Mastering Music with Warren Sokol - Warren Huart Produce Like A Pro

hey it's Lauren here here hope you're doing marvelously well I'm sitting with a great Warren suckle how are you good nice great name by the way yours too I was really impressed just by that yeah well you know so we're here at I suppose United maestra United mastering but it's in the main United building yeah so we have like Studio B here's VI over there you know B I have a partner here Eric labsim is another engineer that I partner with here and when we found out that they were looking to put mastering back in here it just wasn't even a question the vibe here though you know you have people across the hall actually making music there's a creative vibe here and just walking down the halls you can feel it so tell us a little bit about your setup here now what what I find interesting is first of all we were talking about the acoustic treatment you had to do in here I think that's probably something we should get into okay the reason why we bring this up is because I've never seen these before these are well tell some time ago these are active active bass traps device they're made by psi Audio and it's called the avaa and what it is it works from 15 Hertz to 150 Hertz which is kind of rare period for acoustic treatment plugs into the wall and it creates an anti impedance zone there's a pressure sound pressure mic in there and two membranes one is a resistance and one is an impedance which it's kind of the same thing technically it one is frequency based but so the microphone feeds a signal to one of them and creating an impedance in front of the resistance creating an anti impedance zone that's about four and a half feet in diameter in the seating environment sitting over there when I played something earlier you turn them on and off there was like this low-end floppiness and then you turn it on and suddenly all the love and got really super tight yeah I ain't very defined by Scott Merida hmm one of the places I hear is like in rock music is the kick in the base with them off there's a bit of a masking effect where you just kind of hear bass you know you can hear them but you can't hear that kick and the face distinctly turn them on it removes the mode the main mode that's in the room right great now the Lipinski's uh-huh these are very beautiful view Ben you did you use these also at Universal yeah I've been using these for almost 1012 years now exclusively I shouldn't say exclusively but if someone was to say what speaker the Oni is it's going to be these they're extremely accurate like Kenyan there's a lot of their advertising calls them audio microscopes they're extremely accurate and defined but at the same time I enjoy listening to them like there's some audio file and extremely accurate speakers that just aren't any fun what I mean they don't I don't know it's technically perfect but it doesn't sound good to the ear and sitting there for 12 hours they working on something I don't want something irritating my brain you know what I mean right regardless of accuracy but so why did you when did you stop I started doing mastering exclusively we probably about 15 years ago in Phoenix I was in a band got into recording went to recording school mainly just for us which recording school the recording workshop in Chillicothe Ohio no nice yeah there's one out here as well the Hollywood recording workshop I really did enjoy it a lot and it definitely influenced you know I wasn't looking at getting into mastering back then I was doing recording and mixing I always wanted out anybody gets into mastery just it's you know mean idea what was that journey how do you go from band to learning to record to becoming a mastering engineer for myself like I said I was in a band and I wanted to know how to record for us you know I mean I wasn't looking at doing a home studio this was when we were still on tape and this was over 20 years ago now so I want to know how to work for us you know and got into the recording side of it and so I bought a small recording setup for the home just for myself so I could continue making music and then I had a big home studio at that point where I was servicing bands and not really doing much for myself anymore and at that point a lot of people started doing home studios Pro Tools Elliott had come out and cheaper gear and started to come out so a lot of people were making home studios so I was like how can I make mine better and have the idea to buy a couple of mastering pieces and what I had purchased originally was a manly very mu because it was the one compressor I would see in every mastering studio so you had the very new what was very cute you had a manly man surpasses Oh which I still have one of those so did you start taking on projects from other people to do mastering oh not at first first it was just kind of when I would record and mix something I would come touch it up at the end not really knowing much about mastering but it was a learning process at that time and it was something that I would always do when I get done mixing with something before I really knew what mastering was at all and so when I started getting into it and learning the technical parts about it it was kind of like an analysis alright and so I would ask you bit about the gift but I want to know a basic question before we're going to how much are you doing software stuff depends on the project really important yeah if I got something it's a really great mix and something like classical or jazz or something where the depths and and spaciousness of it really counts I don't want to mess that up if it sounds great so I have some really high-quality digital pieces and some plugins and stuff and something's really great and I just need to touch it a little and maybe get the level up I'll sometimes stay all-digital do you have a limit