LIVE with Marc Daniel Nelson: Learn Mixing Secrets From A Grammy-Nominated Producer

well it is 11 o'clock we did it on time mark how are you i'm i'm good okay are we going to be doing public radio announcements yes who's alec baldwin and uh i really love your no anyway so [Laughter] it doesn't really work when it's two dudes well i suppose it could you know so you're good yeah great great great great you hunkered down in the studio i see yeah i i had to cover all the windows up this is a bright morning today that's good yeah yeah it's fun being in los angeles in uh i suppose early march so typically i suppose it's spring now but it is funny that you know we had days in the last couple of months where you get out and it's like 75 degrees outside and you're like wait what happened isn't it we got much winter this year no not a lot not a lot although eric bought a electric heater wait there did i buy electric heater um okay i bought an electric heater without realizing it but apparently i bought an electric heater and sometimes i walk in the studio and it's like whoa it's so hot in here and i'm like dude uh aren't you latino aren't you supposed to be warm-blooded i see i'm trying to figure out why you would need a heater when you have an ssl you don't you don't but yeah but there was actually an egg on that thing yeah actually no the sso it runs pretty the 4000 runs really really smoothly it's the it's the knee v and vr series oh the v51 was the hottest console over the vr i've ever been in front of the 51 oh my goodness absolutely crazy so we have a a lot of wonderful people here hello everybody um if you haven't already subscribed you know what to do please subscribe um and of course you can hit the notification bell i'm saying all the things that youtubers say hey why not um and uh and please hit the like button because then it lets um youtube know that you like it and more people will come and watch it um james says england is is very bloody cold i'm sure it is i'm sure it is um tom says we're on time what's what what's with that i don't know you have to thank eric he he managed to get here early enough to get it set up god bless eric rick so um feel free to ask questions in of course in the chat that's what a live q a with mark daniel nelson will be all about um but mark i'm very excited we're putting out a course with you today on with eric burden he's a rather rather wonderful uh artiste to say the least i grew up listening to um my dad had a compilation album from the mid 60s and it had um it had um oh lord please don't let me be misunderstood so i remember one of my earliest memories of anything that wasn't classical or jazz was hearing eric burden's voice which of course is rather special so please check out um mark's course you can see it above there um so let's get started with some stuff how what have you been uh obviously with the the the old dan pemik um you haven't been doing much tracking i imagine um yeah has your mix load been getting pretty massive because i know you do a lot of film and tv stuff as well yeah so actually i'm fine with the no tracking thing just because other than drums like and maybe a full orchestra like honestly i i gave up wanting to sit in a room at 2 a.m recording guitar over dubs so i think for the the mixing thing this kind of happened at a pretty good time in the reality of things you know if i get too overwhelmed you know you go on a walk but i think in general there's two films and three albums and maybe a few like one-off singles stuff seems to happen a lot now people just want one song and they'll come back in a month for another song and stuff like that now what is that uh what is that little desk behind you that controller there can you tell us a little bit about that yeah that's an original d command that's my fault yeah it's got cool wood sides so it tricks people that's the that's the kicker um but yeah it still works great even with pro tools 20 20 whatever you want to call it uh oh so it still works with that 100 yeah oh did we have one of those i thought it stopped working yeah it stopped working and the thing is the pa actually the power supply had gone on hours like three times it was the third time it had gone and we did a research on replacing the power supply and it costs more than if you bought one used on ebay the actual well i can tell you that they were not cheap in the beginning and luckily i didn't buy it uh new i got it in the last couple years and it was very affordable and it worked great and it looks great and it it's definitely you know it's a it's a council looking thing but it i miss the old analog console for sure that you're sitting in front of totally some interesting questions coming in um sam miller says he says what are your thoughts on legendary mixers i think this is also tracking engineers i think sam who use little compression such as bruce sweden and alan parsons i love him absolutely million percent like my favorite of all favorites like i learned under bill schneid who loves compression but absolutely is the purest of all purists and doug sacks and you know that universe al i think honestly if you know how to get your sounds then you're going to get the bigger sound for me i wanted to influence my liking or so my influence of music that i loved growing up to and some of that was dirty distorted sounds and compressed sounds and did i lose you no no i i i'm just showing you in action ow i'm like is he not talking i'm talking yeah yeah i think that ed warren warren was just amazing and [Laughter] no huge fan of you know sad to hear about bruce sweden um you know his whole compressions for kids thing is you know there's obviously when he's sitting behind i think he literally said that while he's sitting in front of two la2as and three 1176s on his rack he had to compress those records he had to a little bit i mean you you gotta a little bit here and there but i think what he's meaning is this whole rule of sending compressors through everything is dangerous but damn it just becomes lifeless which i totally understand and agree but i do think um i think these these uh questions are sort of a little loaded because for bruce and alan and bill and um jack and and uh j messina and you know all of these incredible engineers that we admire remember they were all working completely analog so yeah they weren't in the digital world so it's sort of what works in digital and what works in analog this is you know this has become the big kind of push and pull between the traditional guys and girls and and the newer guys and girls that are coming up there's a lot of wagging finger telling off the young kids that you shouldn't be doing this any other and vice versa well they didn't used to compress well they did because they put a tube mic up and it went into a mic pre with large transformers in it and probably was on the edge of driving and that went on to a couple of compressors maybe lightly but then hit tape pretty hard or fairly hard which also rounded out transients and added a little tiny bit of saturation and then it went back through a console which had line amps with big transformers my point is like so much stuff was sucking then hit tape at the at the end yeah and then hit type and then a third time in master i mean it's just like yeah yeah yeah so when people i totally understand it's a great great question but it's not a fair comparison because if um bruce were making records and ellen were making records it'd be interesting to talk to him about this in a completely digital world they would be adding all of they'd be trying to find how to get that sound that they hear in their head so they'd be adding things to it and it might be compression it might be emulations of tape and preamps and eqs and you know all kinds of stuff because we all know a digital transient looks like this you know as super spiky and yet when you pull up you know the tapes of some of these albums we're talking about everything's so smooth and beautiful because it went through all of this gear on the way in so i totally understand it's a great question but it's not really like with like because they were getting different results um real quick though please add to that you know bill schnee had brevara records his own label that he would do direct to disk 192 digital and for that he would not use eqs or compression as much as he could for that and the key was to retain the transients you know a lot of these guys were at that era were happy to go to digital because you were able to retain the transients but being able to go backwards and taking it off for me and probably for warren we we like both worlds we like the high fidelity kind of sound that makes it bigger than life but then you need the compression for the energy and you need that for the grime and you need that for the power um of course when you're getting records at level volume now you know you can't it's not possible to not use compression now to get it at a commercial value yep i agree um james is saying how's the acoustics with the window so i'm writing there's curtains um they're okay yeah yeah there's a lot of good questions there how do you how do you decide how to compress drums for flavor um do you use them to get sort of more groovery or watery these are lots of terminologies more snappy and punchy slow attack fast release i mean how do you decide i suppose you know song by song tempo by tempo i think it's i'm i've said this a handful of times i like to work on music in terms of what it reminds me of so if i'm if i got a song that reminds me of let's say counting crows august and everything after or counting crows recovering the satellite those are two separate totally separate sounding records by a band that has the same style now the drummer was different and the producer was different you got t-bone burnett and versus what what was his name your friend that did recovering satellite brad yeah so you got two monsters totally technical yeah great totally totally different sounding records both amazing when i get a project i kind of put in my head and i do this with reverbs and other things too i go what does it remind me of or what does it sound like i can influence a certain character so i might hear the drum set of nirvana and go okay that is more clamped and it's going to have a specific type of reverb so for drums i think about that and sometimes there's no compressor on the two bus and usually that's a breathing more relaxed thing a more fidelity thing almost going back to the thriller drum set or something like that and needs a little more life but then you get something that's tighter and punchier you're gonna need it and i go through a couple different i just the pulsar 1178 i don't want to plug too much but that that thing has been i've been using that the last two weeks and it's absolutely we have to do we're going to do a review and a giveaway with it in the next week or two i actually had planned to do it on release day um they're very good friends of mine the pulsar guys yeah they're great they're great guys yeah two two french guys and an italian sounds like uh you know two french guys in italian walk into a bar no they're they're great guys uh i i talk to them a lot and they're really super smart um and i was planning to do that but unfortunately because of uh you know family commitments and stuff you you know mark i wasn't able to release it but it's coming up soon for everybody and do you have a preset in there just have interest he's wanting to do some which i think is going to be on the next release because i had a couple things so we were talking last week about it but the biggest thing i love about that guy is it's got the kind of clipper in it yeah so there's a section for the distortion elements you want to add so there's like a tape compression sound there's clipping there's triode all these elements that you can do for drum buss i just like to use the clipping at the end after i do my seasoning like a little salt and pepper i like to put the clipper there because it's absolutely helping me from the final limiter so i used to just have a fat filter on my drum bus sometimes and i would just have that cutting off one or two db of the top top transient stuff and with this guy i'm looking at it and seeing what it's doing and it's basically clipping that half db to a db of transient that i wanted gone before i hit the final brick wall anyway so there's some really cool things about that compressor i haven't heard it on any other compressor um there is a lot a lot of really good questions here um the one i did i did like um he's posting a couple times do you have any preference on vocal chain and i think when you're recording but more i think what they really want to know is like do you have like a go-to mic for a guy or a girl is it like or do you find you have something that works in both scenarios if you just like yeah i think i i think with i love my favorite mic and i said this in a video my favorite mic for vocals is u47 still is um 251 is probably my favorite overall mic just beautiful like holy grail wow i love this mic but the 47 is my favorite for vocals for girls i usually if i had a c12 i would like that or something in the vein of that but at the same time i mean there's so many options let's go backwards and talk about stuff without budgets you know i did a project where they had a peloso or pelosi what is it peluso paluso yep yep yeah paluso m49 it sounded incredible over every vintage mic at prairie sun we had and we had a 67 up but a c12 up and a 47 up and stuff like that and the paluso m49 which was the artists sounded the best so it just depends on the vocalist um i'm just a huge fan of two mikes as i've said a couple of times no totally me too i um yesterday i i did some background vocals on a song we've got coming out maybe next week or the week after we did a wonderful collaboration with an insane singer so stay tuned for that and so i did some backgrounds not a great singer and i actually went on to the luit the nine and i have a u-47 i can see it over there i have a u-47 but i went on to the lewitt um because i needed a certain tonality um i'm i'm enjoying i'm enjoying the modern world where i um one mic can provide different results i agree with you entirely if you only had one mic for a vocal can't really go wrong with u-47 uh it's going to be it i think we use it 90 of the time and then we go to the lewit the other 10 and then we have you know we're blessed we have every mic you could think of we have c12s and everything and we have a lot of the palusa which are fantastic but the the 47 is always a go-to i often feel like without waffling on too long i often feel like there's certain things that become standards because we associate them with certain artists and records and the 47 of course is so many of our favorite albums that we like that sound um just in the same way a 57 on a guitar cab it's pretty much the sound of rock and roll it's most records the 57 on a ludwig super phonic snare always sounds like the best snare drum sound you've ever had go figure you know it's there's certain things it doesn't mean that we shouldn't experiment but i do agree i'll tell you what real fast before you jump on the next guy um i did a session with ken kelley where i was engineering and he was producing and i put up a 47 and it was a girl singer and i thought it sounded great and he's like put up an re20 and i'm like okay i mean i'm a fan of dynamics on vocals but she had a really pretty voice in it you know quiet i'm like well then we okay so we did and it destroyed the the u47 and it was just another instance of going okay you just you can't always just go off i like to use the same things over and over i'm comfortable at doing that but sometimes you you surprise yourself even by using things that you wouldn't usually go after so just keep kind of experimenting my whole mantra this week is music is supposed to be fun i've said this like 10 times this week and um because there's a lot of negativity for some reason going around and music is supposed to be fun experiment get crazy do stuff that you wouldn't usually do just have fun i agree entirely so lots of great questions um inglewood yes i did crazy enough was what about inglewood is that where you grew up no he said did i really have a