Deadmau5 & Steve Duda Explaining the Mixing and Mastering Process

I've seen over the years you use like all different types of of Master compression so I think I think it's worth mentioning here that you don't do this on every song right this isn't like no there's no such thing as a magical Master chain it's gonna make everything sound way way more fatter and and better it's it's a lot of experimentation with you know different types of things but the principle stays the same is that at the end of your chain you're definitely going to want a limiter that's going to give you a ceiling of you know I don't know why it's actually it could be zero but it's actually 0.3 for reasons unbeknownst to me I could talk about intersample peaking might be a reason but um you can get can get technical reasons you might not want to go to zero but um but the fact of the matter ultimately is you're you're basically controlling Dynamics more than like um overall like EQ stuff it looks like with your with your plug-in chain here because you have the limiting going on the Ott is doing this compression downwards and upwards compression right so you're really kind of putting all of the sounds what what I noticed is sort of a result of this is is for one it allows quieter stuff to be heard a little bit more right because it because as you as you know compressors reducing the dynamic range so so louder stuff and quieter stuff become kind of closer together in volume um so it allows that quieter stuff not to get so lost um and then the other thing it's doing is it's catching straight Peaks and that sort of things you get an overall louder mix out so so your your mix isn't going to sound too wimpy versus others but the Ott does have sort of a tone quality to it too although I see you're leaving it pretty flat so it's pretty much just giving you a constant balance of certain amount of low certain amount of mids and certain amount of highs yeah one one other thing I do before I I tend to go to all these uh you know limiters and compressors and and any Dynamics modifier on my master chain is it's actually disabled here for uh the laziness reasons but uh I do attend to cut below 20 Hertz just because you know you're not going to hear it it's not sub and some synths or some soft sense especially uh actually any any digital anything is more prone to putting out Sub sub frequency that actually does affect Dynamics down the chains even though you don't hear it um you know some you know these these speakers I think the lowest they'll go is like 30. you know yeah I mean I could probably hear like they're probably really rolling off down there they could probably put out 20 but in a in a weak way uh but yeah your ears don't hear your ears won't hear it and I I wouldn't dare crank these loud enough to even attempt to feel that but uh on major huge Pas and stuff like that that stuff really counts because they really do drive those and and those big uh you know Club Stacks or concert Stacks really add up and uh put out those kind of frequencies um so to in order to get a little more loudness out of everything you're you're low you're low mid your mid and you're high and stuff like that rolling off you know anything or completely cutting off with a plug-in actually I recommend call the engineers filter you can just Google that it's free um stuff like that you can use to you know just totally strip out anything below 20 Hertz just due to the fact that you're not going to get any of those weird magical spikes that are sub 20 Hertz that are going to affect your Dynamics later down the chain so that's actually the first thing I put on my master chain is just you know just drop everything below 20 Hertz right so you won't hear it right when you're testing it so don't be like well it's not doing anything it is right you'll on a good system you'd hear it so it's giving you a little more Headroom and it's making you avoid the potentially problematic Rumble if you will that would be just causing mud in a big PA situation I've seen I've heard you know kind of details of lore of people cutting below 30 yeah and stuff like that but yeah I don't I don't think there's much like content that we care about below 30 Hertz although you know it really starts going into like the feeling it kind of Realm so right um you know I always felt like I couldn't really care about 20 Hertz until I was on a stage with a big PA that might have been yours where I started to realize wow even these you know even these vibrations that are kind of below you can hear you you still feel them so yeah there's something cool about it but if especially if you're in headphones or in a small like apartment or whatever bedroom with with smaller speakers you don't even know what's going on down there so you're probably better safe than sorry to just actually uh take a look um let's see what happens if we uh going to the head here I'll just use some EQ rub it up so this is before anything on my master and if you look here yeah see look at that activity uh so yeah 30 30 Hertz it's up there you know um and then what I would I guess uh 48 DB High Pass right right yeah can they change that so you can so that's a bit of a roll off I mean that's not gonna cut that's why I prefer the engineers filter because it's a straight cut um but uh rolled off won't hurt too if you don't have a an EQ that's going to cut that out I mean I even even at you know starting to roll off at 37 Hertz I can't hear the difference at all but it's there yeah touchless Rumble maybe and that's just because we have huge speakers so we can perceive the difference but on headphones you probably wouldn't hear anything no and so that's that's great um so yeah so you also do so besides the master channel here which you've been talking about you also do some busing beforehand right to get all your stuff to the master you tend to kind of group things together yeah a lot of stuff I can get away with so uh I I think I have a kick channel in here somewhere that's something a whole hats group uh