to them that you I really like the limiter in the TC 6000 which isn't a plug-in obviously it's digital but it's outboard and the TC they have a great brick wall limiter it happens to be pulled up the thing has four engines so I have some things ready to go but you know what I mean the limiter in there is great as far as software the PSP Zenon limiter PSP zealand's via PSP the audio where they make they make a bunch of plugins and they have a couple of mastering plug-in EQ great limiter and that limiter is great it really is as far as being able to push level when you need to and not have it the normal artifacting that they do I also use the ozone limiter as a version I think six they were they rather than all being one big plug-in they have you know just a limiter just to EQ great their limiter is good too it tends to color things a little more than say this or the PSP so I use that when I want it to kind of put an edge on the sound a little and that's not a bad thing you know sometimes that's exactly what you need over the past year or so I've really got into using the plug-in limiters more mainly because of revision sometimes you know our vision needs to be EQ and stuff and you have to recall everything and then plug in eq's is ready once again the PSP neon interest is a great plug-in EQ it's both linear phase and regular and it's once again it's great are you reaching for the linear phase you feel like that's I don't use it all that often when I I'm setting something up depending on what I'm doing with the EQ I'll check it go back and forth pretty much every time and 99.9% of the time I go with the standard phase sometimes with low-pass filters I'll use the linear phase it seems to be a bit cleaner or affect the audible band a little less in most cases though I'm I like the minimum phasic standard EQ smoker says okay so the pendulum mm-hmm I see this a lot I'm glad yes this is my tube compressor now my philosophy I know not everybody's like this but I don't feel I need every piece of gear in the world you know no me no I need something I know is going to work right every time so you know right not to jump off of that no but in reference real quick these are kind of a new compressor from David Hill who owns crane song he has a new line called Dave Hill designs and right now it's just a preamp on this compressor and they're digitally controlled analog and it's interest is actually two compressors in here a pulse width modulation like a massive Berg which is incredibly clean like I can crank down 10 DB of gain reduction on this to match the level and if it's on this pulse width you can barely tell anything happen depending on the mix it's unbelievably clean compressor except for the compression that you're learning you know I mean it doesn't dole transients or change the frequencies and then opposite that it says vintage but that's a diode compressor similar to an Abbey Road which is kind of spongy and purposely distorted and there's 15 steps between it so with this guy and there's also a couple of other special things here's dynamic color that what that knob does is as its compressing the envelope of the of the sound it will expand the transients so if I have to do a little more compression than I wanted that's kind of like the bring the life back knob so anyway with this guy I can get pretty much anything I need mastering wise except for the sound of tube compression which is more of a hug it's these things sound cleaner and edgier where tube compression tends to kind of glue things more and round things off so with those two boxes I can get pretty much anything I need are you doing much multiband compression on a fan of it yeah I don't want to need it and usually I'll be using one band maybe two is it more of a rescue situation like if you got that one bass note everything straighten that one base no it sticks out that's where I'll go reach for a multiband more than vocals buried or when there's a problem is when I use them I'm finally mixing on early I don't use multiband at all very rarely and there's a it tends to be cannibals good on bass for the same that's what I wear I use it most of your bass or of like I said a vocal there's a question I've never asked a mastery from a mix point of view you know I have an academy so people mix my tracks all the time so I get to hear other people interpret it's amazing how much the same exact tracks can be a hundred percent different yeah but I find certain issues reoccur for me it's like in a vocal I hear like six seven hundred ha like I'm always telling people pull it out pull that out pull that out as a marching engineer you're getting hundreds of thousands of different mixers and work but do you find common mistakes that come up yeah one of those kind of maybe different versions of common mistakes a lot of times the simple thing clipping you know I mean whether you can see red lights or not the tracks might have been clipped during recording and you can hear that and there's no fixing that so the first thing you'll notice is clipping yeah just clipping or sending something to be mastered that's already been through a limiter because it was on your mix bus the whole time your math your mixing thing I used to teach for a long time as well when I was in Phoenix and I would always try to instill in them that if you have a limiter or a compressor on your master bus while you're mixing you're not really hearing what the individual things are doing and I know that some people have the complete opposite opinion of that but in my experience mixing and getting mixes for mastering you get a much better result just mixing and if you're going to master it yourself doing that stuff after your mix is finished to me is more beneficial you're growing in these stages as opposed to here just throw it all out there and see if we can sweep it into a song you