Mixing In The Box LIVE

dull day here in not so sunny california maybe it will get a little sunnier later cannot complain how are you all who do we have we have cos billingham hey cos i am doing marvelously well hope you're doing marvelously well uh we have fernando hey fernando we have one six nine one four idaho turtle how are you ivan idea mr steve took presumably a mark bowling fan t-rex fam d s uh daniel simones how are you all you're good deep space f music official that's a cool name daniel ray matthew hey matthew kristoff um wow so what we're going to do today is we're going to mix a track from scratch this is a track i actually mixed in a hybrid fashion through the console so i mixed it using obviously my daw but output through the ssl so there's a couple of things that are going to be interesting about this number one um i'm gonna reference initially my hybrid mix and then mixing in the box i'm gonna i'm gonna want to beat it let's say let's beat the hybrid mix going through all the expensive gear a couple of other nice things are i've put some new speakers up do you see them those are some genelecs they're the 83 51bs so i'll move between headphones and speakers so you'll probably see me coming over here like this hello everybody and we'll do a bit of mixing on headphones and mixing on the new speakers i'll probably be predominantly on the headphones because of course i want to be able to communicate with you lovely people but i thought i would also mix using the speakers so because then they're new and lovely and yeah new gen looks i'm rather excited we did our first on friday we had to uh mix a song we had to mix one song um which was like an instrumental blues song but it wasn't blues it was more like a chet atkins style track so we mixed that and then we recalled a mix by khloe so we did two songs on it on friday um so yeah i will say you know because we got the sub with it as well it's really it's really nice hearing such full range system um now don't get me wrong 1032s i've been using for years and love so this is quite lovely anyway let's not waffle on too much a couple of things we will be doing giveaways as per usual like we do in live streams so we'll be giving away some stuff so stick around this will probably go on for an hour and a half or two hours so get some popcorn um and i'm sure maybe i'll finish the song by the end of it probably not because when i'm explaining things i tend to take twice as long as if i was just mixing so because i'm explaining what i'm doing if i'm not talking about what i'm doing i just do it and it's twice as fast but then that would be absolutely useless for you wouldn't it because i wouldn't actually be helping out so um there's that and of course yes like i say stick around for some giveaways we'll do at least three giveaways to produce like a pro membership um and most importantly if you look below the video now look down there look down below me you'll see download the chase k lonely one multi-tracks so this is a song that i recorded from scratch here at the studio it's not me playing drums on this one and i don't remember who played drums on it didn't poo play drums on this one i don't remember i think it's blair i think it's blair sorry blair i think it's blair it could be matt starr matt starr played on some of it blair played on some of it but either way it's a really great drama and it's using the 64 lard wig and it's not extensively miked or even expensively miked it's done with luit microphones and um so and it's just a small kit but i am using some how dare he some drum samples what which you can choose to use or not um but that's the drums and then i played bass on it i played oh the acoustic guitar did i play acoustic on this let me listen [Music] sounds like me playing [Music] and did chase play electric on this [Music] it sounds like me playing as well what he might have done um he may have played a scratch acoustic and sung it so what the way i would produce chase is he's a great singer songwriter he was probably he was only in his early 20s now he's probably like 18 or 19 when we did this i think it was about four five years ago and what he would do is he would come in and he would play acoustic guitar and sing and frankly leave and then i would do some overdub sometimes he would stay for some of the overdubs for a while but usually he was super busy on stuff and he would leave he was actually studying at the time um at usc doing the music business program so often he would leave and then i would send him stuff and we'd take it from there and it usually was about you could usually track the song in a day you know so this was like a day's production and do we have harmonies is that him singing this is fun going back to the song i don't wanna be the lonely one [Music] i don't wanna be the lonely one who's singing harmonies erica [Music] yeah i don't wanna be the lonely one i don't remember that i do not remember that i don't remember that i don't remember if that's actually a harmony or whether we maybe manipulated it but it doesn't look like it's manipulated it looks like it is a harmony but i don't remember who it was well so there you go got a question for you have you used the studio with alan heath live mixer not an allen heath live mixer but i've used allen heath mixers and they're great you know i often uh without getting into too much of a tangent because i like that question um i often tell people go back and buy mixers from the you know late mid late 80s and 90s before we went all digital things that used to cost five or ten thousand dollars like you say you can get for a couple of hundred bucks and if you want to get a cheap easy way of taking multiple inputs and then summing them down to one or two they can't get cheaper and easier and better sounding than some of that technology so all right um it looks like the the base is in stereo eric what is that what is this base let's have a listen to this base i don't know what this is [Music] i don't remember the space this is going to be a real interesting and i actually have no idea what that is that might actually be one of those keyboard emulation bases i don't remember so this makes it all the more exciting for mixing all right so what do we do what i do is i'll start off by just you know listening to the tracks but why don't we listen to the original mix that was done on this was done on a console so let's check it out i don't know how loud it is hopefully won't blow our heads off oh it's okay all right [Music] i guess the part is over the dreams are gone and we all know [Music] it doesn't seem