tattoo of a telephone on the back of my arm you did yeah i did when i was 19 or 20 20 yeah yeah like 20 years ago um sam another good question from sam says whenever i use compression on acoustics guitar and ukulele i find it degrades the sound quality why not f would you use compression on acoustic string instruments i i sort of have to agree with that i'm i'm very like i love using compression on acoustic guitars and ukuleles and mandolins and stuff like that but as soon as i hear it i hate it it's one of those things and but then again in a in a dense track sometimes it's nice to have it kind of a little bit slammed because it brings some extra energy in there i think sam you know on a vocal acoustic i'd probably or limited amount of instruments i'd probably be probably looking at volume rides first before i look at compression and then some of the artifacts i always hear is when it's a very very dynamic signal hitting a compressor in a kind of arbitrary way so if i go in there and draw in and you know gain match it whatever you want to call it volume ride it um you know and get it so it evenly hits the compressor then i can control what i'm hearing a little bit more but yeah that's a tough one i mean compression on acoustics is just song dependent isn't it yeah i'm a huge fan of [Music] trying to as in digital with with tape acoustic guitars don't need to be compressed at all because what it's doing is it's shaving off all the transients so when you're wanting to compress acoustic it's probably because one the mic technique made it sound a little more brittle so it's being a little more spiky or the player is playing in a way that's not necessarily creating that so you find ways even trying like an l1 slight l1 limiter on acoustic guitar is going to take the peaks off without really compressing because i'm like warren i'm not a huge huge fan of compression and then sometimes if you use something like an la2a or that mjuc on the um on the the setting that looks like a old collins limiter very slow tuggy at a half db works really good but like i would rather put like a tape saturated plug-in on an acoustic guitar before really compressing because now if you're delivering in a full mix i like to hear guitars acoustics compressed but usually if it's a songwriter thing and that's the same with like hard painting acoustic when there's a vocal and just a vocal and acoustic guitar used to do that and then i found that like it didn't connect right so i used to kind of put it more in the center um and that seems to kind of create a little more of like a performance aspect and it makes the peaks less aggressive um man there's a lot of questions a lot of great questions actually i saw this one i think uh michael put this one up under the yesterday's video michael says hi hi guys mark on your most recent video regarding the guitar delay automation with the h delay and isotope vinyl how wet was the original guitar and and how was it tracked was there any additional reverb in the box yeah i saw that maybe an hour ago i think i think there's a part in the video where i just show for a second the guitar but if i don't you guys have access to that multitrack from the automation video this was a thing hold on my air is going on this was a thing that i put out for todd kessler's automation video so you can actually listen to that it's the only electric guitar in it so you can hear what was done to that track by itself now if you listen to it the reverb is fully wet and it's not going back into itself it's just the feedback control on the mj or on the h delay so it's it's doing an internal loop thing there but i'm just automating the feedback and goosing it on the guitar track so there's no reverb it's just a delay but the way the delay is set up which the preset is on the description of that video i believe that you can maybe almost make it sound like it's reverb because it's amplifying all the noise it's amplifying the reverb on the guitar because i believe the guitar had a little bit of spring reverb stuff like that right answer that no it's really good it's really good i'm answering questions as well by email about the course multitasking one of my acoustic guitar sound is never going as one of my favorite acoustic guitar sounds is never going back by flute with mac that one just came in but i just had to point it out because i do think that's one of the best acoustic guitar sounds yeah that's a lav mic it's what mic is it it was a lav mic ken liked to put lav mics on acoustic guitar so i'm pretty sure that was so that's rumors i'm pretty sure that was a lav like a little oh a lav mic lavalier mic oh so that so that's what uh that's exactly what um um oh what's his name uh buckingham no no no no um james taylor would do that as well that's that's a lag mic yeah that's a lav mic that was just it's like a little sony cheap lab mic that just was was on there ah so i didn't know that that's incredible i think so yeah if you ask i remember asking ken a couple years ago i mean i have the multi-tracks of rumors and you listen to it it's very cool you shouldn't have said that that's that's that was like that's like waving candy in front of like you know a bunch of you know sugar-fed kids i'm like what i think that's the multitasker what what we're trying to get away from it now but if you listen to it it's it sounds like it because it sounds really kind of high focused and that also that album was done on two separate tape machines at sausalito right you know at the time they had they it was required that they had two machines rolling and one was called jaws because it literally ate i think it was a 3m machine literally eight tape machine and there's a story that ken has about i don't remember what song on rumors but the tape machine literally broke and totally ripped off an entire five or ten bars of the song and you can hear it in the master where they did an edit and it's just like it's like a speed bump wow um i'm i just wonder you know inside of the academy whether we could privately one time maybe listen to them you know did you just say that he said sure all they could bring can too we'll have a little listening party with ken and listen to the tracks inside of the academy hey academy members did you hear that that's insane i i grew up on that album um i sort of i don't want to i don't want to wish wish the years to speed up a little bit but i'm hoping it can be like at least when it's like 20-22 won't that be what yeah was it 76 or 77 i think yeah one of those two cameras 76 or 77 sorry everybody i'm not recalling it exactly but that will be um that will be uh um a nice anniversary we should just do it anyways just do a video on the album uh and get get ken involved and all that kind of fun stuff all right i'm considering it done mean like i got i was blessed to track in that room uh it wasn't the original console though do you remember what console they were using rachel console was an api uh i don't remember i was just talking to ken about this because somebody claims that they have it in texas and i i had to talk to the guy in reverb for a bit and ken is because ken took over the sausalito record plan again which eventually we're going to do a cool little segment on that so just reply for that um and then warren's going to have to go back to the past and have the memories of that place when he did the framework oh my god yeah catching on fire oh yeah yeah yeah let's just say it's an incredible studio but by the time i got to work there not so much maybe in ken's day it was but now ken's going to rescue it so god bless you ken yeah what a upkeep um i'm reading through some great questions uh so there's a lot of questions about this this 480 music club c uh drum reverb i probably get five emails a day and i try to send it out as many as i can it sits on my desktop literally because i'm trying to give it out as many people as can you just send it to us and then we'll blossom maybe we'll do that maybe from if you guys aren't able to get it or i'm not responding it's not just send it to eric and we'll blast it i think we'll do a blast where everyone gets it because it's just an impulse yeah so it will be what it is yep we'll we'll we'll craft an email from the man himself mark with the c and blast it um okay i'm going through all of these questions here there's lots of really really good ones there's loads of conversation going on which is rather beautiful um lots of people just talking about what they use um somebody's asking is that a j160e it looks like it looks like it to me is that correct yeah yeah that's a 68. oh it is i have to come over and one six steal that bar borrow it yeah it sounds exactly what you think it like a piece of firewood well it's i i recorded uh augustana um hey now and well the whole album with the j160e it is one it's they play beautifully because it's got like a les paul neck it's one of the best playing worst sounding in the room acoustic guitars that records really well as i say if you want a unbelievable if everyone's like how do you get that beatles acoustic to get a j-160 yeah it's sure it's like a telephone coming out i mean it's like what the heck it's ridiculous to be yeah i was because why is it because of the uh the way that the the uh the bracing is is that what it is well it's it's it's not it's not a solid top it's a plywood top so it's like it's like i wouldn't say it's a cheap guitar don't get me wrong but by gibson's standards it's like a cheaper guitar um and so it tends to be a little dead sounding but that is beautiful when you put a mic in front of it because it doesn't boom it doesn't go gap yeah exactly it's almost like the better this is an over generalization and everybody will tell me i'm wrong but my over generalization when it comes to recording acoustic guitars is the better and fatter and warmer and more beautiful on acoustic guitar feels in the room the worse it's going to be to record i mean everybody loves strumming a j200 try and record it horrific it's just blue ammo yeah and yeah so those kind of things um i think somebody was asking earlier i'm sorry i think was mark becker asked if you use tape emulation plug-ins do you have any favorites you know now this week i've been really using the soft tube guy it's really neat i like all of them to be honest they're even going back to the macy tapehead i think that one's really oh it's so good remember when that came steve massey isn't it we need to get his information yeah he'd be a great guy he was one of the first guys that were putting out really rock-solid plug-ins in the beginning um but so that guy's great you know the the kramer tape is really unique because it's an ampex guy the two uad suckers the studer and the atr i use atr on my master i use the studer stuff depending it's in my drum buss it's engaged in my channels um the slate's pretty good actually i like that on acoustic guitar quite a bit and uh what am i missing oh the acoustica i haven't put my head around the tape or whatever they call that guy it's pretty good it's a little confusing because there's so many options you know they've got so many different model tape machines on it that you know it's it's not it's a little overwhelming i mean there's a lot of boxes out there and plug-ins that have so many controls that turns me the word turned me off is probably wrong but gets me scared because it's just overwhelming but to be honest they're all pretty solid i don't know if any of them really sound like tape you know in general but they sound pretty the atr is pretty good yeah i was talking i was talking to just just just to sort of a tail on to this i was talking to um our pulsar friends who would say great guys and i and they looked at one of i'm not going to say what it is one of the most popular transformer plug-ins and analyzed it and said yes an amazing plug-in it's not transformer it's just different variations of saturation and you know it's just the reality is is like you know a lot of these things are what's the right way of our um what do you call it when you're stacking things up like one we end up using tape plug-ins transformer plug-ins in a way that was very different from the way they were usually used because it was a combination of maybe 10 things in a chain that gave us that sound so we're trying to get a plug in to get the whole sound of a classic record i'm just going to put this tape plugging on it well it's like as mark was saying when you need the tape going in you need the tape going out when it's mixed you need at least i don't know eight transformers in the way because you have a transformer in the mic probably with the tube in the mic going into a you know into a compressor which had a couple of transformers input and output transformers input and output transformer on the mic pre you know and then then that's maybe that's then that's coming back down the console with the line amp with a transformer and a transfer on the output stage bounce to tape uh poltex transformers tubes i mean and then we're going which plug-ins gonna sound like that you know what i mean we've got to we've got to cut ourselves some slack here in a digital world that um you know you're not going to get that exact same sound unless you carefully reconstruct everything exactly because it wasn't just the magic of tape we all love tape i have an a80 you have what's that behind you that's just an akai yeah a quad you know we all love that but it can't just be solved with one of the pieces but it definitely helps i like the massey a lot i've forgotten about that because um but they were fantastic they stopped supporting other daws other than pro tools still a big fan yeah unfortunately i think i think he supports a couple of ones but i don't i don't think he has a vst anymore we'll have to hit him up and then um but mark ender swears by loves the massey um and then um i still i still use my dsp analog channel you like that i actually have never used much mac tsp maybe a bit in chicago at crc when i was doing stuff there they had a lot of that there so i would use it here and there but i think for your sensibilities you like it because it's it's definitely feels more like uh i'm being asked if i still record to tape a lot i still record to tape occasionally i don't do it a lot so i'm thinking about doing an episode there's a guy he's a wonderful guy named matt who's um on the east coast that refurbishes he's a retired navy guy and he refurbishes old tape machines that's his whole universe i saw this random thing where he has this like shop with like 40 and a lot of them's prosumer tape machines they're not all you know super big multitracks and it got to me thinking that like for me like i have a super digital chain my conversion's ridiculous every you know with everyone it's like quality is really great why would someone in 2021 want a tape machine they usually want it because they're wanting to color it and make things sound worse and so i go man i think i want to get a tascam 388 which is that original eight-track giant porta studio that it made it's a reel to reel just because i wanted to have options to maybe do some serious damage to things that i can't do i mean i have this guy which is oh this is the this is the original mark daniel nelson [Laughter] recorder that i had this is how i started going up on reverb for twenty seven thousand dollars being what's that company in england that sells everything at 10 times their price oh yeah this you know i don't know if you can read what this says oh it did it just autofocus uh it says john lennon bootleg i don't even so this is the original thing i've run a lot of stuff through it because it does something really cool that you can't do in uh digital so i'm thinking you'll be really neat is to have like a real cool setup like a 388 or something to be able to do just transfer stuff in it mangle it up because honestly if you want tape you're going to want it to make it sound a little less pretty you know you don't want it because you're looking for fidelity i had an atr in my room for two years and i never turned it on because it was so good and tran like everything was so good sounding that it was very far it wasn't far enough off from digital print and um that's my thing if you're gonna use tape you might as well go crazy i mean i had an