Adam "Nolly" Getgood Mixing Masterclass part 2 of 2: Bass, guitar, and vocals

[Applause] having gone through the mixing process of the drums for this track let's take a look at the guitars bass and vocals and as ever it's worth bearing in mind that your end product is always going to be limited by the quality of your source tone so remember that you've got to be working with very best tracks you can in order to get the best results so a lot of the techniques you'll be seeing me apply here today a fairly minimal and that's just a reflection of the fact that the tracks already sound pretty decent also it's worth noting that I do use a kind of top-down mixing approach as we touched on earlier so although some of the moves seem very minimal on these tracks don't forget there is a bit of extra top-end and bottom end being added on the instruments not the vocals thing the tones we've got to work with here for the bass are a DI channel and then an amp track which is a kind of distorted bass tone it just kind of in keeping with what I normally do for my bass tones and this was recorded by me with my Diggle ng2 4 string model in E standard so didn't actually have to do very much to the bass guitar to get it to sit into the mix really well here I'm gonna start by disabling all of the processing this time and then I'll show you what each bits doing but you know firstly I think it's worth talking about achieving the best consistency that you can at the playing end as you can see here from the DI that's with no compression you can see I've really aimed to get my playing as consistent dynamically as possible and this is kind of crucial to me to be able to get a low-end especially on the bass guitar that feels really consistent and you don't have to hyper compress to try and get it to sound consistent but I mean you're never going to be able to make up for inconsistent playing through compression because just that the tambour of every single notes gonna be so different you can also see here that for the verse section I've played a much lower dynamic and and just like with the drums it's really crucial I think that if you want something to sound fairly soft to track it that way so you can see here that the DI drops down significantly in volume though the distorted amp track doesn't so much because the distal that is running through so let's just take a little listen to the DI first and the intro and then the amp truck [Music] so the amp track is using actually funnily enough a stock logic plug-in it's called grit it's like a essentially a recreation of a pro co rat pedal and I'm running that straight into an impulse response that I made and essentially that form is the bulk of my tone on this track I'm just kind of blending that with the DI to a small extent but on the DI I kind of wanted to give the attack character a little bit more juice so I thought it'd be nice to compress it and I thought we could use the smash-and-grab compressor I said it to the overhead mode which gives a relatively transparent character and I used it in smash mode which gives it the kind of more controlled transients so I'll show you what that's doing on the channel here I'll start with a bypassed and then then initialize it [Music] so while we've got them at hand I actually use the beef and our controls a little bit so I'm boosting up the beef a little bit to give a little bit more sub low and then I'm cutting the air just to trim off a bit of the finger noise that you might be getting or pick noise perhaps just that the kind of very obviously di2 part of the signal just give it a little bit more around a top so I think this actually worked out really well on base for this year's the other thing I've done is actually I've used a bit of saturation I found that the saturation in tighten tape mode in particularly sounds really cool on the eye so I'll show you what that does just as an aside but I'm not using it to a particular extreme [Music] so you could hear is it got really aggressive there it starts to sound a lot like a I call distortion pedal effect almost it's well worth bearing in mind for her yeah for use in the future you could even try running that into a cabinet impulse response perhaps just to see what happens and so once the compression was done I still felt like I wanted to trim the peaks down a little bit more so similarly to what I did with the Tom tracks earlier I'm using a limiter here just to trim off a bit of the flap from the front end it sounds like this [Music] it's a really subtle difference we're talking about to 3db if that even but it just makes sure that everything's kept exactly in check the amp track didn't really need any processing on its own apart from I just I thought I could hear quite a kind of strong resonant note here about 12 20 Hertz I'll show you what that sounds like if I boost it just to show you what I mean when I say strong resonant note [Music] it's quite common when you just store a bass guitar or any guitar for that matter that you start to get these certain frequencies that start to dominate and you can hear them ringing out on top of everything else so when you can identify those it's often worth cutting a little bit of it out of the signal just to maintain a more clean frequency response I find that sometimes you might want to reduce the mid-range in general on an instrument and then realize that actually it's just one really narrow band of