as fun a little sadder a little lonely [Music] so this is getting older [Music] oh [Music] just another weekend cool so download these multitracks um don't forget to do it it was going to be cool about this this is a mixture of some cool programmed keyboard elements um you know some live stuff i do i'm not sure about that bass i don't remember that bass so i can't tell you whether that was a keyboard emulation or reel but either way um we will treat it like a real bass regardless and uh yeah this is gonna be a fun one because like i said it's a blend of some modern stuff and um and uh some traditional recorded instruments as well um [Music] um so what i'm going to do is i'm going to group all of the tracks together just for a second so i'm just going to call this all tracks you might say why am i doing that oh an interesting view okay i'm going to do that um and the reason i'm going to do that is i'm just going to turn them down because they're all because now i want to listen to the everything together and i'm going to do a live quick balance on everything so this is kind of this is a big part of my process i just want to come in and just just play the tracks down and start balancing and panning stuff around now a lot of this can be really really simple and i i might do a little bit of kind of tweaking of things and then stop and explain it afterwards so let's get rid of that also i'm going to create groups so i might actually do that let's not do it yet okay so [Music] all right so now this is everything all that not zero brought down but all the tracks playing at once [Music] first thing i noticed missing kick this is what we do so here's all my kick samples i just can't get it past me so i'm going to make that as a group so i'm going to call this kick samples good management of your stuff is really really effective and really super important so okay all right [Music] i'm going to turn off the mutamatic so you're going to hear me talk while i'm doing this as well okay so what i've decided to do is just quickly do a balance of the drums so this is with no compression no eq just balancing out the elements i have [Music] so i put this rack tom over about 20 percent so it's just to the right hand side i personally do it from audience perspective but you can of course do it from drummer perspective if that's what you want [Music] now i like to put the hat about sixty percent i don't go full right but about sixty percent fifty sixty is up to you again to the right hand side of the snare again i'm doing an audience perspective if you want to do it from drummer's perspective that's perfectly fine [Music] now this is a very very small drum kit it's just a kick a snare rack and floor hi-hat two symbols and so just a crash and a ride there's close mics on the drums but there's no room mics in this situation so we did do some over other dubs of like symbols and things like that to exaggerate areas did some reverses but here is a very very quick two second drum sound [Music] cool so we'll ignore all of those reverse symbols and symbol crashes at the moment because we can't balance them because we don't know how effective they're going to be do we because they're for sections they're like reverse is coming up announcing a section and a crash to go here it is everybody so let's just throw in the base now chase is an acoustic guitarist so next thing i'm going to do because this is an acoustic vocal is bring up all of those acoustics underneath the bass and drums and everything looks like it's in stereo or it's at least doubled for choruses i will always go full wide initially so let's just go to those chorus acoustics pan them hard left and hard right and have a quick listen to that chorus [Music] it's a good place to start [Music] don't like that bass note playing or boom i'll probably just for schnitz and sniggles copy that and put it here so what i just did is i knocked back that bass note so now i've got hey because it went butt bum but the rest of the band went crown so this is just what you do a little bit of mixing is also a bit of fixing um okay interesting i didn't notice that when i originally tracked it deary me okay so it looks like the acoustics there's a left and right so for the intro we'll go hard left and hard right [Music] i'm bringing down this one that's on the left i'm actually going to pan this left one to the right believe it or not and vice versa the thinking for that is this it looks like we've got a guitar here which is going to play in the verses and acoustics playing in the verses i don't want that to be on the same side as the hi-hat do i if there's only going to be a drummer playing hat and then an acoustic kind of rolling along get that out off off of the hi-hat and make it just you know move along see this is this was obviously played super soft obviously and i've got a choice here do i want to compress the snizzle out here or do i want to maybe take that and put it on a separate tracks have a listen [Music] you see let's go on the outside [Music] this is what i'm tempted to do to be quite honest it depends on your daw but in in pro tools or whatever daw you've got i'm just going to do this so i'm going to take this section and i'm going to clip gain it up because it's just going to be too much because or it's either that or i have to put it on a separate track um which i could do as well but it seems silly to me to compress the whole track just to bring up that section so this is just smart mixing [Music] so and there's another reason for doing this i'll show you in a second okay so then i'm going to do the same thing over here up to the pre-chorus so on the second verse and i'm going to bring that also up 4.4 db like that what's interesting about it is the one below actually is doesn't need to be brought up so it's was probably just that recording now also this because it's the only acoustic guitar on the first verse and the oh and the main thing driving along opposite the hi-hat i'm actually going to bring the pan in so what i'm doing is i'm taking this acoustic guitar and i'm going to bring it to about 50 or 60 percent so you know somewhere roughly around that area so it bounces out the hi-hat so now the hi-hat is over here and the acoustics on the other side see nice balance higher over here acoustic guitar over there [Music] now with the second verse we probably don't have to do that because of course the second verse there's balance there's there's a hard pan left and right now the question is do we want to keep it hard left or right do we want to maybe bring them in a little bit so that when the