Adam "Nolly" Getgood Mixing Masterclass part 1 of 2: Periphery "It's Only Smiles"

[Music] hey guys in honor of the release of our brand-new drum library that's the ggd Matt help and signature p4 drum pack we're going to be taking a look at one of the actual mix sessions from the periphery for Hale Stan album and that's the song it's only smiles except there's a twist we've programmed all of the drums this time around and I've also revamped the drum mix with a couple of new techniques and are generally simplified workflow and I think it should be pretty easy to follow along with but also to adapt to your own mixing style the guys in periphery have very kindly allowed us to use the actual album stems and to give them away along with the drum MIDI that we've been using in this session so check out the description down below to get your link to download these intermix along with me so extra final mixing of periphery four was done an incredibly intense week-long session with Misha and Spencer flying out to mix with me and as a result I don't really know what I'm going to find in this project because there definitely wasn't time to do things the proper way it's gonna be a bit of an exploration for all of us and that's definitely gonna be all sorts of odd redundancies and stuff in there so it's gonna be quite a bit of fun and quite light hearted so let's dive in okay so before we get stuck into any of the actual mixing let's take a look at how I've got the p4 kit set up here I'm using a snap shot that it's called reptile and then after the song is on he'll stay on the record but it's also the main kit setup that we use for pretty much the whole album it comprised of the 22 inch bass drum the VK snare the medium tuned one he didn't play with a 10-inch rack tormal that we included it in the sample library he said he just had a 13 interact on 16 and 18 inch floors and this is pretty much the cymbal setup that we used on on most songs looking through this preset you can see that I've pushed the hyperrealism a little bit i've actually pulled down the kick snare and toms in the overhead channels i've actually boosted a lot more snare into the rooms then you've got of the kick and toms and then actually pulled back the cymbals a lot this is something you couldn't do in real life but it essentially means that you can get much nice and more pristine sounding cymbals because they're not washing around in the room you can compress the room and boost the high end a little bit more without telling the cymbals into this really fatiguing sound you'll see to that I've kept all the spot mics on the various symbols really low on the mixer they're all going out to a single stereo output and you know the way we recorded this they actually really do not mean very much reinforcement even the little splashes so this is how I've gone about doing things and it's all preap and of course if you wanted to you could set these all at unity gain and then pull down the fader and in the mixer logic or your door toys this is just how chosen to do it today so just quickly I'm just gonna click around the kit so you can get an idea of the kinds of sounds we've got going on here so you can hear it's sounding really good one thing I should note straight away is that this is not a recreation of the mix which we used on pro-free for drum wise this is actually a brand new drum mix which I've done for this video you think what a minimal set of plugins almost as a challenge but I'm really pleased with how its come out even though it's been a little bit less than a year since we actually did this mix I've come up with a few new tricks of my own and I've also kind of picked up a few things from other people that I wanted to implement this time around and we'll be going through those and it's actually quite drastic the amount of processing that we've managed to reduce by implementing some of those ideas so let's take a look at the drum MIDI these this MIDI information has been derived from the actual performance on the album as well as a couple of bits which we took from the original demo drum so it might not be exactly 100% the same as one that played on the record but it's absolutely the same vibe you'll see the velocity wise there's a little bit of variation with them the kicks kind of peaking at about one hundred and sixteen some of these softer hits are more like 105 you can see there's also some really soft clicks case like this one over here this green one which is part of a double to really get the the right dynamics the snares are right up in the kinda hundred and fifteen range but you'll notice the ghost notes are extremely soft and velocity they're only at ten on the velocity scale and the reason for this is that's actually kind of the realistic dynamic that you get if you actually see the waveform of a live drummer even somebody like Matt playing the ghost notes are incredibly soft that's why they're called ghost notes and one common issue that I see with people programming gems they tend to make those far too loud in the programming so is triggering hits samples which a much louder than Neutron would ever actually play a ghost no and the result is it sounds quite mechanical so that's just a little tip right on the office to keep those really low the symbols in general yeah same kind of thing about 105 ish I guess about hundred for the China there yeah so general range kind of between one hundred hundred and ten for the symbols a few just certain accents here and there that need to be hiring a few patterns worries kind of riding between hard and soft tears we've duplicated that in the MIDI too so before we go any further I'm just gonna take a