whammy on this I'm going to do two things first of all I'm going to take this really beautiful clean di and I'm going to whack a sounds out on it yeah and that's just really really ugly isn't it but I'm going to do you a couple of little tricks here that I do so I'm going to take the sounds amp and I'm going to annihilate it so we'll turn the level down because in the buzz there we can fade out before that okay so together so it's cool yeah but let's do this so now we've destroyed that di sound if you've got a DI or an amp or just a DI you're gonna love this okay so now I'm just gonna go and I'm gonna get a reverb and I'm gonna go mono believe it or not right down the middle I like this because I got a stereo delay on the other guitar and let's listen to this [Music] it's just great so what we've done there is like you can find your di so you can do all these things you can put amp simulators on them and all this kind of stuff you can just be recording a DI but when you're in this situation we have a DI and amp together your di is another source of a way of manipulating the sound it's about creating a whole sonic landscape I discovered this by doing things like recording real pianos and MIDI pianos and taking the MIDI piano and smothering with reverb 100% effect and putting up against the real piano and it creates this amazing ghostly effect take it out put it in it's kind of a double whammy a little bit of a reverb trick there as well but I love the Sansa it's on its own um it's pretty I think what the sansamp does for me with di is on guitars is it gives me the closest thing well not as sort of the closest thing but gives me a similar idea of like taking a fuzz pedal and plugging it straight into a console which is something Jimmy Page would do on a lot of this famous sellers what fuzz box is going into like NIMH or Helios consoles so I do that but in this instance we've made it more interesting still by putting reverb on it but the reason why I like that sound is because sometimes when you're sitting there and you've got all these beautifully handcrafted wonderful you know virtual simulated or perfectly recorded guitars the sansamp from a DI just slots into the mix it just says hey I'm completely different listen to my tone because even that when its own it's not very loud listen so it's pretty low in the mix but you can see if that was the only guitar playing it's pretty special but let's go back to our idea put a bit of herb on it so that's the wonderful thing about having plugins now if we have a couple of different sources we can really really get carried away and have some fun things you can split signals up you can treat them in different ways like if you did have only a DI and you wanted to do what I did there you could take a clean D I put some you know really disgusting distortion like the sansamp on it wash it out with verb so you've got a completely different guitar tonality and then duplicate that di and the other di you could use a beautiful virtual simulator if you use bios or or whatever it is you like to get a more natural sound and then you can get something like I've done here - sounds combined into one [Music] pretty tasty I got so many other tricks to show you while I'm doing this I'm thinking oh there's a trick I need to show them about that noise but we'll get into that a little later we'll get into that in another episode so here we got a completely different drum track and the reason why I went for that is because I want to show you a little trick so pretty well recorded track two sets of rooms overheads [Music] and I like the energy from this there's some low mids I want to cut out so we'll open that up let's get it quickly gravity cue if you know me well you'll know I'll go to like 350 and pull some of that out it's a little ugly it's also a little thumpy on the low end it will compete with the kick so it's cool okay so definitely better didn't take long to make that a lot better not too bad the cymbals get a little carried away so one last quick trick this is for room mics where you get unbelievable amounts of splash and it can be because of number one the drummer some drummers are like well dad don't go Shh they're like absolutely caving in on the cymbals but they're like you know lightly playing there kick of snare so you can get that situation but it could also be the sound of the room and lots of rooms frankly have a lot of glass or a lot of steel and all this kind of stuff and so the high end goes absolutely nuts so this is a trick that I learned years ago again using distortion saturation and I what I usually do is reach for the low Phi so for those of you approach tools but you can do this with any saturation listen to what it's doing so that tiny amount of saturation listen to the symbols than the hi-hat and cymbals so the saturation is distorting the high-end first another really really good plug-in to do that to kind of duck cymbals out for those of you remember and have followed me for a while will know I am a big fan of the MJ you see so we're going to dynamics here's the MJ you see this is another wonderful plugin this is what I love drop this menu down here and she's got Drive here and you can go dark so that's cheating that's not a saturation