chorus comes in there's more drama let's have a listen [Music] just listening i'm deciding a couple of things here so i'm deciding do i want pre-chorus guitars and as well on that first pre-chorus to also be wide [Music] and i've just decided i don't i'm not going to make that decision at the moment let's see what other overdubs there are again we'll ignore all of the symbols that's all here these are all overdubs but we'll go to this main electric part now that's is driving the song along with the acoustics so let's check those out because it's stereo i'm going to make an assumption i'm going to pan them left and right initially and i'll drop them in [Music] do [Music] so it sounds like to me that one guitar has got um some kind of pitch change on it so let's just listen to the left hand guitar at the moment so that has like a slap delay on it and then this other one here you can hear this one just kind of cool so we got one you know one with a dirty slap delay the other one has got some pitch change on it put them together [Music] it's it's cool it gives it some good width i'm enjoying it not going to do much else to them at the moment because there's a lot of other things to put into the mix this is like what we were talking about in a video last week i think was last week monday the static mix this is our static mix so we're just getting balances going here so why don't we now go over and check out the chorus guitars i'm going to leave the keys to the end i'm going to think about them as a separate entity there's no real major reason why i'm just getting all the guitars down while i'm in guitar mode so i've got stereo chorus guitars here i've also got um oh andy allen's watching us live hey andy allen from audient hey he just texted me there's going to be a 20 second delay andy but in 20 seconds time you'll text me back won't you saying hello warren [Laughter] and we are actually working through the id 44 i can't pick it up so i don't unplug it but that's what we're mixing through audient id 44 everybody is down there and we've got our blue headphones on but we will eventually check out on our really expensive genelecs but at the moment we're keeping everything very very affordable um yeah audient id44 blue headphones okay so i'm going to take my you know it's live when you can talk to people live like that he just responded in capital letters okay so i like that and if you want to do this mix and make it a bit more rock you could emphasize on those but i'm going to bring them down they're just there for energy so again this is our static mix this is our no i no automation i mean look i did automate that acoustic guitar part but i didn't i just gained it up because it was too wimpy okay so here's the acoustics in [Music] sorry the electric's distorted i'm going to tuck them down even more and let's uh let's create a group now as you know the di's are in there we might get we might have some fun with those di's you know the kind of twisted weird things i like to do with di's and change the pitch of them and put reverbs on them and then put them over the dirty sounds and or use them for the dirty and you know all kinds of silliness but we'll just make that one group so i'm just going to call this chorus guitars gtr um [Music] cool i think i think we run out of guitars i think we've done all the guitars now it gets nuts now it gets absolutely nuts now just for schnitz and snaggles let's throw in chase's lead vocal be before we get too carried away not that it's dense at the moment let's be honest it's not a particularly dense mix but let's throw in the acoustics i mean throw in the vocal [Music] are gone [Music] so this is getting older [Music] cool now obviously the vocal feels like it needs some automation needs a little bit of compression just to even things out could be a little bit brighter all those things i'm sure you can all hear that but this is once again our static mix that was a bunch of vocal effects that i printed so when you um download the tracks don't forget to download the multitracks down below um so but this is this is the purpose of our static mix it's just to build up something without too much effort you know it's just panning and volume at this stage panning and volume is all we are doing here we want to achieve we want to get into the mix we want to discover the song and it just takes a few minutes again like i've been saying right the beginning if i wasn't explaining it by talking about it we this would be about 15 minutes work but it's okay that's the purpose of you know of learning together and teaching each other um okay so here's all the synths again i'm still going to ignore all of the reverse symbols and all that schnitzel we'd have to worry about that yet for the drama but there's quite a lot of stuff now there is a main piano part um here so why don't we before we get into the sense pull up the piano part and drop that in against our newly static mix including of course the lead vocal [Music] great so let's just bring that pin up a little bit [Music] cool uh it could be brighter it probably needs some high passing but you know we'll get into the high passing schnitzel in a bit it's at the moment we're just kind of getting into the song and as jesper said what did jesper say he said i love how static mixes always get me excited to work on a song yep i agree okay what else do we have that plays a lot oh right so we have an arp we have a hard pad we have a gated pad we have a gated pan too that probably means pad let's uh i let's you know what i'm going to because we know every track here is playing i'm going to actually turn all those off and i'm going to audition solo these parts oh i like that that's an arp [Music] thank you daniel that's very kind of you chase and i actually did write a song for a cartoon strangely enough great could do a little bit of high passing just to get it in there maybe a little bit of brightening but overall that's a really nice um i love that arp with the arpeggiator on it okay so let's have a listen to this what's called a hard pad [Music] [Laughter] it's the right sound needs to be faster to work all right um it looks like already there's a lot of keys going on um gated [Music] pad i like that next one all right that's called gated pad 2. i think that is a duplicate file for those of you downloading this this is a duplicate file and uh it probably was there for effects i don't remember what i did on the original mix i would have to recall the console and go back to the original one but i probably put some kind of reverberation on it so i'm actually going to mute