A Complete Recording Process - tracking, mixing, mastering

okay so today I was going to show you about mixing and mastering I've been asked this question on one of my other youtube videos please do subscribe you can see loads of other demos and music and other things so I'm actually going to do the entire process today I'm going to record just eight bars so this video doesn't end up being 6 hours long and then I'm going to show you how I would go around go about mixing now first of all drums now what I've got is I've got four mics on the drum so I'm going to use my other camera here just to show you where they are so we've got a kick drum mic down there we've got a snare drum mic here which is pointing at the centre point of your snare and then I've got these two overheads here which are looking at 90 degrees to each other over the drum kit so what I've done is I've plugged those in to my mixing desk down here and I'm going to record onto the computer and the computer there and my hard disk machine at the same time now the reason that I'm doing this is that you can do a lot with your computer with logic you can put compression on channels you can do lots of e queuing you can do that sort of thing I'm actually going to mix in two ways today so you can see the old way and the new way what new way being about 20 years old now but it helps to look at the old way to know how the new way works it's quite important this anyone under 30 won't have used a mixing desk and a dedicated recorder unless they've been assisting in a studio or now producers or whatever so you need to know where signals have gone and where they're going to and how you do your mixing and the queuing and reverbs and compression so bass and snare drum are actually going through a compressor here two sides of a compressor and they've gone through this preamp here so if I hit the snare hopefully you shall see the righthand vu they're moving and the bass drum is on that one at the same time those mic channels will also be going to the computer but without going through the compressor so that's how I'm going to do this I'm going to record the drums uncompressed onto the computer and compressed onto the hard disk record okay so I now set up ready to record so my kick drum and snare drum are the only ones that I've compressed the overheads I have not now why do we use compression on the way in well it stops for example the recording level going too high but that's really a secondary thing because actually you want the kick drum and the snare drum to be quite strong in the mix the more compressed they are the more you can push them up because it's clipped the peaks off which means that you can have the bass drum and the snare drum really strong and really consistent there is however a downside you don't over compress otherwise you'll have no dynamics at all and you can get that sort of horrible pumping effect so if I just briefly show you the compressor on here you will see that the snare drum for example there's only been reduced by about 3 DB and the same thing for the bass drum so I've just taken the edge off ok so there we go it's gone on to the hard disk machine which says please wait while the hard drive is rendering everything and the computer system it's processing it's important to leave those things in place until you're ready to go now I'm going to put some bass down X so I've got to do a little bit of preliminary mixing before I can put the bass down so that I am happy with what I'm hearing you have to make sure that you're utterly happy with your mix before you continue recording notice how important it is at the end of your recording to be as silent as you can know sort of none of that sort of stuff so if you sign it at the end and signs at the beginning it's a piece of cake to mix and master because you haven't got anything to worry about so now it's the turn of the bass I've got my bass bugged into the preamp that the snare drum was in there we go you can see the meter moving and it's also going into the compressor from that preamp the meter on the left there which is going sort of right-to-left is the amount that is reducing the level by if I'm the louder stones you can see that there are more lights showing but it will still allow me the dynamic to play quietly so if you look on the meter on the right-hand side it remains quite constant even when there's lots of level in there so that's going into my hard disk machine it's also going onto the computer so I'm going to listen to the output of this machine but the hard disk recorder is controlling the laptop via MIDI timecode so that actually I'm able to record onto both things at once this is just purely for this demonstration so [Music] okay so there's my bass part now it's ha I've got a guitar amp here a small guitar amp that's running only three watts so it's perfect for studio use you can have it quite loud and what happens with a guitar amp is that it delivers natural compression at that sort of power level so that means I don't need to put it through my compressor if I look at the level meter and see that number 14 is enabled track 14 the level going to it doesn't change a great deal because the amp is compressing now I've also set up the guitar to run through what's called a DI box you can have a look at one of my other videos to see about that about what is for so what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to record two channels to the computer I'm going to record the guitar just going into the Machine and the guitar going through this now the reason I'm doing that is that maybe afterwards on the computer I may want to change my guitar sound what they used to have to do was to send a track from the multitrack back into the studio and play the guitar track back through another amplifier and then record the mic output record with a mic that guitar amps sound so there was quite a lot of hassle involved so it's good to try and get your guitar sounds sorted before you start that doesn't mean that it's always going to work though so you know we are in uncharted waters really so on the computer you'll be hearing the dry guitar signal as well and you can use a guitar amp simulator that's built into logic or Cubase or whatever so I'm going to record that guitar part here we go [Music] so I'm going to stick a bit of keyboard on next just a sound to try and fill out that harmony of that tune and it just helps with the mix as well it helps join everything together so that's my next job