FREE MIXING COURSE with Grammy-Nominee Marc Daniel Nelson

hello everybody hope you're doing marvelously well we have a special surprise here we have our good friend mr mark daniel nelson and he is going to be giving us a one hour for one hour mix in the box session and you can download the multitrack so you can download and follow along with him while he mixes this song the artist is jeremiah jones the song is called take my lonely and it was produced by andrew so this is gonna be a lot of fun you can watch it in real time you can download the multitracks for free and have a blast so thank you ever so much take it away mr mark daniel nelson [Music] how's it going ladies and fellows i'm mark daniel nelson here with make mine music and today i'm going to do a complete mix of a song by the artist jeremiah jones called take my lonely was produced by andrew berghold in nashville and i mixed this about a year ago a little over a year ago and i wanted to do a start over complete fresh from the top completely in the box showing you exactly what i do i'm probably not going to do a ton of discussion it's going to more be fly on the wall watching how i'm going to do this mix but i've been getting emails asking if i would do a video from the start because it's a little easier to demonstrate so let me do that i'm going to start it from the top but from here i want to show you that i already have it in the template and i actually already have it grouped so i'm going to explain that a little bit real quick before i jump in with this session it's a pop track and there's quite a bit of percussion on it on top of that there is uh quite a bit of guitar and synthesizers and what i'm going to do is show you that i've already used samples in the places i needed them so in the drum set i've already put kicks in there and snares and i can kind of walk through those as i go through it and then i group those into one nap of drum and that goes into its own bus the percussion which is usually sometimes drum machine stuff and percussion into his own bus i labeled this one effects the bass guitar the acoustic guitar which i'm going to talk about because it's really interesting style and andrew the producer um was pretty creative at getting this tone and then the electric guitars the keyboards and synths and then the vocals and to the background vocals so let's jump into this and see what we got i'm going to start from the top and i'm like i said i'm just going to end up just going at this and i might not be talking a ton and just kind of follow along and i will experiment with different plugins and i will talk about why i'm doing certain things but i'm just going to just roll with it first as i go everything is dumping down to the template down to the buses if you can see my buses are in yellow and this is a template i already have usually going up and i kind of pull from there to see what plugins i like and then behind that is my reverbs that i always load in and then that dumps down to a master and today what i have here this is pre adjustment so i'm going to do a clip gain first so i usually like to see where this track is at [Music] so this is the reference so if i click it into the track [Music] i'm already i'm pegging the crap out of it so what i want to do is clip gang it so i'm maybe hovering around negatively [Music] okay now relative i like to put the reference in my print track and then go in and out so i can listen to the ref and hear what i'm doing so right now i am just going to listen to the ref and then i'm going to pull this down as well because i want the rep to be relative to what i'm hearing in my mix i just start with the kick and i'll go down the line another thing i hear about these two is there's two these are both triggers but they're doing a little bit different things so i will leave them in before i even add an eq there's my third trigger that gives a little more room pull that up listen the intro kick yeah now right away okay that's my center that's where i'm going to want to go and go to now the first thing i want to do is say okay needs more low end so i will always put this in which is my pull tech and i'll put this in and that's just my on my bus but that's where it starts i might put the lo-fi in a little bit later let's start from here i think i can add a little more low-end of one of these where's the foundation kick this guy so let's look for ssl channel and i just want to put a little bit of the bunder dunder down underneath and maybe scoop it i'm good with that now if you listen to the kicks that's where you start that's that's the starting place for my low end for this track that's where i want it to be so everything's going to be building around that i'm going to pull the overheads up next there's quite a lot of drum tracks on this if you can see the the samples are a little different color they're like a purple pink so i'm gonna pull up the overheads and the kick and room this looks like it was on there but i think i adjusted it for the crunch my room is usually specifically there for ambience and not really kind of any kind of direct so i think i would like to keep it crunchy as much crunchy as i can so that's with the mj you see in on limit just kind of adds that fur and i'm gonna pull that down a little bit all right let's let's get the snares in now i'm going to rely heavily on the sample again just because i know exactly the sound