mci two-inch for years and i on purpose always kept it at 15 ips and i didn't like noise reduction or anything like that because i wanted the effect of tape if you're gonna go for the effect go for the tape um so levi is asked this question a couple of times sorry for we didn't get to earlier um i'm going to use the bathroom and throw mark under the bus on this one uh what kind of reverb do you like to use on rap vocals mark longer decay time shorter decay time i found i like a short decay plate or room reverb what do you think yeah so hip hop is ever changing trends and i'm going to continue going on this guy because we have a bathroom break here so my background i was an assistant on rap sessions and hip-hop sessions before any other projects i was an intern at a studio that did multitude of every style of music in chicago that studio was called the chicago recording company it was amazing big studio had multiple different types of productions happening large giant jingle sessions that were big orchestra stuff all the way down to nighttime hip-hop sessions and a lot of large names came through that did a lot of the hip-hop albums there in the early 2000s reverb at the time you wouldn't use a lot you would just not do there would be delay and stuff and that goes into the mid-2000s where people started using a little more reverb on hip-hop and rap for me if you're talking hip-hop like original great kind of hip-hop there's kind of lo-fi hip-hop you would use kind of plate reverbs and kind of dirtier reverbs because it's like underground hip-hop stuff like that if you're doing kind of traditional normal modern hip hop and wrap if you're using a long reverb it's only for an effect for a shoot and you're right like something smaller like the amt 250 by universal audio is a fantastic reverb when you start bringing it down almost to the non-linear setting where it's almost like a room setting that will give it just enough for even the d verb in pro tools is pretty ridiculous when you click into the non-lin because it's just this really really short uh grainy kind of reverb and when you need the big long extension it will shoot off and become this really great unique depth that you're creating by creating this large reverb i would end up using a little bit larger reverb on certain projects because if you were kind of creating a motion sometimes the bass is so thick you want to add a little bigger reverb because when you're going for low end and wrap and hip hop you want the bass and the drums to be the biggest part so if you have a medium or smaller reverb on the vocal it actually loses the punch of the drums in the bass so think about it like that so it's either a little bit bigger or a little smaller but medium is kind of dangerous for at least for my approach because it takes away the drums and bass makes it sound less punchy um aslan asked this cup question a couple times so let's uh ask it do you notice any significant difference in placing reference speakers either vertically or horizontally yes so i had years ago i had the focal twins and when i got them they were like this horizontal and i liked them and i wasn't getting an image thing that i wanted out of them i just came back from being spoiled in the listening environment and trying to get the best i could at the time financially where i was at and so the twins were okay and then one day my right-hand man my assistant whatever you want to call my best pal ryan herma who is my guy at the time is like maybe try them up and down so we actually twisted them and put them vertical and what that did was it completely changed the image what i also did was at the time on my meter bridge in my console we had the the speakers and this the one tv monitor to look at pro tools and i didn't like the way that the the monitor was coming in the same atmosphere the same playing field as the tweeters of the speakers so we moved the monitor just back four inches and it actually helped the center of the image going back to the vertical speakers you know i don't know if there's a huge difference between ns10s going vertical versus horizontal because at crc we had ns10s and we had the 1030 genelecs and the 1030 genelecs you would only do them vertical but the ns10s half the time they would be the way you see them in classic pictures which is horizontal and then the other way is up and down which just honestly just looks like you walked into somebody's living room and they're just they took the speakers and put them up like that but i do think depending on the speakers the way that the three ways of a focal is and i think your trios back there are similar or do you not have your trios up uh i've got my uh trio 11's up yep yeah the trios are three ways right yeah but they've designed them if you're talking about the ones where they have two drivers on either side then the tweeter in the middle this has the driver on the outside and people ask me about this all the time that's exactly how they recommend it the bit main driver on the outside and then uh the beryllium tweeter with the mid-range driver underneath yeah on the inside the the sub and the the mid-range driver of the three-way or the same size speaker and i know that if you tr turn it you're going to get a little bit different well these are the trio 11 so they're actually a smaller speaker no no i understand that i'm saying that because i had the trios before i had the atc yeah they sounded really weird that the twins though like if you change them they will sonically change difference and sometimes you can fix phase issues just by changing your speaker so yeah experiment yep definitely um so stuart mcleish is asking about console emulation plugins um if you use them and if you do are you just thinking about them like a console you're putting them on every single channel or you just choosing things to use them on you know i had a couple of years and i was just actually talking eric about this a little bit ago you know i was in and out we talked about this the other day warren was summing i was i had a console then i started trying out all these different summing mixers including everything under the sun i had a custom api summing mixer that had 24 channels of 25 20 op-amps and transformers of real real api guts and then i went completely in the box after knowing that i had to go into it during that time i kind of tried certain console emulations since then i've tried the the waves guy slate sky luna uad's interpretation of what it's doing i know that plug-in alliance has something now they're all cool they all add color in fact yesterday i was watching a random video of somebody doing an a b between the waves and a slate and then the dangerous l2 which was or lt which i believe was the original two bus and my favorite of all those was over the analog summing of the dangers was the actual waves console emulation the nls what if it's called yeah the nls what i know it's doing that i don't gel with that i'm sure a lot of people gel with is i'm hearing some weird crosstalking on the top frequency of the transients so if you hear the air of the snares and stuff the snare like stuff like that starts getting funny sounding to me that i know what it's trying to do but it's not doing what a real console does and that's not why i chose that but take that back i've used it on separate channels and drive the snot out of it all the time because it really does do things uniquely it's just dangerous sometimes if you put it on every over across everything and you can't use mick knobs and stuff like that to make it actually sound clean i'm a big fan of clean but at the same time adding color and textures it's i don't know how to explain that it's really tricky i've used them absolutely do i use them every day i don't know because i think depending on your music if i'm doing a trailer mix i won't use anything because trailer which is like action film trailer sounds needs to be as super sharp and punchy as you can get so i don't even use analog for any of that and i try not to use a lot of compression i use a lot of surgical eq and a lot of clean reverb and it allows you to get super super clean sharp super fat low end stuff like that so depending on the the song or the project i will change it out marvellous yeah there's a lot of really good um questions um there's one here um it's been asked a couple of times um about recording like metal vocals um handheld in a room with speakers i i have done that um really the it's difficult because you know and you can obviously flip the phase and all that kind of stuff but you know you know i'm garth and that's what he calls himself you know garth richardson um did the first um rage against the machine record like that because zach delaroche wasn't used to wearing headphones and and frankly i think maybe he wasn't complaining but garth felt like he wasn't getting the performance he wanted so he just freed him up and gave him a 57 or a 58 and blasted the speakers in the room because remember they did it at a rehearsal room in cole stages which unfortunately has gone um which was an old mortuary for anybody that wanted to know that was a mortuary yeah used to rehearse they had these huge doors they're like this thick like the perfect soundproofing and all the rooms were so soundproofed but they were always really cold like no matter and then i asked the owner anthony and i was like um what's up with that he's like oh yeah this used to be a mortuary that's the reason why all these rooms have these massive thick doors and everything but anyway so how cool is that to add to the uh rage against the machine story that the album was recorded in a mortuary an ex-mortary jim morrison did this bruce botnick put up a u-47 as the real mic but gave him a dynamic same as i believe jack with steven tyler yeah you know put a big shotgun at his head but he held a because they want to perform so they want to hold a dynamic yeah i think it's one of those things that um to answer your questions talk about pantera's vocals um you know my experiences and i've done it many times is like it works um it's never perfect because you can flip phase you can put the mic back on the stand approximate where the singer was then play the music back in the room record it and then reverse the polarity flip it on its head and then you can cancel out quite a lot of the bleed it's pretty remarkable what you can do but you'll never do it perfectly because the volume is going to vary the there's going to be all kinds of different issues it works easily with things like choirs i've done kids choirs quite a few times where i put a pair of mics up over the choir and then the kids leave the room and i play the music back in the room at the same volume and that works 90 i know that they do that with orchestras or abbey road with orchestral stuff they'd have the music blasting in the room with the orchestra playing along and most of the mics of course are only facing the instruments so you'd be surprised how minimal amount of bleed there is in there but then the orchestra would leave and they'd play it back in the room record again flip the polarity cancels out a good 75 percent of the bleed it's pretty miraculous but when you have a singer that's performing like this as you can hear from me moving around it's not even so but i think what mark was trying to point out talking about jack and jim morrison and all that stuff is that the really the performance is the most important thing if you get a fairly well recorded amazing performance that's much better than a really really amazingly well recorded crappy performance i'll take the average recording with the amazing performance any day yeah peter gabriel recorded so entirely by himself with an sm58 in a chicken coop speaker's going i mean bono does the same i mean it's i found that for me as a singer-songwriter if i'm playing in a rehearsal with a band and we recorded it my vocals are better than if i'm sitting by myself doing vocals because i'm not a big guy that likes to do line by line or anything i like the whole performance aspect so i think that's what started with the whole re20 and the sm7 craze and stuff like that ken recorded stevie nicks's vocal dreams was recorded on an re20 oh right if you solo her vocal you hear mick in the corner on the vocal so if you mute the vocal on dreams the snare loses all its like value here's a little trick so if you listen to dreams go listen to drinks the second verse listen to the snare compared to the first verse the second verse is the only part that they punched in vocals on and so you'll hear the snare kind of just drop out in the second verse that's because that's a punch in after they did it and in fact when they did tusk i think they tried to put an m49 in front of stevie and it just wasn't working which is going back to why ken pushed me to do the re20 because it does work i don't know if it makes them more comfortable as a singer or if it's just there's something about a dynamic in the proximity effect versus certain mics it just works really good so i scratch vocals always prepare always record like you're taking a real take obviously that's a huge huge huge big advice that i got told when i was just starting as a second uh it's super important because you never know what's keeper and most the time like phil ramone talks about recording the band back in the day on their first album and like the dynamic microphones were falling over in the middle it takes you can hear it on the record the guitar goes and then it comes back and it's on the record and you remember it but it's all about the performance and the the takes because i think if i get remembered i'm going on a tangent here but i believe when the band recorder i think robbie robertson said that they set them up at a and r fully in gobos and everyone's tied up with headphones and leon helms is can't even move his arms and with all tons of tube microphones and then all of a sudden they said rip it all out we want to be a band and so they put re re20s re whatever the other res that were smaller eevee mics dynamics on everything told that all the amps out and everything's bleeding on each other and it was just a way better project now that sounds counterintuitive to my two comments but if you're recording a band in a room you'd be surprised how much you can get away with with just 57s absolutely no amazing uh i just there there's a mic i'm looking for to talk about but i don't want to talk about it until i end up buying it yeah because every time i talk about a microphone that's like weird and random that we know somebody used it i go to buy one after i put the video out and they're all like seven hundred dollars i'm like wait there that used to be a cheap microphone yeah the key warrant is to buy up all of them and then say it and then put him up online i don't have that much money only danny uh only john mcbride sorry uh john mcbride does that um i think he i think john if he ever retires and wants to sell blackbird is going to be a very very wealthy man his collection is second to none absolutely insane i went there john last week he's great he's doing they're doing great too down there no they're doing they're doing fantastic yeah yeah i um i went there about uh maybe first time well second time i went there maybe 12 or 15 whatever really early on when they were sort of really doing great rates on the room they went there with the fray and we recorded a christmas ep at 7am or something crazy like that because they pulled in the night before they had to leave by one or two so we booked the studio from 7 00 a.m till one and for anybody that's a fan and you want to find the christmas ep isaac singing like this he does that anyway but give the fact that it was probably 7 30 when i had a mic up but i remember we were tracking something before that this is the quick part of the story and they didn't have any supraphonics any love with super phonics which of course is crazy because you know of that being like a classic snare drum so i said to the assistant i said how come you have any super phonics because we're doing an ep there and like another ep there and he goes don't worry next time you come back john will have 12. and we were back six months later and then they had like the best collection of super phonics ever yeah absolutely