little run through my master buss settings now these are very similar to the master buss settings that I've used I've used them on mixers for quite a few years now and it's almost identical to the master buss settings which we used in the previous GTD masterclass so if you haven't checked that out go and see that cuz I'm not gonna run through everything from scratch in the same way that I did back then this is a quick run-through though I tend to use a little bit of what's called a top-down mixing approach which is that I do a bit of EQ on the master bus just brightening using these two eq's and boosting a little bit of low-end to so that all of my individual tracks have a little bit of extra brightness and beefed to them a bit closer to what a master mix would sound like and it reduces the amount of processing but I need to do on individual channels I'm also trimming the gain down a little bit in front of the next stage I should mention by the way that all of this currently is just happening on the instrumental mix buss so there's no vocals going through this chain that I'm showing you now there's bypass this and go directly to the actual master buss which we'll get to in one second so I use on all my mixer I use a very similar approach that user this kind of SSL style compressor with a very fast attack and release and I roll off a little bit of low end and the sidechain the reason for this is I want to be able to clamp down on the snare more than anything this is something I've talked a lot about in the previous master classes so I'm not gonna go into a huge amount of detail but essentially I'm trying to prevent the snare from jumping out on top of the mix so I'm using really fast time constants on quite a clean sounding compressor in order to just duck it down and compress it back down into the mix every time it hits and it's an effect which which my mixes wouldn't sound like my mixes without so that's one stage actually the next thing which I did on this record which is something which I definitely don't do very frequently although I have done a couple of times since is have utilized another compressor this is based on a kind of Focusrite style compressor again by Steven slay the FG red comp and I've got this set with quite a slow attack the fastest possible release and a bit of Drive and high-pass filtering but most importantly I've turned down the mix a little bit now this compressor was directly a result of feedback from the band right at the last minute of the mix so they wanted things to sound a little bit more glued and exciting so I thought this would be a cool way it's actually quite an excessive pumping effect and then blending in back under the mix in order to generate a little bit more excitement so that's pretty cool that's something which I did on this record though I don't normally do and I've carried forward when there's need for little bit of extra excitement on my mixes and then on the actual master buss I have this slate virtual tape machine plug-in again this is absolutely standard stuff for me I have this set to the half-inch to track mode I really like what this does it's just a little bit of extra fatness on my mixes set very subtly though it's definitely no clipping or anything like that going on and then finally while I'm mixing I use this fabfilter limiter the Pro L and this is something which I slap on every mix right from the start because it tames the transients and gives me a sound which is a little bit closer to how the actual records going to come back after it's been mastered so this is something which I bypass when I finished mixing and I'm sending off to the mastering engineer in this case I mean he made a bit she did an amazing job on p4 and masters most of the work that I do here I'm using it because it allows me to judge the drums especially it's all about how pokey the transients are without this limiter and when you compensate for the volume which is adding you'll find that you get a lot more of the kind of abrasive pokey character especially of the snare drum and if I was mixing without this I might take excessive steps to rectify that and then once it's been mastered by urban or somebody else you'll find that perhaps the snare drum doesn't cut through it all so this is a really crucial part of my mixing judgement when I'm when I'm mixing I need to have that limiter in place in order to be able to judge how the drums are going to come out that's quickly some stuff about the master bus let's dive back into the the drums and we'll probably come back and show you some of the individual effects of those compressors Andy Hughes as we start to put the rest of the mix together first of all let's take a little listen to the actual drums on their own so load so he's a little clip of that cool so as you can hear it I mean it sounds very much like the p4 drum mix but it's not exactly identical as I mentioned this is a and your drumming switch i've starts off from scratch let's start off by taking a listen to the kick drum in solo so i'm going to get to this there is a little bit of parallel compression going on on the drum buss but i'm going to bypass that and I'm also going to bypass all of the processing which is on our kick channel over here so it's solo this is what the kick drum sounds like coming out the plug-in it's a really nice sounding kick to me actually sounds quite a bit deeper than a 22 normally does though it was always more kind of 24 in character really nice sounding drum I do find however that the character of the attack maybe it was just this particular session and it's got a little bit of a kind of papery slap to it this very odd descriptive words but