IMSTA ONLINE: PreSonus Studio One Full mix in 30 min | Joe Gilder

hey this is joe gilder from presonus and you may be wondering why is there a timer at the bottom of the screen i'll tell you why uh i'm gonna mix a song in 30 minutes using studio one from presonus now why would i do that part of me wanted to just show you a bunch of mixing features but i don't know you've probably watched your fair share of software demos i want to make this a little more fun and one of the ways that i actually got into studio one uh years ago we're on version five now back on version two was i watched a few people work in it and saw how they got around and realized that that might be worth trying out so that's what i want to do for you obviously i'm incredibly biased i work for presonus but i was using studio one long before i became a software product specialist at presonus so we're gonna start with a blank session and we're gonna mix a song so uh i'm gonna open my template but i'm actually not gonna use it we'll just we'll just we're gonna run with it so a blank session here let me get rid of all of this and we've got an empty empty empty very very empty session here and i've got a folder full of files that i had a friend of mine sent to me and i've not mixed this song yet so i'm going to drag these in and make sure they copy over so one of the things i love about studio one is it's allowed me to have a nice quick mixing workflow and some of that is just because of the way it i mentioned this in my other presentation if you've not seen that the way studio one kind of molds itself to my workflow rather than forcing me into a certain workflow especially when it comes to mixing i'm a big fan of a less is more approach to mixing and of a top-down kind of method to mixing which means instead of going in and doing eqs and compressors on my drums i'd much rather um eq and compress the drum buss and see how good i can get it to sound from there before jumping in so this song it's a pretty cool song called looking for l not a huge number of tracks and i believe the drums are easy drummers the first thing i'm going to do is get my session organized so i tend to follow a bit of a process that i do every time i mix a song and the first is to get it organized now normally this is done inside of a template that i save in studio one that has all the the folders and buses that i'm gonna show you already set up however i wanted to show you everything from scratch here because you're gonna when you download studio one you're gonna be starting from scratch as well so i don't wanna to start from a starting point that's not the same as you so i can get you up and running with it as well so right now i'm just putting things in the order that i like them i'm going to put in these are electric oops these are electric guitars i believe and this will all make sense in just a second um i tend to and i would recommend you do the same organize things in such a way that it's the same every time i know we're creative we're musicians we don't like to back ourselves into a corner but i really like the idea of my drums are always blue and so and they're always on the far left of the session so i can always go and quickly find what i need to find because i color code them the same way every time now there's a couple of cool ways you can do this in studio one and let me show you right now so i'm going to select all my drums and percussion tracks and i have them in the order that i want i'm going to right click on them and choose pack folder okay now this creates a little folder that i can open and close that's pretty cool but what's better than that is i can name this drums drums i can't even type cannot type drums alright that's cool but i can change the color of the folder and guess what it changes the color of all the drums that saves me a little bit of time and i can click right here and i can say add bus channel um actually hang on i need to delete some of this extra stuff that's in my session that i did not mean to be in here because i want to start from a blank slate hold on ignore the man behind the curtain we're deleting these these were just from my template that i imported okay we're good uh so now i'm gonna select this folder i'm gonna click this little button here and say add bus channel what did it do it created a bus you see that little knob there now i've got a fader on my drums and if i go over to the mixer i can now see all these blue channels on my drums i can pack them up into a folder which will actually if i change a setting here yeah i can pack the folder both in the mixer window as well as the arranger window and they're all blue and all of these drums are now feeding into this drum bus now we just have to repeat this process a few more times to get all of our other tracks so let's put there's acoustics let's make one for them i've assigned a keyboard shortcut to some of this to make it a little quicker and actually like i said before i actually have all of this set up in my template so i have these folders sitting here waiting for me and then i just drag tracks into them and what happens is i'm going to call this base i'm not going to make a bus for the base a lot of times i do but just not not today not today um and what happens is if if i create the buses and create the folders and then drag a track into the folder guess what that track automatically gets routed to the output of that folder let me show you let's