FULL COURSE: Mixing Colbie Caillat's "Goldmine" with Marc Daniel Nelson

[Music] hello everybody I hope you're doing my obviously well I do hope you're staying safe happy and above all healthy we have been very blessed to be able to do a lot of free courses for you over the last couple of months during this lockdown there's two courses of mine that's come out there's a mixing in the box one where I mixed a tracker for about six and a half hours you can watch and download the multi tracks there's one I did with peat murrow's which is a singer-songwriter one we had Tony Franklin the great Tony Franklin who of course was in the firm with Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers he did a course Brad word the amazing Brad wood did a mix course with us where I also did some mixing as well and last but definitely no means least mr. Matt star did a full drum recording course as well all of those are listed below but today I am very very excited to announce that we have a free course from mr. mark Daniel Nelson mark Daniel Nelson is incredibly talented as a producer engineer mixer markers work with Fleetwood Mac Coby Calais Eric Burdon and many many more he's ridiculously talented and a really genuinely great guy he's also very successful in film and TV he's mixed tons of huge movies and done tons of TV shows just really really talented and as an instrumentalist and a composer himself he has given us this course for free for you to watch the only thing we ask is if you can if if you are able please send a donation to music cares music cares is something that's very dear to my heart and dear to very many people music cares helps people musicians and jenay's producers mixers who have fallen upon hard times again if you're not in a financial situation to be able to donate I totally understand but if you can please donate whatever you can the link is below so the cost from mark is Colbie Caillat 'he's single gold mine this track was produced by the rather one for an extreme mr. John Shanks so this is a wonderful opportunity to see how mark works and a great insight into Colby's music and how it was created and how it was mixed I'd really like to say thank you ever so much to mark thank you for your generosity and if you can please donate to music cares if you can't I totally understand in the meantime please download any of the other multi tracks and go watch any of the other courses thank you ever so much stay safe stay happy and stay healthy [Music] hi I'm mark Daniel Nelson deconstructing a mix for a Colbie Caillat song called gold mine off of the Malibu sessions album this was produced by John Shanks and I believe they rented a house on Malibu beach and loaded a ton of gear in and just recorded the whole project there at the time Ken Kelly and myself were working on this we did about four or five songs on the record and I wanted to go over my philosophy of mixing on my template and talk about the fact that I do usually do it in the box version and a summing version depending on the song and today I have here my co-pilot Atticus and he's usually falling asleep within 15 minutes of the track the problem is he starts snoring which she starts getting quite loud so I just turn it out wider and lighter to kind of drown him out okay so when we were asked to do this we were at a studio that had an AWS and at that time I was still kind of really jumping in and putting a lot of effort into mixing in the box and I was finding that it was really starting to really work and at the time my template was a little more simple than what it is in this session we expanded it recently but I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that so here give you a little break out so in my session I always group my drums and percussion slash any kind of element in a separate bus so pretend like this is all in the box as of right now everything is grouped literally for drums literally for percussion and then they're sending to their own stereo bus so I haven't mapped where all of my busses are in line at the very end of the session colors are important obviously but the biggest thing that I need to see is that it's together some people like to put it after the groups and it's just hard to navigate for me so basically if I can look it at this and I can see real quickly that I have drums percussion effects and these all three are literally drum percussion effects something that has transient sounding elements to it then it goes to bass an acoustic guitar guitar keyboards synthesizers and then it breaks out to Orchestra stuff because I do do a lot of film work that I've actually have woodwinds brass Orchestra always in my template and then after that it's background vocals lead vocals now the way this happens is today I have on this stuff it was the drums were going into the digital bus everything is digital all the way down to the end but I do have it molted so the whole buses are dumping to the digital bus and they're also alting and molting to today the ssl sigma and on the council today i have just as a reference print backs I have my ssl playback the in the Box version which is the clone same thing the rough mix that I was given by John Shanks and the print which was the print we ended up sending to Eric Boulanger at the bakery for