i'm going to want to get and you'll get to hear these on your own because i'm going to get these out as a multi-track pack so you'll get to go through everything and see what was used but i will get the point out of this snare so this is this guy is my main guy this one's giving me the transient it's giving me the focus i'll probably add a little bit of maybe parallel compression and a little bit of room reverb but then everything else will just be kind of pulling it together so let me pull the kick drum back i'm going to take out the overheads for right now [Music] see that's an accent one i don't know if i wonder yeah it does it doesn't fit right if you kind of throw it to the left a little bit so i'm gonna skip in the center pull the overheads [Music] so this snare seems to be losing yeah it just i need a little more body i'm going to pull up this r bass and you hear that that's adding a little more it's my it's my huey lewis but now all it's doing it's it's adding a little too much focus on the the brittle top end too so i'm just going to add the eq of that and here this whole kit together let's pull up that reverb so this reverb is interesting i've talked about this a few times this specific one is an impulse of the 480 music club c and i've used it for years as an impulse and i've had rio 480s in front of me and used the 480 musiclipsy and it wasn't what i was liking i've used the other simulations and it was the same thing this guy was given to me maybe 29 2008 2009 and i've had it and i've used it on drums ever since and like i said it might not be as smooth or grainy as the original or the counterpart 480s out there but it does one thing really well which is it makes the snare sound very familiar to me of specific rock records that i like so i just put it on and if you guys like it be happy send me an email i'll send you the impulse there you go so i also sampled the toms because i wanted them to have a very epic kind of arena rock kind of sound so let's pull those samples in i didn't have to do much to them but we'll see where they sound [Music] now if you watched my last video mixing kobe kelley i show you that when you're kind of adding tracks and putting them together they sound funny until you bring other instruments in i'm kind of listening to it in my head as an overall picture so it might sound a little goofy until you get things to start oh okay that's why because these toms right now are ridiculously loud and i'm probably going to keep them that loud because i know that the parts are accenting really well and i remember where the vocals are at so they seem like they fit in the pocket nice so i'm going to keep them in just like that and we'll see where they go i'm going to go down the line to the [Music] percussion [Music] i need a little more attack on these drums and instead of putting compression on the kick or the snare i'm just gonna put it on the overall you know i think this was in my mix this lo-fi on the drum bus but i don't like it here because now it's creating it's just losing some of the fidelity and the definition that i really like so i'm going to turn that off but i'm going to try the decapitator this time and see what that sounds like it's a little pointy but i'm gonna pull this distressor up this is my main drum buss compressor for rock i usually only hit it to about three at the most so i'm gonna back it down but then i'm gonna pull the decapitator back and see if that helped [Music] okay i like that there's a tiny bit of mix in there but it's not enough to actually make sense i'm going to bring up this guy [Music] i like it it's again adding a little bit of point but i think it helps so i'm gonna leave that in for now and i'm gonna bring back that effects i'm going to turn down that little hi-hat thing i don't really like that thing i don't know if it's supposed to be as loud as it's saying so let me assuming it's hi-hat synth [Music] there i'm okay with that [Music] right now i'm gonna put a little more pick on the kick [Music] cool [Music] let's pull the low end in i'm going to first talk about my base so base right now is going through my stereo bus on its own and i usually have the b15 this guy to take a little bit of the thunder out because i have a feeling it's going to get a little ridiculous that b15 usually adds so much stuff so i'm going to take maybe up to 27. i know why there's that but i'd like this point to be here and i'm going to turn it off and then i have my two tech which actually has a pultec in it as well but it's only adding a little bit of 30 and a little bit of 1k so first and foremost let's take everything off and just listen to the bass by itself [Music] right away you hear that there's not enough low end it's pretty rocking but it needs more so what i'll do is the first thing i do is check phase between the amplifier and the di so let's hear that there's your problem instantly larger is without so it just needed to be flipped so sometimes i will put that b15 on it and it will just kind of pulverize it to the point where it just makes it a lot more sustainable as they say let's hear that with the b15 i'm gonna put the point on that so you're getting some of the rock back [Music] and then the compressor compress compressor i should compressor now usually i don't really touch this too much it's just i want it to hit about 1 db 2 db most [Music] so without the chain with the chain already