I'm going to record this to my hard disk and to the computer as well it's quite a padi sort of sound that I'm going to use so once again compression are going to leave that now this keyboard is a the Yamaha YC 45 D a very nice classic keyboard from 1973 with some very nice sounds on it [Music] [Music] so it's now time for some vocals have got my vocal mic set up here with this thing it's a pop shield now you put that in front of the mic cuz if I go you can hear that noise and it gets rid of it now one thing that we do have to do is when we play back we're going to have to be careful of the bass response of everything that we're looking at except for the bass drum and the bass guitar we're going through the compressor again you can see that that compressor has rolled things off of it but I'm also going to the computer with no compression so same as before with the bass drum and snare drum bass guitar [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so there we go now I've got all eight tracks down I can start mixing mixing this thing so now we've finished recording now's the time to play it back and have a go at a bit of mixing and I'm gonna start with the old way first and I referred to earlier that is the non computer so this is a hard disk recorder but it's a dedicated recorder so it only stores audio doesn't do any other flashy stuff that logic can do however what we do is we plug this into the mixing desk so that we can listen to all of the individual tracks and do a bit of a mix with some reverbs and all sorts of things so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with all the tracks down here so they're they're all off I'm gonna find my initial position and when I press play you'll hear all the instruments all the individual things coming in one by one now those are my drums the overheads coming on faders three and four so I'm going to twist those two left and right respectively so we get that nice stereo spread that the mics captured earlier and then I'm going to add all the other things up my bass and I've got a guitar and keyboards and vocals and let's just drag the faders up see what we've got [Music] okay it's a start now as with computer recording on any recording you should cut the low end that is the very low base of anything that is not a bass instrument so kick drum and bass guitar and my only two legitimate bass sounds there so that means the snare I'm going to cut a little bit of bass off here now I'm using EQ on the desk here which is a good old fashioned bass and treble cut or boost so I'm just going to take the bass off that and make sure I've kept the bass guitar up there guitar I don't want to cut too much bass that I lose the body of the instrument keyboards a bit of bass off and then the vocals a bit of bass there as well bit of bass cut so I'm going to just quickly play back the individual instruments now now we have a solo function here which I can listen to various things on now the way I've got this demo wired at the moment the solo function won't actually work on this desk with the recording but I can just play you back the bass on its own for example by doing this there's a little red light on the desk which says the level coming from here is a little bit too high luckily there's an input control which allows me to just take that back a bit [Music] so I'm going to put the bass drum and the bass guitar together so that I can look at mixing the low low-end I really want those two instruments to firm up the bass because there's nothing else no other bass instruments there so the bass drum and the bass guitar are working together okay there so I'm going to add the rest of my drums and just see what happens with the bass yeah I think that's okay now I'm going to add the vocals next because actually the vocals are the most important part of the song in terms of delivering the top line and everything so I've got to make sure that they sit above the bass and the drums [Music] the flow in around now you can hear a little bit of reverb or Matt I'm using some old reverb units that I've got in the rack here and I've got a control on the desk here that sends each individual track to a reverb unit and it comes back on this fader here so if I go really overtop with the reverb is you can hear the snare is also feeding that I'm gonna take the snare reverb off simply because a snare the way a snare works is the little metal gauze on the underside of that drum which is the snare actually is kind of a reverb for the drum anyway you hit the drum and the is kind of a natural decay so I'm a bit of a fan of dry drums but you can add reverb if you like now that reverb is way over the top so I'm gonna have that now it is nice to have reverb on the vocals not only for the space but also for the stereo imaging of what the reverb does to that mono signal so that I can hear it above the entire mix I'm going to add the guitar and the keyboards next and we'll just see if that all works together [Music] [Music] okay now over here on the rack and we have got a stereo compressor and this piece of kit essentially takes my output level of the desk and it'll either squash it or just limit it slightly at the moment it's set to bypass so what I'm going to do is I'm going to play the mix back and you'll be able to hear the effect that this has on the overall mix [Music] [Music] good and so that has quite a pronounced effect one effect that it does have is that it brings the reverb up actually because the reverb is a low signal what a compressor does is it brings the top levels down the loudest bits and then you have a gain control which brings everything else which brings everything back up so that you get a narrower band of dynamics and that is what is happening here I'm bringing the reverb up which is the low level signal so you've got to be a little bit careful with this now this is kind of how you might begin to master an analog recording an analog playback that is the machine coming out of the desk so um I'm just gonna play it again and just knock the the very very loudest bits off [Music] big beginner what did [Music] there we go that is an introduction to the analog way the old way now gonna do the new way so I'm going to bring the computer back and what I've listened to that okay so we've seen how we can do a little bit of mixing using the multitrack machine here and the mixing desk in conjunction with some old reverb units and you can hear you can get a pretty good result however you can't if you're going