do this let's do create let's do this i'm going to pack these first two guitars into a folder we'll call this wow wow i can't type today this is amazing and you may think joe you got 24 minutes left why are you focusing on this because this kind of the whole sharpening the axe thing getting this done is going to help me mix faster down the road so this is my electric bus i'm going to create a bus for that okay i got a folder and a bus now oh no i forgot to put this one in there look this track is routed to my main outputs i actually want it to go to my electric guitar bus whatever shall i do i just drag it into the folder joint it's in the folder you can see that now it's packed in the folder and then if we look at that track look it's now routed to my electric bus it did the routing for me i didn't i've you know the last time i actually clicked on the little routing buttons here inside of studio one i just don't because these folders do it for me all right let's put the bass up here next to the drums right there let's swap the electrics and the acoustics there all right background vocals keys keys are next this is the one part i uh oops almost i put the keys in the acoustic bus that was a mistake i almost didn't do this video because i thought i don't want to set up folder tracks but then this is the kind of stuff i like to see i like to see how someone actually works with the system so here's my keys bus keys are usually some shade of orange or salmon that'll work um let's put the keys here um and then here are my background vocals we will make a bus for them um and and there's a couple of things going on here obviously the routing the color coding that's all important and super helpful background vocals are purple by the way we got two different lead vocals i'm going to put them both in a bus which is called the vox bus and make that yellow but the the purpose behind this is yes to do routing and color because that really does save me time but also it it mirrors my workflow um like i said before i like to work kind of like this so we just imported how many tracks we imported 23 tracks into this session but when i look at this i see six colors six buses drums electric guitars acoustic guitars keys vocals background vocals that's it that's kind of the way i'm thinking about this session so now you can see how well yeah i could mix six tracks in 22 minutes but maybe you don't think you can mix 23 tracks in 22 minutes that's the idea i'm going to mix these as a whole rather than as individual tracks where i've got to put plugins on every single fader now my bass track accidentally got put in this bass track is being naughty i'm going to fix that right now okay all right now bass is where it needs to be uh sometimes i would actually create a folder for bass as well i'm not doing it today because i just don't want to waste more time so now what do we do well one thing i want to do is i know i love the fat channel inside of studio one so i'm going to open up my browser that i usually leave open while i'm mixing and i've got things generally in alphabetical order so i can just drag fat channel onto here and look what it does if i have them all selected it put a fat channel on every track that's pretty cool that's handy now i have those there i don't need the plugins yet they're not doing anything to the sound next what i need to do and this is where things start to get fun is i'm going to spend the next probably five minutes or so getting a good static mix of everything that means getting just just adjusting fader levels and panning and that's it so i've got my volume fader at zero i've got my all my faders at zero and i'm going to come in here and make sure i can see these input controls this is a trim knob at the top of every channel and i'm going to use that to adjust my volume so i can leave my faders at zero and adjust the volumes of the trim coming into it so that my faders stay nice and high real quick why do i do that what happens if if i move this fader like this a little movement like this like i'm using a track pad i'm moving my fingers up and down i mean just maybe a centimeter or so and it's moving you know six or so db that's a doubling of volume well let's say this track is super loud and i need to turn it down because it's too loud it's clipping everything well guess what that same movement here let's look right focus your attention right here on that number i'm doing that same motion with my fingers and it's going from it was what starting at negative 29 going up to negative 14. that's a difference of 15 decibels that's over 12 decibels that is over twice a difference in volume for the same physical movement faders are logarithmic meaning you get more resolution up here a tiny movement here is just a decibel or two a tiny movement down here could be two or three times the the volume which isn't helpful so i would rather keep my faders here that means i set my volume for my speakers at the same level every time i never touch my volume knob i never touch my master fader it's at zero and if i hit play and these tracks are too loud which i have a sneaky suspicion they might be i turn them down before they ever hit the fader and one of the ways you can do that is using these trim knobs here now i have heard these tracks just because i um i let me just turn these i'm gonna turn these buses down because i listened to them just to make sure they were working but i haven't mixed them yet