mastering probably won't listen too much to that but I wanted to go over a little bit about this process because it is important and I'm gonna go between the two so you can actually hear the difference because it is pretty big difference even if I'm not using outboard hardware with it just the summing alone adds something that I actually like so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the drums so with my drums I like I said I always group the into their own buses and I always group the percussion or any kind of electronic element into its own effects or percussion bus so today the most of the percussion and the electronics goes into the effects bus and then it goes down the line with the bass the acoustic guitar is the electric guitars keyboards since usually group out to Kobe's vocals and then to the background vocals which is a lot nelli joy Justin young Colby's fiance Jason Reeves are doing a lot of the background vocals for this track let's take a peak to the song let's hear the rough first and see where we're at first time that you kiss sweet [Music] what I want to hear though is I want to know what they're kind of wanting to hear up in the front usually for me I like to hear drums and vocals and Colbie Caillat track is always known for her voice being the center of it all and so you have to kind of craft everything around that and so listening to the rub with the drums and stuff going I can already tell you that it feels kind of wadded up I want some more like sparkly stuff you know some more acoustics going around with the drums kind of pumping I want the low-end to be deeper and I want her to be front and center going back I can tell you right away I would start drums and then acoustic guitars and then bring in the bass guitar so let's just take a peek at my drums and see what we got going on here now this is Victor and Rizzo on the drums and he clearly has played on more albums than you could even fathom he's just the guy that gets amazing drum tones and so they I think walked him into a bedroom and they just kind of trapped him in this gated acoustic mecca and took tracks of it but the cool thing about all of these things they gave me so many options on the drum set which we're going to really go through and I'm gonna mute a couple things my snare sample and then my drum thing so we can just hear what it's doing but you're gonna hear that there's stuff like well sound which is clearly they took something and ran it all the way across the house in probably the the stairwell of the entryway this big massive sound it sounds like a well and then there's dirty kit and all these other options that you can really blend in and listening to the drum set I'm going to play it just as is right now [Music] so right away you can hear this thing called well and that sounds like it's I don't know 50 feet away and the completely different side of the house but if you zoom in on the rooms they're very processed and they sound really nice and crunchy and that's the cool thing about Victor he's he's kind of like he's always rolling through his parts and it just becomes like a wheel so when you start crunching stuff up it really kind of rolls in a very nice way but like I said if you solo just the overheads super-dead but then you get your rooms super crunchy but then you can get even further into the well which is the stairwell and it sounds like it was in a garage or something there's all these little things like the salt shaker Mike you just got every option you can think of so when I'm doing drums I'd like to do a kind of a vortex of all those sounds where you're gonna have the definition of the kick and snare in your face but you're still gonna have the ticker-tape kind of salt shaker kind of crunchy rolling mic but then you'd get your can any kind of echo from the well sound so when you're putting it together without the samples you're already seeing you're getting a picture of what the drums are gonna sound like [Music] if I just take out the room by itself and I go back and I say okay what did I do to this when it came in it sounded like this so in reality I can tell you it's probably trapped in the bedroom the rooms were probably either in a hallway or in the bedroom with it the thing I needed to hear is that rolling thing that I wanted to get out of it which Victor does really well his ghost notes but I wanted to sound I don't know more gritty and stuff so I pulled up this really cool clink helm compressor and the cool thing about this compressor is I don't know if a lot of people are going after the limit mode but the best part is on one on the timing of 1 in the limit mode you can really get it to do a Fairchild thing remarkably well and if I go between the two that's when it starts to sound like a wheel the drums are starting to crush around [Music] just brings it out it brings out really cool so combining that with the other well you get all those little hi-hat accents that are just really important for the song okay so I'm gonna pull in the set again so this is without the snare sample and I'm a sucker for snare as everyone knows that in fact ken is too obviously and we were trying to find the best kind of focus point because listening in the reference the snare was cool but it's kind of more about the