to do another job you have to remember all your fader positions you have to write them down with logic or computer-based systems it's much easier so let's close all these faders down now that's my multitrack mix that's done and dusted and this time I'm going to bring up just the two channels of my computer so hopefully now when I press play vocals on their own so we've got as the computer showing here I'm just going to close the scale down so that you can see that my tracks are all laid out one above the others you've got drums kick snare overheads the bass guitar a guitar amp with a guitar di and then we've got things like the vocals and the keyboards there now it's always a good idea with a computer to name your tracks always name your track vocal compressed vocal uncompressed okay so now I'm going to go through this I'm just gonna have a little listen all the faders by default on Logic are at zero on your mixer with all the pan controls that is left or right in the middle [Music] so there we are there's the beginning of it so I'm now going to have a little listen I don't sort of do this on the headphones because I've got the narration mic up here as well so let's have a look so the guitar is quite high at the moment now part of the reason for that is that we are listening to two guitar tracks if I just solo out the guitar amp that's the amplifier over here and if I listen to the other one that is the guitar as it went dry into the computer which means that I could if I wanted to put a guitar amp on it for the moment I'm going to just mute that track and I'm also going to mute the vocal uncompressed track sorry the compressed track leaving the uncompressed one now you can hear that the vocal is very low indeed now if you've got a very very low level on Logic or whatever you can actually written you can actually bring the gain right up by either putting the gain up as a plug-in or you could actually adjust the file I'm going to just do a plug-in for the minute it's going to bring it up 12 DB see how that works [Music] getting better now DB scale 6 DB is a doubling of level so 12 DB would be a quadrupling it's double double so if you go the other way 6 DB down is half the level 12 DB down is a quarter once again your ears are the judge of what your eyes see so if there is something that's not quite right it might sound ok if it sounds ok leave it okay so I'm going to put the get the vocals now through a compressor so this is a soft version of the hardware compresses that we've been using up till now now with this display up here you can see that the compressor display has a meter on it which shows how much it's having to reduce that vocal level by that starting to sound a bit better now so with all of the tracks here we have level controls we have EQ and you have plugins on every channel that's something you don't get on a conventional analog mixing desk so I'm just going to get started with the drums on their own because the kick drum and the snare drum are uncompressed so let's have a listen I've just gone into my mixer panel here I'm just gonna listen to the drums on their own now the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to pan the overheads left and right now I'm just going to make sure that my pan controls are set properly there there we go so if I solo if I cut one of the channels now I need to make that snare drum a little bit more beefy now at the moment I'm soloing tracks ideally if you're fiddling with anything try and do it in context rather than soloed because if you solo something out and work for ages on it bring it back into the mix and it doesn't work we've kind of wasted your time a little bit so I'm just going to put a very very gentle compressor on that kick drum [Music] really gentle compressor not nothing too draconian right EQ pain we have a little graph here that shows you essentially bass middle and treble so I'm going to just bring up the bass a little bit on that bass drum now the frequency at which that which you boost or cut for bass depends on the drum depends on the drummer depends on the mic it depends on a lot of things so I but as a rule of thumb the 80 Hertz boost that you've got here is about right for a kick drum now that's up 6 DB that's quite a lot but we're not going to worry about that too much I'm going to put everything back into context and then see if that in fact I'm gonna ride the bass first [Music] now that bass is quite nasal it's a good old fender Precision it's just lots of middle and yeah lovely so I'm going to actually add a little bit of depth to that bass now I'm gonna come slightly away from the bass drum but everything needs to occupy its own space in the frequency domain so kick drum may be bass guitar above that then guitars and keyboards and vocals everything has to occupy its space you don't to things vying for the same now I don't like that vocal at all partly because the the frequency imbalance I must have had something set here on the way in on the EQ on the desk so we've got to try and correct that in a way it's a good thing that we're having to do that because it involves a little bit of a little bit of fiddling about so mother only saw me because we're in love be careful what you do because the lie becomes the truth Billie Jean is not my lover that's not too bad dance on the flower in around now my particular vocal style is quite nasally me so um I should get singing lessons really one who are dance on the floor in around now with that I'm good to cut everything below about a hundred Hertz hundred Hertz is a good rule of thumb when you're a cutting bass off tracks that don't require bass so I'm going to just I'm gonna cut a hundred Hertz off that guitar amp as well okay you can hear a helicopter going overhead on literation mic so let's have a little listen to that [Music] I want a little bit of treble on that guitar to make it a bit spiky they s a bit brighter now keyboards are quite low in general I'm just going to put the the gain up of this now if you are really going to make sure that you got this got the recording absolutely right you would make sure that you had a healthy level whichever tracks you're recording on part of the reason why some things are a little bit of missus because I recorded this and this I had to satisfy both machines so it's slightly tricky doing that okay so I've got some sort of semblance of level out of most of the tracks now so I'm just going to have a listen from the beginning and I'm going to play this