Do you gain stage tracks before mixing? | FAQ Friday - Warren Huart: Produce Like A Pro

hi everybody hope you're doing marvelously well well big the bad were back when awesome black for another frequently asked questions Friday back Friday so we just had a rather wonderful 12 days globe-trotting we went to Berlin and worked at Hans of studios for a few days and you probably saw the resultant video from a couple of days ago it was so much fun thank you ever so much to our artist Charlie clauser thank you ever so much to Alex from the studio the studio manager for showing us around what an incredible studio if you haven't checked it out already please check it out there'll be some kind of links and stuff to it such an insanely amazing city I loved being in Berlin we all did and what an incredible studio with amazing history doing those three Bowie albums low lodger and heroes plus of course Depeche Mode and many many many other incredible records were done there so we had a wonderful time as ever please hit that to like button subscribe go to produce like a pro calm son if the email list get a whole bunch of free goodies and of course you can try out the 14-day free trial of the Academy ok we're gonna get stuck in with some wonderful questions this week in back Friday when bouncing how do you feel about master brass processing the SSL buss compressor doing about 2 to 3 DB of compression for instance that's a great question that's a wonderful question when I'm bouncing tracks I do do a gentle amount of compression on the master buss and actually some EQ I have a couple of choices I either use my SSL buss compressor here giving me around about 2 to 3 DB worth of gain reduction or I use the Tegeler cream up there again giving a similar 2 to 3 DB worth of gain reduction also using the EQ of the tiegler now you may have noticed and in previous videos that I also have a pair of real politics which I use on this bus compression so yes I do it I do blast compress an EQ only 2 to 3 DB and a little bit of boom and fizz a little bit of 60 Hertz a little bit of 10 or 12 K that's all I'll do and I'll do maybe a DB of each I like mixing through gentle buss compression and gentle buss EQ and I do print with that on I also mix with it on and it's there the whole time gently hitting everything now bear in mind I'm doing obviously compression and EQ on individual channels before reaching the buss compressor that means it's fairly controlled I don't use my master buss compressor to fix all of the problems that is where everything goes horribly wrong and where top-down mixing doesn't work if you're putting loading your master buss with tons of EQ compression multiband compressor z' you know ms techniques limiting all this stuff which is what a lot of people unfortunately are advocating you're not really going to learn much about mixing because you're just slamming stuff in there and it's all getting squashed down and multiband compressor and eacute I would say a gentle amount of compression a gentle amount of EQ is not going to do you any harm if you listen to your buss compressor and it's squashing the shnizzle out of everything and obviously that's a difficult thing if you want to only apply gentle compression and EQ at the very end I applaud you that's a great way of working often I'll do this I'll lean over and just bring this in and out to see how much compression I'm really applying and if it's something that becomes inaudible then it's not as necessarily a bad thing if it's applying a gentle amount of compression but I'm not hearing that much of a change then it's doing its job it's just taming some of those transients now when i say inaudible you don't want it so it's actually not doing anything that was my exaggeration you want it you want to hear it but you just want to hear it tame transients and just tuck things in in some ways I like it because it is reminiscent of what tapes used to do for us tape would nicely control those transition and now we need other devices to do that but of course you can do that with tape emulations inside of your da da W as well but there's nothing wrong with gentle buss compression gentle buss EQ just use it sparingly and if you want apply it at the end but you can bounce with it on a mastering engineer will love you giving him or her something that is really nicely controlled just don't slam the schnozz ladder with multiband compression EQ limiting compression everything like 15 inch stacked plugins ah you know you'll get a mix to sound even but will not sound exciting and it certainly will not do you're mashing engineer any favors I'd like your opinion on whether IRS are a true replacement for a mic and cab marvelous question ah yes honestly I think IRS are a saving grace when it comes to using virtual instruments I mean they're huge we do it all the time now you can put it on synths and stuff like that just to make them feel not so flat and dry and just make them feel like they went through an ant the cab or something like that so I am a big fan of them do ice I think the only thing that I would advocate when it comes to miking over not making is this is that you can get something that's uniquely yours if you're making your own cab with your own mic and your own mic pre of course it's gonna sound nothing like somebody else's emulation ir's are very accurate and do immediately change the sound dramatically if you go through like 20 different IRS and different different cabs with different speakers and different miking you can dramatically change the sound you can you can make a fizzy sounding thin virtual instrument into something that sounds completely different so IRS are a massive saving grace but if you're asking me the pros and cons the pros are that you can turn digital sounding instruments into something it sounds remarkably more natural more organic more like what our ears are used to quite frankly