those that's what comes to mind so while I was mixing this I thought it'd be a good I just take that out with a couple of kind of relatively narrow humans here I didn't mean to adjust the the cue there but shouldn't make too much difference what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna bypass every step of this EQ I'll leave the high pass on it's not doing very much so that we can individually bring them back in again and you'll be able to hear what I'm doing I'm gonna start with these two these two EQ points up here so you hear that immediately clears up the character and really allows a little bit more of the clique to come through so even here it kind of gives a slightly softer more squishy kind of character to the kick-drum which I really like if you went too wide on these cuts you might find that you actually start to really new to the attack of the drum so it's quite important to keep these relatively narrow as I've done here if you're after this kind of sound anyway next I cut away a little bit of mid-range with this big old scoop at around 400 Hertz I'm also taemin's back a little bit of low end and this is just a bit of compensation for the high end that I've kind of taken all the attack that I've taken out of the drum just to prevent it from sounding to Bhumi as a result of having less of the important attack frequencies in there so I'm just gonna activate those one by one so you can hear what's going on so hopefully you can hear that that's improved the sound of this kick drum it's kind of decluttered a little bit inform e it's focused the attack now the beater attack right in the kind of really Pleasant area I've experimented with a few different ways of doing this with this particular example and for me the actual top end like kind of above 5k it's got everything you need up there it's more a question of reducing the stuff underneath and boosting extra top-end in my taste that is of course so let's get rid of that a hue screen for a moment and let's look at the next plug-in which is a little round of compression I'm using one of my favorite compressors to use on a kick drum it's made by clang helm it's called MJ you see it's got actually three different types of very new compression in it kind of going from very old-school through to more a little bit more modern and then quite a modern sounding compressor with a very mucous circuit and I really like the sound of this when you crank the punch all the way up to its maximum setting of three and I also depress the density high ratio and I staged modes all of which seemed to exaggerate the compression effect I'm using a relatively slow attack and not the fastest release actually but quite fast an idea here is I really want to get some of the kind of wet sup sound of a kick drum that Familia is really pleasing something you should note though is the vu meter on this plugin is incredibly slow to respond which is probably very accurate to the kinds of Units Iza modeled on as a result if this needle is moving ignore the numbers it's doing plenty of compression so I generally don't aim to go beyond about minus 1 in terms of compression on a kick drum if you over compress a kick drum it's going to sound to attack focus and essentially going to lose a little bit of low-end so let's let's see how that sounds I'm going to just switch between having it in the Jerian and out again you'll hopefully be able to hear what's going on hopefully you can hear that as soon as it starts going between or as soon as it starts nudging above about minus 0.5 of supposes gain reduction is getting quite quite audibly compressed so that's cool I really love how this sounds on kick drum it seems to work quite well a lot of the time for me next up I've got a round of slate virtual tape machine this is the same plugin i'm using my master buss this is something which i've very typically used on on my kick drum sounds for a number of years now I use it in the 15 upsetting which cuts a little bit of high-end and seems to give it a bit of an upper mid lift and then I use the half track mode which gives it a little bit of extra low-end beef I really like what this does it kind of counteracts any excessive cleanness that might be there so I'll show you what that sounds like both in process and then bypass mode so you can hear what's going on it's quite subtle [Music] actually it's not that subtle it's quite quite audible on this particular kick drum is definitely adding quite a lot of low-end presence and I would always do this post compression for that that reason to it's a nice way of getting back a little bit more of the low-end bloom with a bass drum after compressing it then finally I am using a gain trim plug-in and I'm actually pulling down the signal by 5 dB I guess the reason for this would have been when I was mixing I was founding that was having to pull the fader quite far down I guess it would've been about minus 9 to achieve the same kind of level before the game plug-in and I don't really like having my fade is much lower than about minus 10 in general I will probably find as you go through this mix there's a few examples where that's not the case but in general you just don't get so much resolution as you start going down into the far reaches of the fader and it just doesn't look very neat to me I much prefer to be closer up to you to unity gain where you've got quite a nice amount of fine control over the DB adjustments that you're making driven the mix so if I ever find that I managed to do quite an extreme move on the fader I'll tend to use a gain plug-in to counteract that and to bring the fader back into a kind of reasonable position let's check