much better let's pull the bass with the drums and the percussion and see where one more [Music] so the foundation of this song is actually the acoustic guitar and it's this andrew burkhold that produced this song and co-wrote i believe this and a few other tracks on the album with jeremiah played the guitar through an iphone recorded it with a c12 and then recorded it on his iphone on the messages and then took that and flew it in and lined up the two and let's just listen to that by itself it's a very unique sounding guitar but super familiar too in this kind of generation of what's going on in the pop world [Music] but right now there's nothing other than guitar eq so that's without the eq just taking some of the top end down and adding a little bit of hundred which is some of the thickness that the iphone wasn't getting but it has super unique sound so i'm gonna pull drums bass and percussion and guitar and then we'll see where we're at i'm going to take out the banjo and the mandolin stuff right away and see [Music] so what i'm listening for is i'm trying to hear the top of the acoustic that's aggressing with the top of the base and the top of the drum so the top of the snare the high frequency of the kick the toms the symbols they all should be relative without having to compress you're balancing just that frequency alone and if you sometimes go real quiet you can hear those most important instruments on this right now is the snare still hear the bass [Music] there's no eq really at all right now [Music] then i'm just gonna start adding goodies one at a time this one i think has two banjo tracks and a mandolin on the acoustic instrument so i'm gonna solo those with this and hear what it sounds like [Music] now remember andrew was specifically trying to make sure that we didn't put any compression on the guitar because every time we added a little bit of this fairchild it started changing the percussiveness of the acoustic track which actually changes the emotion of the whole song so i'm going to put it in just to show you what i mean this is actually going with the the other banjo and the mandolin stuff too but you'll hear that it just kind of loses the vibe that it had going [Music] if i level match it it's probably a little more accurate that's with it [Music] yeah taking it out just helps kind of the little high frequency things poking out a little prettier and i'm gonna go down the line back to electric guitar let me just solo this total group of electric guitars because honestly i'm not doing anything this was recorded so well that i didn't really need to do much to it but you will see the panning was done on my end and that's specifically because i find that panning and placement is way bigger than eq so if you hard pan stuff specifically you don't even have to eq it if you look there's stuff hard left and right and then there's like the ebo stuff that's kind of in the center [Music] and maybe a little reverb on that okay so there's an automation of this long verb youtube style guitar [Music] i'm gonna look at my bus on this i don't think i have anything going but eq i'm just taking everything kind of below 60 hertz and then a little bit of the 200 which is the nasty stuff and then a bit of sparkle even though there's nothing really up there i just wanted to see where i would go [Music] [Music] so right about here is the foundation and i will start bringing in the stereo compressor and um maybe the eq the tape machine on my stereo bus to kind of see where we're going so let's do that and hear what this adds i'm not going to pull this air eq in yet sometimes i put it in the ad or take out a little bit of the bottom bottom and then take out some low mids but it sounds pretty clean right now i'm going to first pull up the atr and then i'm going to add my api line amp which i don't want to do any eq on it so i'm going to flatten it just use it as a line amp because i feel like it adds a nice little character and then i'm going to try one of these compressors the the glue i'm not going to use the glue because i know that that's kind of an ssl style and i don't want that from this i'm going to try the germanium and uh fairchild style acoustica and the tubetech style multiband acoustica and see which one we like the best so let's go with the tape first and see where [Music] i like to use this repo head as an eq too but you can tell really quickly it gets things kind of sizzling a little too much so it's a good guard to go that's too far [Music] i'm going to pull in the line amp on the api 560. [Music] let's pull the bus compressor in now and see where we're at i'm going to try this germanium first it might be too dirty but this might actually fit nice we'll see no it's too much so the thing that i don't like about this guy is sometimes it is so ace in the hole it's ridiculous when it comes to just taking it to a different level and then sometimes it just pulverizes the living daylights out of it even if it's barely working and if you saw right there for me it's just too colored it's not getting enough a definition out of it so when we start adding gain it's going to just turn it into muck so i'm going to go next down the line and see what we have i believe it's the acoustica titanium and this one is set up like my hardware over here and we'll see what this guy sounds like i'm going to start with just soloing the top band and going down because the