this one and take it up here okay and just for snitching snuggles i'm going to play all the pads together [Music] i'll have that arpeggiated up arpeggiated up [Music] i feel like the pads have a purpose but they're more ear candy i may drench them in reverb i might distort them more i might put some artificial widening on them i might do something with it but i don't see them as being loud in the mix do you i feel like if they're loud in the mix the whole thing's just gonna be crap crap and all the subtlety and the beauty of you know the drummer who can play and the nice acoustic guitar part is all gonna be drowned in pads but they could be a nice way of just having some energy but i think that the arpeggiation you know on the up the arpeggio plus the piano are really quite kind of beautiful cool okay so let's that's our quick rough static mix of that so let's drop that back into all of our everything we've done thus far up until that point [Music] it [Music] okay um now we've got the synth in a chorus again let's just pull these two elements up you can see the beauty of the static mix so you know when we did our five rules of mixing i should probably put that underneath as well but the five rules of mixing this was the stuff i was talking about about how to get into the mix it's interesting [Music] i love that since at the moment i'm keeping them panned left and right fantastic um okay so let's pull those together and i want to go to the end when all that's i don't going be a lonely one [Music] wow [Music] great great great great okay um so there you go there's the basic balancing done on everything except for backgrounds so the backgrounds it looks like are only in the choruses now if we want to go full-blown 90s r b you do hard pan left and right which might work at the end there where a second set comes in but i don't think we're going to go full blown well let's see what i'll do is i'll take the first harmony and i'll put it you know 50 left or 40 40 50 left and right around the lead vocal let's just drop that in and see how it sounds [Music] yes f it is a new multitrack we will for those of you that are our academy members you can um obviously you're going to download the multi tracks like everybody here please download multitracks and mix them but for the academy members of course this will go into our um you know multitracks that we're going to um do mix critiques on so please mix the song and i love doing these okay so let's let's just make that the first so we'll call that i don't know why it's labeled harmony one two three four because actually harmony one and two are the same harmony so we'll just call it bv one and then the second one which comes in on the end here will be our bv2 i don't know if it goes above if it does go above i might pan it a little tiny bit wider so if we're like 40 40 let's go you know like 60 60ish there's a melodyned there's a very melodyne so let's pull those down really quiet just as a little effect hey vaisey's here hey vadc how are you um so wright sees it was vice's birthday yesterday so please everybody wish him a happy birthday happy birthday i hope you had a wonderful day my friend um we love white sea he does some really really cool reviews and also what i love about uh leitzy is he's got a i don't know i i understand him because he loves plugins but he also likes hardware so he's like he likes a bit of it all he likes the modern technology with the classics and blends it all together which to me is like a win-win isn't it and uh you know so say happy birthday if i'd see so that right see what we've done so far and for anybody that's just tuning in is this is a static mix there's been no eq no compression we're just balancing and panning you're very welcome my friend um just bouncing and panning um so we've got and these backgrounds are actually rediscovered they're melodyned especially these the high ones so yeah you know let's just say you know they're a little how can i put it a little artificial but you know they're quite high so i'm not going to solo them and embarrass poor old chase but i am going to tuck them in there i'm sure you all follow white uh c audio anyway but if you don't go follow him he's pretty awesome and we we sometimes do the same reviews um he does like he reviews like everything so you go to his channel he'll if there's a new plugin out he will review it i don't get to review all of them because we're doing so many different things but he he reviews like everything new and i'm so when i want to know about what's up and coming um he's already reviewed it usually and and we have a similar review style which is kind of open it up and start tweaking with it rather than reading a menu for four weeks which i also appreciate because who who actually who actually reads the manual you know we just kind of open it up don't you and you play with it all right so here is chase's um melodyne high bvs tucked in [Music] it's interesting because i feel like it's all harmony isn't it so and that's what's happening when you don't have any compression or eq on the lead vocal um yeah exactly said who reads manuals i have no idea um the um the my wife reads manuals that's the reality all the women in my life read the manuals and they're probably smarter than me just be honest probably much smarter but us dudes we do have a tendency men do have a tendency to just stop playing with the toys don't we all right um so i'm actually gonna bring the main harmony down a little bit as well and i'm just gonna make the lead come up a bit just see if i can get the blame with that before we get into [Music] compression [Music] fantastic all right um so yeah so once again please download the multitracks um academy members we'll check it out so speaking of the academy we'll um we'll offer up a free membership if you're already a member of course you can get a year extension and if you're a lifetime member which we have quite a few here of course you will give you any promise academy course you want um okay i'm still hesitant with this reverse stuff but i might put it in so the question is ooh because we got vaisya on here who is like definitely the aficionado of testing out plug-ins what new plug-in everybody what new plug-in are you most excited about what i mean you like over the last couple of years so it could be the the dime ones the golfers the leap wings i'm not trying to baby audio denise audio you know all new anything new by waves or fab filter or i don't want to miss anybody out that's not fair but you understand what i mean what new plug-in over the last couple of years have you been