out the snare I've taken the snare top and bottom mics from the plug-in and I've sent them two separate outputs down here but I've then sent them both to bus one which is a bus that I can process the snare top and bottom mics together on this is what I typically do when I'm mixing I'm not the kind of mixer that likes to work on the top and bottom separately I'd like to use the top for most of my sound blend in a little bit of the bottom mic too to bring out more of the wire response but I'm typically not doing different processing on top and bottom you can see here in the plug-in that the bottom is pulled down by 10 DB relative to the top and I've gone and pulled it down an extra 1 DB more than that on the mixer here just to get the right balance for my ears before I'm doing any kind of processing so let's take a little listen to how the snare drum is sounding in isolation this is just the close mics and then I'll run you through all the processing moves which I've carried out of course I really love the sound of this drum for one it's a it's an absolute beast it weighs so much it's a super thick cast bronze drum with cast bronze hoops on it too and it's such a tank it's got a lovely sound it's caused so much attack and pop to it so that's why we end up using it for most of the record it records really well and you can see here beyond the processing that was done on the way in during the recording session it really does not need very much in the way of processing so just got a couple of EQ moves here I've got a little bit of an EQ taking out just under two DB of 2k properties to reduce the poking us with a stick attack a little bit and a tiny little move here you could probably buy barsen not even notice but I guess what that's doing is reducing a little bit of the kind of raspy sound of the snare wires coming through then I'm boosting a little bit of the high-end lift back in again also what I'm doing is I'm notching out with a fairly narrow Q the resonant peak of the drum there kind of tone of the the tuning of the head just because I don't want to sustain to be all of this kind of fundamental tone ringing out on top of the mix and this is how I typically deal with that so I'll show you what it sounds like without the plug-in instantiate it and then I'll switch it on again so you can hear what the CQ is bringing to the snare sound it's pretty amazing how much these little moves can do - you know there's this apart from this cut all of these moves are around they're kind of - 1 or 2 dB mark but they do just enough to open up the snare sound and make it sound nice and clear so moving on from that the next thing which we've got in the chain is a gate typically with gates you think about a live snare track and trying to reduce the amount of bleed onto it but what I find is that when I'm kind of bringing my mix over to the world of prog drums it's still really useful to have a gate there because not only is it bringing down the bleed but it's also kind of shortening the envelope of the driver and tightening it up and it might even be having a bit fact on the the transient character of the drum just softening a tiny bit these are the settings which I use on basically all of my mixers just tweaking the ratio range and threshold so these days I'm using very short releases and this goes 184 milliseconds no hold time no look ahead to which I wouldn't have thought would be good but it seems to sound really good and what I'm gonna do is kind of aim for the threshold that they're kind of lying here you can see in the GUI to more or less line up with where the peaks of the hardest hits are and this is going to have the added benefit to of once we add some parallel compression that's going to bring up the the level of the softer hits the gate is kind of is going to mean that the there's still a natural dynamic between soft and hard hits on the drum sometimes if you do a lot of parallel compression you can end up with ghost notes sounding as loud as your main back piece and obviously that's not what anyone wants to hear so the gate will be the next thing in the chain I'm going to bypass it and then bring it back into the chain using this button here so you can hear how it kind of tightens up the sound of the drum something else worth mentioning is that the room that we recorded in for this awesome sounding studio called magpie cage it's really reverberant and even though we did put some gobos around the kit it's actually plenty of reverb coming back in through the closed mics on the snare it's not something that we typically think about when we're recording that much because especially when there's bleed from the other kit pieces coming through as well it can be really difficult to make out the actual ambience trail that's coming through in the snare place mics but it is there and when you hear a sample that's got nothing else coming after it's quite perceivable so using the gate helps to tighten that up reduce the amount of the reflections from the room which are coming through and just lead to a more clean sounding drum mix right after the gate I'm following this up with smash-and-grab this is our GT plugin absolutely love especially on snare drum I'm using it in grab mode which is a kind of slow attack and fast release kind of vibe based on VC a style compressors and the idea here is to really bring out the punch of the drum and to shape that kind of the raw aggression which Matt's putting into the drum into this kind of very focused poppy kind of character that you get out of using this kind of compression this is you know this is how I like to hear snare drums and really happy with how smash-and-grab brings