device only it is a compressor with some saturation on it it's very subtle amounts of Drive you know depending on the signal coming in but I like it a lot I highly recommend this one and you can go nuts with this plug-in because it's got a mix control over here it's good in this situation the low fee I think is a little more preferable I think the dmj you see was a little bit more subtle than I wanted but you can see what the reality is that's another great thing about saturation particularly impro tools if you're using Pro Tools you can use the low fight now you can do with other saturation as well but the great thing is you take the high end and it distorts first so it sucks up that extra higher and the extra you know symbol bleed etc and when he's just washing away on the cymbals but still those are all car the energy that we love from room mics because I mean that's a lot of personality in a drum track take it up back on still going to all go go on the snare if anything's got more energy more smack in the snare more aggression and yet the hi-hat and the symbol have disappeared and all I did was open up and default and put point O six on saturation now if I use distortion will do the opposite will actually get thinner sounding I'll show you it's a little too brittle it's all about using such right there you go so there's five ways that use saturation but ultimately they're all doing the same thing they're controlling transience so you don't get those huge Peaks they're bringing energy because they're bringing the transits down but they're allowing the energy of the trap to get more so you get a bigger fatter louder sound without those peaks you get something akin to what happened when you always were recording onto tape through analog you know tube and valve for the English people and tons of Transformers all of that all of those electronics distorted gave a little extra harmonics and basically added saturation to the signal now I'm not saying that you have to go through every single thing on your mix but as you can see I cherry-pick things like the snare drum was a dramatic difference on that snare drum it was more even it sounded fantastic on the bass guitar it added bite and presence to the bass but as soon as the bass was in the track you didn't hear that extra Distortion he just heard more personality on the piano that particular one the futz box seemed to add a bit of air to it actually had some top-end kept the transient a little bit alive but also added some energy and made it so I didn't have to turn the piano up any louder there's so many great things that you can do using saturation so I would highly recommend that you get lots of different ones the ones that come free some free some cheap ones that you can download just because you're going to use different plugins for different flavours for different things as you can see the low fiber comes improves is really kind of cool all of you know decapitations are an amazing plugin sansamp which again comes free you know these are plugins that give me different results the sans adds a little bit more artificial but with that guitar it was wonderful because I took the DI and I'm either I can use it either the DI to create a different sound against my amps or my amp simulators something a bit more artificial like a fuzz box going into a mic pre or I can use it where my amps sound but then mess with it and stick a reverb over it or delayed effects or a phaser something that gives me two different things to blend and gives me a more interesting guitar cell so ultimately there's so many great things you can do with saturation and just using little amounts often all over the mix will make your mix bigger and fatter and just louder in general and frankly just better because that's how everything used to be recorded everything had all those transients removed by frankly just hitting tape when I pull up some of my old mixes or if you you know don't tell anybody download some of those songs that were recorded in the 60s and 70s you don't see this you see big blobs of vocal huge blobs and that's compression and tape compression and saturation all going on it's giving you that effect and when everybody harps back to those classic records of the 60s and the 70s that's what they're talking about they're talking not just great performance of course there was great performance but they're talking about in the things that were inherent in the gear alright so I hope that helps please this have a massive discussion about saturation it's a wonderful tool and as ever please subscribe hit the notifications bell and you'll know when we're bringing out a new video and of course go to produce like a pro comm and sign up for the email list to get a whole bunch of free goodies and you're gonna get multi-tracks drum samples and extra videos so have a Marvis time recording and mixing I'll see you all again very soon [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 160,971

Keywords: warren huart, produce like a pro, home studio, home recording, recording audio, music production, record producer, recording studio, Mixing Tricks, Quick Saturation Mixing Tricks, Saturation Mixing

Id: 97e-0TxuOKI

Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018