however why would you want to make a cab then well you want to make a to get your own result so I don't think one is better or worse because of course if you're using a digital instrument and you use an outside eye are you that you might be the only person doing that combination however if you do have the ability to record your own cab yes it's going to be unique it's going to be your sound and your sound only so it's six of one half a dozen the other I do both I use IRS and I record cabs uniquely and I love both processes so if you have that ability to record your own caps do it you know but also remember there's cheap alternative ways to get an amazingly quick results that is what is wonderful about digital so god bless it do you gain stage tracks before mixing um yes quite often not on stuff I've recorded because I record it at a level that makes sense through my equipment but definitely definitely when people sent me stuff I I get stat sent stuff that's like super super hot and then barely audible and if it's clipping then there's not a lot I can do I will bring it down there are a number of plugins out there which can remove clips they're not perfect but they do help so often people send me stuff that which is really badly clipped and I have to do that and then gain it down more often than not I see the opposite sometimes we send tracks that I don't know there's audio on there until we make the view go up like five or six hundred percent and then suddenly a track will start to appear usually that's okay because it's a digital only signal so there's no inherent noise on there in there but there are times when unfortunately it is a lot of noise you start amplifying the track so it's actually loud enough to be able to use you bring up the game but also bringing up a huge amount of you know noise hence the signal-to-noise ratio is not good so those are the times I do it on my own stuff no I don't need to do that because we're printing in nice big fat tones that I can do whatever I want with I can turn up or down so just be mindful that you print a decent enough level it doesn't have to be you know 90% of the screen but you know give yourself enough level don't worry about the lu-lu FS as Warren so calls explaining that's the average of the whole length of the track just use common sense don't clip it and don't make it so it's inaudible somewhere in between and not clipping and not visible on the screen is a good safe place it's really just use common sense because then if there's any gain like a DB or two either way it's not going to make that much of an issue you've got so many plugins you're going to apply that can give you more or less gain that shouldn't be something you're concerned about you shouldn't need to normalize all your tracks you just need to work within logic printing a good nice loud but not too loud without clipping signal with decent signal-to-noise ratio just use common sense anybody can work with that any mix in the world will be able to take your tracks and mix them I've never heard a mixer complain that it was like oh it's one DB too quiet or one DB too loud nobody thinks or talks that way so take that pressure off yourself just print good loud fat tones that aren't clipping and don't print inaudible tracks that you have to bring up so loud that it's all just noise I hope you enjoyed this week's FAQ Friday of course please hit the like button leave us a comment and questions below if there's anything about this video you want to discuss more please don't hesitate to do that do you think it makes sense to look for a mixing engineer who uses the same da w as oneself this way one could send the da W files and the engineer could open the project and enable or disable the effects of in the project itself without needing to go back and forth with the different tracks what are your thoughts on that that is a marvelous question um I think you're I think the answers within the question how did you record are you recording a ton of D eyes and virtual instruments if you are then it would make a lot of sense for your mixer to also use the scene same D aw they'll be able to open it up and see all the virtual instruments and all of the tons of plugins you've got on it if they don't have the same da w as you then yes you're going to be a little bit up missile Creek you know you're gonna open up they're not going to see all those plugins are not going to be able to enable all of that stuff so a lot of guys bigger professional guys and girls who mix do mix with Pro Tools not all of them but a lot of them so if you're impro tools you're probably in luck they're going to open up and see your plugins almost every mixer I know owns every plug-in possible and if they don't they get it that's just part of the job if you're a professional mixer however it is important to realize that not every single mixer is going to be impro tools and that is quite all right you know there's plenty of guys I know that work exclusively in Cubase Studio One reaper logic and they are and many more and they're all amazing you know the the da W is a tool that you need to know and if you know it inside or out that's better than just using the same one as everybody else if you know Studio One like the back of your hand then you know Studio One like the back of your hand in that instance you have one of two choices and what a lot of people do is they they have the original signal and then they have the audio that has been run through the plugins so they'll get the sound that you have created and then they'll have like the original source that didn't have those plugins on that is one way around it it does make things a little bit more difficult because they've got to emulate your sounds and if they don't like all of the effect that you have on of your printed track then they have no way to subtly undo it they can't get there and open up a plug-in and reduce