the ghost notes and stuff in the rollin we wanted to find something that had more of an aggressive punch so I found the snare sample I ended up printing it but it's on its own it sounds a little aggressive but when you blend it in it's the peace so let me it's without the verb all I have here on the on the EQ channel is just a little bit of low mid at a hundred and that will give me and it's just a smidgen of expander just so it doesn't ring out the sample that we had was kind of long and we wanted to cut it down so the cool thing about this reverb though is if I go down to my drum reverb section so on my bus I have unbelievable amount of reverb ready to go and these guys are already kind of set so some are already set to literally long some are set exactly I have three or four plates that I know exactly the sound I want in my head depending on the record I loved growing up or whatever I kind of crafted these sounds off of that the reverb for the drums is just an impulse from the 480 the music club C and I use it almost on every drum set thing I liked about this one and the fact that Victor was playing in this rolling fashion I wanted to kind of create kind of a not electronic but kind of a stylistic kind of moment movement of it and I saw okay that's kind of doesn't really have a lot of life to it but if I could create a gate on top of the reverb which I have just following my reverb set it's more humanized in the sense it's it's random that the gates are shutting down differently and you can hear that in the track where it just kind of pulls and pushes and it adds a little bit of element so let's hear what the sample sounds like with the whole drum set without the reverb so the Tom's on this I also a sample because I wanted them to be really hard left and right and really punchy so my toms here I just printed but if you listen by themselves they sound almost like keyboards there's not a lot of line of life to them this one velocity hits but if you put it in the track it's another one of those things because there's so much movement going on that it actually creates its own interesting part so here's what the Tom's in [Music] which is cool so next we have the percussion and the electronic get so there's a lot of low-end coming on this I'm going to go back in a second to the acoustic set but I want to talk about what we have in the elements of percussion and right now it's pretty straightforward we've got a four in the four kick going see what we got you know just have a little bit so I took it looks like 250 out and that was probably to make sure that the real one had some pump so if we put the two yeah so they're they're kind of feeling pockets so together here's the drum set with the electronics and the actual percussion [Music] so you can still hear the actual snare and the ghosts going underneath it but you get that force of the snare every time it hits on the snare same with the Tom's and those create this like kind of definition of how the drums are gonna come out and it kind of gives you both worlds where you got the actual vibe of the drumset and then actual really sustaining punchy hits let's talk about the two bus so on my drums for the overall sound I have a pretty simple set up and it's usually one or two plugins and this is what it's going into so right now I just have a pull tech and that's just 60 Hertz and 10k just as a smiley face that just gives it a little bottom and a little top so without it it just adds up just a little more a little more body to everything and a little more air and that's pretty all I'm trying to do I'm not trying to kind of create any kind of sound from the two bus other than just enhancing the elements that are already there for the compression on the drums this depends on the track but for this one I went with the distress or usually do one or two compressors either the Pro L on the drums or the de-stresser depending on the type of music and depending on what the sound is for this one it's a little more aggressive so without it and then with it [Music] I'm only doing about a DB of gain reduction but what it's doing is it's clearly adding the grip to it which I like and but it's not coloring it too much and I don't want it to sound too pumped definitely don't want it to go there once I get the drums where I like them for this kind of song I'll go right to the acoustic guitars with the drums before I put bass and usually it's drums and bass but since this is Kobe's song acoustic instruments are incredibly important with her voice so I wanted the drums and the acoustics to be the shiners so right now I have as you can see John Shanks played on almost all of these tracks maybe justin played on some of them but we've got high strong's we have some ukulele stuff and we have traditional six string and right now I have some very subtle EQ going on and stuff like that and then on the feed down to the bus I have another pole tech which is just enhancing the top top-end so I'm going to take that off and I'm just going to play the acoustic by themselves and this is what really makes Kobe's tracks are these really pretty acoustic elements I mean the best element I can say for her music is acoustic fullness and thickness it just enhances everything really well you got stuff like the pie