How To Mix Vocals w/ Waves Plugins (Andrew Scheps Tutorial)

[Music] production time I'm Reid Stephan realest puppet in the game today we're joined by an extra-special guest Grammy award-winning producer mixer and engineer Andrew chefs he's going to tell us about his waves plug-in that chefs omni-channel and answer some questions about the Pro Tools session that I've been working on in my last few tutorials Andrew thank you so much for coming on the show and it means the world to me and my fan base that rock stars like you are willing to come on YouTube channels like this and share your expertise and knowledge with us so thank you so much and welcome to the show my pleasure so that's that feedback is exactly the reason to do it that being said I've got a Pro Tools session here and I'd like for you to replace some of my plugins with whatever it is that you do and we'll just jump into my very first question this vocal was recorded through a chain with a little bit of analog compression but that's not quite enough for this vocal to cut through the mix of the loud music production do you have a go to inside your Shep's omni channel for the loud disrespectful compression effect yeah there'd be two things that I would do so if we solo the lead vocal and have a listen to what it's a second to get off this battery honest revelations just so the first thing would be on the insert itself the channel strip plug-in I think the first thing is our just adds some saturation because I just love so they're three different kind of flavours of it odd is odd harmonics even is even harmonics heavy is a clipper but it's got a really weird shape to it so it is a clipper but it isn't a hard clipper you don't get a corner on it you do get a curve as it clips you don't get this soft clip that a lot of Clippers do it's sort of like having two Clippers and series kind of thing and so it interacts and what it's doing that I like is it's bringing some of the presence of the vocal back in some of the body so you sort of feel the air hitting the microphone a little bit and then from there I think probably just a little bit of EQ there's a resonance shelf which I think just sounds really good on pretty much everything so really opens up the top but it also gets a little bit harsh so now I'm gonna use the de-esser and it's 2d aesir's and they're both full frequency range one of them is just on top of the other because it had to go somewhere there's no like high frequency low frequency thing with this so we'll use the top one just cause I'm gonna choose kind of a sharp curve we may end up making this a little wider and then there's a really cool function where anything that has a frequency to it if you hold down control it turns it into a bandpass as you turn the knob so you can actually hear what you're doing you don't have to pretend you're a tone Meister now go that s is centered at exactly four thousand two hundred and eighty four Hertz and just find it and then get rid of it I just need a second to taste these bad dreams but I gotta be don't wanna lose my always superstitious like it's Friday 13 I don't wanna break I don't wanna let that okay chillin on my bed happy it's already pretty compressed I don't know that I would compress more but we will just cuz just emotion deeps now obviously we're doing all this in solo so it's easy to hear what I'm doing this is more just to kind of show you the tools then we'll drop it into the track and see if any of its helping I'm not going to bother compressing any more here and what we'll do is you already have a parallel set up for your vocals yep okay and so you've already gotten all buttons in this is pretty much what I would do yep is to use in all buttons in 1176 type thing and then you just to keep the red lights off I might not even do that so we'll just see and obviously we've been listening to that while we did everything else so listen to the the T's in that acting phone fast and without the limiter they'll really start to pop out again after the 205 which again in the track might be cool so we'll just leave the limiter bypass but that is exactly the sort of thing I would do because I think once you've got the vocal especially with some parallel compression it's usually loud enough in the mix that it controls the mix so once I get the vocal right they'll just be the tail ends of a couple of words or the way something is sung that you really have to take care of but overall yeah I'm very lazy I like to leave stuff static as much as possible I call it efficient I like his style so we can move on to question number two the background vocals were recorded exactly the same way as the lead vocals what would you do to help them not compete in the mix it could just be as as much as volume and panning usually I'll put more effects on the backgrounds and I will on the lead because that will push them back especially like a slap delay or reverb because that just physically pushes them behind the lead vocals we've all seen closer and then the other thing is just filtering like there's no reason for background vocals to have as much low end as the lead vocal and possibly not even as much top-end so those would be the two things I'd try first so get emotion [Music] and these aren't their own part right these are just all doubles so really these probably want to be hard panned to separate themselves from leave unless it's distracting because you start to hear individual voices vocals do hearts and all four of them or sometimes I mean when they're all doubles probably not I'd spread them a little bit and really the problem is when they're hard panned tees and S's in individual takes can start to be really distracting so then you start to have to bring them in and tuck them in and then you lose what you're trying to get which is to make it wider so that's the balancing act let's just so vocals wanna get a motion that little bit has really made them pop out so at that point just panning and that might be all they needed because in the track you sort of could feel there were more vocals but I didn't really hear more voices and I think you probably want to hear that there are extras [Music] so in this case there's little ELLs unlike and those T's it's actually kind of cool because they're just popping out a little bit and you get the idea that there are more voices but the lead is still there really important so in this case I wouldn't do much it sounds pretty good but you can do the most in terms of sonically separating things by changing a microphone and background vocals you can do on an sm57 do it on something super cheap so if you spent some money on a vocal mic we've got the road or you know whatever it happens to be it's most likely a good sounding mic so do your background vocals on something that isn't that great sounding and you sort of get a package that's the way it works in my brain this sort of package of background vocals with just a little bit more mid-range it doesn't have as much dynamic in it just because of the microphone choice it's a little more low fie and that will completely separate it awesome that makes a lot of sense my next question is this whole vocal performance is over a guitar would you treat the guitar under the singing differently than the guitar in the intro of the song it's the same performance of guitar it's just they're singing over it after the verse no I'd leave it alone completely I mean when I mix I use a lot