MAGIC IS IN THE MIDRANGE (mix tutorial)

after making records for nearly a decade without a mentor of any kind whatsoever an internet show popped up called pensado's place jack joseph pwig was on episode 22 and it changed my life in addition to being a complete master class on compression he said a couple things that directly impacted every move that i would make moving forward for the entire rest of my career he said in that episode episode 22 i'll link it in the description if you want to go watch it after this video he said that the soul is in the mid-range that the attitude is in the mid-range and like i've mentioned in previous videos i remember watching this and being like that's a weird thing to say i don't understand that at all but i really like his approach i really like his work and so i decided to try to implement this for myself what i very quickly came up with thanks to being inspired by jjp literally took my mixes up like eight levels and my consistency of work and how great every mix became went through the roof things became so much more consistent my mixes started translating way better from the studio to the car to the radio to the grocery store and so after mentioning this and a handful of videos and having literally hundreds of comments of people asking for this video today we are going to unpack how i focus on the mid-range i'm going to show you my process exactly what i do explain my mindset and then you can do the same and i think it will drastically improve the consistency and the quality of your work let's go [Music] now you can accomplish this without buying anything at all i did for years for years i got through this uh and all this huge jump in consistency and in quality this happened without me buying anything however when the time did finally come for me to pick up a pair of oritone 5cs or and my ns10s it went up another level yet and so what i'm going to show you today is how to get through this without buying anything at all but if you'd like to turn it up even harder there's links in the description to go check these monitors out and pick up a pair for yourself if you would like i cannot recommend them enough okay so mid-range to me is between 204 now jjp in that episode of pensado's place he discussed it from like 600 to 4k however what i figured out what works best for me is like 200 to 4k because i kind of need to hear just a little bit lower in order to actually pull this technique off that's one of the reasons why the auratones do such a good job is because that's literally the frequency spectrum that they show you is is like 200 to like 4k so there's basically two techniques that i want to talk about that help me accomplish this now the first thing that you can do is just not let yourself adjust anything outside of that 200 hertz to 4k and so while you're still listening to the full spectrum of things try to accomplish whatever it is you think needs to be done to the audio without going outside of that 200 to 4k boundary so let me show you how i would do that right now okay so i've got a song loaded up here in pro tools now unfortunately one of the hardest things about making these kind of videos is not getting copyright strikes i can basically not use songs that i've worked on myself or songs that artists that i've worked with have released because i'll either get demonetized or i'll get a copyright strike this has already happened multiple times on the channel and i need to avoid that at all costs so i use a service called epidemic sounds to get all my music that you guys always hear on the channel on the youtube channel not a sponsorship so that's what we're working with today is just stems from a song that i got from epidemic sounds and then i want you to take these principles that i'm going to show you and apply it to all your individual tracks okay so let's take a listen to this chorus real quick and hear what we got going on [Music] okay so the first thing that i hear is that these vocals sound a little harsh they're not super full they're they're like too sizzly too crisp so let's go to our vocal channel and let's open up an eq plug-in here and let's take a look at what we got okay so here's 4k and here's 200 so how do i accomplish what i want to accomplish within that range now to me this vocal could benefit from like some 800 hertz so let's see what that sounds like okay to me that sounds much less harsh already uh i would like a little bit more low end personally this is all the personal taste i'm just showing you like how i would do this so let's work on some like two or three hundred see what we can come up with [Music] okay let's bypass it and put it back in [Music] now there's a little bit of a jump in volume but overall the tone of that vocal sounds much much better much smoother to me and so all i've done here is let's see we've got a boost of a little over 3 db at about 900 hertz and we've got a boost at of about 4 db at just over 200 hertz and so what i've done is i've accomplished my goal of staying within the within this parameter this 200 to 4k parameter and i've accomplished what i wanted with this particular vocal now it might be your first instinct oh the vocals too harsh let's boost a bunch of low end but then you run the risk of things getting muddy and that's kind of kind of outside of the point of this video if you can accomplish the goal that you're trying to accomplish within that 200 to 4k range then your translation uh and your consistency goes through the roof so let's leave that vocal there let's look at some of these drums now this is just a drum stem but let's take a look at them [Music] so that kick drum is a little bit kind of woofy to me let's see what's going on here with those drums [Music] i feel like this could use the same thing let's give a boost and now i'm using my ears here this is not visual you might think that that i'm looking at this equalizer and i'm seeing what needs to be boosted but that's not the case i'm using my ears visually you almost can't pay attention to that but here we go i i'm gonna boost some like five or six hundred let's see what that sounds like [Music] and we're gonna try boosting some like 2k and we'll bypass this [Music] to me that sounds better let's listen to it in the track okay so let me show you the difference in just these two moves that i made focusing on the mid-range so if we bypass the drum uh eq and the vocal eq here's what it sounded like without and then i'm going to put them back in halfway through here we go okay now at this point i feel like these drums could be like a little snappier and so maybe we go all the way up to 4k maybe let's pull like the 2k down and let's push some 4k into it and let's see what that sounds like [Music] to me that sounds really good and i've still stayed within this 200 to 4k range and we've got a lot more perceived volume which is important that's part of what you get accomplished when you focus on the mid-range like this but overall the clarity and the smoothness is just much much better in my opinion so the point is that you would take this idea and you would work all the way through your entire mix pretty much only worrying about this frequency range and so we're in this instance we're making the decision to only look at that i'm going to show you another trick in just a second but then at the very end of this mix at the end of this entire process then if that kick drum still doesn't have enough low end or if that vocal doesn't have enough air at like 10k or 15k then i would put that stuff in but i would get