frequencies that are peaking and using a kind of traditional fairly wide hue to cut that area would be reducing a lot of the good information at the same time so I try and keep the cues it's a quite a small amount when doing this kind of work in order that you're not really affecting the general EQ curve of the instrument looking at the actual bass bus you'll be able to see the processing which I've done here which is being done by two different fabfilter plugins and I'm high and low passing is one typically does on most channels cutting a little bit of the strong resonances that I was getting around about a hundred and fifty Hertz hundred sixty-five Hertz in this case there's a very strong note and the bass there especially with it being tuned II that's quite high up in the spectrum and instead of having the kind of almost into the upper base region like I should say being too prominent I thought it better to cut there and instead fill it with a lot more sub and you'll see over here on this multiband compressor that is only instantiated on the low end I'm doing a similar thing actually in fact it's almost exactly the same only being done with a shelf boost here for the low end so essentially what the pro mb is doing is it's compressing it's it's drastically reducing the dynamic range of the low frequencies in two different bands and as far as the kind a hundred and fifty hertz regions goes it's cutting them and below that it's actually boosting it to give us a really nice solid sub so i'll start by showing you what the eq does and then i'll bring in the multi bank on [Music] and the keen-eyed of you would noticed that I'm getting a kind of similar smiley face kind of thing happening here on the frequency chart like I was getting with Tom's the kick the snare there's definitely something in that is something which I look for in a lot of instruments and then bringing in a multiband compression sound like this [Music] there's just a sense of again tightened up when you engage the multiband compressor because you know it's not just a fixed EQ curve so it just sounds like there's a lot more consistency between the notes there's not EQ that there's not frequencies being cut when it's not necessary instead like all the notes retain the same amount of body and the sub low sound very kind of pinned and non dynamic which i think is good you want your bass guitar so have a very consistent low-end underneath the rest of the instruments now I found that with that I was pretty much done as far as the bass processing on this track the lower you tune on bass I feel like the more problems you run into with managing the low-end but Annie standard it's ER it's really quite easygoing so as a relatively easy bass track to work with moving on to guitars there are essentially three different pairs of guitars we've got a pair of main rhythm guitars which are just playing power chords we've got some overdubs guitars which are playing a kind of arpeggiated and wrung out pattern over the the intro and chorus and then we have a pair of non-symmetrical guitars which which kind of play off each other during the verse let's start by looking at the rhythm guitars I tracked these with a PRS custom 24 with bare knuckle pickups and again being an e standard you've got a lot of options open to you in terms of tone so first of all let's take a look at the rhythm guitars these tracks here were generated using an amp sim which is made by a scuffle amps I think it's a really great amp so especially for higher tuned stuff where it's not really all about super high going tones I forget actually which model I use but I printed it down I ran it through some custom made impulse responses that that I made actually funnily enough here at middle farm and I think the tone came out really cool and this is using a PRS custom 24 Utah however the tone was really quite dark so you can see here the EQ which is the only person I've done to these guitars is reducing a lot of the kind of mid-range emphasis and bringing in some extra top-end and a little bit of extra low-end too so I'll show you what the guitars sound like with no EQ and then what they sound like with a bit of EQ applied [Music] you have to resist the temptation to feel that that it sounds too scooped whether you do that because whenever you compare back against the kind of darker and more mid-range esource it can be really difficult sometimes to appreciate the new brighter version it can often sound a little bit harsh by comparison but in this case that mid-range spike was causing a lot of issues once you chucked it into the mix on top of everything else and applying that eq allow that to sit amongst the other instruments especially the the drums which do occupy like way more top and bottom and information it's really important when you're a being to not lose sight of the fact there is probably going to be drawn to the darker more meter energy vision often times you'll find that by the time we viewed something to sound really good in a mix it might sound a little bit more harsh than the unnie hewed version however if you don't directly a/b it you don't think that way it's just one of those things like I say he is naturally tend towards the kind of smoother version so with that he hue carried out on the guitars I found there wasn't really any need for any more processing I mean the guitars are they're really not very dynamic there's no palm muting