strong right here we find it so I have a little delay that just kind of creates a little bit more of a movement but just on its own if you just take these two acoustic guitars and play them this Kramer pie is pretty cool even though it's a little older it still has a character where it has some low mid thing that I don't know if an any other plug-in compressor really does and I'm wondering how like I've never used the real pie in my life I'm wondering how enhanced that really is with the real thing which makes me really want to hear it if I take them off and then add them it just adds this kind of low mid thrust thing it's very subtle but it really does glue it together and I actually like to use these eq's on acoustics the top end of the SSL is interesting it's not very clean at the same time it adds this kind of I don't know how to explain it it's just I like it on cousteau guitar and I like it on vocals sometimes because it may be just relevant to what I've grew up listening to and it reminds me of specific records that I can hear the top and better than I can hear the low-end so I usually use that on acoustic guitars and on vocals and let's just hear what this goes without here's another counter this one had the la3 and I don't know why we had it maybe I was just experimenting so next thing I want to do is kind of listen to the acoustic guitars only and the drumset with the electronic set percussion bus I'm gonna solo these three elements and let's just take a peek at what we got and see what our levels are at I mean right away you can tell the track is there's the meat right there without bass without synthesizers without electric guitars without background vocals without vocals and that's a Kobe song it's all about you know what you can kind of take with you on a beach and then you add some filling and stuff like that for energy but in reality with the sixteenth know pretty stuff and then by dicks kind of rolling drum part I mean that's that's the track [Music] electrics John Shanks master always has killer killer tone it sounds like I've got something panting hard Otto panting okay so yeah so we've got a verse a picky kind of chicken picky part this is one of my favorite plugins auto pan so it's it's pretty much a free plug-in it's a little different than the sound toy stuff it's really easy to kind of make what it needs to do I have it just kind of going back and forth slowly and what it's doing is it's moving in and out so if I just have the guitars [Music] you're getting movement so when you have the drums and the guitars up by themselves it's kind of moving back between the speaker's back and forth and it's kind of creating this movement if I take it out let's hear what it sounds like if I take out the panning [Applause] I don't know it doesn't say how it's good to me [Applause] [Music] it's another element that's random it's creating randomness so no matter what if I come back for a recall if I'm playing this now versus when we mixed it a few years ago it's just it's it's gonna be different and I like that I like the fact that it's never the same let's see well we got on this other guitar okay so two things kind of my trademarks is if I have ever any any kind of up picks Motown style I always put a spring on the hard right if if it's on hard left so that's without the reverb it's another element of stereo where you're having hard hard pans and you're creating ambience on the other hard pan so you're getting this pan law and it's just another movement thing okay this looks like another clang helm box that I have and it's adding a little bit of distortion now the cool thing about this box which is different than the capitate ER or the the thermic culture is it gives you elements to choose from different algorithms that are either the tube bus a digital distortion a fuzz distortion or a desk which sounds like transistor and the cool thing about this if I take it off we can hear what it sounds like and take the reverb off it's great it's good tone but I think it needed a little more juice basically without compressing and without actually like flatline distorting it let's just go through these in here the tube is this it's a little fuzzier it's a little more pointed yeah the thing with the tube algorithm it's bringing out the actual natural spring from the amplifier and then when you add the other spring there's your stereo image so that's pretty cool it looks like another third electric that I'm looking at that's coming in on the chorus and let's just hear that by itself okay so there's a ping-pong going on for sure this is ass and I have and it's ping-pong in let's see what we got for this I don't know what delay that is so it's just an H delay on ping-pong another element of just circulating stereo it kind of creates this image once you put all them together there's just a lot of just movement just with some effects and some delays not a lot of reverb at all actually if we just did the percussion track pretty good starting to sound pretty great let's talk about low-end real quick bass so with me there's two types of bass that I like to get one is like overpowering low low low low and that usually sets the mix apart from other people and there's two ways to do that one is to emphasize your bus with a harmonic