the mix working with only using this mid-range uh across all the instruments throughout the entire mix once the mix sounds really good then i would start tweaking like the sub bass of the kick and of the bass uh synth or whatever and like the top end of the vocal and whatever but only after i did this first okay so the next thing that i would do is i would put an eq as the last insert on my mix buss after any sort of eq or compression or saturation or anything at the very end of the chain i would put another eq and then i would set that up as a band pass so let me actually set that up so you can see what that sounds like so this eq is now on our mix buss okay so something like this now i know this is a little higher than 4k but effectively because of the curve here uh it works out to be roughly 4k now what this is doing right here is this is kind of mimicking what a pair of oritone 5cs does it's not as good as a pair of orton 5cs but it gets you in the ballpark and kind of simulates that sort of thing that limited frequency range so you're only capable of hearing what's happening in that 200 to 4k range now when i used to do this i don't do this anymore now that i have these monitors but when i used to do this i wouldn't just put this on and mix like this the whole time because it can kind of distort your perception of what is appropriate when you turn this off it sounds weird so what i would do is i would do like five minutes with it on five minutes with it off five minutes with it on five minutes with it off i'm not using like a stopwatch or anything but like i would constantly be switching it in and out and so this does a very similar thing to those of us that use multiple pairs of monitors basically what you're doing is you're trying to get the mix to sound like there's no more changes to be made there's nothing else to fix regardless of if this eq is turned on or off so it's the same thing when we have multiple pairs of monitors i'm constantly switching between my monitors here and when there's no changes left to be made on any of the monitors then i know the mix is good and it's going to translate really well it's going to sound great everywhere so let's just take a listen to this uh with this band pass on the mix bus and let's see what we hear okay the first thing that i hear is that the instruments uh don't have quite enough crispness so let's go to our eq on these instruments here and let's play around still staying within that 4k range but we can get a little bit outside of that right now because we're only hearing that like 200 to 4k range but let's see what we can come up with [Music] but letting go just comes okay so to me they were fighting the vocal just a little bit these instruments were in the like 2.5 k range and i know i went above 4k here but i'm doing this while only listening to up to 4k so i did a little bit of a boost at 57 a little over 5 700 hertz and i wanted it to be a little bit smoother while having more like more presence so i pushed up some 541 hertz again all using my ears i'm not actually doing this because of the number value i don't care what the number value is i'm not looking at the eq per se i'm hearing what i think sounds good and then making the changes appropriately so let's turn this eq off of our master bus here and so here's what it sounds like now [Music] okay now let me bypass all these for you and this is what it sounded like previously [Music] turn them back on now you may disagree but i think this sounds way better it's smoother uh it's gonna translate way better it has more presence it's more intelligible the definition is way better now and so these are kind of the two approaches that i would take going back and forth and so basically what i would do is i would put this eq on my mix bus and i would listen to it half the time on with that eq engaged and half the time with it bypassed but even when it was bypassed i was doing it the same way i started in the beginning of this video where i'm still kind of only focusing on the mid-range and only looking at that 200 to 4k range even when i'm hearing the full spectrum it's a little bit easier when i put the bandpass in on the mixbus because then i'm not able to even hear outside of that spectrum so let's take a listen to the bottom end of this drum kit of this kick drum and let's see what we got going on [Music] now this is a taste thing but i would like this to hit a little deeper so now that we've got our mid-range totally sorted out now let's look at that low end [Music] okay that sounds way better to me now let's look at the top end of the vocal see what that looks like [Music] okay now that i now i can hear that there needs to be a de-esser on those vocals again this is kind of mixed someone mixed this song already so the moves that you make might be way more dramatic but i'm just going to grab the fabfilter multi-band here and i've got a preset for de-essing let's see what that sounds [Music] [Music] like okay there we go so that sounds much better to me so i wasn't paying attention to those s's really until the end of this i really do like this fab filter multi-band as a de-esser it's my go-to for de-essing uh and just side note here basically what i do is i just choose the band and i run the attack and the release as fast as they'll go um at like a four to one whatever you can play around with that if you want and then i just use the threshold on each band individually and then i have this lower band like the upper mids here this is going from about 2k to about 6700 hertz but i've i'm analyzing this range right here and it's triggering this band off of what's happening up here and basically what this is let me do is i'm just kind of getting rid of the harshness to me the harshness of sibilance happens in that upper mid range and so this helps me trigger that while not affecting the overall like upper mid range of the vocal it's left completely untouched until an s or a t or a k or something gets hit and then it turns it down so a little side note on de-essing there this is how i de-ess all my vocals okay so one more listen let's bypass all of these plug-ins and then i'm going to put them back in as we're listening so you can kind of hear the difference what we came up with [Music] so there you can kind of hear the difference of what happened uh basically this approach is all it is it's these two tricks it's only focusing on the 200 to 4k and it's uh then putting the band pass on the mix bus if you can pull off grabbing a set of or tone 5cs again link in the description if you want to at least check them out or pick a pair up for yourself i really can't recommend those enough because what they do is they do the exact same thing that we've done here with this plug-in and they they only show you this frequency range and so if you can switch back and forth between your regular monitors and repair oratone 5cs awesome or you can just do this and if you don't have the money to do it this gets you most of the way there that is better but i did this for literally years don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon next to the subscribe tab and give me a thumbs up and drop me a comment let me know what you think hit me up on instagram colecaperoon and i'll see you guys in the next video [Music] peace know

Channel: Colt Capperrune

Views: 395,756

Keywords: colt capperrune, mix, mixing, how to, music, home studio, studio build, studio tour, rick beato, mix with the masters, pensados place

Id: 3PnQWjtMROs

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020