amazing there's a good question here um i i don't want to speak too much about this but it's a good question to talk about compression because um matthew messner says what's what exactly is waves arvox doing besides compression same goes with mv2 and the reason why i like that is because there's something about the rvox which i absolutely love um and one what i've always reason why i always reach for it is yes it's a really great compressor um but it seems to really bring up the low end and the low mids dramatically so it's a good compressor to reach for when i've got a girl singer or a guy with a thinner voice and i'm trying to bring a bit body in it and i think it raises this whole question on sort of what we've been skirting around in so many ways that not all compressors are created equally the compressors that come with your daws are probably absolutely phenomenal at compressing the signal but the reason why we like these emulations or we like hardware is because they do so much more than just compress they add tons of you know different things that we love um well the other thing is at the time when like the renaissance series waves plug-ins came out i hate to say it but the plug-ins that came with the daws weren't very good right so we all flocked to these things in the beginning and got very used to using them so it's not that we think that they're not good enough it's just we became used to using certain things in the beginning i don't even know what's under the hood of an r box no idea i don't know why that's not l1 combined with the damn emulation of a 1176 i use it a little bit to tickle but i also love the gate it's ridiculous it's super active and accurate and it goes on every vocal just to have that little bit of a clean chain at the very end of it yep i agree um yeah i agree i i really i enjoy a lot um i think our base is another one of those ones i'm really a big fan fan of you know what i mean absolutely our base on every mix there is a video coming out eventually of me just doing a low end thing that you guys want me to do one of those yeah i do i'm making a joke because warren and i said how many videos can we do with low end low end videos yeah i i i agree um i mean i mean i'm enjoying everybody on youtube remaking my videos i i it's thank you so smart it's it's a lot of fun [Laughter] yeah i agree with you on the renaissance stuff it's they're my stock plugins i reach from all the time i know how they work and they just sound great and i use them but you're right when they came out most of the stock plugins we had were not as good now of course stock plugins are fantastic all right let's keep going through the questions um um um somebody's saying from some of the questions in the chat yen says it must be happy hour in some parts of the world right now i'm noticing that right on fellas uh oh someone asked about atticus oh i missed atticus where is atticus oh you can barely see him he's i can see his his legs are sticking out if you can't see him he's he's trying to stay as close as he can the question i believe was how does he stay so quiet i don't know i i've lucked out i had a wine writer named oliver before him that passed away a couple years ago that was the most crazy maniac i've ever had that used to sing along to every song and he just he's great he just he just becomes anarchist just sleeps all the time and he's my little story buddy so we we have long conversations about music and compressors and everything that's amazing there's just loads of stuff coming in yep uh [Music] what is the mixbus 32c what is the mixbus 32c oh yeah it's a daw which is great there's a lot of people like the harrison thing it's the harrison thing yeah gotcha i saw something about i haven't used it somebody said i like this uh yours how yours said the difference between a good and a bad vocalist is a good vocalist sounds great on a fifty dollar mic and a bad singer sounds even worse on a twenty thousand dollar mic i'd never have never heard that before it's true you can't fix something that is already clunking yep definitely uh tips for cellos harrison oh i missed um you know it's orchestra instruments are tricky because it's usually based around two elements three elements before it even hits the microphone the player the instrument and then the room now if you can't get those three right you're gonna be in really tricky place for me i use that word a lot but for me i like a u-47 a fat-47 something that has a good mid-range on a cello i don't like to stay too far away i like to get a lot of the low end so i can get a little bit of the eleanor rigby kind of sound where you're getting some of the bite out of it even for large scale film stuff i've been kind of pushed by other engineers that oh you can't do that it's like yes you can absolutely you can totally like an instrument close but i would say anything that has a large diaphragm something a little less expensive audio technica 4050s very good mic 400 mic sounds great on cello it's a darker not super super super bright mic it's not based around an 87 or something like that but if you want something like an 87 try an 87 or something that has that sound they just don't sound really great on my opinion on a cello they're a little too bright and zingy sounding so john's asking monitor preference now obviously we we know use atc's which are you know they're right up there pmcs atc's genelecs i mean all of those companies make incredible monitors focal in the top of the end range of those companies is unbelievable but forgetting the monitor manufacturer for a second um john powers asking do you prefer three-way worth three-way monitors versus two-way and a sub which do what do you what do you think you would you like the combinations do you ever do you have a preference real quick andre yes 414 on cello works absolutely that was the chetle mic that i learned from dennis tusana and gus at chicago recording company back in the day so 100 100 uh preference on speakers three ways two ways subwoofers all the good stuff i i like power i'm a huge fan of not hearing the speaker compress and distort i like sub information i'm still always fighting if i'm getting enough low end because i always tend to lean into it and i like mid-range i don't like fatigue brightness i've had a problem over the last 20 years that i mix way too loud to the point now where i'm really trying to force myself to come back and tone down it's just really hard for me to mix and hear low end at a quiet volume the trinov saved my life for many years in a room that i had to have accurate listening environment that i didn't like subs until i got the trend off and that made me really like it and just pause you for a second we're going to do a video with trinov here and try it out in the room so back to you great yeah it's going to be a neat little shazam experiment i would say you know there's plenty of speakers out there that are really good the the original event 2020s not bad if you keep them quiet not bad at all the precision eights by event not bad if you keep them quiet a lot of these speakers the manufacturers can't put large amplifiers in there or the components aren't made to be able to handle a lot of sound a lot of pressure if you're going to go back before then back to the traditional sense like a jbl or a larger yuri those things can handle a lot more pressure and they feel like you're getting a lot more but all you're doing is just not being able to clip them and they still sound funny to me certain ones like those old what are they the 803s the uries with the blue i think so yeah centric yep those were funny but i'm a fan of the dual concentric in the tanuays like the gold tens the mastering lab crossovers in those you know ed cerney al schmidt bill schnee george massenberg all these guys love this tanyay box to knoy whatever way you want to talk about because of the way it represented your mix you can almost hear the speaker in the mixes ethan johns i believe use them and you can talk about the little golds yeah the lit they're like little tanya tens with the mastering lab crossover yeah dave jordan had i don't know if he still has them anymore but i think he had four pairs identical pairs all with the mastering lab crossovers on them yeah bill had six or seven pairs i'm sure al has them too it's just does one thing really well and you know they're old speakers and i bet if these guys didn't have them it wouldn't matter isn't ivana doing the i don't know if they're still doing it or not well i think you have to i think you customers order yeah well you the customer has to find the has to find a pair of the speakers because she doesn't have them so what you do is you ship them um you know a pair that you buy used and then she does the mods for you got it yeah i don't believe that the drivers are being made anymore you know they said they are no i talked to somebody at tannoy a few days ago and unfortunately the scottish uh scottish uh factory is gone there's your answer but they are making them um they're still making them in europe they're making them in poland so you can but i don't know of those particular drivers um hey brett real quick question brett wheeler i had to get a really super computer just how do you handle the cpu of all the plugins i use it was a decision i made i had a 12 core tower and it was starting to finally take a dive and i had to make a real decision if i was going to end up investing into a new super mac pro 2020 mac pro versus getting an r2d2 so i ended up jumping for the big guy and it's but you know with the new m1 processors coming out you're going to probably be able to hang just as well which makes me go should have waited we'll see there's a couple of questions here i i like um there's like three in a row here i like this one from uh yantho yantho weepinghorn um and yantho says warren and mark and the reason why i like this question is because this is the one i remember asking ed ed cerney uh warren and mark obviously mark if the building caught fire what is the one piece of gear you would save probably my computer only because of the time it's taken for me to get everything i have it all backed up but i'm looking around going i can't grab any of my outboard gear regardless of how much it's worth i certainly couldn't grab both of my atc speakers i couldn't grab my shadow hills compressor i couldn't grab my teegler stuff down here i would be able to grab that guitar because i'm running out the door i would probably just rip out as much as i could and grab my computer just because it has everything and it would allow me to go right away and work continuously because if i didn't have that i couldn't work right away it's a weird thing to say but no it's a good answer it's an honest answer this stuff's easily replaceable with my insurance that isn't right away that's true yeah yeah creative stuff is not replaceable yeah frank atticus is right here i can see him he's having a nap he's very happy and relaxed um other great questions um um oh we had the upright bass question well that'd be the same as the cello the 47 for you still definitely me for the upright for an upright bass yeah definitely it's weird i think bill brought up the story with you schnee about the one time he was recording i was there when he was recording a young kid that was getting into juilliard and he put a u-47 up and the kids like oh no i use this mic and bill looks at him like i know what i'm doing um u47 always works on an upright bass even if the bass is a piece of firewood just it there's something about it that sounds great m149 actually sounds pretty good too but that's because the high output of that sucker anything that has a ton of low end you're able to capture that doesn't have a lot of gain issues so depending on your ribbon mic you're not going to end up getting a lot of you might get a lot of noise with a ribbon mic basically what i'm saying is if you're going to try to bring it up too much uh do you have an answer for this this has been a discussion inside of the academy do you do you have any particular insurance uh for your studio equipment or do you just do it under your house our house insurance is covered through that but i actually have an extension through state farm and they're really great at organization and knowing what you have and what you need to figure out how to put that together it's important because no one really thinks it's going to happen and it does happen it could be anything from theft to fire to water damage to anything anything at all if the gear just blew up there's clauses you can have under your insurance program that allows you to have that being repaired or fixed so you just have to keep your eyes open know that over the course of a year it's not going to cost an absolute ton of money considering how much money you might have invested into it dj medusa is buying you a sandwich and says are there any shortcuts to a better mix that you wish you had known before now yeah when you were starting off what's the what what are the shortcuts that you're like ah if only i think buses stereo buses were a big awakening moment for me because i grew up on a console and i was you know trained to not group things in a way when i was starting and i was using a console on my studio i had other engineers come in and they would always have buses set up for their instruments and i never oh that's not good that's not right because you're so used to using single channels and the way you'd sum out and you'd use eqs and then you'd group things for parallel or something the second i started creating buses for my groups not only allowed me in my template to create stems in real time it just made things easier where i only had to program and process things as a whole literally for a drum set i don't do a ton of eq anymore on a full drum set i just add a pull tech and depending on the compressor or distortion box it can get me really close way faster than having five or six plug-ins so i'd say stereo bus grouping on top of it if you have a track or a session that has 400 tracks it takes forever to get around it so being able to group things in elements color coding correctly each group consistently where your bind knows exactly what the the group is based on the color and then using your stereo busses before it dumps down into the master has saved a lot of time and made things a lot more fun here is his interesting question uh question that everybody asks i don't know if you've answered this under one of the other videos but ma marcio uh mosquito is saying mark do you actually use those in-ears for mixing absolutely these suckers sig sim got let me see if i can hold it to the let me try this again i don't know yeah perfect so this was a fluke i i didn't want when i was doing these videos i didn't want to use big bulky headphones i just thought they looked ridiculous and i can't get these to work i just i don't know what i'm doing here i didn't want big giant headphones when i was mixing because i didn't want two things i didn't want to be able to be tied down to it and i you know i'm all about challenging myself as well i think the kicker is if you learn something that you're not supposed to be able to pull off and you're able to pull it off it becomes way cooler so i would say i bought these as a fluke because i'm like oh they're 150 we'll see how they sound and we would go and decide that based around if they're going to work i did one song with them and they seemed to work well and then right after the one song i mixed i mixed that that first mixing pop slash americana project for you guys for that first mixing video and that was a hundred percent all the way on these guys and they sound great i do have these audeze lcd x's they're great they look cool they sound great they have amazing low end i have the audeze in-ears they sound great they work really great um the the receive or uh there's a couple other companies that i have i have the sony's over there i think i'm starting to realize i can mix on whatever i put myself into if i understand what's doing but it's never gonna work until you really have kind of trust in something so with these i knew just by listening to music i could tell you that they're really bright and that i had to be very careful but part of mixing is not doing things