most excited about and just let us know what's the one that you've been like yes that sounds great there's no wrong answer because eric over there will pick at random okay so you know why don't we just go and hear what we got with all this reversey stuff so let us know please oh yeah please hit the like button because when you hit the like button it tells peop tells the youtube algorithm that there's people watching it's like almost an identical symbol [Music] why why have one stereo when you can have a mono ana stereo i mean i i like the wide one i suppose i've got the mono we'll leave them all in for a second but it's pretty humorous that i did that don't i don't remember doing it that i basically got the same symbols hands now with the crashes these are on the downbeats of the choruses mary and joseph i'll bring that down um hopefully nobody had that 120 db but anyway um it looks like there's some flanging on it sorry some phasing on it it's kind of cool what's the bottom one here i'm gonna bring this one down after the cool i love making these the other thing is when you download these you've got all these for your own productions so download the multitracks you've got all of these um and you've got all the samples as well those are the kick and snare samples you have them all all right um so let's let's just solo everything and by the way you know we don't want to get into the five-hour discussion about soloing we are soloing to teach so we can talk about stuff you know i know in the real world there's al what's all the experts say don't boost only cut which have you ever watched any any masterclass with any major mixer what do they do they boost you definitely want to cut issues then they say don't solo yeah don't solo and spend ages listening to something in solo and eq'ing and compressing it and applying a million different things and then drop it in the mix and realize it doesn't work but soloing for the for the purpose of educating and showing people it's not a bad thing it's okay but i'm sure i'll still have somebody go you're so loud here we go [Music] i'll bring those down a bit more they are a little a little loud and annoying [Music] okay so all we have left on our static mix the whites he says don't sell it and why is the button there exactly no i think i think what gets lost in translation is like you don't solo and obsess about something and make decisions based on what it sounds like in solo which is totally logical um totally logical okay so the h3 thousand for those of you that don't remember is is actually literally my h3000 which i don't know if there's in the shot because some ads playing what's going on with my thing no no it's not in the shot sorry but there is over there a um even tied h3 thousand we also have an h what is its nine thousand or seven thousand i can't remember and anyway and so what it do what we do on this is the vocal thickening trick is we just detune left and right left and right three different ways so soloed it's pretty horrific talking of soloing i guess the part is over the drinks are gone and we are over so pretty horrific but at the right volume i.e incredibly quiet like you should not listen to this loud drop it beneath the lead vocal and it will push the lead vocal forward i guess the part is over the drinks are gone and we hung over it doesn't seem as fun now it just gives it a little tiny bit of separation and i'm sure it's all totally wrong and phasing and schmishing and smashing all that stuff however used lightly it's a really nice trick but i do not use it loud okay and then what i also did for you lovely people is i printed the reverbs that we were using on the hybrid mix so this is i'm looking over here to get it right my lexicon it's a pcm 90 so it's two settings on the pcm 90. i've had 70s 80s 90s and i'm like i'm so used to it i forgot what model it was so dropping those in as the well one you can see there needs to be high passing down on that who asked a question cheers warren thanks ivan idea you rock i don't want to be the lonely one i don't want to be the lonely one all right just for snitching sniggles why don't we just listen to all of these things together i'm going to turn on the muta matic back now so you're not hearing me talking while it and let's just sort of listen to intro first first pre-chorus and chorus oh yeah whoever won email eric so you can win [Music] i guess it doesn't seem as fun now a little sadder a little lonely so this is [Music] just another weekend across the border [Music] trying to find [Music] so this is getting older each year [Music] oh [Music] wow so this is [Music] cool well we listened a lot longer as you can tell because we listened a lot longer a couple of things that uh it taught me were our good our static mix is a good place to start i think we've uh we we've got uh hey carsten we've got to a really good place um i cranked the floor tom a little bit so if we listen to those drums like let's go and put all those drums together so now i've got here's just the drums are now grouped together [Music] cool so the purpose of the static mix is to get a rough um a rough feel of the drums feel of everything working together so that we've got a place to work from and if you do this with a static mix especially as a beginner because a lot of this applies to you know when you're first starting out is like you're trying to learn from your tracks trying to learn what to do there's so many techniques that i can launch into really quickly but i'm not going to do that here because well i haven't because i want us to get into the song and realize what needs to be done now what have we learned i think we've learned that you you know the drums with the with a couple of samples that are supplied with a good balance but actually pretty good i mean have a listen again [Music] so let's go and get this base together now for some reason it's done as a stereo track which i have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever so first of all i know why because i would have doubled it um i would have doubled it so [Music] let us separate those two out so i'm separating them out on purpose i think that's what happened is i separated it out and then when eric created this he made it a stereo track because what i would have done is taken the top and the bottom separately that's why we're hearing a stereo so let's just hide and make the stereo track inactive because we don't need it and then we'll do what i've been doing for years and been teaching now for six years first of all we can obviously group these so now this is just base but it's