which is causing excess blow n22 flub around and I made sure that as much as possible the saw stone was really you know well played and well captured so that so that wasn't really anything to fix in the mix so to move on to the overdubbed guitars here we've got a pair we've they're playing the same thing but I did one side tractor with a strap and the other with the same PRS that I track to the rhythm guitars with so to get these to sit on top I find that in general when trying to sit overdubbed guitars on top of rhythm guitars you have to extract quite a lot of low-end is then you have to remove a lot of low-end for it not to kind of just add way too much muddy frequency wash in the mix so you can see I've got very drastic high-pass filter going on here it's like 200 Hertz and then using just purely subtractive EQ to cut a few of the more harsh frequencies out something I often find especially with guitars is if you high-pass them quite aggressively it kind of uncovers this need to cut all sorts of frequencies up and they're kind of upper mid-range and treble just because otherwise it gets really kind of thin and of sounding so you can see here I've used subtractive EQ to cut all sorts of junk out of the guitars up here I'll show you what the overdub guitar sounded like on their own and then I'll bring in the EQ to show you these were using a different cabinet impulse than the rhythm guitar so they needed a little bit of extra work to just to play nice alongside the rhythm guitars [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so you can hear I've carved away a gigantic amount of those guitars and it sounds extreme on its own but when you put them alongside the rhythm guitars you'll hear why because there's just no need for them to have any body all you really want to hear is like the chime enos of the notes ringing out and it's not even about being super distinct but just giving this huge wash of sound when combined with the rhythm guitar so I'll show you what that sounds like with the two channels together [Music] so that's what I've done in terms of EQ on these overdubs guitars I also thought it'd be nice to add a little bit of echo to them and I've got a kind of ping pong going on here with a quarter note on one side on an eighth note on the other just to give an extra bit of movement to this guitar and make it a bit washer I've used the studio tape mode in this plug-in called echo boy but notice I've also filtered out quite a lot of the low and high end to make it not become too indistinct too much higher than in delays especially on guitars and vocals I can find I often find it just a bit distracting you get too much repetition of the of the attack frequencies and it just doesn't sound very good to my ears so plenty of high and low cut so with the echo on there [Music] it's just a bit of extra texture there and then finally I noticed that there was a couple of well it was a frequency in particular this one here 3.3 K that was a bit harsh so I'll show what it sounds like without then I'll engage it and hopefully you'll hear that that just again tames some of the bite on the guitars is kind of a whistling frequency that they're just not very keen on [Music] this little notch mousse applied across basically everything in the mix for me add up two tracks that are way easier to make louder in the mix because those kinds of harsh whistles and and resonant frequencies just eat up so much space once you make that the track that contains them loud in the mix so for me those are some of the most important moves and in my mixing actually just finding the right frequencies to cut and these very narrow notches in order that as a whole that track then becomes something which is way less aggressive on the ear and therefore you can make louder and more present in the mix without it dominating during the verse we've got a couple of different guitars these are both recorded with my strat we've got one which is just a kind of percussive constant eighth note guitar and on the other side we have these kind of held chords that are shimmery and I use the the Tran bar a little bit to give them a bit of extra movement and they have quite similar treatments I mean the the right-hand guitar has very little going on on it the kind of percussive guitar and the left one has an echo applied to but let's just let's dive in and listen to the percussive guitar and we'll see what I've done to treat that so I'll bypass the processing you I've been talking a lot about these notches and here's one appearing in a very different frequency range to where I typically do them what I found here is because I'm palm-muting that one note the root note e so much in this riff it's a little bit overbearing so I actually went and found the frequency of that note and cut it it seems a little bit counterintuitive to cut the fundamental tone of them know that you're playing but by doing that it actually allows the rest of the kind of percussive character of the the sound to come through and you don't get this kind of bogged down sound with too much of that low-end there again you might be tempted to take that out with a much of wider cut and end up with a sound that perhaps lacks a bit of character so it's kind of nice to take care of that with a narrow notched filter I'm also using quite a steep high-pass filter here set at 78 to just prevent any extra low-end from being there so let me