based around routine and trusting yourself so if i'm adding 15 decibels of snare a top end on a snare something's wrong because i don't ever really have to do that so if you put on new pair of headphones and you're doing stuff totally out of your range or paired new speakers out of your range most likely something's wrong and that goes to everything so real reality-wise my sounds usually stay the same previous sets do seem to work okay to get you started on toms and kick my eq curves relatively same stay the same regardless of who's recording it warren could you say the same about getting tracks they're relative it's not everything is not the same but relative you stay pretty close to the same i think that's why people with 80 series neves are able to do such great work because they're only using it as a sculpting mechanism and it's relatively doing the same thing no matter what or whoever whoever's using it whoever records it yeah i i i when i work with i did three albums with dave sardi um a long time ago like early 2000s and you know dave's fantastic and has made some of the best sounding records like jet obviously and the first wolf mother record which is phenomenal yeah and i had an 8058 and an api um and he helped reinforce a lot of what we're talking about like he would mix i remember we were sent the towers of london records anybody remember the towers of london they were like this kind of like uh british i can't remember if they were welsh but anyway they were british um like metal kind of 70s new wave of new wave of british metal kind of bit trashy you know banned and we got sent this record and i can't remember who had recorded it but anyway it had like five mics on every single guitar and so he said to me can you just output this through the console and choose choose some mics for me like he was testing me you know choose some mics so i was like oh all terrified you know because we were making a record so he went off into the other room at the past dave way's old studio and went back to doing some tracking while i output this for him so he could come back in the next day and mix it and i remember just like the five mics all together just sounded like total mush because they're all completely out of phase of each other and you know that thing that we all do you know record let's put up more mics it's gonna sound better you know and um so i ended up like choosing the one that was labeled 57 like you do it was the close mic 57 it was the only one that i thought anybody had a chance of being able to make a choice with and what he did is like when he came into mix like he came in he started mixing he's like okay cool you can go back and work on something else i went over and then i came back at the end of the mix and he said do me a favor can you do some prints so i would do the print so vocals up vocals down guitars up guitars down snare up snare down all these different prints he gave me a list of about 20 different prints to do in case the label wanted some quick changes or the band so i did all the prints and so i'm sitting there listening to every single print as it goes down in real time and i go over to the console and the thing about this just the same thing with apis classic apis and classic neves is all the boosts and the cuts are what you expect and because you're quote limited for one of a better word with the frequencies that you can do on an ac series console you know compared with the fully sweepable you know ssl you know semi-parametric you know or other consoles with fully parametric because you're limited it sort of it sort of became like a jigsaw puzzle of logic you go to the kick you go 60 boost you go to the snare you go i put a bit of 220 on that you go to the bass guitar you put a bit of 110 on it it's amazing and it all just starts to fit together like this incredible jigsaw puzzle and then before you know it you got a record it's it it's that all the limitations were actually so helpful and like you just said i was all just adding on to what you said a couple of minutes ago people that have an 80 series console they have a methodology of working it doesn't mean that you don't use plug-ins and tweak things and maybe use um like we used to use the massenberg on the master bus you know eq and maybe we would print through an ssl bus compressor sometimes the focusrite red we tried different things but essentially 90 of it was on what the console did it was the cat sound of the console absolutely [Music] reading some of these i know some great questions um dennis says there's two questions that are similar can you talk about your mix bus philosophy a couple of people asked earlier about what you do or don't do on your mix bus when you're mixing in the box yeah in or out i i try to chase one thing which is you know retaining the biggest element you can out of your master bigger than life i have a hard time when i click in and listen to a reference that i'm given after i'm starting my mix and i'm clicking into my mix and it sounds smaller it really hurts it's just like what can't be and i know some people would rather go for character and they don't focus on that because honestly speakers are going to make something sound bigger but for me i try to choose bigness and bigger than life over anything and with a 2buss that means everything so it i choose in the box compressor or an eq or a tape emulation around that if it shifts things in a way that's okay but if it makes it smaller or it takes low mids out of something i don't like that i get really worried because i feel that that is creating a counterintuitive approach of how i'm trying to get things to sound in general not to go against any companies or anything but when i do put something in line and it takes something away it it puts me into a real hard place to decide if i want to continue on with that that could be a bass guitar that could be the drum mix that could be the full mix if i put a tape saturation plugging in and it takes low end out like let's say 30 hertz just a little bit i don't want to have to add that back with an eq now some things you have to like analog you you kind of have to know that but it's just a little different character to deal with that um i'm sorry i'm reading some of these other questions there's just they're just folding down like falling down the stairs i would just use something in a very tasteful way i like two or three different types of multi-band compression on a 2buss sometimes it's literally the fat filter multiband compressor where you can really figure out what you want to take out of it sometimes it's the acoustica titanium which is i'm assuming the tube tack uh smc 2b which i have the hardware of and i like the glue symtonic glue which is the ssl style and i like ssl's bus compressor they're all fantastic i do like the ones with mix knobs because what i can do is create the glue and then get the like definition of the size back with the mix knob and kind of fool around with that but my approach is i do add uh api 550 or 5500 eq on a 2buss because it's becoming a new thing with me where i like the curve i like the 50 hertz and the 10k and whatever happens with the 20 twice 25 20 op amp whatever that's doing to it two bus really seems to make it sound like a record so i do use that almost on everything i used to do the pull tech thing i know warren does that he likes the pultex i think it's just you go for what you can do i'm not a huge multi-multi guy like brower who uses five different compressors that's tricky for me my mind can't like approach that it gets really mucky but that doesn't mean it doesn't work for some people absolutely probably works definitely works for michael so i think for me it's more simpler is better and then i use a limiter for makeup and i use it even if i know it's going to mastering like eric boulanger at the bakery or something it will just go to him with the limiter and then one without so he can hear at least what i'm doing and what i like to hear because i like to shave off the snare and stuff before it goes to them anyways so i might just bring out the volume just a little bit so they can do their twinkling afterwards fantastic uh lots of questions versions of the question of sort of how do you know when the mix is finished what's your sort of process do you have a a checking process do you listen in the car do you have it on do you take an hour break come back and listen to it you wait till the next day what is your sort of process of signing off on the mix for yourself when i was kind of getting started it was you know you had time to kind of like a mix and then wait until the next project came in or you could really do 40 different versions of it to make sure you're happy after the experience and after the 10 000 hours it took you to get to a place you feel comfortable i just got to a place where now i'm working on three or four projects a day that doesn't mean i'm finishing three or four projects a day it just means i'm working on three or four separate songs or q for a film a day my template's set up where everything is falling in line all i have to really touch for recall is my tubetech and all that is is just touching the threshold everything else everything else stays the same so for me when i know it's done is when it just sounds right and i literally will mix a song for two hours and go on to the next song of a completely different album and then come back the next day on the same song and i will catch stuff that i didn't do but a lot of times i don't like printing in one day i don't like mixing a song i happens all the time or i have to because of time constraints or whatever but if i had my choice i would mix it all over the place where i'm like this sounds good and then i'd leave it and i'd come back in a day or two while i'm working on something else and by doing that i put it up in it could be ready to print the second i put it up and i'll go up the vocal is a little too loud or up the snare is too loud you can't always be satisfied because that's the never-ending devil's triangle that we as engineer mixers get lost in when to stop when it's enough because how many times have you guys mixed something hated it absolutely despised it embarrassed what you did people think it's great but you think it's terrible and you're just shamed and then like four months later you come back and you hear it again you're like this sounds freaking great what did i do how come i can't get it to sound like that now it's because everything is evolving your opinion is always changing tomorrow you could use a different compressor that you would have used today it's just knowing that it's all about the the experience and the the moment of decision making it's why i've flocked more to producing and mixing versus engineering producing and mixing full albums i still do but the project has to be something i really want to be a part of is because i like coming in super fresh and then leaving it's because it's as a creative you still are using your mind as a mixer similar to you would if you were writing a song or something like that so you have to come in fresh and know what's going on and just trust that your instinct that day is going to do what it does marvelous uh there was another earlier question um that i really liked that there's variations on talking about you know obviously the classic way of making records you know we're talking earlier about rumors and we were talking about greats like ken and jack douglas and sheliakis and james cena all of these people that are mentors to us either directly or indirectly um they all talk about bill schneid they all talk about recording the way that they want to hear it committing the sound do you still think that way when you're recording um and then a cup somebody couple people ask that but then somebody else also asks like well how do you decide how do you decide what the sound's going to be it's the same approach of just trusting whatever your body's telling you at that moment you know uh centered what how do you pronounce isc and or d delta iv yes i'm a huge gianlan fan and that inspires me every day like that guy incredibly inspires me every day i have no idea what kind of person i would have been like without the beatles so to say of course of whatever i mean it's i'm going to think about his tape delay when i'm mixing a song or i will think about the drums that jim keltner played on on mind games which is just outstanding sounding or the same as the production value on double fantasy like i still see jack douglas as unattainable mystical god that was part of something so magical that i can't process that so when i think about double fantasy i think about that and how special that record was and how unbelievable it sounds i still listen to it today the drums on that record are so unbelievable the toms just the arrangements that jack douglas did with john lennon unbelievable so all these little things it's the same thing going back to like conning crows and t-bone burnett his influence it's all about influence of what they're hearing now they may be hearing something like oh i wanted to do this because it sounded like the beatles i do remember john lennon saying when they were recording woman that was his beatles song let's record this like it's like make it like the beatles did it sound like the beatles absolutely not but it sounded like john lennon and anything that john lennon does sounds like the beatles so there's reference to anything you can make it do i think trusting yourself when you're starting i did that guitar video yesterday and somebody said it reminds me of daniel lenoir and what he does with his son escapes and briannino and they're just textures and it's exactly why i do that because that's what it reminds me of too and i think there's no new ideas i think the ideas that come new are the ideas you combine from your influences which create new vision and as a mixer i try not to like reinvent the ball or reinvent the game or anything but i do like to kind of pull certain things and sometimes i will literally pull de carlos drum sound that jack produced lita carlo who engineered double fantasy his his drum sound and then bill schneids bass sound from this thing and then michael brower's vocal reverb sound from that shade record that i love and all these things and turn that into one sound in my head when i'm mixing this r b track so it just it it just comes when you hear it it's instinct great i'm cherry-picking some great questions here here's one i think we should talk about because i get asked it um maybe 25 times a day and i have my answer i'm not going to influence yours but how much headroom do you leave for the mastering process can't tell how many times i get asked that day well i think that was important five ten years ago i'm not sure if it's as nearly as important now knowing that the architecture and these daws can handle overs 32-bit stuff like that up processing i mean i remember back in gears dan lay days you would end up going and trying to find out how do you make why isn't an in-the-box mix as good as a console mix and at the time i believe that the busing system in pro tools specifically i'll talk about that because that's what i use was in sense that by the time you bottlenecked down to your master if you were you know hitting lights and stuff then it just sounded clamped and not very pleasing so if you brought everything down with clip gain and you're hitting your 2buss quieter it just was leaving a lot more headroom it's like if you hit electronics hard you're going to start clamping things down now i think you can get away with the things a little bit easier but off of approach and what i do and i'm sure what warren does similar sometimes is you end up kind of going into a routine and for me i like to get a rough mix going and i always ask the client to make sure they include the ref but make sure that the prints the session sounds like the ref relative without the eq and the reverbs and stuff but the balance is close and then when i put it on i can bring everything down clip gain right away so the peak is negative four that's my sweet spot so when i put in my buses they're only tapping a little bit right away and i don't have to do a ton of gain staging there's another question about do i start every mix with the