that across so I've selected drum type snare as you'd expect I haven't changed to the extreme mode that would make the amount of pop even more exaggerated I just left it in normal and what I've done is I've pulled down the threshold until I'm getting a significant amount of gain reduction on the meter and really I'm not afraid here to smash the drum a lot or to grab the drum a lot with some heavy compression to really bring out that attack this time I'm also using quite heavy saturation in the tape mode and the idea is to clip back down some of that transient having just brought it out so it's not going to sound super pokey in the mix I'm gonna hit play I'm going to have this bypassed then we're gonna bring it in and just fiddle around with these controls so you can hear what's going on I've actually just decided to turn up the threshold turn it down a little bit more to get even more compression because I really like how that sounds the saturation is so so crucial to getting the snare to sound right in the mix for me without that even if in solo it sounds pretty decent once you try and level it in the mix you'll just find that you're constantly fighting the level of the attack portion of the snare drum you know you'll be pulling down the fader because the snare feels really loud but then you'll lose all of the body so the saturation just trims off that initial super hard impact it allows you to get more body of the snare coming through in the mix finally in the chain and this is something I added quite late in the day I've got a little bit of extra saturation essentially or you transient control coming from waves l2 ultra Maximizer this is a classic plugin that's been around for ages it's actually a little bit notorious that if you push this too high it turns snare drums into sandpaper basically but if you're using it lightly as I am it's a really effective tool or just making sure that there's an extra level of control on the transient of the snare drum so I'll show you what it sounds like without and with but to be honest it's quite a minor difference when you hear it in isolation and that is the end of the processing on the snare top and bottom mics but we'll get to some of the really crucial other components and getting the snare sound right such as the room mics and the parallel compression once we take a look at the Tom's so the Tom's in this session we actually left them quite raw when he brought them over into the sample pack and the idea is be maximum sculpt ability for people that want to get kind of more mid-range e and less bright sounding toms then I might go for so they're really really great sounding Tom's one thing I will note is I've used the ahd the attack hold and decay settings within the plugin in order to reduce the amount of resonance of the floor toms like these floor toms they've got so much natural resonance they last for a good few seconds if you don't do that it sound awesome on their own but sometimes within the context of the mix that could be hanging around for a little bit too long so here I've done that just to tighten them up when I mixed before and when I mix most records anyway I'm looking at gating the Tom's and manually by cutting out all the silence and failing them out fairly quickly because you don't want to have all of that low-end hanging around and this is just a really good way of having that happening directly within the plugin as I mentioned I've sent them out to three separate busses over here and I'm actually applying exactly the same processing every time and this is one thing that I'm really excited about personally because this is a completely new technique for me I have to say it's heavily inspired by watching Eric Valentine's amazing videos which he's been putting out recently or he's been breaking down mixes if you've not heard of Eric Valentine he's a fantastic producer and he goes for completely different drum sounds than the ones which I go for but his drum sound amazing and he turned me on to this concept through his videos of using fabfilter saturn which is a multi band saturation device with multiple distortion modes that you can apply to each channel and he was talking about distorting the high frequencies more than the low frequencies on his drums in order to be able to get more transient control without them getting that really squelch she kind of farty distorted low-end on instruments that have a lot of low ends so I've taken a leaf out of his book here by doing exactly that I've split this into three bands the lowest crossover is about 250 Hertz or so and this is not done that scientifically and the top bands around 3k and I'm using the warm tape mode with the drive absolutely maxed out on the high frequencies of the toms the mids I'm using warm tube mode I'm distorting a little bit but I'm taking advantage of the fact that you can also control the level of each of the individual bands within Saturn to bake him quite a heavy mid scoop of around 8 DB between the low and the high frequencies and then I'm leaving the low band more or less as stock with a clean tape mode and the drive set very low indeed I love this plug-in I've used it for a long time but I've never thought to use it in this way and it's almost like a channel strip if you wanted to you could also use these dynamics components to get a hue/saturation multiband saturation and even some kind of gating effects if you play with this control in one so it's a super powerful plug-in I just love what it does to the sound of Tom's check this out I'm going to find a section which has a drum fill using all the three Tom's I'm going to select all three of the Tom's and I'm going to bypass