of parallel compression which trying to think if you've done a parallel compression just straight tutorial thing or do just because you'd use it a lot on your vocals but you don't use it a whole lot I haven't used it too much in the music I've just been using it mostly on the vocals right if we really quickly just select all the music we'll just select everything so we've got music vocals and drunk rate so we'll take these three guys and we'll do a send on those three tracks to a new track and we'll just call it parallel and it's an aux input that's the aux right there and I'll put it down the bottom because that's the way my brain works it's audios like water it all flows downhill well we could just put it 1176 on there just to make it really easy um so what kind of a low ratio slow attack fast release and basically what this is going to do is it's going to send everything exactly how it sounds in the mix off to this compressor and I'll just sort of blend it in and what should happen is that everything will start to interact so when the vocal comes in even without a buss compressor the guitar will just come up in every single tiny little hole in the vocal if the vocal is the loudest thing so check out the way the the vocal and the guitar are interacting I play the first four bars with this muted second four bars with it and the one thing I didn't do is I would normally use a multi mono version of it so all that means is that when you're using a stereo version of a compressor and it actually saves the settings which is cool as you switch between them with a stereo version if anything loud happens on the left it turns the left and the right down but in this case I don't want that to happen because it was actually making the guitar move around too much so I just want the left and the right to do their own thing that leaves a useful piece of information it's huge it is a huge thing use multi when you have lots of stuff or a drum kit or just anytime you've got lots of things going into a compressor always listen to it multi mono it might get crazy and you might think like no I really want to control everything but usually there's something that'll happen on one side and you don't want it to affect the other side and it just really splits your mix into a left mix and a right mix and then they take care of themselves to get out this battery all these revelations is confused by so you can kind of hear the vocal jumping out of the mix and it's because it's pushing the guitar down whenever you're singing so no I wouldn't do anything to the guitar differently between when the vocals in not in the pre-course section these toms right here may not have enough drive to be heard in a cellphone speakers do you have a go-to drive to add just aggression or disrespect to some drums yeah so why not so I would say if we use some saturation a little bit of the fet compressor and a little bit of EQ that's gonna pop out like crazy and you might think that you'd want to EQ in more of the low mids but that's not what you really hear you want that kind of mid-range II know easy part of it so I'm gonna add some I don't know somewhere around 2k or and again all you hold down control so I can find the frequency [Music] and then it's just a trade-off of now are they too aggressive do you back off on the compressor because it's not quite as nice as it was but that's the general and is the direction oppressor just a general choice you make for percussive material or does it's kind of the noisiest one the VCA is really clear okay the opto is slow so I wanted something fast but with some grainy dirt on it cuz that's the whole point the more dirt there is the easier it is to hear the mid-range which is what you want you want that thing to stick out but you don't want to just crank it up because I'm gonna start competing with other things that's a really useful explanation of all the different flavours of compression that you have in your cuz I know myself included we're kind of just switching through I'm really wondering okay what exactly do I have to choose from here yeah and the idea in this plug-in in particular was to try to make it so you could just switch between the three and the unified controls are close enough that it isn't just crazy because if you just had three different plugins to get them to match where you could switch is it just takes a lot of time yes sometimes just to set up your a/b test is time yeah so we thought we'll spend a lot of time doing that and it's yeah it's a really easy way just to go back and forth and kind of learn what they are - all right and my sixth and final question as you said earlier and as my viewers see me do all the time parallel processing is such a major part of the process of mixing do you have any shortcuts within your chef's omni-channel to create some parallel effects yeah but I don't actually use it this way very often there is a wet/dry control on the compressors so if you want to do a parallel compression thing like we could take these toms and compress them way too much and then blend it in so instead of backing off the amount of compression you back off how much of the compression you're listening to so and then you can blend in how much of that effect you want to do whereas with less compression you would never get that sort of attack so that's the the parallel side of this really okay it's this was build because my template is nothing but parallel processes and there are hundreds of them in the template but for the inserts that's a build it from scratch every time because it's so dependent upon the material so I just got tired of having to have this catalog in my head of 30 or 40 plugins of what I would normally use on an insert so now the 30 or 40 best bits of all those plugins are all there including some stuff that didn't exist like the fact that the deserts are full frequency range and now when I know I need to treat something because the other tools are there I'll just try them right and I'll actually do more on inserts than I used to do because it's all just sort of sitting there on the screen if you want to go more in-depth on that particular plugin there is a very long tutorial video that I did for wave so it's on their channel on on YouTube and you also get to it from the site and there's a lot under the hood a lot of really advanced stuff you can do here too so there's a lot of really deep stuff if you want to know more about it then and I'll put that link in the description to the chef's Omni channel on the waves web site Andrew thank you so much for collaborating with waves to bring us the chef's Omni channel and thank you so much for coming on my channel and inspiring beginners and advanced producers alike and for that you are an absolute rock star thank you so much for being a part of today's show yeah excellent thanks so much all right thank you so much and I'll catch you guys next time with another tutorial peace out

Channel: Reid Stefan

Views: 89,657

Keywords: andrew scheps, tutorial, plugin, waves, mixing, how to, mix in the box, in the box, pro tools 12, puppet, reid stefan, mix, pro tools tutorial, andrew, scheps, mixing pop, mixing trap, trap mixing, how to mix a trap song, waves plugins, scheps omni channel, omni channel, omni, channel, channel strip, channel strip mixing, waves scheps parallel particles, parallel, particles, neve

Id: S3uIInF1LO0

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019