drums and it's yes only because that's i have a hard time starting with a guitar and a vocal and knowing that there's drums in there it's only because i like drum and bass and i feel that that's a super important element and i don't think that it causes problems with my vocal saving it to last i don't know why it just doesn't seem to ever affect it i've tried a couple times to do it the other way around and it's a disaster so i just stay with my way for some reason it does work but it's the same as my favorite mixers all do uh audience perspective drums and i do drummer's perspective so it doesn't mean i'm following anything crazy no i i think uh but this is a good question when you talk about the mixing vocals first or last i think if if you're producing a record really well you're starting off with a vocal and then building the tracks around it so if that's been done really really well like i quite often i've got close to a keeper vocal an acoustic guitar before i even add instruments and quite i am you can list thousands of records made where they use some of the earliest vocals because everybody has performed around them and nothing feels better especially in a pre kind of gridded world where the musicians were playing off of the lead vocal so why do i bring that up i bring that up because then it doesn't really matter which order you're mixing because you can mix the drums first because everything works around the vocal i think it's a difficult world where you know the vocals left till the very very end and there was no scratch vocal in the whole process and you just built a track up you might be moving between the vocal and the tracks trying to figure out how to make them relate together but in a more traditional recording environment where you have a great scratch vocal you're tracking around you can you can and there's obviously gonna be different opinions but you can leave the vocal tool last because they've been recorded to fit around it um so there's a ton of really good questions here um there some some of them are sort of yes and no oh by the way slick with the k slik we did answer that question about recording uh vocals um in a room you may be slipped off and went to another video and came back but if you go back earlier we talked about that we talked about how regimes against machine recorded vocals in a room how garth did it all that stuff um steve chaos do you avoid listening to any of your own mixes should i listen to other music that i enjoy i.e classic rock etc or would that discolor my mixes to sound less like they need to sound like for today oh i have what do you think of that do you reference classic stuff even though it might not be necessarily current yeah i have to because i love the way it sounds but here's the thing i mix so different than what i love it's just something that i i don't know why but it's like when i did the reissue for fleetwood on the mirage album that was like ken did the original with keith and it's a great sounding record and when we did the reissue i added more bottom because that's how i mix and there was a couple parts don't tell anybody that we used a sample on the kick because mr featherfoot mick fleetwood who's my favorite drummer of all time we couldn't get the punch the correct way so we had to tuck certain things in and you couldn't hear it you wouldn't know that it's there because we were augmenting but my point is i hear differently than i love my favorite records i can't even do what they do and i wouldn't because it's there's just a weird combination i do listen to my records and i am absolutely terrified at what i hear absolutely i don't like the way i mix i always question every mastering engineer are you sure there's too much are you is there too much low end nah it sounds great it's huge no no no it's just a little too boomy it's i might i'm listening on my iphone and the snare is gone the limiter on my mind something's gone and like i'm my worst critic it's always going to sound the worst as the person it's the same as the singer saying can you turn can you turn my vocal down a little bit because they don't want to hear themselves because they're embarrassed internally about for some or insecure they they're focused hyper focusing on one thing instead of the overall picture listen to your peers listen to people around them try to get the positive feedback even if it's negative use that as a positive try to use anything you can to better yourself and if you don't trust yourself it's really hard to if you don't listen to other people and if they say it's great it's great go with that um a couple of questions tom thanos hey thanos um is asking about saturational main vocal yeah i like the i call it the fur you know it's i don't like super black keys kind of distorted vocals when it doesn't need to be there but when it does it's awesome you know the decapitator is phenomenal the thermonic culture uad plug-in is phenomenal the uh just stompbox plugins are freaking great sansamp plugin miracle on vocals uh clanghelm has a thing i think it's called sdr somebody will correct me sdr something that lets you go between transformer tape tube uh solid state and overdrive and that will allow you to do all these sort of unique distortions when you're a mixer and everyone's kind of staying in the box you want to create your own sounds so if you can find your own distortion box if you have the option to do a loopback that's why i was talking about tape machines earlier cheaper tape machines is because you can do stuff that no one else can do with distortion and then your mixer goes or your client goes how did you do that because they don't have access to that certain thing so find stuff even if you're at like a garage sale and there's like old receivers you know that i think they used to make those high fidelity reverb spring delays for high phi systems and stuff like that just cheap old realistic you know brand reverbs stuff like that try to incorporate all these unique custom things into your sounds and then you're independent from other people and that's a kicker same as reverbs same as rehamping and stuff like that no that's absolutely fantastic um just an interesting question here so emery or emera um tama or tamar says mark how much are you being involved in a project for example do you come up with the ideas of let's say do you suggest you wouldn't use that guitar part or change an instrument completely i mean obviously the quick answer to that would be you know are you if you're the producer then obviously that's a big part of your job but i think maybe another way of looking at that question is like just say somebody sends you something to mix and you like it and you you kind of invested in it you think it's a great song you like the artists think they have a great voice you think the arrangement's good but there's things that you just wish they had redone how you know not necessarily i think this is the kicker because obviously if something's terrible we all go that's terrible redo it but if you felt like something could have something added to it that would really take it over the edge do you find yourself doing that or do you think you're always balancing kind of time and money you know going well if i get them to retract that i won't hear it from them for three weeks what's your sort of process you have to kind of yeah you have to balance and mourn you know this you have to balance your relationship like almost like you're a therapist with the artist so what you're doing is you're sensing their temperament so if you feel that it needs to be redone you have to decide when it's right to tell them the other thing is that half the time if the music's great and it sounds great and you know that their temperament is going to be a certain way you just move on you mix it and you're excited and you move on it is what it is you have to always remember when it is what it is you you move on that's the performance that's the representation they're trying to achieve moving on and then sometimes weird stuff happens where you get you know called and they're like we want you to mix this song or this record and you listen you're like this is really good and then they get excited and then you start like befriending each other and i'm dealing with that right now with this artist named zev who's phenomenal writer and he's been producing his own stuff for a long time and i just really jide with him really well and i gave him some ideas and he was super open to it and now like we're talking about you know my assistant is like going to reham some stuff on his synth with like literal real analog synth bass versus it's software abyss stuff like that and it's like you just kind of inspire yourselves when you're working with clients i just want to create the best thing i can create the song isn't great and i'm being asked to work on it i do reach out and try to help as many people as i can even if the song in my opinion isn't amazing i just want to help so we try to do things that are unique enough that it's going to create a nice atmosphere and a nice relationship working-wise to better the track even if the song's already really good you can always take it up a little bit more nuno's asked this question a few times so i apologize nuno i keep seeing it and wanting to ask it um and you've just refined the question even more which is fantastic nuno asks approaching approach to mixed drums that attract in a small space without any room mics and then nuno adds i like to send drum tracks to the ik sunset sound reverb that's the room emulation and also likes the st devil lock do you have any tips for when somebody sends you something which is literally kicks and air pair of overheads yeah i like the dead drum sound i grew up loving rumors i was not saying rumors yeah i mean that's as dead as you can get i mean warren's done drums in that room it's yep carpet literally fuzzy little fuzzy stuff creating the most dead sound you can imagine now the key with that is you want to train the drummer to not hit as hard like ben from the fray is a mofo when it comes to hitting a drumstick it's incredible drummer but like i always used to when i remember first hearing the fray before they were even signed i used to go that guy reminds me of fleetwood mac just his performance his vibe everything about it so it does matter what kind of drama does the brain he has the brain of a producer he wants to produce so he thinks about his drums in the context of the song as opposed to here's this great phil i just made up exactly exactly just for the song so but i would say a drummer like ben or a drummer like mick fleetwood in a dead room will always succeed because of that or ringo that's why if you listen to plastic owner band which we're hitting 50 years now going back to john lennon ringo's drum sound and that album is unbelievable and that's like a lot of it is just because he's decided not to play cymbals or he's playing light so i learned right away in the beginning that the best way to get a unbelievable drum sound is to have the drummer play very light and then amplify it with great preamps and compression and stuff to make it sound bigger than life now if you get the tracks and they aren't played like that and the symbols are too much just take them down i mean there's so much opportunity now where you can reamp or you can re-sample or do anything you need to fake it and as a mixer you need to do it in a way that no one knows you're doing it you don't want to hear the gun on the snare so you have to like automate triggers so if it's light and there's ghost nuts you got to keep the original all sorts of little tricks so james is asking because um all the academy members by the way hi everybody from the academy here lots of you here amazing obviously know that i use poltex whether i'm mixing hybrid or not i try you know whether i'm mixing through the full console or i'm just using it for more of a monitoring situation i do there's a couple of things that are pretty irreplaceable for me not to say there isn't plug-ins for them but it's usually the bus compressor obviously if i can i hit that obviously i have the tagalog or the jiggler crem bus compressor as well and i have poltex particularly on the base it's absolutely amazing um they're asking what is it for you is there like certain pieces of hardware are you looking at certain pieces oh yeah yeah hardware is so i can be confident to say that in the box i i could do what i do i'm very happy now if i have a choice hardware i do like it it does matter to me it does help me get to a place faster big fan of the api 5500 eq it creates a very instant sound that really works well the plug-in does something similar but doesn't do it same as the tubetech multi-band it does something different same as the teegler audio compressor that i have down here that's the uh switchcraft that is its own device i don't even know what it does i'm trying to talk to michael and say what is it doing and i'm believing it's the line amps of the tubes that are making it sound magical same as the tiger reverb same as the brocassi reverb like all these things really do work great and there are plug-in counterparts like my template is set where i have my brocassi running into the full mix but i have the seventh heaven running a hundred percent into all the stems in the same setting and it's totally doing the same thing now there's a little bit of a difference in a sound character that i like on a hardware but relative plug-in stuff is just as go-to or i almost feel like oh no i'm not as i got i can't as it is hardware converters summing mixers you know if i had great speakers in a great dac two channel with a good monitor controller and a good sounding room i could do anything i would feel just as strong to do it but i like to be comfortable it's like people wanting to work in their own world it's like why people chose reebok instead of nike it's why people drive chevy trucks instead of toyotas they like what they like they stay what they like they might like a gibson better than they like a schecter whatever it is i think the biggest kicker is choose what you love build what you love know that there's access around it learn how to get around it and then do what you that do sense that makes perfect sense a lot of people are [Music] asking you know about getting rid of harshness and stuff and i've been trying to answer that in some of the questions i'm a big fan obviously of oak sound but you know dieses and then uh somebody else sound the soothing the suits yeah which is an absolutely amazing plugin um it's dangerous gotta be careful with that oh yes yeah because you're gonna want to put it on everything it's almost like the clarophonic where it's like if you don't step away from it you're you're going too far you do the 15 10 rule yeah this sounds good come back 10 yeah no i agree we had this conversation inside the academy and underneath a lot of the video and i was answering people i was talking about uh karen i think is here hey karen um was asking karen bassett was asking about that inside the academy and i you know the thing about it is is like i agree with you because it's jim scott who told me that i was working did an album with jim and we were mixing and he he's just said to me the loudest thing in the mix is the last thing you mixed you know wake up in the morning come back and the vocals two db too loud because guess what you're mixing the vocal wake up in the morning come in the guitar is too loud because guess what you're mixing the guitar so you just sort of learn to get it and go yeah that sounds great i love how bright it is and then you just back it off we just did that yesterday i was mixing a track here um and i brightened on you you and i were talking about it yesterday mark i used the ssl to brighten it because there's something magical about ssl eqs but i also put in my phoenix eqs because those phoenix eqs are super sweet on the high end and then i put a little tiny bit in on the plugin so i had plug in the db 2 3 db on the ssl because you'd be quite aggressive with it and then two or three db on the phoenix and i'm like yeah this sounds great put on the headphones it's like whoa what happened you know i just got carried away i ended up putting 7 db of subtle changes but unfortunately