the amount of EQ you've done they can't reduce the amount of saturation it's it's difficult so yes in an ideal world I wish we were all on the same da W and all owned the same plugins however shnizzle happens and great people make great music on all kinds of da w so don't necessarily look for somebody who has the same da w as you if you like their mixes then they will have encountered all kinds of issues of all kinds of other da W's and they will know how to work around it choosing somebody based on their da W is not smart to be honest choosing somebody based on their resume is only the beginning you want to listen to the music they've created if you haven't they happen to work with the bands you like that's a good start but listen to that maybe the band now when they did all the song they did is like not typical of the band so a little bit of research on your mixer is always a good test and if you are what you do want to hire a mixer to do a full album maybe just send them a single and get them to do the single and if they nail the single then give them the rest of the album you know there's all kinds of things you can do I'm not a big fan of getting people to do it for free pay them to do their job you know when you can but if you're unsure just pay them to do one song they'll probably charge you more for one song and they would have an average of ten but you know that's part of the process and maybe you work with them and finesse the mix to be the place you want knowing that when they come to do the album they'll have all that information for it how much processing should be applied to a sample drum kit easy tremor where there are perfect samples should compression and EQ still be applied to each sound and to the drum buss or is this just a taste thing yes and yes at both of those last parts of that question the answer is yes I mean yes you should play EQ and compression and is it a taste thing yes but the answer is really is what is appropriate that's really just the answer often these perfect samples are perfect and often they're too perfect often they've been in compress and eq'd so much that they sound like fake drums they sound like a perfectly recorded drums which to be honest if you solo any drum kit by any major artist you've ever listened to they don't sound that perfect they don't sound as perfect as the as these drum recordings would make you believe because when you do sample kits people are sitting there and keeping it perfectly in tune and they're building these perfect velocities when drummers play they don't go to do that they don't play these perfect performances things are idiosyncratic they play kicks loud of medium somewhere in between all kinds of stuff it's not a machine and therein lies the problem so yes applying EQ and compression to already perfected sounds can be a little bit destructive to your M result but putting delays on distorting them and messing it up a little bit it's probably more of what I'd be doing when I'm using you know addictive drums or any of the other drums out there I'm always randomizing I'm always messing them up because they sound too perfect because they are as you're saying perfectly recorded and perfectly performed in a way that no drummer plays and that's just not how music is made so I do do things to the effects but there's usually to randomize them and mess them up and make them sound less perfect not more compression EQ to make my sound even more perfect how much reverb is enough how much is too much I often struggle balancing getting ambience in my productions without making them sound too wooly well I think the last part of your question is part of the answer I'll be careful not to send a ton of low end into your reverbs when I do a kick drum reverb which I do often I like a bit of reverb on the kick or even a little bit of ambience on the bass guitar if I'm doing a kind of sax Motown Atlantic thing if I'm doing that I'm making sure there's not a lot of low-end going into the reverb because if I send a ton of low-end in there it just turns into this build-up and that is not pleasing that is not pleasant yeah it's not a good thing so I highly recommend highly highly recommend that you keep and control your reverb sense so basically take a high and low pass and make sure you know do the kind of Abbey Road technique control the amount of high end phase and low end warble that goes on in your Riva that's the first thing secondly too much reverb if you're asking how much is too much well I think if it just turns into a big wash and nothing is defined I mean it's just using your ears it's taste there's plenty of tracks to have a lot of reverb and that is a good thing but just make sure it's really really super controlled and is done in keeping and if you're not sure what that is find reference tracks that you would and reference those but really I think probably part of the problem is is you're putting too much low end and too much high end into your reverbs and so the top is just sizzle and the bottom end as you're saying is all wooly and too out of control so it's really about controlling what frequencies are being exaggerated by the reverb okay I hope you enjoyed this week's fact Friday thank you ever so much for all of the amazing questions let us know what your experiences are with reverb with gain staging on tracks with all of these things please comment in question below and of course add some more questions for fact Friday I really appreciate everybody's time and thank you ever so much for watching and please if you haven't already subscribe and hit the like button have a marvelous time recording and mixing [Music] you

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 74,680

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio, Gain Staging, Gain Staging your tracks, Printing too hot

Id: 9x37RIYWHyA

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019