satin across all of them so you can hear what phil sounds like on its own so quite raw sounding Tom's with loads of kind of mid resonance going on once I put in Saturn I just love that it's instant great Tom sound I first say I'm using the exact same settings on all three of the Tom's here and just just set and forget really the combination of that saturation and the top frequencies with the kind of extra level booster you're getting out of cranking that Drive bring a lot more brightness to the tone but without making the attack really sharp because of the amount of saturation that's going on at the same time that mid scoop just takes away all of the kind of mud within the mid frequencies of the drums and leaves them with really modern sounding Tom's so this is what that feels like in context with that check this how I felt to bypass Saturn it's just knowing it the same thing as him I sent these three Tom's to a buss labeled Tom's thinking that perhaps I was going to do a bit of extra processing to the Tom's in general but that's a time trick took care of this and the sound so well I basically didn't see the need to do anything so that's now just a fader to control the overall Tom level if I wanted to so let's move on to the cymbals as I mentioned before this is a setup which I've got the cymbal page with the spotlights turn down very low and they're all coming out down one stereo channel here which not even doing any processing on overheads are coming down this next channel and I'm sending both that spot mic a stereo channel and the overheads to a bus that's labeled cymbals so I'm can control basically the level of the spot I send the overheads all in one so as far as the overheads go I've got quite extreme processing going on EQ wise I'm actually high passing them all the way up at 450 Hertz give or take a little bit and I'm cutting a few different areas from the upper upper mids really up into the kind of lower end at the high end before boosting a bit of extra top-end in there let me find section over here though I can show you what it sounds like without any hue I know that sounds really extreme and it is quite extreme but for me that's how I get my cymbals to work in the mix without cluttering up everything else and these upper mid-range cuts and kind of lower treble cuts are really crucial at reducing the harshness of the cymbals especially the crashes in order that in the context of the mix they just sit there really nicely as this lovely Sheen on top of everything there is however a plugin that's come out in recent years which has revolutionized a lot of people's approach the reducing the amount of harshness of overhead cymbals vocals guitars - and that is sooth by a sound and it's basically something which will automatically find the notches that are necessary to reduce horrible ringing frequencies and in the high end and I've got a little preset that I tend to use a lot which focuses around the kind of two key areas which for me most abrasive symbolize kind of around the four and a half and then the kind of nearly 3k area and I've got this set as sharp as it can go Maximus the selectivity and no stereo linking to so that you know it's really if it's only something centralized on the the right crash it's only going to be cut on the right hand side as opposed to something which is going to be affecting the EQ on both sides of the of the overheads at the same time and you have to be careful with this depth control because push it too far and you can just ruin the sound completely but around here seems to work well for this particular mix I'll show you what it sounds like without and then with [Music] actually taking it a little bit further than I had originally because yeah it just seems to do a really good job of adding that extra level of Sheen and shimmer to the symbols it's a plug-in which you know beforehand I'd be notching really specific frequencies using my ear to figure out which ones are most necessary and occasionally automating them on and off if it's something which only affected a certain symbol and this is just nice to have there cuz it just catches all those resonances but it doesn't completely kill them I use this one basically every mix so great job there to the creators of that soothe plug-in I know it's revolutionized mixing for a lot of people so lastly let's take a look at the room mics now unlike other ggd libraries we've only gone and given you guys one stereo pair of room mics because that's how we tracked the for every four album the room is so big sounding at the magpie cage studio it's so reverberant that essentially you can put the room lights pretty much anywhere and you have a very similar response so when we were engineering the record for the album life I thought to myself I really don't need options here all I need is just to find a good spot to set a single stereo pair of rooms up and yeah and it's gonna basically take care of itself so that's what we've got here it's I say it's a massive sounding room and what I've done is I've boosted a lot more snare drum into the room than the toms kick and especially cymbals and that's because for me the room really comes on to its own for making sure that the snare has the life in space that it needs let's take a little listen to how that room mic sounds with zero processing on it I'm just gonna bring the fader up in volume so that you can really hear a bit more clearly [Music] [Music] signe there's a bit of an unnatural image with the snare being so much louder than the cymbals and everything else but that's really going to come into its own once we start processing and compressing these mics especially so first things