that many subtle changes meant it was pretty unbearable so you yeah you learn to sort of go okay whatever i'm doing i'm just going to back it down a little bit and you end up getting it right almost every time first time rather than waiting to hear it and know that you're wrong yeah i i agree i mean i could tell you that i came from the land of oh don't eq it or take it easy on the eq because it's going to have phase and stuff but and then i remember ken and i were tracking at the village on studio one studio a whatever one room you want to call it the first room when you enter to the left and it's the one with the 8048 console and we were recording piano and he's like it feels dark and i felt like it felt fine but he literally popped in the 1081s and pegged top bands of both of the eqs and i was like what are you doing like as a joke because we're buddies and we goof around in sessions and stuff and he's like sounds great and i instantly was like no it doesn't why would you do and then he's i'm it sounds great like it totally worked and usually i would not have done that i would not have just pegged it i'm not that kind of guy i was trained not to be the peg kind of guy ken's a lot more rock and roll and he called he's like you're such a snob and he was right like sometimes you just gotta just go extreme go a little radical there's nothing wrong with just getting out there because honestly phase shifting is part of the sound of some of these special records too i wouldn't do it every time and i certainly wouldn't do it instinctively every time but you would be surprised how much you can get away with yeah that's that's a whole whole conversation uh when we were in um blackbird doing a masterclass when was it three years ago um obviously at least two years ago because of covet but um reed shipham came in and gave a talk to all the master class uh people and it was fantastic and re comes in and great bunch of it's all academy members and and one of them asked you know about eq'ing and how you know basically pointed to a videos online which talk about you know when you're using eq there's a phase shift and and uh reed said basically what you just said he said you know and they're like well you know it's a phase shift and he's like does it sound better he's like most of the records we all growing up listening to had massive eq boosts and cuts and dramatic things and we all loved the way they sounded we were sort of but it's like well if you see if you watch and then all the words about looking come up you know people start talking about videos they've seen and how people demonstrate it on you know in in in a in a video and all this kind of stuff and the reality is is quite a lot of what we we love has has been dramatically done i mean we can watch mixers all day that are sitting there particularly on ssls like we're talking about earlier boosting high mids and high end into compression and yet if you put it on a scope it might have some phase shift but does it sound good heck yes it sounds awesome the high mids go papa the snare goes the guitars go and they do all of those kind of things but they probably don't look good on an oscilloscope so i think i think that's always an interesting kind of conversation where people talk talk about these things um you know um you know changing the phase and if it's affecting it adversely and sounds worse that's when you worry about it not what it looks like you know um oh yeah somebody mr morphy morpheus did ask this a couple of people asked about this um how important are your converters and i suppose that leads into like what you have do you love them you know what have you tried how did you how did you end up with the converters that you've got uh yes and then just tagging on to the last thing that one was saying about eq and shifting he's a great dude he's awesome and he makes million percent sense like just be radical the thing i do get caught up with is knowing and when you have kind of a luxury to be able to use a couple different mastering testers for a project you can hear really quickly what people are doing to your mixes so one guy might be doing a lot of eq and you can hear it and then there's people that were like doug sacks or eric or you know that kind of like that literally are all about like is straight wire and super sun you can get and that's why they kind of get what they get you just have to be careful to see what works because i can't say either way yes or no of that and that goes into the converter talk because with converters it's the same thing i actually have a good video i've been sitting on for almost two months now of converter shootout of me doing a print test and i don't know if people like it or not it might get you know 300 views but it's it's pretty it's pretty cool but it's subtle but it's like i say that five percent you can't get you can't get it i don't care it's a hundred percent to anybody else because you can't get it if you can't get five percent it's way more than five percent so it's like when you're starving and you don't have money you five dollars is everything so five percent is a lot converters are getting really good yeah they are aren't they like honestly this little ssl 2 sounds really good the apollo sounds really good the lynx aurora who's going on 18 years or something i have a pair of those really good and i still have i have we have pretty much everything we're blessed we have we have the qes the pad 2. i don't know what happened to qes does anybody know what happened to that guy he didn't respond to my emails i hope he's okay sorry second he passed away he passed away oh it's terrible terrible yeah he stopped responding i didn't realize he had passed away sorry but his pad two was just phenomenal then i have apogees old ones even older late 90s the apology yep i have the hack then i had the purple one it's called i don't know what it's called but it's got the soft limiting in it and we still use it to print drums through we're crazy rosetta or the pre-rosetta oh it's pre-resetter it's cool oh the purple in the 96k one the special edition it's called literally called special editions purple it used to belong to dave jordan it's what he made all of his great records on when he went digital um and then um i have 192s i have labries i have i mean i have all different kinds of things and i'll be honest i haven't you know and i use the audience stuff oh and the steinberg stuff is fantastic i think we're a bit spoiled and of course antelope the new antelope's amazing uad we have the uad ones we have the x18s sorry x16s we have an apollo i think anyway i'm waffling on but my point is i agree with you we're at a place where the quality now is unbelievable i think converters are important i don't think it's gonna make or break a single being a number one hit i think the 192 was a little rough compared to the new avid not even it's not even new it's five years old but the newer avid hdio um i have really boutique high-end converters because of my never-ending journey of going after stuff karen you said did you design a8s nothing sounds like that now the a88 mix plus systems were the absolute crappiest worst thing i've ever heard over eight ats over da-88s i made the triple-a i made at least one album that debuted at number one on 88s i got a couple yeah i mean it was just the worst just the worst the first top 10 album i ever made was on d24 i mean this is uh i mean we could go back to like the dash machine and like how great those sounded i think garth was still using d24 when hd came out and he was still making top 10 albums yeah it's it you know think about all the records that came out between 2002 and 2009 whenever hd came out it really came around because i think pro tools 7 which was 2009 was starting to get better so yeah 7-4 was a huge thing but no i think i think it was like 2004 i bought the hd system so that's crazy that it's 16 17 years old since you know it got absolutely amazing i mean hd on it's been sounding incredible people are talking about motu boxes it's funny i remixed a thing that was tracked on a mo 224 io remember that and that was at least 17 years old and the drum sounded great just great i couldn't believe it because at the time i'm like no two so i just think it's like depending on where you're at and how you're trying to hear and you always want the i have this crazy journey my converters now are you know pretty crazy and they do help there is a difference i love it and that's all i can say now is it radical to do that do you need it no because if you're in the box and you have a good dac you can get a benchmark dac one for 600 and it's an absolute incredible dac that superstar mastering guys are still using it's cheap and it has a great monitor controller on it the um kahuna is asking please can i do a low pass on 16k on my master i think what they're asking about is like a lot of modern pop stuff um you know there's not much going on above 16k and it seems like it's it's low passed yeah i'm assuming yeah i think a lot of it would be you know super super super high frequency i don't even know if i can hear about 15k really honestly i don't even think i care that i can hear about 15k now is there things in that above that you want absolutely there's harmonic stuff content like i can definitely hear the difference between 96k versus 44.1 and that has to do with some airiness or whatever it's causing it but i don't know i don't know how it works when you're doing a super air lift at 20k but if you do that on like a piano or an orchestra you feel it you hear it so you got to be careful when you're doing the high pass i don't even like doing a super super low pass sometimes because sometimes some of that low stuff or the high stuff that you're cutting out is just perceived as something you just got to decide if it's going to be best for you because once it goes to uh mp3 it's going to shelve it down to 12k or whatever it is anyways i don't know what a 320 mp3 cuts out at do you anyone anyone no if it's on my head i'm sure we could google it in a second um people are asking about the burl um i have a very strong opinion about the bill i think it's absolutely phenomenal depending on how you record when we uh when we were doing the aerosmith record years ago ten years ago now nine years ago whatever it was um we got to try out every single one and we ended up with the lavry of all of them the burl we absolutely loved but we found that we had used so many tubes so many transformers we'd also gone to tape and then transferred because we were using what was then the clasp system so we were coming off the repro head so we were getting tape we were doing so much analog shmannolog along the way so much of it that we actually found the bull was incredible and adding all these beautiful lows and all this kind of stuff but we actually didn't need it because we had already shaped the sound inside of pro tools the way that we wanted to be because we'd already come off tape and we'd already thrown ribbons and tubes and stuff like that however when you don't have several million dollars worth of gear like we did because it was ridiculous we had everything we wanted two tape machines running together at 15 ips 2 inch tape machines drums going on to a 16 track head stack i mean everything was fat with a ph however the bull is going to be wonderful this is my opinion for anybody who doesn't have a million dollars worth of gear because it does impart a big sonic footprint on it so i'm a big fan of it i really am but for us we didn't find like we needed it we actually wanted a facsimile of the mix that we were putting down through the neve but not to take anything away from it it's it's great the the burl is amazing especially if you want an analog sound and you don't have all of that gear anyway that's just my personal opinion yeah i think it's exactly right i owned a bomber and i've used the the mother ship a lot in different studios including east west quite a lot at east west um it's really cool for tracking in certain things for mixing and print i do not like it and that's because i don't need to color that section i also don't want to use something that's super clean i do do a demonstration on that converter video my favorite converter is josh florian's jcf converters the reason why i like his stuff is because it is by far the most important stuff do you like jcf audio that's josh florian's converter i i have a couple of friends who have those and absolutely love us yeah they're very so i have 16 out and 8n it's ridiculous i know it but it's oh man it makes me so happy because it really does there's no electronics in the chain there's a transformer but you're not hearing the transformer you're hearing what the music is doing it's very very open sounding the burl it does this cool thing but it's coloring in a way and i talk about that where like for a kick drum it's really neat or for a vocal it's adding neat color if you need that color so if you let's say your vocal mic isn't doing exactly what you're wanting it to do the burl would actually do really good at making it sound more colorful uh but for me i like to get that size thing and i feel like i'm able to get that with jcf really well somebody's asking about the dw fern i'll give you my quick 30 second dw therm when you sit and talk to to to doug when you talk to him it feels like you're talking oh it's a cricketer you feel like you're talking to like one of the engineers at trident who's designing equipment that they want to use for their studio because we all know that trident produced those a range consoles because that's what the engineers wanted and they were very specific and they wanted a certain sound and they wanted certain things and that's doug he ended up designing something that he wanted so i think that's why i personally love the dw fern stuff i actually i've always rent it or borrow it because i don't have enough spare money to buy it but i should probably just buy something now you're a user aren't you yeah i have a preamp but i think the compressor is where i am the same with you like i gotta get one of those yeah preamp is outstanding nothing sounds like it the di is outstanding nothing sounds like it somebody asked earlier about explain bill schneider's bass sound well for me i think a lot of it's his di no one makes his di this isn't a fern di but it's something different but the fern di was one of the few dis i heard that did something very similar to the di that dan garcia and bill schneider i believe al schmidt have is a very very unique very gorgeous large sound the preamp on the fern going back to what we were talking about is super lush super fast super clean but not like grace preamp clean or millennial preamp clean it's like gorgeous and it's almost high gain like a mastering lab preamp where it just sounds enormous thick a tube preamp like a 610 is thick and dark and woolly sounding but the fern is just it half of the reason why i like to use super gear is because it just makes it i just lose all of my insecurities of like okay i know this is going to sound great no matter what because i've used it in the past and sounds unbelievable the hard thing about not having a studio with the tracking capability anymore is that any new room i go into i need to make sure that they have something similar but if i'm putting up a bunch of two microphones half the time they don't sound anything like what i was hoping they sounded like or remembered mine sounding like or something like that so it's all about going and experimenting and hoping for the best because half the time things aren't maintained the right way because it just can't gear as an analog falls apart that's why apollo and these other companies the microphone modeling companies are just getting better and better and making things really really cool because you don't have to deal with the other problems like the breaking down and such well this is james is asking a very interesting possibly contentious question i don't want to get into brands and things like that but he's asking about what we feel about clones um i think what's the right way of putting this i'm being delicate here i think there's clones in electronics and then there's clones in look and if you're going to ask me what i prefer that i do like some clones