just the di there's a like why don't we just nudge that down beat back just for the heck of it [Music] put that mono cool so that's it's basically just a double of rdi that's why we ended up with a stereo tracker it should have been two monos but it's fine so what i always do with this and we'll show you again is we just take because i feel like the bass needs to be more even before we do anything so i'm just going to focus in on this so let's just take an re q2 any any eq you want stock is perfectly fine i just treat this plug-in as a stock plug-in quite frankly um you know what [Music] i'm actually going to go to a four okay so let's go here i don't know i want to go maybe around 200 ish you know what turn this one off confusing you all i'm sorry so let's go at about 200 and just wipe everything off okay around about 200 and then here i don't need some super super low rumble so i'm actually gonna go i don't know i'm going to start about 40 50 but i'm going to gentle the slope so i'm actually not going to use it super aggressively [Music] what's interesting about this is it's all just kind of very middly so there's a part me that just wants to duplicate this [Music] it's interesting how much mid-range is still coming through anyway now let's go and grab the other side and do the opposite so you know i'll just copy this plug-in down even though it's not the settings that we want and we'll just move this to about 200 so now what we've got is the other side of the di is now going to be the high-end stuff just play with fingers it's a little mid-rangey funky that's okay but i want more low end out of it so i'm just going to rebalance those two elements okay now let's take our low end and just apply a little bit of extra compression to that you can use stock compression i don't mind what you use just use a little bit of stock compression which in this case i am just going to jump and get too many things to play with here [Music] yep just something stuck but on a high end for schnitzel snuggles [Music] okay now i'm going to bust these two to the same place i'm going to take a random number bus number 31 i used to take the bus number 31 to uh 31 we'll call this bass d r sorry bass sub so it's my bass sub um because it's a very mid range bass sound i doubled up the eq here the high and low passing not that bothers me at all carsten i mean maybe if you look today i mean this is the technique that's just been done for decades by people so [Music] so i think one of the first things i'm going to do is just control i'm going to put an overall eq on those two elements that are summed together what's interesting of course [Music] it's just so mid-rangey there's nothing of any personality up there so why don't we just try and do that on our other one here so we'll just so we're just adding some finger noise anything to make it sound less mid-rangey to our second half [Music] the thing that bothers me is it goes well it's two mid ranges i'm actually gonna stick an r bass um next and the reason why i like to eq going into the r bass is um i want it i want to control the boost that it does because the boost on this is like it pulls up the 40 as well as the 80. [Music] now to me the most magical thing and again i'm moving quickly and i'll probably tweak the tweak but this is just a quick setup so you can see is the mv2 and the reason why i love the mv2 is it brings the low information and the high information together so i can go to low end here so all before that area there was just those those notes were just dying and now the low end is there i'm going to push the r base into it harder have i ever layered a electric bass with a digital midi bass oh tons of times tons and tons of times it's really great the mv2 is just a great plugin it really is um so please hit the like button we'll do another competition in a minute so we can do give away a year's membership to the academy [Music] now there's no extended low end at the moment on the kick drum there will be on the bass drum but you know there's not that um i want underneath but i guess the part is [Music] so i'm listening to the snare here for a second [Music] so i think it is blair because that's blair's trademark and i'm not hearing it i'm hearing it there when i solo it but i'm not hearing it because there's a sample against it so someone listen to the overheads thank you michael [Music] oh you're funny andy now on the console over here you can't see it too easily but there's a dbx parallel down there and what that is it's out of shot it's actually the overheads so i learned this from i learned this from jack so what he does is he actually takes the overheads which i'm i'm going to do on this one i don't normally do this but i'm going to take the overheads and i'm going to smash them compress them heavily now i could do a couple of things we could control the high end we'll see what that does but i'm going to do i'm going to do that i'm going to do it early on because i'm going to try different things to um you know i'm just uh trying what compressor to use i was thinking of something pretty stock let's go to what's uh uh avid's own so this is a stock compressor here you go this is the one that comes free with your daw now you saw i just quickly had changed the attack time the reason why i changed the attack time is because it was just slow enough that the tick tick tick sound was coming through which i don't actually want to exaggerate so now i made the attack time so unbelievably quick that it's well you'll hear what it does so have a listen i'm going to turn this track up louder than it needs to be so you can hear why i changed the attack now we'll go back to this where it was dif where it was at so hit a tick tick tick tick tick now we'll bring the attack super super fast the only thing is is i'm getting out of low end from the kick which i really don't need in there so what i'm going to do is just eq that out before it even goes into compression again you can use anything stock you want i'll just grab an req just because i use it know what it does very tempted to do the opposite there you go so now it's just throw that into our drum mix [Music] okay so i've blended it down now [Music] i'm just getting all that [Music] so that's just the thing i decided to do now don't get me wrong i don't do that on every mix i was just thinking to myself how can i bring out some of that little you know extra stuff so it's just a decision we're making this time it is not the only way to do this we can actually parallel compress the live snare so we might actually do that as well and i'm sure the