way i do that is i take it all off and then i add slow threshold and i just want to get maybe half db each band next band [Music] down the line of the sub now this guy is actually the crossover goes at 100 so it's really taking much below it if you listen to itself [Music] and i just want to just kind of kiss it just a little bit and depending on the song i might hit the bottom band a little harder but what i'm going to do is i'm going to slow this down a little bit because it's just a little a little tight [Music] that feels good i'm going to open up the mid-band [Music] i'm going to go up to the top [Music] cool i like how that sounds i'm gonna pull back the ratio just a little bit on some of these [Music] i don't want them to be too much because i could start hearing clint a little too much let's take it out [Music] out [Music] that reminds me of the tube tech that i have the hardware and i like that i'm going to keep this on for right now and then bypass and go to this fairchild which is awesome acoustica plug-in this might be too much for the whole top but i want to try it and i want to be able to show you the difference between the two as well so i'm going to actually leave this in i'm just going to actually bypass it these guys are crazy good plug-in developing company acoustic up but they are crazy insane on your system resources so you might fall in love with it but you got to do whatever you can to make them work on your system because most systems can't handle the power that they need to take let's hear this [Music] i just want to kiss this too [Music] [Music] i don't hate that either actually i do not hate that either so putting it down to the one on the fair child is actu i wish i knew what the settings were but it reminds me more of what a fair child is about i've never really stayed on 345 on a fair child tracking it's and usually it was for drums or bass guitar it was always one specifically and i don't know if that was off habit but i always seem to like it this seems to work really good with this too then in [Music] okay so this is the fun part now being able to shoot out between the two compressors they're both tube compressors one's an opto style the titanium which is the tubetech style which is a solid-state amplifier with a optical compressor multi-band going into a tube line amp and then the fairchild is obviously a very mew that is compression setting based off of the ampage and the stuff that i don't even understand just know that i like it and the beatles used it so it was always good and we can hear the two and the two should sound different and this can tell you really quickly where to go so let's listen with out first and i'm gonna pull in titanium and now i'm going to pull in the ultra which is the fairchild okay so here is this is where it gets tricky and where i totally slow down and mixing it doesn't take me much to get to here actually took me longer today than it should have because i was trying to figure out where i was going to go with this the second i got the mix to where i wanted it was all about the impression the first impression which is what i think the two bus should be which is why i have all this outboard gear specifically for two bus i'm not using that today so i need to do that in the box and finding that i have to create a sound in my head that i think i want i don't want solid-state aggressive vca compression i don't want a germanium style solid-state aggressive compressor with like dirty harmonic gain i want kind of the smooth velvety sound of a tube box but at the same time i want to hear the tube tech multi-band thing and so the difference between the titanium and this ultra marin 3 whatever they call it marine ultramarine i'll just call it the fairchild acoustica fairchild is so this this guy just has this really lush beautiful golden age era kind of sound it's really smooth and really nice listen to the snare drum without just pulls it up but if you listen to the titanium it does something very cool which is this front to back 3d thing that's incredibly hard to do in the box and it does it for you it might not do the lush kind of low mid thing that the fairchild acoustica plug-in does but it does this other thing that you can't get so let's hear that [Music] on top of that you listen to the top band listen to the frequency like everything the air it's just really pretty oh so off [Music] titanium take that out and listen to fair job [Music] there is nothing wrong with this guy the ultramarine 3 but for this mix it goes this guy gets this because of the 3d space and i know once i start putting a limiter on it and get up to a level that's competitive it's going to need it let's move on i think it's time to hear the sense and hear what it does so that's right now my stereo bus [Music] versus the ref [Music] now the other cool thing about the titanium it lets you use it as an eq2 so if you want to just adjust low mid or high you can do that just as an eq on the stereo bus so if i want to pull a little more top end i can do that but right now i don't think it needs it but if i do i can just do that instead of adding another eq in the chain let's pull the uh synths and keyboards in i believe they're all linked together so i'm going to hear them on their own and see what they've got so apparently the acoustic guitar is going into the piano too i'm gonna leave that i don't know why it's doing that it