you ask about bae i love bae and i would call that a clone in electronics and i don't want to go any further than that so you know i like you you know um there was a time that uh the original owner of that company brent averill who unfortunately passed away was it last year or earlier this year um last year um brent averill um would buy in the late 90s and the early 2000s would buy neves 1073s 1081s 1084s and he would rebuild them clean them up recap them and then resell them at a fairly affordable price when he first started off and then of course you know people asked him to then put them into 19 inch rack mount so then he went and found original transformers and etc and that was like the birth of bae and the philosophy has always been built around making as close as humanly possible depending on parts availability exact copies the reality is is making exact copies of british built 60s and 70s and early 80s gear is very expensive and there's a reality in that so they tend to be a bit more expensive but it did open up this huge market for people wanting them why not we all want neve equipment we all want api so that opens up the look like the gear kind of equipment and i think that there is some really good inexpensive things i'm a huge fan of 1176 clones i feel like there's some inexpensive 1176 clones out there which are unbelievable and my personal opinion on that is i have electronics engineer friends and they say to me frankly the components of 1176 are really cheap so you shouldn't have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a new original when you can actually get a clone which is pretty darn close but it's a hard question to answer because people get very upset if you aren't incredibly positive about every piece of equipment that was ever made but um for me i feel like and you can speak to this mark in fact i'll give you the floor while i i've had too many cups of tea i mean it's tough i don't want to talk about specific pieces of gear and any particular companies but um i feel like i feel like i i'm i'm nevered out i've got enough neves now i've got combination of neve gear i've got bae i've got api i've got baes apis and i'm pretty darn happy i'm i'm i'm excited by companies like teagler i'm excited by i haven't talked about in a while but where's audio um there's that louder than liftoff that i really want to try i hear that guy is a genius um you know he designed um can he design the clairfonic i think he did or something he was like an ex ex member of that um you know there's these guys and girls people out there making interesting new exciting pieces of equipment and i feel like if i'm going to find something maybe at a bargain price i might want to try out some of those you know what i mean i don't know what do you think mark are you do you have favorite pieces of gear that you just think are like incredible value for money and just i know we both like teagler a lot so yeah when i started there wasn't a lot of clones too you know and i fell into the bandwagon of using the first brent a roll 1272 that was made off of original 1272 preamps and they sounded outstanding and then there was dan alexander who was very similar went around and pulled parts i had a 1272 preamp to 1272 dan alexander preamps really good then i bought another one that was a complete clone of the original and it was excellent but then you know bintec came out and then all of a sudden you start seeing all these other golden ages heritage uh phoenix all these companies just doing clones and half the time you just see a red knob that looks like a neve knob and you go okay that's that's looks like it does it sound like it same to say with fairchild same to say with la2as and 1176s i would say that an la2a is special because of the transformer and the opto cell now the newer stuff the optical cells are led base versus a light bulb based but there's certain opto cells that work really good some that don't sound anything like an original la2a as well i'm not a snob i literally go for anything i can get sounding good i literally have black lions b173 right here and this is 400 and it sounds i'm assuming it's based off of a 173 so it's 173 so it's a 1073 ish thing it's got stepped you can hear it stepped guy and i literally did acoustic guitar with it the other day with the tube mic and it sounded fantastic four hundred dollar preamp so i think relative to that we are at a place now where we're not seeing a ton of specialness with somebody re-releasing a similar preamp but i do believe that everyone that's putting out stuff at some point is putting out something with a lot of quality there isn't anything garbage coming out now i feel that component wise it definitely seems to help so let me look at some other questions while warren is in the bathroom uh kahuna says something about special techniques with the 2-bus multi-banding compression i don't really go into there's two ways a multi-band i use one is my 2-bus multi-band i approach it where i'm just tapping every frequency band by half db and then the other one is as a plug-in like a fab filter i'm using that as a almost surgical dynamic eq and sometimes i use the fab filter eq3's dynamic eq or i'll use the multi-band they similarly sound similar and that just is like okay this acoustic guitar has a boominess at 100 hertz so i'm just gonna focus the multiband on just that section yeah in look who's back [Laughter] do i throw you under the bus there for a few minutes yeah i think i might have to go take a quick so you're gonna have to run for a second let me on a pause um oh chad's asking about that i haven't you you can we you can put it on me for a few minutes if you have to use the the bathroom i gotta use the loo you gotta use the ball here i'll let atticus talk to you guys you got yeah let the let the puppy uh oh look he's getting up he's getting up he's like where's my dad going now he's going back to sleep he's like yeah whatever so chad's asking uh hey chad i don't know if this was already answered by mark is the black lion audio modded apollo twin good enough to run as a converter with new atc 45s thanks you too i can ask um mark as well when he comes back but first of all the apollo twin sounds fantastic and everything that i personally know about black lion audio is really amazing i've never actually personally recorded with one but i have a lot of friends that love the mods that they do i remember going to scott's studio before he died you know from stone temple pilot and they pilots and they had the black lion modded converters there and absolutely loved them and were making records with it so i can tell you from that perspective that obviously if it's good enough to make albums that we all bought then it's definitely good and i think you know the apollo twin actually starts off at a higher level than those old digi design ones that were you know because we're talking about the digi design ones from the early 2000s that were they were modding and making much much better i think the apollo twin is a far superior interface than a 20 year old digidesign one no disrespect to digital design because at the time they were making really really good stuff you know it was as good for the time but i would say yes the black lion stuff would be rather wonderful um yeah i was talking about black line i have their b173 here and it's great sounds great um let's see somebody saying thanos is spanning well he's just asking about vst instruments violence or pianos for me like vst pianos are pretty insanely good um you'll never get it to sound like it's played as badly as a real piano player you know because like we're talking about with with piano performance you know the left and the right hand balance is such about you know uh the player you know isaac for instance is he he could not piano's out of tune i think he's right-handed i'm sure he's right-handed but he plays the left hand like this like comes down like this he'd be like he'd be like playing his right hand like this and then turn the left like that so you know it would always be like hey uh because i think he was so used to to tracking on his own and probably because in a mix you take the the low end of the piano out not entirely but reduce it so that the bass guitar can live so he was probably listening now i come to think of it with the piano i was giving him with a little bit of low rolled off from about 100 hertz and below and he was probably playing it louder to make it feel more so that's a good lesson for me next time i'm tracking the piano player leave the low end in there so they play a little softer on the left hand amazing how we work this stuff out while we're talking about it um but as far as violins and stuff like that with vst instruments they can be great it's tough with solo solo vst stringed instruments pretty painful i've heard some cellos that can work really well on single lines but violins can end up sounding a little you know a little too perfect very expressive i'll just say this because i deal with a lot of guys in composers working with fake synths you can pull it off it's possible to make it real you just have to understand how to do it i don't get it it's like the mixing tricks and stuff i know composers that are using vst samples packs that everyone else are using that i get and i literally asked where it was recorded and it's all about the programming and understanding how to do the dynamics and the the foot pedal thing that i've seen a couple guys do with kind of some of the dynamics and such like that but it is doable same as fake drums now there are plugins like the suit plug-in or the the uh what would you call that the floss gloss gloss golfos that's great they're a great company that does take some of that harshness out of these samples but some it's like ringing in some of the samples that i hear that i can't get out same as guitar uh simulations and stuff but it is getting better and better and there are stuff where i just don't know if it's real or not 100 right well fantastic um i think we're coming near the end of this i think let's do a couple of um let's do first of all please hit the like button it's absolutely fantastic it's seven it's been over 700 people consecutively watching this it's pretty pretty wonderful i appreciate you all and of course if you haven't already check out the course there is a link to it above here so go and check out mark's course he is um i'm looking at clockwise so yeah my stems go through its own universe i clone my my my stereo yeah i think um the so what was i saying um yeah the um zaintini yes scientific what is that tell me jay zaintini asked if 16 channels is enough i said yes i'm just commenting on these guys i'm trying to get as many as i can before we have to go so burning desires what sort of burning desires can we do we have here anybody got some uh anita says she got here late needed some more sleep hope you feel better um uh nasty nasty sounds in high mids yeah there's definitely some eq tricks to get rid of that our friend scott at chernobyl studios has a course called guitar tone mastery so if you go to pro mix academy you can see his course look it up guitar tone mastery and he talks about how to get amp sims to sound more realistic um makes the uh apparently you make the best youtube tutorials there you go congratulations thank you what do we think of merging technologies interfaces have you used them emerging tech say it again yeah is it technology's interfaces i think i can't remember i can't remember if i used it or not so i don't i try not to have opinions on things that i don't use exactly i don't know what that is yeah alcohol does not ever help a mix it helps after a mix but not during no way does it ever help same as pot like no way yantho says i've had an experience with a cad um eq tech e300 i think so i've used some giant thing i don't know says it's had batteries leaked in it so i don't know i know there's some cheaper cad there's obviously originally cad was like a super high-end um i remember the bbc used to have some and everything but i don't know the newer stuff i know the newer stuff i do well i did i used i use a newer one i think it was a ribbon as a mono room mic in boston and it was pretty amazing um uh i like cad mics yeah what should james is asking what do you think of the best mix you've ever done what are you most proud of mix-wise i would say fleetwood mac only because it's the song i grew up on like that album had my favorite philly mac song on it which was um gypsy and i feel like it was the easiest mix i've ever done because it was so well recorded and so easy and it was the funnest mix i ever like i almost started crying when i was doing it um there's a lot i like a lot of stuff but i hate 99 of everything i mix i literally can't understand why i keep getting phone calls to work sometimes just because i get into these stumps and i'm just like this isn't sounding great but i'm getting closer to being consistent in my mind and i think that's the key but i've said this before you don't want to arrive anywhere yet you always want to grow into stuff so i'm still going after my journey of how to get the best or try to get the best sound my this year's struggle is dealing with transients with volume it's trying to be able to retain the transients i need with still making loud records it's been really difficult trying to figure that out even when it's mastered um and maybe there's no way to do it but that's my my my goal amazing yeah lots of people love the gypsy mix this has been fantastic we got three minutes and we'll knock it on on the head thank any burning desires please hit that like button um and stay um it's this channel good fellow stay tuned for mark more mark what is the next one you can do you can do the converters i think the next one is going to be pre-delay okay yeah a lot of people have asked about that there's been a constant question about reaver pre-delay and then i think converters and then i think um teagle reverb oh yeah really there's a couple other cool little sneaky ones that i'll i'll have i'm planning just trying to get my my focus i've got to decide if i like this dark mode you can see it over here this pro tools dark mode i'm going back and forth every other project i do i'm in darker than normal dark and normal all of my personal stuff on a phone and laptop i have on the dark mode just because i'm on it too often and i get headaches otherwise so i don't know about pro tools i'm not sure about that i did i've been had a headache the last couple of days it will not go away and we've been working quite a lot on this track so maybe that's what it was have you do you get headaches from working yes and my tinnitus is not traditional it's like it messes up my vision i know i'm mixing too loud if my vision gets all right so you just gotta take care of your eyes and your ears and breaks super breaks get outside be in the sun as much as you can for a bit and just take care of yourself amazing so what do you think we're going to do that pre-delay maybe next week pre-delay yeah next week and then the converter one will come probably after that might as well get it out there i've been delaying it for some reason paul that guitar is a gibson j160e we talked about it earlier so if you go back to the beginning of the video we actually had a whole discussion on how to record it um and all kinds of good stuff um amazing well i will see everybody in the academy stream um in about half an hour i was hoping my lunch would be here because i ordered it over an hour and 15 minutes ago but apparently not mark it's been wonderful thank you talk to you guys soon appreciate it everybody check out mark's course if you click above there it's mixing two eric burden songs yes that's eric burdham from the animals and of course war another amazing band so check it out if you go to the top of the chat there you can click on that link and it will take you to it and uh thanks everybody have a marvelous time recording and mixing um and we'll see you all again very soon thank you again mark bye thanks so long farewell love you

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 41,361

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

Id: t6RwV-DUsAU

Length: 150min 30sec (9030 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021