first I've high-pass this I don't really want much low-end in these room mics it's just gonna sound especially cuz this room has a lot of low-end to it it's just gonna kind of muddy things up and then I've also boosted a little bit more presence in and this is something which we can do because there aren't very much in the way of cymbal high frequencies washing around in the room because of the fact that you can pull down the volume of cymbals in the room mic in our plugin so I've been able to give it about 3 DB of extra kind of Sheen up at the 12 K area so hear what that sounds like with the EQ engaged [Music] so next in the chain I've opened an instance of a good old smash-and-grab compressor this time I'm using in smash mode set to room as you'd expect and what I'm going to do with this is really kind of bring out a lot of extra sustain from these room mics and also tame a little bit the transient which you're hearing on the snare is coming across a little bit harsh that initial attack coming through the room mics so setting the threshold quite quite aggressively I'm also adding a little bit of extra air but I'm also pulling back on the mix control in order to just not completely trash it so I'm going to put that back up to full just so you can appreciate what's going on as far as the compression is concerned before I roll the mix back off again [Music] [Music] just a great sounding compressor on rooms absolutely love it next up I'm using fabfilter saturn again again divide it up into three bands and still kind of inspired a little bit by those Eric Valentine ideas which I which I picked up from his videos and what I'm doing here there is I'm distorting the mid-range frequencies a lot so similar kind of crossover points a little bit lower on the top there and I'm driving quite aggressively using the warm tape mode and the idea here is to get some extra distortion and length out the mid-range frequencies of the room without bringing out too much harshness in the cymbals and that's why this is a really effective technique so I'll show you what it sounds like without and then with [Music] [Music] so you can hear that's really bringing a lot of explosiveness to the snare decay there then finally I found that that same move perhaps was bringing out a little bit too much lower mids in the snare too so so this little move is going to reduce the amount of kind of muddy frequencies in the snare especially within the context of the whole mix you know in solo it might sound really cool having those frequencies there but once we slot it in with the rest of the drum mix it's probably just gonna kind of add this washing around muddy kind of kind of vibe to the to the drum mix so I'm going to set the fader back down to roughly where it was it was yep - twelve point - I'm gonna play the actual drum mix in solo without this as cut engaged and then I'm gonna bring it back in again so you can hear the kind of effect once the drums are being played in unison it does quite a lot it really reduces the kind of tub enos of the snare for sure then finally I'm gonna be taking a little look at some parallel compression now I'm doing things a little bit differently than I've done them in the past and this is something which I've only very recently been experimenting with because I've been doing parallel compression on drums basically the same way for all of my professional career but again inspired by art valentine who use a pair of hardware de-stresses in parallel with his drums all the time we thought I'd try out similar settings and I really liked how they sounded so I don't know if I'm gonna use this on everything but it was pretty cool to experiment with this for this particular mix which I put together I really like how it sounds so the general settings are 20 to one as far as the ratio goes quite a slow attack relatively fast release but the important stuff is to have the high pass and mid bump in the detector circuit engaged and what this is going to do is reduce the amount of pumping that you get from the kick and also prevent the cymbals from getting too mangled sounding it's going to really focus this compression onto the shells especially the snare most of the time so you know play the drum mix which you've heard a few times now and I'm going to engage this and hopefully you'll hear it bring a nice bit of liveliness into the drum mix so I've actually got an increase the amount of compression that's going on there I just really like how it sounds and it's unusual because typically the parallel compression I use on drums tends to be with a very fast attack and release aiming to kind of just get this wash of drums with very little transient information I can blend under my main drum mix here it's doing something quite different yet I don't feel like I'm losing you know kind of my sound as far as drums guys so it's really cool I don't know if I'm gonna use this on every mix but it's there as a cool tool and I thought it'd be fun to demonstrate it within the context of this song [Music]

Channel: GetGood Drums

Views: 188,242

Keywords: getgood drums, periphery, adam nolly getgood, mixing, mix, masterclass, it's only smiles

Id: X7bUCCQUBeA

Length: 40min 4sec (2404 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/asian_dude12]

Free stems for the song can be downloaded from the link in the description!

[u/Swiggles1987]

Praise be

[u/ZeusHimself1]

His videos have been by far some of the most helpful and beneficial. It's actually real info in there and not just 100% a commercial for their product. Which in turn, probably makes the viewer more likely to get the product lol. Win-win.

[u/CloisteredCabal]

Sensei 🙇🏻