could have been just based off of the fact that we didn't have an acoustic bus and then we just ended up dumping the keys in it too i'm gonna leave it i don't hate it so there's some piano drops and then the synth stuff by itself i'm gonna listen to on its own [Music] i remember trying to figure out why there is a bass going a rock bass and then a synth bass but the synth bass doesn't happen through the whole song so the problem with trying to shift between the two is you're going to lose the attention of your bottom and then your mix kind of falls apart so i think i ended up turning the rock bass into a synth style bass for that reason and then use this kind of arpeggiated galloping synth bass as more of a plucking stereo base so how i did that this was a mono signal so all i wanted to do was take some of the low beef out and then add some finger which you're going to hear and i took this time adjuster all i did was just spread it left and right and engage it it's stereo so now you got the the center of the base here's the chorus again with the bass guitar and say left right synth then rock on the bass on the center [Music] if you take that out it goes it's just mono's it doesn't sound right see it's gone now another base is carrying it [Music] oh [Music] let's add a little topic [Music] i feel i need a little more drums so i'm going to pull these kick and snare into my parallel and if i it's a big session you got to scroll through it i put it on pre-delay too and they're going to fire right into the parallel now i'm gonna just dump it for a second and hear the difference between the two so here is without it and then that's with it [Music] so what is it doing we've got a 33609 we got a poltec key we got a 160 we got a dermatic culture all these guys are doing specifically one thing and that is adding harmonic content to bring up the information now it's also adding thrust so the 33609 and the 160 together really add a ton of flick and then the pultec adds a little body with the 60 and some top frequency with the three which is adding more thick and then the culture vulture basically all it does is add grit so if i take it out [Music] and i add it brings the drum attack a little bit forward without having to sacrifice it with the limiter let's move on to the vocals so let's take the verse by itself worthless or keep me guessing i'm either laughing or lost in your almost every vocal needs a ds around [Music] i would choose you every time i wanna try to make you feel all my love my one and only you take my loneliness [Music] you can leave me breathless or keep me guessing i'm either laughing or lost in your eyes sometimes i'm stranded i want this to hit one at the loudest maybe [Music] is just really there for a gate i don't really like the limiter on it too much you can leave me breathless or keep me guessing i'm either laughing or lost in your eyes sometimes i'm stranded out on your ocean so this channel is not doing anything on the bottom of the pultec or the mids it's only adding a little bit of air and then a tiny bit of squeeze and i'll go over this on a different episode but i want to focus just getting through this as quick as i can so i can pull up the mix and talk a little bit of the philosophy of that but eventually i want to talk about the vocal chain so i like to use a lot of different compressors on the vocal unison very slightly and it just seems to add a lot of character it almost takes care of all the little things it needs to care for so right now by itself it sounds like it's almost there this is also hitting the titanium stereo [Music] [Music] sometimes it's easy and sometimes we fight but if i had to do it all over and my last guy usually is this el rey which is greg wells nice little guy by acoustica it's a great rca old vintage very mew compressor that will add a ton of fatness and most of the time it does too much but i don't like to not try it for this song i know it worked well because the vocals came in a little thin jeremiah has a really great aggressive vocal but you have to kind of set him off a little bit or he kind of burns out the mic so we want to try to get that back and i'm just going to keep this very subtle and see where it sounds you can leave me breathless or keep me guessing i'm either laughing or lost in your eyes sometimes i'm stranded i'm gonna also use this as my line amp i'm gonna probably need to do another just because i can hear it um another de-esser on this just because once you start compressing a little too much that's where it all comes out i really like this old waves de-esser i used this fella as a back end only because it does a little different thing you combine those two they actually do a very similar thing when you combine compressors on their own they just kind of add a unique blanket to everything so i'm going to just go through that you can leave me breathless or keep me guessing i'm either laughing or lost erosion sometimes it's easy and sometimes we fight but if i had to do it all over you know i would choose you every time now this mv2 i'm not going to pull in until the track is cooking it might not need it it was on the main mix for the release but i might not have to do it this time only because i i just i listened back to the final master and i just felt like it was a little too a little too much so i'm going to keep it off for right now i'm going to pull this delay in though and see