next time we pull up this mix i might open it up and go i prefer the parallel snare compression that brings up the over the overheads but i'm just making conscious decisions and finding issues these are the issues i found by doing the static mix we opened up the static mix and i found that the problems i'm having are this okay let's do another giveaway we did the we did the uh what do we think is uh their newest favorite um favorite uh plug-in um i it's it's you know i've asked this one 100 times before but i want to ask it again what uh what medium do you record on this is something i've asked a lot but i i'm always interested to see what everybody uses what d a w do you use so and if you don't use the daw and you're recording on a tascam 4 track a fostex you're doing memo recordings whatever it is just let us know what is it that you record on how do you record and um yeah so and this is to win a year's membership to uh produce like a pro academy and if you're already a member you can get an extended year if you're a lifetime member you can get any pro-mix academy course that you want okay so let's have a listen see where we're at so there's no wrong answer just let us know what do you use tim driver says garageband [Music] what's interesting is i don't like the mid-range that's being added during um you know with the others with that overhead trick during the um intro so what i'm actually gonna do is i'm gonna volume right it down see what happens [Music] so i'm doing some really quick automation stuff here just for schnitz and schnegel so i'm actually volume writing it down so i'm just making that the focus of [Music] it does sound like matt's star playing that's much more matte star way of playing a feel de pratom is definitely a matte star phil and not a blair sinter one [Music] cool okay throw in the base oh and please hit that like button if you haven't already if you're not a subscriber please subscribe it's we we we'll do this one like once a week until we finish mixing the song so you can watch it on there [Music] i like i like actually like the oh that kind of uh i really like listening to the way the kick with those overheads sounds in the verses because it kind of sounds like a bomb kind of mid-range to it i hear all the air in the room okay so now i'm going to just bust my kick together and the reason why i went earlier to like number 31 is because i like to do like kick bus one snare bus two you know i like i like it to be logical okay so let's now take all those kick elements and make them one so we call it kick all and have a listen we'll turn off call the drum element so i'm now going to create a mono kick bus so we'll call this kick and you can call it bus you can call it sub you can call it auxiliary they're all the same thing to me all right oh let's input it as bus one i mean it sounds pretty darn good um we could do something collectively on it or we could work on elements of it at the moment i like the balance that we came up when we were listening that was the quick balance we did things can change quite easily once you're mixing you know you might once you start bringing other things you might find that the kick drum needs more attack and then you might want to solo in on one part of the kick drum and take that aggression up because each one of those elements might have a little bit more snap to it a little bit more body but let's do some fairly generic stuff here so we'll go and uh we can do some why don't we just go first of all here and just take 60 hertz and just boost that now you can see we're using a very wide q at the moment so not only we hey sheila not only are we boosting 60 hertz we're also bringing up 20 30 40 and we're also bringing up 80 and 100. now i've been doing this a long time and i know i'll make this an req six just gonna do some extra i know that i don't want to bring up too much 80 to 100 because that's where the fundamental of our mate my bass guitar will live so so we'll go to sort of 80 to 100 area here we'll say 90 hertz for schnitz and snuggles i'll make the cue a little wider and we'll do a little cut so there you go and just for the heck of it why don't we drop in the bass guitar to see how the relationship is between the two [Music] now because we are using some samples we did cheat with the sample they they're all really fairly eq'd but there's always that 350 400 area in the bass drum the kick drum which just gets a little ugly so we'll pull out a little bit more of that and have a look [Music] 2-5 is typical for a pop rock 253k attack so let's pull up a little bit more of that if it was more metal probably more like 7k [Music] so i'll turn off the uh mutomatic on the vocal and you can hear me tell you before and after and have a listen so here's the before [Music] after [Music] now there's a there's a volume difference obviously it's got a little bit louder but also there's a massive difference in the low end and the attack [Music] so that's a nice start we're not going to go even more crazy at the moment i think we you know this is like stage one up from the from the um from the static mix and i don't think we need to go any crazier than that now let's do a similar thing with our snare so we'll group all of these elements together and there's a lot there is a lot i admit although some of them are turned down quite dramatically it's favoring the live snare of course and again you can use whatever you like so we'll go to bus two and so this is our snare again you can call it sub you can call it buzz you call it auxiliary i get asked all the time what they all are so and then let's make a group of all of our snares so we'll go snare all and group them all together have a listen ah warren you're an egypt you can tell i'm live because i just created a stereo not a mono snare so there you go now a mono snare group that snare bus i should say here we go now let's make that two and give it a listen [Music] such a young americans young americans they were the young americans [Music] it's interesting the snare bottom seems to be providing the most amount of the most amount of the you know i mean so if i crank that for a second have a listen the only problem is is that when i turn the snare bottom up it also it also is turning up the um the kick the kick bleed so why don't we do this why don't we take one of these like shorter kick samples that we made i don't know maybe this one which one which is the shorter one that one there and let's send from there you're to think i'm crazy so we'll go to 33 a bus random bus so we'll send we'll make it pre-fade meaning i don't have to