plugin like the B 15 here which I don't have on but I can pull it up in my template and show you this guy will fatten anything up super super quickly but it will also pulverize any kind of definition you have this song I kind of want to hear I almost wish it was like a semi hollow body and maybe it is but it I needed to enhance that more so what I would do is first I would find the low end and if it's given to me like this where it's the bass and the DI it's going to be a phase give or take so with the amp by itself and then the deai so when you sum the two you're getting some of the fur but you're not getting the low pocket and this is before let me take off what I've got on the base chain so what I like to do is you know obviously check the phase okay so for this track this is really cool what it's doing is it's it's putting it out of phase actually and most people wouldn't want to do that usually so without [Music] it just sounds fuller it's way deeper but the thing is it's losing all your mids now when you're your upper low mids the stuff around 500 all that nice finger noise is gone now but it's got all that rich sub stuff which is basically shoving the bass way down below electric guitars and keyboards which is all fighting in that low medium frequency range so what I usually do I'm a huge fan of just putting a huge point on bass and as you can see I do that it's probably between 900 and 1200 and we'll see what we got it's right at 1100 K so without it you don't really got the definition there's your string now it just sounds wampie so you put a little compression on it and then a little bit of tape saturation now it sounds like a semi hollow body so without all the toys and that's with the face swapped on the amp so with it again I'm gonna pull the drums in now let's hear what that sounds like with the drums in the bass falling in okay so what it's doing is the drums are taking over a lot of the the the focus so if you didn't have that point on the bass you wouldn't hear it on speakers that are like the small speakers like give you an example so right here we have this Bose speaker that I really like to use because in today's world most people only use Bluetooth speakers or in headphones or smart speakers on their TVs soundbar stuff like that and all these speakers seem to have this like enhanced low harmonic frequency thing that gets really tricky and like in earbuds and stuff are doing it now where it's you have to be really careful with how you're hearing it because I'm listening on full range of ATC 45s that sound fantastic but when you're listening to it on something traditional from your TV or a Bluetooth speaker or anything like that it tends to get really funky so you have to add certain elements to kind of make up for it which is why this boss box is really cool it's still stereo but it's all coming from an angle versus it coming from a split so you're hearing things almost in a mono world and for bass and stuff like that you can just decide how much you're gonna give off that I can't show you exactly what it sounds like obviously but anyone who has anyone knows what these boxes sound like so having one to check your mixes odds we're actually pretty cool it's almost like a an aura tone thing but it's letting me hear that like the finger noise and stuff okay let's put the guitars and bass and drums together let's hear this [Music] things are moving around you can start hearing things kind of find their place I'm not doing any automation actually on any of this I'm noticing because I didn't think it needed it the stuff I was doing the panning alone was creating this kind of pocket we are in two keyboards now so let's look at what we have in this session it seems like the road starts the song with the guitars and everything else and then it goes the first course that comes into a second roads and then goes into a second verse the clav and these are all John Shanks keyboards that he puts in itself so all the keyboards and the guitars it looks like are all John's so going into the second verse there's a wah-wah clavinet I don't really have anything on these plugins and they're dumping into the key bus and I don't have anything on that either so clearly John had some great tones coming in and we really didn't have to touch it too much maybe it has a tiny bit of top-end lift from the ATR which I like to use the high frequency which I'll show you once we get down past the vocals but in general [Music] just sounds like it's just clouds and roads going on right now and then if we can take a peek at the sense [Music] we have some arpeggios some synth lines melody line but again nothing is dumping nothing is on the two bus of the synth so the keyboards and the sense are really clean the only thing I see is this imager and this is on a pad line and let's find that real quick and see what it's doing I'm assuming it's some kind of melodic piece let's just play it real quick I'm assuming not so it's just clearly synth part but without it it's a little little tight this kind of brings it out it's a cool little box it's pretty old plug-in by waves but it definitely does some kind of phase element that actually whitens the image quite a bit so when everything's in it it's kind of reaching out far with all the other elements