know what I mean you know I still mix in a hybrid fashion and I'm going through a console and I have an SSL happiness itself so I used the buss compressor and I'm definitely getting to maximum four but usually like two DB's worth the gain reduction but the SSL buss compressor has such a sound so four thousand you know that you take it out and it doesn't sound like you mix anymore you know and I do have a pair of mastering politics mm-hmm where I have a little 60 boost a little 10k boost always on and I'm not saying there's anything wrong I don't crank it that's the thing is I'll get I'll get something so many things into mastering that 60 be louder than it needs to be when it's finished because they've had a limiter cranked down to minus six the whole time they're mastering or minus ten and it's making it loud the second they pull up one fader so then my second question would be in this same subject do you have a preferred level or is it just as long as it's not clipping I can deal with it okay I prefer it to be you know loudness average level that's going to depend per song but clipping if it's minus three minus six something like there that peak level I should say not clipping it's interesting because we as professionals and this is this is something I think that is a good point always talk about the distance from zero mm-hmm where I I get asked all the time about minus 18 DB F us aq nine seven one and I'm like I don't we don't talk like that right it's it's interesting I think there's a new because everything is in digital now everything you know da w7 with everybody talks in a way that's a manufacturer based world right what that's different for every manufacturing like Isis though to you know it's a little confusing because for us it's like here's zero mmm-hmm here's like CD at zero you have a ceiling you have a low ceiling here so for us you want you want three or four DBS worth of Headroom right so you can master it and then you're happy and if even if it goes right up to zero as long it's not clipping you can deal with it right work if I need to I can bring it down on the DA before I come out to all this so as long as it's not clipping I can work with it I'd prefer it to come in completely unlimited compression that's the mixers taste you know what I mean although sometimes that can tie the hands of whether or not I can add like the benefits of this tube sound because giving it any more compression is going to be too much in a lot of cases a lot of mastering guys I've been speaking to a actually just outside of you know produced like a pro just as a mixer tell me they're increasingly net not compressing again that's true it is limited hmm I've never kind of relied only on compression limiting to get loudness there's some things in the analog world you can kind of play with gain you know ii mean game staging and driving this into that and then making sure that the output level is acceptable and gained some rms level through harmonics so I tend to use harmonics and gain more than let's compress it by 5 DB because I need to bring it up you know what I mean that you're ruining something in order to do that so my next question would be what are you Q problems you're getting continuously you must be usually in the bass you know I mean 99% of problematic stuff that comes in once again mastering room speaker system is flat as possible we have subwoofers dual subwoofers and it's calibrated in a way so that we have the flattest signal possible usually flat doesn't necessarily sound good but in a mastering situation I don't want my speakers coloring what I'm hearing so if somebody went and mixed their whole hip-hop album on a speaker that big more than likely there's going to be a problem in the bass because you can't hear the low sub and subsonic frequencies out of a speaker that big or you're hearing the harmonics of it and making decisions based on that and so people bring stuff in usually it's stuff with big bass you know the song that's meant to have big bass will come in and either it's through the roof big bass or one really loud note and the rest is quiet or normal or there's no bass and it just rolls off and that's usually the opposite situation where they've got a subwoofer set up like you would one of those boom and nineties cars with this huge bass and its role in your stomach no matter what but you go listen to it somewhere else it doesn't have that and obviously that's not there so those are the main problems I see in bass when I grow up making records and working with people on consoles they would always really constructively use high passing beautifully and so what would happen is you get a defined kick you get an amazing low-end on your bass you get the low-end glue from the guitars to the bass and there's been a little bit of misinformation over the last couple of years probably due to YouTube where they're telling people not to high-pass anymore so I get mixes that have this horrible masking effect of low-end where the kick and the bass and the guitars are just this big blob of low-end you know that's hard to deal with here yeah so I'm wondering about that because I I've been seeing a lot of misinformation and it's it's a little scary because I'm listening to mixes all the time oh yeah but I saw this guy telling me I shouldn't be high passing you know like no you shouldn't be high passing badly but you should definitely be high post yeah if you have all these different sounds trying to take up that it just ends up putting it all together and that's a hard thing to fix in the mastering side of things we have some specialized tools you can go ms for those not familiar with ms are only familiar with ms being mid side microphone technique we can also use that in mastering or if I have a left-right signal and I put it through an MS processor left now becomes just the center