but i remember them being fairly loud so i'm going to turn down all my main buses and we're going to start with the drums get some levels there base we'll go through and just make sure we have decent levels for everything before we ever put a plug-in on why do we do that i call it a static mix we do that because so many problems you face in your mix are because you didn't get balances right you've got you know the bass guitar is just too loud and you're trying to fix it with eq and compression when really the problem was it was just too loud just turn it down that's because you you jumped too quickly to using plugins and you didn't sit back and really make sure you got a nice static mix where you set the levels and got all the relative balances between everything i'm not talking about setting everything even i'm saying set it balanced meaning we can hear the things we need to hear we've got the the right balance between things drums are nice and prominent we can hear the guitars we can hear the bass nothing's overly too loud but nothing's like hidden either and a lot of that just happens by moving the panning up and down and faders left and right so i'm going to hit play actually before i hit play i'm going to do something here i am going to there's a little feature here where i can hide the busses and just see the audio tracks i'm just going to bring all of these down with the trim knob here and hit play right in the middle of the song just to see where my volumes are so i don't blow your ears out [Music] okay we can't even hear all the tracks because i turned the faders down i just realized that um but that the drums aren't like blowing our heads off i did notice that my electric guitars were coming through so i'm gonna turn those down as well all right so let's let's rewind let's go to what looks like kind of the biggest portion of the song which is kind of right here let's just loop that section and let's just get levels so i'm going to mute my microphone for a minute and we're going to get some levels here and then i'll come back and talk to you about what i did [Music] okay i just found where there was a spot with the tom so i could hear that let me go find a spot where the hi-hat is playing something does it play here in the verse [Music] barely [Music] setting level for the base try to match it with the kick drum so they're kind of two of the same a lot of people talk about i don't want my bass and kick drum to interfere they're the same thing the bass goes they're the boom the bass is the b of the letter of the word boom the other kick drum is the b the bass guitar is the um boom that makes the sound together so i don't mind if they're on top of each other because they sound good together so make sure those two play nicely [Music] together [Music] where are you [Music] now everyone's looking for red everyone's wondering that tambourine's killing me is it killing you two yeah right there let's turn that whole percussion track down a little bit yeah and that part was too loud so you can do it there's a couple ways to deal with a specific thing that's just too loud it jumped out and scared me a little bit you can use the clip gain envelopes that we have sometimes for something like this i'll just do this right just pull it down [Music] okay now you might be thinking i mean the fact that you're here thanks for sticking around um what what's going on we spent granted i've done a decent amount of talking which is what you have to do but we got 12 minutes and five seconds to go i've not touched a plug-in yet and to most people that's insanity like you gave yourself 30 seconds to mix a song you spent you basically spent rough numbers 10 minutes setting it up and getting everything in the right place another 10 minutes or 8 minutes setting the levels when are you gonna do the good stuff that's the point listen to how good this sounds without any plugins [Music] it is a fun game that i never get tired of playing which is how good can i make this sound before i slap plugins on here and then once i do that guess how much more fun mixing is a huge huge like i can't even measure it difference because i've done my job here now a big piece you might be saying is well joe my trucks don't sound that good take a note then if your tracks don't sound this good your mixes won't sound this good so focus on getting really great sounding tracks that sound like a mix without any plugins that's the secret that's the thing that all the plugin companies don't want us to believe and okay it's not a conspiracy but that's the thing we tend to want to believe the narrative in our heads is the reason that mix is great is because that guy used really great plugins or is a really good mix engineer sure that might be a piece of it but a bigger piece of it is the person who recorded and produced it did a great job and the tracks already sounded good that's the the takeaway shouldn't be like ah nothing to learn here my tracks don't sound that good the takeaway should be the thing i'm learning here is forget the mix and go make your tracks sound good and you can you don't need super super high-end equipment to get good sounding tracks this was recorded by two of my vip members in home studios i was i would doubt they use anything more than like a 300 microphone and some software to pull this off i think the drums are easy drummer and i think it's a guitar amp modeler and just you've heard it probably a thousand times you