kind of nine and three but I'm a big hard panner as you can see stuffer either all the way wide open or kind of focused on the other so if you look at like my guitars and stuff they're usually really hard left or hard right and that just creates the kind of imaging that kind of creates that so if we opened up the whole mix up to this point dramas all the way down to the cents you can start hearing the track let's take peak first two [Music] take a peek at what it does with the base if I take the base out of phase from the amplifier it's gonna shift the low-end back up to the mid-range so let's hear what that sounds like [Music] see that's another weird thing so even though it was out of phase it still feels like it's bigger and that's just really obvious when you play it with the full track how important that is that it's extending the octave down let's make sure we keep that on I want to talk to you a little bit more about my template and what I'm doing in terms of summing verses in the box and kind of playing you those two differences because now we're starting to have the song but put together a little bit and you can start hearing what it's doing so let me talk to you about it so like I said everything is digital dumped into the stereo buses and once I do that I have it molted going to my in the Box digital print bus and I have it malted two summing on the ssl i have going to this jcf converter built by friend josh Florian's phenomenal converter it's super super clean but it actually has survived in fact I don't think it has any electronics other than make up transformers in it so it's it's just it's awesome it's all I can say it's really cool so having those go through it it's going through the summing into the tube tech which is the multi band tube tech I have that off now and I'll come back to in a second but it's come it's returning with the jcf converter into my mix buss basically and that's dumping all of the the stereo buss is down from summing and then it's coming back and that comes back and it hits this amp X ATR and then it hits this 560 EQ and I'll tell you about this thing so my friend Eric Boulanger the bakery turned me on to just using this as an insert and it's not really doing much as an EQ and I'll tell you why I use it and it's really impressive the line amp is pretty cool because if you need to just add a little bit there you can same with the EQ if you just need to add a little bit you can but I don't really use it for that I mainly use it just to actually hear the line amplifier insert which in itself is awesome it's its own color so let me just do that real quick I'm gonna play this without and I'm gonna play it with so let's just hear what this 560 does just off [Music] and then we're gonna put it on [Music] now I hear two things I hear it giving a tiny bit of gain but that's not what I'm hearing it's it's actually enhancing the stereo image a little bit in your center Channel your kick and snare are actually sitting in a pocket let's hear that one more time with and without [Music] very cool so that's my stereo chain of my summing but if you see here here's my in the box same print and that's the clone it's the exact same plug-in settings so if I go over to in the box [Music] it's the exact same digital print as the summing and this is for one or two reasons and I'll tell you why sometimes in any kind of high velocity electronic or trailer or anything that needs a lot of sharp focus I'll stay in the in the box I still think that it's King on certain elements I actually like to hear both at the same time and toggle between the two once I'm setting up a mix before I kind of lock in with my compressor and stuff like that so let's just do that let's just play what we have from the digital sends of the stereo busses down to my summing SSL with a little bit of plugins and the in the Box version well let's go between the two so here's the in the Box version [Music] and here is the summit [Music] back in the box [Music] back to something [Music] okay the two things I hear with summing is it's spreading it out a little bit it's starting to loosen the collar a little bit what it doesn't sound is tight I'm gonna go back and play it and not talk I'm gonna toggle between the two and there might be a tiny bit of a level difference but really start listening to two things listen the transient and the drums the transience of the acoustic elements and listen to how things are starting to carve out and spread out and with all these delays and floating things it's starting to become alive and that's one of the elements of summing that I still think is king but with the in the Box stuff it's sharper so depending on the type of music you could really actually use any one of the two and they would be good so let's go back one more time and just take a peek at in the box verses this SSL summing now again this summing does not have a compressor on it it's just coming out to the summer and coming back in through the jcf converter so I'm going to start on in the box [Music] very cool glad I went to someing because it does have this spark element that I'm hearing that it's not doing on the in the box chain now I think we could probably pull up the compressor that I have on the to bus and I have a tube tech stereo