well I did at one point okay so like you'll have a sort of a bus for your yeah or kicks right yeah right so if my kick here I can see it's going to D bus right so if I we go just take a look at D bus and uh solo that and see what's on there um yeah it's all my drums and then I think I'm even yeah okay so dbus is routing to my master so I know that that's going to be probably you know one of the loudest parts of you know the song um so we're not really doing anything crazy magical to it just using some cheesy old Vengeance kicks here and uh [Music] um layering them up tuning them a bit you know nothing wrong with using DeWalt this is that I I find make the difference too it's uh even though you're you know you can you can use some stock samples like you know the binge and stuff right that's all rage um it's little cool things that you can actually do you know to make a difference is uh say uh what is this automation here it's uh the game and ah yes so here uh I actually shipped the transpose and loop that little piece of tail so you made your own effect symbol basically I made my own cool little symbol thing um and you know you're not going to get that off the CD but you got the sample and you got you know your little tool to work with [Music] foreign so it's just you know little fun tricks like that to keep yourself from falling asleep while you're making EDM which is you know pretty easy to do um you know things like little like fade-in shakers [Music] that's our serum again somewhere yeah I know there's some strings that come in as a nice layer at some point I don't know if we want to order those yeah that's that's more musicy stuff like so here I'm using uh the Vienna versing Cube uh it's just another component to add to our RP here so here's um serum uh kind of being some main synth here serum you say yeah serum available on x4records.com forward slash products forward slash serum I got it right this time yeah ah it's such a great synth I it's it's honestly like one of my go-to's for you know the dead belts pluck uh well the demos clock essentially is a saw wave with a filter on it um of course the how to get that sound is just by you know making various tweaks and adjustments so you're gonna go ping pong delay super super uh high quality high-tech delay that just blows my mind and a bit of shaping and layering with other synths and stuff like that too so what I could do also is you know just kind of copy this and duplicate it like a cheap jerk and go to uh external or instrument right so the way we have this uh audio effects right right the way we have this setup wired up is uh I've installed a Moog midi out guy so I can actually take midi out to uh slim fatty which is just a midi device you know it could be your midi out I can say audio input from one which is you know my uh you can see it in the corner there it's that big mod candy is already patched up and ready to go so that's actually analog all right so you're riding the same midi that you're using for serum now you're also layering your external synthesizer that's feeding back into the Apollo so now the joys of analog I have to walk all the way over here use my hands and turn knobs [Music] that's why I need to be in a band though because someone also has to record this at the same time so if we pull that down conveniently enough as I duplicated the track it copied the EQ settings which I might not want a little more low end there take that ridiculous delay off now it's just pure analog straight in the exception of that game and it's going to the same synth bus so now if I also layer that with serum you're hearing both now [Music] of course it doesn't have to be a 400 module mod can say that could be any little synth that could be a you know a little slim fatty mother 32 any any synth really um so in both cases though both with serum and with your modular you're basically using a Sawtooth and then a filter like a low pass filter so you're adding the Sawtooth into the filter and then you have some sort of envelope in both cases that's moving the cutoff of the filter right so which is what's giving the pluck yeah is like on the start of the note you hear the full saw basically and then the envelope decays down leaving you with just sort of the low end and then you're not even using an amplitude envelope right well that gets super nerdy uh into modular World kind of most synths that come off the shelf or you know you buy it you know a music store that's like you know a Moog or a a Nord or you know anything um usually have the What's called the adsr envelopes like kind of just built in so it's like you know you hit the note you take your hand off and it's already there you know it's got its attack sustained Decay release and all that stuff already like programmed into the patch whereas modular ones you kind of have to do yourself um and same with serum sort of that like they're already there they're ready to go but they just kind of default in a certain way and you're changing you know your attack Decay sustain and release and all that stuff but for my type of thing is I never really uh adjust amplitude I use cut off control voltage uh to determine you know it's Peaks and then the same thing here on serum you have like the envelope 2 which is controlling the cutoff of the of the of the right filter there uh yeah cool so I think I did yes right so there's the Decay down oh I mean this is really like four clicks away from uh default position when you when you load up serum it's really just a matter of an enabling a filter and assigning an envelope to the cutoff and and maybe adjusting some Unison if you're feeling some sort of way [Music]

Channel: ZigZag Production Studio

Views: 98,852

Keywords: Deadmau5, Deadmau5 Mixing, Deadmau5 Mastering, Deadmau5 Mixing and Mastering, Deadmau5 Mixing Tips, Deadmau5 Mastering Tips, Deadmau5 Mastering Chain, Steve Duda, Steve Duda Deadmau5, Deadmau5 Steve Duda, Steve Duda Mixing, Steve Duda Mastering

Id: AOHc0T0UIlk

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023