and right becomes the sides and then it goes back through another conversion and turns back to left right between mid/side processing and multiband processing and a couple of other pretty surgical tools like that you can fix a lot of stuff but when you have just complete frequency masking like that what I would do to try to make the guitar come out more is going to mess up the bass or the kick so that's a really hard thing to fix are you getting a little bit recently yes and no that's I think that's something that's always been a problem or what have you no I mean more this so than clipping which kind of came about in the past ten years with the advent of everybody has a dawn in their bedroom now you know what I mean and I've actually had somebody tell me one time yeah we got perfect levels the red lights are on the whole time well usually it's things like that digital problems that came about because there's so many tools available and so much misinformation like you were talking about or just the not going out and getting that information so my general reality is like if I got my loan of guitars and I'm maybe about 150 200 what my bass to sit around about 80 100 my kick traditionally in like 40 or 60 so what I've been noticing with a lot of people they've been sending me mixers to critique and stuff is that in this sort of area between late 60 and 200 is no clarity anymore because they're not going in and finding the areas of the guitar now I get it you know obviously if you had a low a guitar you know you may want to go below there but then you're going to have to maybe try some tricks like you either multiband compression or you know sidechain compression so maybe when the kick hits it just sucks out a little bit of energy out of the other instruments throughout it so if there's some definition all right so low-frequency issues you get you have to deal with whether they be hip up and too much bass enough bass masking and rock-and-roll where there's any other sort of thing so me I was saying earlier you know I get a lot of that kind of nasal nests and vocals I know how to get people to bring out its de-essing as well um it comes up and there's in mastering there's two different coming more than that but there's two different main cases where you need the icing is the vocal or an instrument that has something really sibling or harsh in it and then there's a mix that the whole top end is harsh and no matter what's going on you know I mean so I have a couple of different tools I prefer digital DSS to analog I don't know what that's true for all mastering engineers but I think your your de-essing digital now is choice yeah if I think about other gear that I've seen another studio think that's kind of common now also I find it if I have issues in the mixing world I can use 3ds I can't necessarily do that but right but you know it immediately on one one source we're back in the analog only world we had ODF maybe - right that's true well the ones that I use are both plug-in DSS one is by SPL audio and it's very broad it's a very it's a bell shape and it uses phase cancellation as opposed to dynamic reduction so it is unbelievably transparent and just does what it's supposed to do there's no setting a specific frequency because it just because of phase cancellation it basically only cancels out the offending problem and they work great when you've got something broad if I have an S that I need to go and take that band out it's not useful for that to me if it's an S with you know the big gap in the tooth kind of thing where it's going to cut your head off every time I say a word with an S I prefer the PSP I'm sorry it's the Sonics I think it's called the suppressor and it's uh it can be used as a full band compressor too but it's it allows you to go in and make an extremely tight area and it's linear phase I'm not a big fan of when you're Phase II Q but linear phase correctional stuff tends to work very transparently you can set a suit or tight band widths anywhere in the frequency zone it doesn't have to be just high so if I've got a kick drum that tends to bounce out like that I can use it for that as well or a full band compressor and better options anyway it's unbelievably surgical and really really transparent as well for that kind of thing so those are the two ones I tend to use nice great those are great tips any other EQ situations you'll find and coming up a lot genre specific it's more mixed specific although I would say like hip-hop tends to have bass problems if there's going to be a problem it's generally in the bass or its mono cuz I get a lot of and not just once again not just independent stuff there's a album that just came out the big-time hip hop album and I would say half or more of it is in mono or at least the beat is the beetle be mono and then you'll have a stereo spread of vocals yeah and that's a big problem too because if everything's down the center it's all sitting on top of each other not only frequency wise but physically mostly it's in the base of vocals sometimes we'll have it usually when I see it more when there's a lot of vocal tracks when they've doubled or tripled or quadrupled the vocal track and haven't necessarily set up one as the main vocal I'll have vocal problems that interact with the guitar sit on top of each other the whole time what kind of frequency ranges um probably like 4 K to 6 or 700 maybe a little lower than that depending on the song high end doesn't seem to be as big of an issue these days but as far as the mixes that come in that seems to be a bit more standardized I feel like people have no afraid to low-pass they're afraid they're afraid to hypotheses and the listening environment you know I'm reaching for a cellphone to this I think so many people are listening with earbuds cellphones laptops that they're actually here in the high