multiband and this was turned on to me by Bill Schnee over 10 years ago I remember I was working under him he had it I never saw it before and he had stuff going into it and I'm just going multiband on a stereo that is insane I don't I don't know if that that's that's dangerous but I always noticed he was never hitting it more than 1/2 DB at the very most of all bands and so ended up getting one and it's been really hard to take it off my bus as you can see I have quite a lot of other compressors and I just been sticking to this guy and I'll show you why because it's another one of those elements of aliveness where it creates this alive kind of flow because it's tucking stuff just slightly so I'm gonna play you just a second of the song again with and without the tube tech [Music] starting to flow again everything is just slowly it's like a wave it's like an ocean I mean it's just creating a very alive spacious stereo image with it okay I think as a track itself it's sounding like everything is starting to sit really good I'm hitting the compressor about 1/2 DB on my 2-buss like I said on this ATR on this ATR there's a repo high frequency that I can use as an EQ and that just kind of sweetens things just a little bit there is a sweet spot to it though so you got to be careful it starts zipping if you don't watch it [Music] so that's just kind of flat and that's too much whatever I had on in the box is a clone so that's basically back to normal let's listen to this without it [Music] [Music] it's my favorite at least for this track it's cool to kind of shuffle through and get a little different EQ curves and stop off the tape balance I don't really touch the calibration or the head type I just keep it on one inch it's the fattest you can get so might as well go for it this just seems to add another kind of sweetness Sparkle thing so when you start adding everything together it just creates an image and that's the biggest thing I try to get as bigger-than-life as I can when I'm going against any other reference or anything I try to just make it sound as big as I can so if it definitely sounds bigger than the ref that's okay so let's take a peek at what it sounds like without the compression and without these two plugins on their own because I started with them on so we haven't really heard them without them I'm gonna play them I'm gonna turn off this tube Tech and I'm gonna just take them out and let's just listen for a minute and just hear what does [Music] you see now that the drums are all put together with the elements that the samples actually don't nearly sound sampling as much as they used to and a lot of that is because of the overall movement everything is kind of covering but it definitely helps having that attack and that punch where things are just coming in out really pretty alright let's listen the vocal let's talk about Colby's vocal so in my experience in listening to the previous records that Ken's done with Colby and stuff her vocal is always showcasing almost 80% of the track in fact there's a weirdness where the drums and the vocals are competing but they're not fighting each other and that was the biggest thing I've found with her stuff that's tricky you know I think it goes back to Ken's days with Fleetwood Mac in the beginning on the first two records that Colby did that brought in this very you know great rhythm element with her voice that really worked well but her voice is kind of always needing to be there and Kobe's mom died has been the gatekeeper for at least for this record of getting making sure that every corner and every word is just absolutely in your face without it sounding too compressed so I'm just going to open up this channel strip chain and see just see what I'm doing I don't think I'm doing a terrible amount I like this guy a lot this is one of my favorite vocal compressors the clang helm this env2 is I hate to say a secret weapon for at least Colby because that's where I started doing it and I've saw on previous sessions of hers this was on it and what this does it's it's a very different type of compression plug-in where I think you're bringing up low information and you're bringing down high level so you're kind of able to control those two types of things but it really does make it sound like a record right away when you put it in the Decapitator is just giving it a little bit of fur I believe she tracked this on au 47 and it sounds excellent as is and then a little bit of multiband on her voice de-essing I actually have two parallels of de-essing one on this and then one on the the output bus and that just keeps her tucked while being able to get as bright as you can get a little bit of delay there's some automation delay and I have it called guitar delay because that's just what the delay was on my bus and then at the end I had a little more EQ and again this is the SSL and that top end going back to it again around 10k it just adds the sound I don't know what it is it's kind of like it's not open it's just it sounds like records I grew up in I guess that's the biggest way I could think of it if I knew any other angle I would probably try to explain it but I don't know how to explain that let's see what else hold on okay so we have the delay on the voice and then down at the