what we got i have this in parallel like i said i'm also automating into the compressor these lines are depending on what parts already kind of automated to go into things and then once you drop it down to the lead vocal there is quite a bit of automation going i've got the eighth level triggering i've got long reverb triggers here here here here and i can go over that in a second and then i got this which is on the chorus it comes in so on the verses it's off even though this is on you can leave me breathless or keep [Music] [Music] okay that's john lennon delay everything goes back to that guy try to make you feel i want to try to make okay so i have reverb on this as well you pick me up i'm either laughing or lost in your eyes sometimes so this reverb is looks like the soft tube guy it's almost like a non-lin smaller room and then i put an eq behind it to add a little bit of the grain i'm either laughing or lost in your eyes sometimes i'm stranded [Music] [Music] so what you're hearing also right now as you're hearing the low vocals which is just this guy and then the double of the low and i can show you that i'm gonna pulverize i usually pulverize background vocal s's and doubles because they mean nothing if the lead is there in front and center that's where the s is important not the double because that's where you get all the flams let's go into that chorus again let's get a balance let's pull up the reverb so that's the broadcasting 7th kevin i'm so cynical you're so glad you pick me up when i'm feeling low [Music] is the rap so here in the reference i'm instantly going where's the banjo where's the where's the banjo where's the mandolin where's the high strung so let's pull these up [Music] that's the reverb [Music] so i have that automated on that own send i do that a couple times i do it right here too [Music] then i do it at the end [Music] it's just kind of adding another element [Music] you pull the background in backgrounds are as follows [Music] all right i'm going to pull on the mv2 now because i feel like it does need to be a little more thrusted [Music] [Music] is i feel pretty good about it so far i feel like the one thing that's missing though is the fact that i still don't have enough vocal so let's let's pull that in and find out how i can do that i'm going to pull up my parallel chain which is similar to the other one i've got 1176 a de-esser which is pulverizing that and that it's just probably on nuke maybe not uh i can't tell let's see i'm gonna take it out and then we'll put it in and see what you take [Music] spanking the crap out of it so let me pull it in and see what it does [Music] it's a rape [Music] and i'm [Music] if i had to do it all over you know i will choose you every time i wanna try to make you feel all my love it's coming down another reverb [Music] [Music] [Music] i'm gonna pull in the pro-l limiter just so i can have it as a protector i like to kind of do a little bit of the leg work before it hits mastering of course if it's going to go to streaming we know that we're going to keep it around negative 14 l ufs and if it's going to cd i i usually try to stay around negative 10 rms but if it's going to go to mastering like eric boulanger or someone like that they're going to be thankful that you're going to leave them headroom for today i'm going to only take off maybe a db because actually i won't even do that i'll do 0.3 of a db just for a protector but i'd like to get a little bit of the snare crunch off of it too and that way i know i have control over what the drums are going to do by the time it hits mastering i can't tell you the times i've sent it to other mastering guys in the past and that comes back and the drums are gone so i'd like to know what it's doing and i'll leave it on and i'll just take it back maybe 3db at the very end before it hits so they can use whatever they need to make it up for it [Music] i you take my little i'm gonna come back to the top and just go through it one time i'm not doing any automation today i don't think it needs a terrible amount of it that's the other thing finding the sweet spot you take up most of the time for it i have his reverbs muted here i don't need them since i end up using my own but sometimes they'll print their own effects and shimmer reverbs dream reverbs the only thing i can think it could help is if possibly i ended up doing a tiny bit of a ride at the last breakdown so i'm going to focus on that you can see a little bit on the drums here there's a little bit of that but i'm going to do that on the master mix so i'm going to come back and on the breakdown i'm going to drop the breakdown post limiter down so it's going to print post limiter down to a db and then i'm going to bring it back up on the one [Music] so right there is where it comes in and that's where i had to do it so let's take that down a db maybe a db and a half and see what that does and that will give it a thrust to the end too [Music] my one and only [Music] i wanna go [Music] [Music] you take [Music] all right well that feels like the mix let's see if we can just print this out and hand it over thanks for joining me see you next time [Music] sometimes we fight but [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 88,644

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio

Id: ZMAv5yPe_Fo

Length: 58min 21sec (3501 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020