end more than anything else alright so this return to the gear we are in a briefing on the pendulum I should tube compressor compressor solid-state input/output amps as opposed to the Fairchild or Barry media which are two input two compression tube output amp which obviously colors it a lot more but it does cover it it does although not that much enough to wear like a Fairchild of MU I probably couldn't use on a hip-hop song because they just bury the bass even with a high-pass filter on the side chain it still just buries the bass this doesn't do that in fact I think there might be a bit of a high-pass filter built into it naturally because I can put it on hip-hop and actually it depending on where I got the attack it'll give it a bit of a from the transients sometimes of the kick and stuff Espio talking to vespi oh yeah this is a pretty special EQ similar to a pull tech in that I have low frequency cut low frequency boost so the way this is laid out is odd there's an output gain it's only attenuation I don't have any actual gain it's attenuator I should call it gain and then this side is cut and this side is boost and then we've got a cue for this so low shelf cut low shelf boost I can do them at the same time similar to a pull tech although the cut isn't a bell they're both shelves interesting so what does it do because we're the pole tech what we love about the boost and cut you boost the 60 and then you attenuate it and it just kind of does this yeah this doesn't do that although the shelves and naturally have some of that built in like as you increase more gain it does that bit of a dip on there for the boosting side of it but it is it's just shelving shelving EQ let's call it a base shelf is when we take whatever frequency we'll say I'm at 95 Hertz as I cut that it's going to be cutting everything from 95 all the way down to zero so a shelf whatever your corner frequency is that you pick on the EQ it's going to on a low shelf it's going to a cute EQ from that frequency all the way down to the bottom as low as it goes a high shelf would do the opposite pick the frequency and it's going to boost or cut the high end all the way up as far as the bandwidth of the veq goes a bell eq is one of them it's shaped like that so you boost it up and it goes like that and you have bandwidth to make it wider or tighter the mid bands on this are bells although they don't give you a cue or a bandwidth control the high fairly wide yeah everything on here is really wide this I can't do anything correctional with this as well as that such a tone EQ and I can't use it on every mix do the technique focusing in EQ is what I call it other people have another word for it where let's say I need to find the vocal frequency what I would do is boost one of my mid bands up and then start going through the frequencies and I tell find the one that makes the vocal stick out and then depending on what I want to do I would even zero it out just add enough or dip out enough on finding a frequency focusing the EQ unlike other bell-shaped eq's when I'm going to the frequency selection on this it does a weird thing where as I switch to a different frequency normally the center of the Bell will jump to the new Center frequency and on this one I had didn't realize this until I saw it on the white noise but you go through the first couple and it jumps frequencies like normal and then you hit one and instead of jumping to a completely new frequency it widens out creating a new Center frequency with a wider Bell and then the next step will wide it a little more and the next one starts closing it back up and then it jumps to the next one so like interest you're going for eight four five four K three and then it widens out to two point eight and widens at the two three and then tightens back up to one gate and tightens up to one three and then completely jumps to 17 to it and not knowing that I would be focusing it in and all of a sudden it wasn't the next step didn't do what it would normally do why do they did that because there's certain frequencies that it's not musical they think well that's it is that they're helping you make decision and that's the idea behind it and being a lot of times stepped frequencies on an EQ analog at least that's the exact thing is that each one uses a different set of resistors or capacitors to do what it's doing so yeah I think this being a completely passive EQ like a pole tech at the passive you no wonder people do this what do people actually figure out what the gears doing because when you're talking to people about equipment and I'm one of those people who talks about equipment you're like I love the way this sound so we make this assumption that they're two point eight EQ sounds better than somebody else's two point eight very true and it might be that one person's gear is just boosting 2.8 mm and the other ones is just doing this yeah yeah interesting every EQ is different but this one passively queues in general whether it's this one or actually for the passive EQ as well like I said the the electronics that allow you to do this frequency or that frequency sometimes dictate the shape and what it's doing and I know that's hang on this and people love passive EQ again it's a great explanation because with active eq's dat sidechaining is taking a piece of the signal off boosting it and then folding it back into the signal which inherently can mess with the phase relationship right so that's when people say to me all this sounds really eq'd it's really kind of the sound of standard eq's is how much phase shift it has cleaner eq's have less without happy kids have very little positive take the whole signal and apply the EQ so we've done a little bit on this mass Manly massive passive once again a unique EQ also it's not as unique as this one where everything about that is weird and special