just show you i'll only engage and disengage the fundamental tone knotch just so you can hear what's going [Music] some really cleans up the part makes a sound a lot kind of tighter after that I've engaged a little bit of compression with this amazing de-stresser clone made by an by slate again slate digital I've got it set fairly moderately with kind of medium attack and release settings and a three to one ratio and it's just kind of there to just to congeal that sound a little bit more it doesn't need much dynamic control but I like the sound of the compressor on this is giving a little bit of extra extra vibe I guess I'm not using it on full mix though so let me show you what it sounds like first without and then I'll engage the compressor and you can hear I love that little kind of that wetness that you get on the attack with the compressor engaged is really nice and and that was all I really felt was necessary to to do on that guitar on the other side I've got you know a similar high-pass filter a bit higher up this time and trimming up a bit of low mids as well as notching out a kind of resonant note up at like the 2.3 K area and I'm also following up with a really long very analog sounding delay with a lot of modulation on it just to fill the gaps in between the chord so I'll show you what that sounds like [Music] if I were to bypass the EQ and delay it would sound like this so you can hear it does have quite a lot of kind of low-end junk in there so you can see why I passed it so much and the delay just adds a really beautiful sustain to everything happening there [Music] so underneath the verse section we have a kind of atmospheric pad synth sound and that I wanted to use this give an extra sense of spaciousness and atmosphere but what you got a lost The Times with pad synthesis you get these very strong tones ringing through so as we've almost everything else in this mix I've found it necessary to cut the specific fundamental tones out of the synth the idea here is don't really need much note there it's ringing in key but more than anything just want this kind of breathy atmosphere around what I'm hearing along with that I'm also cutting some of the extreme high end just because sometimes since contain like insane amounts of top-end content which can sit a little bit strangely alongside more traditional elements and I'm also giving it a little bit of extra bite let me show you what this sounds like with no processing and then I'll show you what I've done EQ wise [Music] I'll show you exactly how much I'm cutting those notes you might have noticed it it drastically reduces the amount of of like I guess melody note that you can hear in the in the pad [Music] [Music] as I mentioned before these notch filters absolutely crucial to being able to find a good level for this track in the mix you know by taking out those fundamental frequencies I can now make that pad a lot louder in the mix and therefore actually hear the cool atmospheric elements that it's got but there's one more thing which I find with a lot of these kinds of very static pad scientists that they can really fill the middle of the mix right where you've got your bass guitar your vocal your snare drum all these really important elements are fighting for that space so there's this move that I keep coming back to and it's really simple I use it on since I use it sometimes on reverbs for I don't know guitars vocals anything that's stereo and doesn't I don't want it to conflict with what's happening in the middle of the mix you can use this little techniques this is a good one I put an EQ it could be any hue into mid/side mode so you can EQ the mono part of the signal and then the side part signal separately and I just do a big old cut into the low-mid Ranger I'm not even particularly specific about it but doing that immediately makes whatever it is you're cueing sound very wide and also immediately means it's not going to be fighting with those really crucial other kind of low mid frequencies from the centrally panned elements in the mix so let me show you what this sounds like without and with and this is such a great alternative to like a stereo widenar plug-in that you might have or you know can kind of pitch shifting techniques for sterilizing stuff I think this is a really very neat technique that served me very well in recent times so instantly it just kind of fills the side speakers and D clutters what's happening in the middle of the mix oh that's a good one too no I think vocals are one of the hardest parts of a mix to have like a set approach on I mean there's always going to be things that you do similarly every time but there's so much that's dependent on the specific voice of the singer and also what kind of what range they're using and what dynamic they're singing in so this track that we're using for the master class has both a very aggressively sung kind of almost screaming chorus and then voice got a very softly song verse and those two things require quite a different approach because the human voice generates very different frequencies you know Hardy you sing typically the more travel heavy the more presence your voice will have when you sing softly you can always have way too much body to it so there's definitely a lot of extra precautions that need to be taken when you're dealing with vocals and you know hear the vocals have been presented beautifully Robin did an amazing