at the bus of the vocal the lead vocal I have the per caste which I have the real guy set on Sunset Chamber which is probably one of my favorites and it's coming back here on a digital send it's a digital i/o and then it's cool this m7 controller is able to control it via plug-in so everything can be preset the other really cool thing is is right next to it I had the seventh Heaven plug-in which is inversion algorithm version of this guy and what it does is it does it's very very good job doing it so I can set this and this the same and if I loved this setting and I wanted on background vocals and a little different decay or different free delay or whatever I could just pull this up but my main verb right now is the real bruh caste and it just seems to work but if I wanted to use it on snare or whatever and I knew exactly the sound I want I could actually dial it up with the hardware use this m7 controller which is virtually a plugin at this point because it's digital i/o and it's in and out I just only have one instance but it does make it make a difference all right let's listen to the vocal first verse and then I can go through all the plugins and stuff but we can talk about it smile I have $4.00 more than I will need to get back cuz imma be in there if you count every sunrise we can buy your side and every good night all you have was the way that I love you so this clang helm just taps a little bit but it creates it from poking out too much it's very colored I'm assuming this is supposed to be something like a stay level or something and it does something similar where it kind of glues it together versus a grabbing Peaks it's just kind of just smothering it and kind of creating this so the env2 if we can by your side this is the trek this is a really cool plugin it it brings all the low level up and it keeps it tucked then we can too back to the multiband with it very first time that you kiss me in the sweet style I love you and this eyes when you lit this fire feels like we're sitting on top of a gold mine flame so bright there you go Decapitator is really not doing a ton other than like I said adding a smidgen of fur and let's just take a peek at this SSL because I wanted to show you what I meant about the top-end being different because if I pulled up let's just say a fab filter and set that the settings relatively the same at 10k and you know a couple DB I'm gonna take it out and then I'm gonna play this SSL and relative these are give or take about the same but I want you to just listen to the two and just kind of hear what it's doing cuz it's basically it's adding the SSL adds this kind of nut gonna say electronic air to it but it's definitely not as smooth as like a poll-- tech and that actually works really well for vocals so the SSL by itself here it is if I was delivering your breath smell now listen to the top of the vocal too and then here's the fabfilter relatively same setting if all I had was the delivering your breath smell I have a dollar more than I would need to get back cuz imma be it's just way more air on the SSL if you can hear it on every come in on her vocal if all I had was the delivering your breath and then here's the filter if all I had was the dollar in your breath just not as there so I like to keep that on the voice as much as I can when I need something that sticks through with a lot of percussion and stuff and the de-essing is just just tucking that's the second one and it's just doing about 2 dB let's hear no backgrounds and just her voice with the track [Music] [Music] the honeybees in June I keep you laugh and keep you smile and keep your dreams true as long as I have you I feel we can't it's okay so on the background vocals it sounds like it's Jason Reeves and maybe some Nelly which is Jason's wife Nelly joy that sounds like Nelly and Colby [Music] [Music] that's Jason and Nelly again it sounds let me take this poor caste off yeah John Shanks and Colby and team really killed it on the backgrounds they really he just sew everything up together kids eyes you lit this fire feels like we're sitting on top of a gold mine flame so bright they won't die in a billion years they'll still be cuz I love is a gold mine [Music] [Music] that's cool so John Shanks producing this track with Kobe and the gang the background vocals itself they're just it's really great this track was super super fun because everything was just there the pockets were all there anytime there was a hole they filled it with a vocal or acoustic lick or something that actually just made it constantly change here's the full track with everything I'm gonna listen at the bridge and decide and I'm gonna listen to the whole track with everything in at the bridge [Music] [Music] I'm gonna go back and forth between the in the box and this and you can actually hear the summing versus the in the box [Music] so private one [Music] [Music] it's the rap again [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] there you have it go Meier [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 65,362

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio, Mix Breakdown, Free Course, Multitracks, Colbie Caillat, Marc Daniel Nelson

Id: UxvbTyFB7yI

Length: 64min 41sec (3881 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020