there's a little bit more detailed yeah I can get a lot more detailed once again this is still a broad EQ it's a one band EQ we've got four controls on a one band EQ meaning almost no phase shifting so I can do these huge boosts on this thing if necessary and it doesn't get harsh and it doesn't get weird and Phase II because quite honestly it's one band of EQ meaning if I go to let's find one that matches here I go to this band and I go 1.2 kilohertz let's see the bandwidth is there and I boost it by 4 DB for clicks I'll explain why that's not DB in just a second and then I go over to this band which also has a 1.2 right here and I slid it to the exact same settings what would happen on a normal link here well presumably would get significantly louder right you'd have another 3 DB right now because they're in series a normal EQ you've got band one fan to band 3 and they go series so if I EQ this frequency here and here I've now eq'd it twice not the case with this guy right now this is just going into the same spot this is that because it's a single band all the bands interact with each other so the only way I'm gonna get more volume now is to go above that then it's all additive it's a single band with four controls why would you have crossover points of frequency set um once again space shifting making it it really is a master in EQ and they designed it in the point that I can do huge boosts if necessary and not get phase shifting and sound like EQ it like I said it sounds really eq'd it doesn't really happen with this guy one of the other things that's interactive is the gain and the bandwidth on these if you look at the settings here and I have that boosted all the way up the bandwidth as high as it'll go as tight as it'll go and if I have that cranked up all the way that's 20 DB of gain which I'm not in the mastering I'm never eating by 20 B DB at the most maybe one or two DB with the bandwidth all the way as tight as it'll go this will do 20 to be a boost I didn't change the gain I just changed the bandwidth as low as wide as it would go it's now only 60 to boost is it physically in your chain why we see it it is if I do this and so what I'm saying is is this naturally is this does this represent a bit of a signal flow would you not okay it's with mastering every it's always different there is no single set up as it's preset as it can be I have a setting on my digital pass bay here that loads up a preset that goes out of that computer through both converters over to here runs through the input gain stereo width these are all my inserts meaning push this guy and I got my manly EQ push that guy and I have my pendulum compressor that one is the SPL EQ and they are in series here and I can flip five and six around a couple other options as far as rearranging stuff but basically this is all just here available to me with a push of a button I can put it into the signal path with another one I can reroute things I'm sure you're very conscious of like when I do when I mix things especially mixing an SSL for me it's EQ into compression mmm because I boost something and to get that spanky kind of aggressive SSL so I push that push it back down so I might boost I don't know 3k on something and I compress it very heavily and of course it's grabbing that 3k first you know which doesn't just turn it down it makes it go mmm and gives us that aggression I'm assuming you're conscious of stuff like that where you're boosting and go into compression these this button here which flips these two inserts it's my pendulum compressor in my SPL EQ but this thing has a sweet really really sweet top-end so that was one of the main reasons why we got this for this unbelievably silky beautiful top end if I'm compressing it first which without that button pushed goes compressor than EQ I can flip that if I want to and it makes 100% difference every time depending on what I'm doing with this EQ if I'm boosting the bass and then it hits the compressor secondarily that bass is going to be causing a lot more compression than the rest of the song depending on certain aspects but in mastering situations a lot of times we'll do the EQ before compression now the wife's I've seen these a few times and I had these can get very surgical and yeah they're basically I have incredibly rod coloured EQ somewhere in the middle colored but controllable and I can get pretty cool with this but not that surgical because of the way the bands interact this guy being in digital EQ it will do 650 is the tightest bandwidth which is less than a single note so I can go in and remove single notes with this guy just so you can see that's what that is took a line if I get a straight line on the graph there and you widen it out and the widest point on this guy takes up pretty much the entire bandwidth so you can go from incredibly wide to incredibly not wide and just remove single frequencies I got to admit that I've never had it that tight you know anyway but I can go in and do some pretty surgical stuff with this every six of seven band EQ it will do ms left-right and any one of the bands can be either a high pass low pass filter shelving high or low shelving or a bell-shaped EQ a parametric Somoza and then it also has an option for dynamic EQ for a long time dynamic EQ other than this one meant basically multiband compression and they call that a dynamic EQ it lets you EQ it's basically a parametric EQ with a threshold control where I use it is when I don't need de-essing but there's a harsh note every now and then I don't want it there all the time right but there's like the third course there's they added a symbol or something that's incredibly harsh or something along those lines I can go in and correct that and then go back to the threshold control and now say I want to control it dynamically and set the threshold to where it doesn't