job of singing editing and presenting these verticals for the song but if he hadn't done so and I say if these verse vocals which are sung very softly were grouped on the same channels as our pitch screamed leads you might well want to separate them onto new channels so that you can process them differently let's get stuck into the strongest part of the song the chorus and we'll look at the techniques which I've used here to compress an e hue and process the the main pitch lead so Robin tracked his voice with a little bit of compression on the way and you can see even just visually that these are quite nice sausages of audio they're not super dynamic and all over the place now part of that's also that he's a really good singer that's great and maintaining his volume controlling the volume of his voice but a little bit of compression on the way in is often my preference just so that the the voice is not completely raw once I start mixing it he's provided me with a main voice and then a double and a triple so he's recorded the same part three times over and has lined them all up so it sounds like one big voice essentially he's also given me a low octave voice so the is the same part as he's singing but recorded an octave lower and that's something which is just gonna get softly blend it blended in underneath the main voice so let's take a listen to the main voice in the chorus and you'll hear that there's quite a lot of distortion on it already partly just as he's overloading the capsule of the microphone and partly the way that his voice is saturating as he sings the part at the bottom of my cupboard and frees up now you can hear there's a lot of proximity effect in that microphone you're getting a lot of that kind of lower mid build-up kind of sounds like he's singing through cotton wool so for me I think with voice with vocals I found the best approach is to stick to this subtractive EQ methodology and you can see my moves that I've done here on the on the voice a very much cutting low-end cutting the lower mids focusing on this kind of more radio speaker esque frequency around 1k and cutting some of that cutting again up in the more kind of presence Peaks easy I'm just cutting away loads of the voice to hopefully leave something that sounds a lot more balanced so I'll show you what it sounds like without and then win so you can hear that's really cleared his voice up a lot it's kind of D congested it a lot and for me that problem frequencies often are in these areas you know you're three to five hundred seven to 1k or maybe a little bit more like here then you're two to three care area those are the kind of typical areas where I found that that really loud vocals often need to be tamed and surfing like this low mid area some English when we get to the quieter vocals is going to need a lot of attention to get right moving on from the EQ I've chosen to hit it with some fairly heavy FET style compression from slate digital again using this kind of blue stripe esque compressor with attack and release on full night people use all sorts of different settings on these compressors for vote for vocals I like to have the attack all the way up when I use an 1176 or a derivation of it I find that if you turn the attack back yes you get this nice percussive element to the voice but I also find that you tend to get quite a lot of s being exaggerated and this you'll see through the compression stages on the voice one of the things I'm really trying to minimize the amount of s that's coming through or make it sound natural without having to resort to kind of unnatural or de-essing so keeping the attack on full and this kind of compressor for me does a really good job of making sure the voice sounds very smooth I'll show you what that's doing now by playing it to you first without compression then including the compressor so you can hear that that's really gluing his voice in I started to make the voice sound very non dynamic which is a good thing because he's got to sing up against these very distorted guitars that are just basically flat line as far as volume goes next up I've got another round of compression but this is a really important one to my process again I'm using a fabfilter plugin the pro c to order in the vocal mode the really cool thing with this plug-in is that you can EQ the sidechain so this is what the compressor is acting on it's not actually hearing the signal that you're hearing but what I love to do with this compressor on vote on vocals is to heavily emphasize the high frequency so you can see here I'm boosting 15 dB at 8 or 9 K the reason why I'm doing this is because when you compress in more typical ways with normal compressors you find that the esses can get really out of control going into the compressor these s generally very quiet when you see them on the waveform so therefore they don't get turned down in volume alongside the rest of the the sounds that the vocalist is making and they come out of the other side way louder by comparison to the rest of the vocal so that's why you end up needing to use DSS and get creative to them cut back those s's however if you've got a plugin like this where you can heavily emphasize those high frequencies you can end up with a compression where the esses are treated very similarly to the rest of the vocal sound and therefore don't come out sounding way out of whack in comparison so this is a really