through one last time and I get to make small adjustments as I go through [Music] so the snare drum wants a bit of a waking up so I'm just going to put a compressor on that just to make sure we can make that cut through the mix [Music] [Music] so I just cut a little bit of the nays of the content from the base as well so I've brought the snare up I've brought the overheads down slightly the overheads are designed us to get the symbols the high hats the Tom's etc so I want to be a little bit careful cutting too much base off those for the sake of those Tom's so I'm going to put a little bit of reverb on those vocals now so I'm gonna add a stereo plug-in you want reverb really to be in stereo so that you get a nice sense of where the vocals are in that stereo space in that spread now it gives you usually a default of 80% dry 20% effected or wet signal I'm gonna have that immediately because it's quite can be quite much now settings wise with the compressor I always go for a ratio of about three to one for vocals three or four to one and you have to set your threshold of your compressor so it's not acting too soon and then there's a little make-up gain the other end which allows you to bring your level back up [Music] so I always aim for a four or five DB reduction on the loudest passages at a ratio of three to one and that means that I can maintain some of the dynamics in that vocal line but it still cuts above the mix so I also panned the guitar and the keyboards ever so slightly in the stereo image just to leave a bit of space for the vocals in the middle so that everything wasn't vying for space in the middle of your mix as well so now usually you would have another track on Logic seven at any rate in Logic 8 9 and Pro X the output track is automatically shown the output of the computer on Logic 7 you have to assign one so I'm going to have a look at what the stereo output is doing so this is the mastering bit this is what you do when you want to make this track into something you can play on iTunes or seed CD or whatever so now the meter is going to show the output level overall degree there's an awful lot of peaking there's not much in the way of that sort of higher average level that you would want now you have something called I'll just get rid of this I've gotta lean over that computer so I'm going to bring up what's called a multi presser now what this is is a multiband compression where you can actually set the you can set the levels of each individual part of your frequency band so you have bass middle and treble you can have three or four bands I'm just gonna go with the three so I'm just going to play the mix through and have a little fiddle with it I'm going to start compressing the mid-range first bar like a beauty queen from a movie scene I said don't mind but what do you mean I am so I've just applied a little bit of compression not much about you know one point four to one at the moment but what is done is it's actually distorted the output of my computer so I'm having to bring the overall level down now I can do that actually within the multiband compressor you have a master gain which is quite handy so that you can actually listen to the effect of the mastering plug-in without having to overload the output of the computer now what I can do is I can put this also through a limiter which is simply a plug-in that prevents the output from going over zero dB on my digital scale zero DB is the highest everything below that is a negative value from minus ninety right up to zero so I'm going to put this limiter on now it's just going to put this page over here so you can see on the other camera [Music] [Music] so I'm gonna play this now with no compression it's going to take the effects off so I will point to the screen when that happens that is with no compression at all now back in what it's done is it's made everything a little bit flatter in terms of the dynamics and what I can do is I can then bring that up bring the dynamics bring the compression up slightly on your on the mastering plug-in just to try and squash everything down a bit now the master fader down here now is showing a much higher average level in contrast to this that doesn't have much life but this has much more that snare is really punchy now you don't want to overdo this especially now this is a version of how to do a bit of mastering for your own use and for maybe for production for other people or whether you're just sending ideas if you want something mastered you are better off taking it to a mastering facility which is a professional facility where somebody with lots and lots of listening experience we'll listen to your music and decide where it sits in the marketplace sonically so there is no substitute for really for taking it to a mastering facility but the ideas are presented here you compressing various frequency bands and then applying overall limiting at the end you can also put a little bit of EQ on as well you have very very expensive equalizers in these mastering facilities which allow you to select very very narrow bands if there's a particular fault you can actually do something with that now mastering engineers cannot fix problems with a mix lots of people says I will fix it in the mix or they're actually better off fixing things at the time otherwise you're in a really tight spot with it so there is a version of how to mix and master using the computer-based software now just before I ring off there are of course other plugins that you can use things like a bit of course on the guitar or a bit of reverb on the snare I just put a tiny bit of reverb on the snare but actually I like drums really dry my own personal taste is that drums should be as dry as possible but I'm just gonna play this with a bit of reverb on the snare so you can hear it [Music] [Music] for me that's kind of ruin that snare drum a bit so I'm just gonna play it dry like a beauty queen from a movie scene that's it there we go there's there is a little introduction to mixing on the computer

Channel: Dan Baker

Views: 514,510

Keywords: Recording, tracking, misixng, song production, drums, drum recording, bass, Fender bass, bass recording, compression, guitar recording, reamping, DI box, Logic Pro, Fostex D160, Soundcraft Spirit, Drawmer MX-30, Yamaha YC45D, Dan Baker, se3300, pop shield, Multitracking, Fender Stratocaster, Billie Jean, Michael Jackson

Id: o0Ft-vgM7Rw

Length: 43min 36sec (2616 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2017