do any Q until it gets to there it plays that cymbal part which causes that frequency band to get louder and now it's going to compress it and dip it out but it's only compressing the EQ bandwidth based on the EQ bandwidth so it's reading the EQ bandwidth compressing the EQ bandwidth and basically taking it to the point well that corrective EQ this one owns only downwards correctional meaning that it I can only like take things and effectively move them and I can boost it but it's going to do the same thing it's going to lower it when it hits that threshold this has been really really sweet top-end and low end which is where a lot of digital EQ is used to lack the low end would get boxy my n would get distorted yeah and this doesn't do that there are some plug-in eq's now they're just as good of this as this are getting better I still like having in the rack though and having knobs gain frequency bandwidth instead of a mouse to control all that yeah tactile is yes isn't it be able to reach for stuff so what's interesting now you see you've got this you got the manly as your sort of Center sound but you've also got the crane so we've seen presumably is doing the same thing if you want time no to mastering console actually I said this is my console before it's actually two together two together so how do you employ them together this is it's called a mastering console other people call it an insert switcher because basically what this is doing is my routing and audio control there's two paths going on there's my monitor path and then there's the capture path everything starts over there on the source computer when somebody gives me a mix I'll load it into that computer and it'll play out of there through my D to a come into the console here and basically what I'm talking about is the the processing path this audio is going through all the gear coming over to my master system and being recorded certain points in the audio path source point output of the master output of a reference input of this output of this is all right here in my monitor controller so unlike a mixing console or that's all put into one board and the center section or master section has your routing and control and monitor control and sourcing and stuff like that in a mastering console in a lot of cases those are two separate things so I have my process path in my monitor path and this is probably the most important piece of gear in the room is my monitor controller you said before you're a big fan of Manley and I do have some manly stuff here and I do like it they dad they have a nice way of coloring things without going overboard on it crane song is a company like giant fan of I found that a lot of people either like the tone or not to me once again being a mastering engineer I'm looking for something that's clean unless I don't want it to be clean his monitor controller the cool little thing that it does that most of them don't is gain matching or level matching so I have three digital inputs here my source my reference meaning if they give me a track that they like the sound over the level of I can load that in here and that's my reference level or if I'm doing an album as I'm working I'll be you know collecting the captured songs and I'll be able to reference the stuff I've already mastered against the song I'm working on now so source master and reference greater than three analog inputs this one is basically which one of these have I selected so one of the first things I do is go there and say which of my converters is going to work best for this song this one does a bit of a the for sale converter somehow adds a bit of space without it's not like turning a stereo with knob or something like that but it adds a spaciousness between the sounds and stuff where the crane song one literally sounds like the source on the modern controller I can hear the input the console verses the output of the console or source master reference and then through my digital patch bay I can pretty much put anything in there I want as well so if we're going to listen to a CD I could send that to my reference if I wanted to so real quick what I was talking about with the level mashing with this thing let's say I'm the other thing is a step knob like so that's one of the most important things in here because it's a calibrated room this is where my monitor gain usually is for most modern recordings and I know that when I have this level here a certain loudness is coming out of these speakers when it's correct so when I'm working here there's my mix and the master is considerably louder [Music] so what I can do is hit this guy as I'm working and gain him up and basically match the levels as I'm working what that lets me do is here the master at the same level as the source and in a lot of cases what you're doing in mastering is trying to get that level up without screwing up their mix there's other monitor controls that do the level matching but not as easy as that hit the button hit it again level match it hit it again goes back to monitor control and it's that simple if you're doing surround sound you can hit one button and turn this all into surround sound takes a couple more input-output boxes I have one for stereo I think it takes three of them to do surround sound and it also does polarity mono dimming cool thing that you don't see on any other piece of equipment is a 16 bit truncation on the input and what that does is allows me to hear dither truly hear it because it takes the input all the way to the output makes it 16-bit do you hear that much difference you'd be surprised sometimes no it really depends on the music like something that's super loud like a hip-hop tracks just loud the whole time you're not really going to hear much difference it's when things dip down into the client areas like that song we were just listening to that