important part of my vocal processing today I really love this trick it generally means you don't need to use a DES or on your vocals which I really like I hate hearing kind of lispy sounding vocals I'll show you what this sounds like I'm also using this just for general compression for me with a aggressively sung vocal like this it's just about getting as much compression as you can possibly get onto there in order that sounds completely pinned and really aggressive so this is also giving you quite a big volume boosters makes it more difficult to hear but essentially this is giving us just a next level of flatlining on the vertical but hopefully you can hear the percussive T's and the asses are not getting over emphasized when they come out this compressor and that's really due to this this high end boost in the sidechain so that's kind of where I end up on my individual track processing so there's some compression on the way in got something here then we've got two more stages of compression and as we'll see there's gonna be another stage of compression on top of that all the try and just get this vocal to be as non-dynamic as possible and to sound really full and upfront all the time however there's also a bit of ambience needed to get this vocal to sound the way I like to hear a vocal you know so it's got some sustain and body in the mix so I'm gonna start with a little bit of delay got a dual echo here with two quarter note delay so we've got kind of a wide delay but it's the same delay time on both sides you can see here that I'm cutting a lot of low and top-end out of this again just so that it's not interacting too much with the original vocal and just kind of providing a bed of sustain in between the words something which I'm also doing at the moment is I'm using a very similar technique to what I used on the verse pad synth to cut out that kind of low mid build up on the delay trails to on the voice so I'm again got a mid cut here going on at 450 Hertz more or less but only on the mid channel that's gonna push this delay further out to the sides I mean that the voice doesn't end up kind of getting masked by its own delays moving on to reverb I found this preset in Logic space designer a while ago and it served me really well across a load of mixers it's called hard ambience and it's just a really good sound for a reverb on a voice for me it's a it's not particularly long it's not like really lush sounding but it does a good job they're giving a sense of ambience and length to the voice without being kind of too dark and muddying up other things and not being too zing either so here's what the voice sounds like a boost the the reverb up a little bit so you can really hear it I really like that it's kind of almost got like a gated feel to it like it's there and then it drops away really quickly so I like the sound of this verb but little goes a long way I try not to rely too heavily on the verb it can make things sound a little bit dingy if you're not careful so their vocal with the EQ compression delay and verb 1 it sounds like this and then we have the same thing on the vocal double and triple just that they are a lot quieter than the mix I think I've got the above them 10 dB quieter and they panned out a little bit to the side so when you hear the three performances are the same part together it sounds like this so you're just getting that really wide full and just great commercial vocal sound that way I also like to apply a bit of processing to the sub mix of these chorus vocals so I found that upon putting these vocals into the mix it sounded a little bit thin and edgy so I found myself cutting just a little bit around well I guess about 3k boosting a little bit of body back in but these are really small moves you know - 1.5 DB + + 1 DB just to smooth the vocal a little bit I also found a couple of frequencies that need notching in his voice - it's really normal the vocalist might have these kind of very strong resonant frequencies that are related to the dimensions of their throat when they're singing and particular when they're pushing really hard they can get quite abrasive so I found a couple here that I wanted to cut I'll show you I'll show you what this vocal sounds like without and then with with those notch filters it's a subtle difference and it's not on every word if I was doing a particularly conscientious job I might go and automate those cuts onto just the points where they're necessary but I don't feel either particularly doing anything bad to the vocal by leaving them on all the time finally on the chorus vocal buss I'm using another instance of our smash-and-grab compressor again set to the overhead mode which that's a good overall mode if you want to try using this compressor on non drum instruments so here I'm going to use a little bit on the voice this is going to give me a little bit of extra control just volume wise because we've got a couple of extra vocals popping in and out and I don't want the voice volume to be changing around too much as that happens nor do I want to be having to automate to an extreme so I'm doing some fairly heavy compression but then I'm blending back a bit of the dry signal in so it doesn't actually sound like a kind of crazy compressed vocal I never dated it like I do now and that's those chorus vocals taken care of [Music] [Applause] moving to the verses I mentioned a little bit of a different