don't need all the fancy stuff okay let's dive into this so one thing i'm going to do is open up our console shaper plugin which is kind of like it's built into studio one nobody knows about this and it basically has the sound of a console across the buses so it behaves like those plug-ins you've seen that you put on every channel that make the mixer sound like an analog mixer we have that built into studio one professional so i'm going to turn that on and just kind of crank up the drive a little bit and see how it sounds and then we'll go from there [Music] so crosstalk is mimicking like there's a little bit of the bass in the drum channel a little bit of drums in the bass channel it actually ends up for some reason sounding cool because that's what analog you know mixers used to do so i just set that get turned some things up so it sounds kind of cool then i just leave it alone all right next thing i want to do is let's get some bust compression on the on the mix bus since the mix already sounds pretty good i don't hear any huge problems i'm going to do some bus compression and start our top down process start with the top the buses and work our way down to the channel so here's our mix bus i've got the brit comp which is one of the plugins you get um if you're a persona sphere member you get access to all of our add-on plugins that come for our fat channel this is one of the ones that you get sounds really cool [Music] just add a little bit of glue underneath the low end just changes even if there's not much compression happening it just does something to the low end that's wonderful so now we're going to kind of rewind i'm going to mute everything go back to the drums and we're going to tweak the drums and kind of retweak everything so i've got a fat channel on the drums we're going to use we'll use this compressor this eq that's great let's go [Music] i love it we the drums went from sounding like this [Music] to this [Music] that mid-range on the on the snare drum is tamed a little bit everything's got a little bit more squash to it it's not a huge night and day difference but i really dig it and we'll even give ourselves a little tiny bump in the low end too [Music] just a little tighter sounds pretty good i'm gonna leave it alone let's go on to the base what you got for me mr bass [Music] just a little kind of optical compression a little bit of eq i might do let me put another eq on here just to tame that there's a lot of mid-range there helps that bass sound a little deeper um there all right i don't have much time i don't do a lot on my electric guitar buses because they can sound wildly different but i do sometimes do a little bump at 360 just to give it a little extra warmth without adding any muddiness [Music] a little low-pass filter to kind of smooth out the top end sometimes digital amps get a little too crispy for me that should be fine acoustic guitar i'm not gonna do much too it sounds good [Music] these are meant to be kind of brighter um adding something to the mix so we're gonna probably leave them like that [Music] all right keyboards keyboards can oftentimes have too much kind of in the 700 hertz range like right in here [Music] so a little cut there can help running out of time i got to get to the vocals let's do the background vocals first uh we'll go to the chorus oh goodness well i got i lost track of myself here we go let's find out where the where the background vocals sing right here here we go [Music] you know what i'm going to use a regular eq because that's generally what i use in this situation real simple low cut bring some mids down boost some of those highs [Music] and with two minutes to go let's let's look at the lead vocal here there's two vocals going to this lead vocal bus it doesn't bother me um because i kind of like to treat them the same and they kind of glue together but mostly it's just this one vocal so i'm gonna focus on this and go back and see what the other vocal is doing but here we go [Music] okay he's singing lower and then the background vocals are singing higher i don't want him to be boomy so a little bit of a high pass let's compress him first oh everyone's looking for real how everyone's looking for real everyone's praying she's all right so it's just compressing the louder notes not the quieter ones oh everyone's looking for real that feels good um i want it to be a little brighter it's kind of muffled sounding oh everyone's looking for real everyone's praying she's all right everyone's looking for friends i need a de-esser real quick we've got a de-esser preset on our compressor i'm just gonna dial it in i don't have much time to show you it uses a side chain to just listen to the high frequencies everyone's looking for real everyone's praying she's all right okay that's cool that's great and what's this other vocal doing he comes in i always get i get so sweaty here at the end uh okay here's this vocal [Music] and that's that's the mix right um let's let's get let's play back the chorus with 37 seconds left to see what we got um but that's it this is mixing in studio one it's fun i never get tired of it thanks for watching [Music] everyone

Channel: IMSTA FESTA

Views: 8,107

Keywords: IMSTA FESTA, Free Music Festival, Free Music Education, Melodyne Songwriting Competition, BlackRock Studios, Vocal Tuning, Vocal Effects, FabFilter, Music Software Education

Id: V6GcjNpOTq8

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020