just guitar strumming out notes in a slow drumbeat there's so much space and openness there that's what really gets messed up when you're truncating things it takes away the depth and space the quiet part debgen always used to say to me it was reverb trails for him yeah yeah I heard a Takei or something I listened to the depth like when I hit that I hear the depth go boom when I'm working I'm listening in-between sounds especially on the dynamics processing with EQ I'm more listening to the full sound compression I'm listening like less like here's the vocal and here's a guitar here's the guitar I'm listening to the space in between those because if I'm compressing I'm bringing that up technically you're bringing down the loud parts to bring up the quiet sure but those quiet areas are where the details lie in music it's the stuff that's not right in your face a lot of times at least on my side of the of the process it's all about the details and bringing out those details and they exist in between and below the lab stuff that really is sounds like the art of listening to me yeah I see an antelope damn yeah the once again the room like a lot of mastering studios these days is controlled by a central master clock this box the 10 MX is an atomic clock this thing can be used it has word clock outputs if we only needed one word clock to control the whole room all you really need is this now because it has word clock outputs and I can have it run at any sample rate from 30 to write 32 kilohertz to 768 kala her right now the way that we're using it is this atomic clock is sent to this Trinity box which gives me three different sample rates my master sample rate for my say D system my source sample rate for Wavelab over there and the center one is any digital processors my TC electronics system 6000 it has a word clock input so since that TC 6000 might be put in before my converter or it might be put in after my converter I have that on a separate board clock because a lot of times this thing will look like this the source they give me will be 44 K but I almost always capture at 96 K regardless of the source in a mastering room where you have all these different pieces of gear that you have to tie together something like this is pretty much necessary or invaluable you know in a larger studio like this the three sample rate thing is really really handy I have two converters this is a D to AF four cell D to a converter and then I have a crane song head which is both a D to a converter and an A to B converter and a harmonics processor all of this yeah these three but knobs here those those three knobs are incredibly powerful there's a triode harmonic which tends to add detail to the bass and sometimes can boost level a pentode harmonics which those are two different types of tubes by the way Penn toads tend to add harmonic distortion to the mid-range and the high range and it adds detail and depth to things while also giving you some level and then there's a now labeled tape when you record a tape there's certain EQ things that go on in the recording and then there's harmonics added and there's a bit of a tape compression though that happens and this Simula it's all digital but it simulates that as well before you cringe want to say all that analogue harmonics is digital it does it in a way that absolutely does not sound digital and one of the cool things as well just talking about the harmonics processing here if I want to use this as just a processing box I don't have to use the converters I can hit a knob here and have a good digital in digital out and one of the reasons why this sounds so natural and sounds like the harmonics that would come out of an analogue piece of gear is because it isn't processing the signal signal comes in it's the output and much like a compressor sends it out to a secondary processing algorithm that creates the distortion and then mixes that into the original so it's not taking your signal and processing it into distortion takes a signal and analyzes it and creates the harmonic distortion built on that and kind of mixes it in a parallel situation so the only thing that's distorted is the distortion first it hits my DJ's and on the console here I have a selection right here of that DJ a coming into the console this DJ coming into the console and they have a different sound or an auxilary input which is an analog input I have on the ground I have a nice turntable back there sometimes I do turn vinyl transfers to digital for older stuff that people want to save so what's the what's the tone type the turntable is made by a company called shinola and my question is well what they do is that they take they take merchandise or products from companies and kind of give it a different look and their belt-driven so rather than a motor turning the table there's a little motor over here and I'm belt that turns the table is there a difference um the belt German ones seem to be if you're looking for accuracy they tend to be cleaner and because the motor isn't on the table itself it's not going to be vibrating and that kind of thing alright well this is fun we can do this all day we could probably sit here another three hours yes exactly so I never got to the end here please leave a bunch of comments and questions below as ever have a Marvis time recording a mixin will definitely do more with Warren Warren Thank You Warren Thank You Warren they don't eat your that's right and larvae star recording mixing we'll see you again soon Cheers

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 169,436

Keywords: warren huart, produce like a pro, home studio, home recording, recording, audio, music production, record producer, recording studio, mastering, mastering songs, Mastering music

Id: 8tOb-xYWum4

Length: 44min 21sec (2661 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017