treatment required here it's not world's worlds different but you can see I'm cutting a load of low end out of the voice here because he's just singing it a much softer dynamic so I'll show you what the the raw vocal sounds like all bottled up thoughts leave me out of touch by applying this e here we're gonna get rid of a lot of that kind of built-up proximity effect all bottled up thoughts leave me out of church this time I'm only gonna use one stage of compression and it's gonna be the one with our high-frequency emphasis it's a slightly different setting this is all just kind of done on the fly but similarly I'm using the vocal mode of this Pro CT with fast attack and release settings I'll show you what that sounds like all bottled up thoughts leave me out of touch searching in what brings them to the surface so I mean I'm compressing pretty hard here we're looking at like 15 DB of compression times sometimes a little bit more but I really like how this compressor sounds surprisingly transparent given that it's got a kind of variable ratio that's just very well designed this compressor it sounds great on voice so that's doing a very good job of leveling out the vocal without making it sound too constricted but what I really like to do on the softest on vocals is to use a multiband compressor as well which is going to kick in when there's kind of too much body on the voice but also not mean that you have to EQ I'll too much low mids from the vocals and end up with some notes sounding thin another one sounding just about right so here I've got the multiband compressor set to be on most of the time but it's really going to ensure that the low mids are just kept in check all the time all bottled up thoughts leave me out of touch searching in wet brings them to the surface using the same delays and reverbs that are used on the chorus vocals just in slightly different quantities to a bit of space so that leaves us with this sound all bottled up thoughts leave me out of touch searching we're starting to get close to a really good vocal sound for this I did just find that within the civil answers there are some pretty harsh frequencies going on and these are the same frequencies that I notched out of the chorus vocals so they go quite a long way on this verse to make sure that the kind of sure sounds and the all of those sounds don't have too much kind of peaky information in there in the way of very specific resonant frequencies and I also found that little bit more low-mid control is necessary to like a kind of 500 Hertz cut and with all of that in place we kind of end up with the final vocal sound during the verse up thoughts leave me out of touch searching in what brings them to the surface as far as the double goes it's very subtle in this part I don't want a very obviously doubled vocal sound because I want it to sound quite intimate however I'm using the same processing and I'm using this soundToys micro shift plug-in to stereo wise it a little bit so it kind of sits out to the sides of the main vocal a little bit I like this technique when you've got a single double it can be really nice to give the vocal a bit more width when you don't have a triple like we did in the chorus so so here's how the double sounds with the stereo Widener applied to it searching em what brings them to the surface if I make it too loud the doubles kind of chorusing effect is gonna make it sound a little bit out of tune so it has to be really quite quiet in the mix I think I had it about 12 DB quieter than the main vocal down I also set up a little channel here with a vocal delay throw on it and what that is is a channel that just has a nice signal chain for a very airy sounding and delay throw essentially we've got our main delay here courtesy of echo boy a memory man kind of very analogue rolled off sounding delay with quite a lot of modulation to it but I'm taking all the low-end out of it that I can with the plugin and I've left it with a load of feedback - and then throwing that into a reverb this great reverb from Valhalla I called the vintage verb which again I'm cutting low-end from with these elements it's really important to keep you know the low end and low mid out so that these sounds can just be airy and sit on top of the music instead of kind of blocking down the main vocal sound so we've got delay into a reverb and then using a compressor on it because what that will mean is that there isn't as much of a drop-off in volume through the delay repeats so the initial delay repeat which is gonna be the loudest is actually gonna get compressed down in volume and then compressor is gradually going to compress less and less on each sequential repeat and you end up with a much more even sound that's a nice little technique I think compressing your delays and Reavers can be a really cool sound and then finally I'm cutting out even more low end and low mids to just make this a very airy sound what you can do once you've got that set up is you just copy you just chop out a little bit from your lead vocal and drag that bit of audio up onto your delay track and you've got a ready-made vocal throw and it means you don't have to clutter up your vocal with a like a reverb or delay that's very long that's just there all the time you don't have to write all the stuff in in automation I find this to be a really good workflow for creating these kinds of delay throws I'm sure what it sounds like just on its own and then what it sounds like in context Bulldog thoughts leave me out of touch searching em that brings them to the surface I also use the same channel during the chorus just to highlight I think there's only one word and each repeat that's the chorus vocal you can see up here so you can hear that really long trail on there on the word nerve there's a nice way of adding a little bit of differences onto certain notes and just highlighting them or the final thing to look at would be the harmony vocals and instead of treating each of these individually I decided instead to do as much like it on the bus processing now Robin actually bounced down these har knees which are made up of many different takes in two stereo files that kind of pre-mixed in volume which makes things quite a lot easier for me as a mix engineer I like it when clients do that so just as one example here's harmony one during the chorus and it's like a held note version of that that fills in the gap and all of these harmonize with the main chorus vocals so in terms of EQ on harmony vocals I think it's really important to make sure they don't have low end that's getting in the way of the other voices particularly here of high pasture about 150 Hertz but I feel I could have probably even been more aggressive we don't need to hear the low end of those those notes the only things would be japax on those held harmonies it would be nice that they don't sound too thin since they're kind of standing on their own rather than being sung at the same time so cousins some some low mids at the same time they're here I've gone for a lot more multiband compression than I typically do on individual tracks and the reason for this is because we've got lots of different types of vocals all going through the same bus and this multiband compressor is basically going to make sure that each range of the of the vocal is being maintained well so we've got one band looking at your kind of hundred up to 400 Hertz got another band looking between that 400 up to I guess about 1.5 K and then from there on up to about 6 K or so and all of these are set to be active but most of the time so they're basically just trimming that though and keeping it very much in place I'll show you actually what the vocal sounds like with no processing and then engage the EQ and multiband comp I found of my confidence Reserve I dunno so you can see that a hue and multiband comp really neat and things up there moving on I've got a bit of compression I'm using my trusty pro C to hear similar deal with the high-frequency emphasis so essentially what we have here is two mono compressors active instead of one stereo compressor which is really good because you've got loads of different vocals panned all over the place and if the right vocal pops out is going to compress down the left vocal if it's set and your kind of standard stereo Lynx mode so by keeping the two sides separate the two sides can compress at just the amount that's needed for each side to maintain a nice even compressed sound so compression applied to all of the harmony vocals together sounds like this I found my confidence reserve that instantly has made them way more punchy in up front I've used to gain plug-in here just to cut some volume you have seen a couple of other gain plugins being used in my in my mix in general just to trim the relative gains to where I want them and I'm doing here actually the same move that I've been doing on the pads and on the vocal delays where basically I'm cutting out that low mid content just in the middle these vocals were all generally pretty hard panned on the harmony vocals but there's still some kind of low frequencies in the middle that are going to be eating into the space that's being taken up by the the lead vocals so that's a cool move and then this guy here is actually affecting all of this spectrum it's not just in the middle and I'm using that to cut around 1k to just give a softer sound to the backing vocals so so I'll start by playing this without this mid/side eq engaged and then with the mid sighting cue engaged again while it's playing I found mine define confident reserved so you can hear that's instantly giving us a super stereo kind of vibe to the backing vocals and I'm rounding all that out with a little bit of delay and reverb just to set this back into the mix a little bit alongside the rest of the vocals and our final harmony vocal sound so listening just from kind of midway through the verse into the chorus with the vocals so loud so you can hear what I'm doing there let's just take a little quick listen trace I know one day that so I've taken me through my process of how I mix this track let's just take a little listen so you can he how I mix the final product and how all these different elements fit together [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] brings them to the surface tres [Music] we hope that you've enjoyed this mix walkthrough and who knows you might even be doing another one sometime soon but in the meantime for more information head over to get good drums calm

Channel: GetGood Drums

Views: 80,172

Keywords: adam nolly getgood, periphery, getgood drums, guitar, bass, drums, vocals, ggd, modern and massive, smash and grab, compression, eq, mixing masterclass

Id: aeMXWCINc3Y

Length: 50min 6sec (3006 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2018