solo that kick drum in order for it to send a signal i do not i can mute it it will still certainly signal so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to the snare bottom and i'm going to grab a compressor and uh just grab a renaissance compressor you can grab whatever compressor you like this just happens to be one i know and love and now i'm going to key it from 33. so now what it's doing is it's going to compress every time the kick drum plays so we'll take a couple of bar sequence like this two bar sequence [Music] so before [Music] after [Music] before [Music] it's really good so a couple of things why don't we do this as well before the compressor so what i'm doing is you can hear that the compressor is catching all of the kick drums so it's compressing it out of it another thing i'm going to do is i'm going to grab an req i'm just gonna wipe off some of the low end that we do not need to here that will also help because then the kick drum bleed won't be as much because that's all the low end so between the two of them cool so now you're hearing those grace notes so much more let's pull the drums together see where we're at [Music] throw in the base [Music] throw everything in [Music] so look as you can tell we're not doing a huge amount but we are doing um what we are doing is um making it so that we're just solving some problems we didn't hear the there was all these beautiful grace notes i can't tell you how many mixes i've heard where i can tell that the drummer is praying playing grace notes but they've all gone and it's just kick and snare some really famous mixers like famous mixers and you just hear the kick and snare samples so we're trying not to do that so i am going to [Music] just do a little bit of treatment on the eq on the snare overall now typically you know you want to get some boom and fizz out of it i would say most people would say that's a poltech emulation to give you that like if this was i was mixing this for jack douglas so he would be good at poltic and he wants to boost you know areas like and there's a lot so there's lots of different poltergei cues we could use i you know um let's think what should we grab let's go down to ik which is their one i'm completely blanking what's the name of theirs oh the eq eq there it is okay so here's ik's poltech now what jack would do is he would actually boost at a hundred um now typically you would think of a classic snare bottom as being like 220 on a neve that's what most people would do lots of people like dave jordan when i was working with him he would talk about matt lang and say how you could hear the eq points of the neve on the ac dc and he'd always go 60 110 on the bass 220 on the on on the snare drum and i think all of that makes sense you could do a mix using uh knee v cues go 60 hertz kick drum bass drum 110 bass guitar and 220 low end of the snare and you'll get something which glues itself nicely together it's a great tip you want that kind of classic ac dc sound that's some really good starting point but what jackalwiz would have me do is boost below the fundamental of the low end of the snare which means sort of providing this nice curve down there so he would go and get a pole tech and do this so i've added quite a lot of body there but we're not in solo as in we are in solo of all the drums but have a listen [Music] and then why don't we go for this 8k here and boost that [Music] now in solo all of those snares together might sound pretty disgusting who knows let's have a listen um you know let's turn off there you know but we just did it as a group i'm tempted to go in to individual elements of that snare and dial in some more low end that can be grabbed at the moment it boosting a hundred dramatically isn't actually making that much difference the high end you can hear quite aggressively so just for snitch and sniggles it's solo out some elements [Music] so that's the live ringing snare which doesn't bother me you've got to be careful with analyzing i i saw a couple of people talking about the ringing snare the thing is the snare ring it gets sucked up really easily by um you know by the track so if you spend too much time obsessing about it in solo you might end up with a really boring sounding snare [Music] that's a bit interesting as i go in to boost up the high end of course in the mid and above i'm getting i'm hearing a lot of cymbal bleed [Music] but i do like that extra body you are here in the ring but let's put them all together let's listen to what this is see that's my d28 that's a jet snare okay i put that same eq on it so listen to it now throat let's not obsess too much about it let's see what we're actually doing in the track before we start analyzing what it sounds like on its own [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i guess the part is over okay so now what's happened as you can probably hear is the snare when we haven't done any other eq or compression or any other instruments only a minor amount on the snare and the bass i'm sorry a minor mountain the drums and the bass and what we're really doing is trying to get that balance between that kick and snare and make it feel natural no reverbs not none of that has been added yet the thing is with the snare is like the brightness it makes it bite but of course it's starting to feel like a snare mix and this is what happens you know as jim scott told me when you spend too much on one instrument suddenly like listen now the snare's the loudest thing in the mix i guess the part is over the dreams are gone [Music] a little sadder a little lonely oh king i'm not close enough to listen to the old mix to worry about at the moment like i said you know this is probably about 40 minutes worth of work we've done but i'm stopping and obviously describing it all so i think what i'm going to do a couple of things i could put some saturation on it and just you know just catch some of those we could put a little bit of compression over the top um you know but i could also quite frankly just move on and be aware of it because i know that lots of other stuff is going to change you know what i mean what ends up happening is um i know where there's a problem and i'm like do i want to deal with this yes yet or not and i'm not sure because it still isn't perfect to me but it's part of the process i like to move quickly so like i said normally i'll be about 30 to 45 minutes in to be here and i'd be moving through onto things and not stopping and talking about them realizing yeah i've got to tweak that in a minute but i want to hear how this works how does that work i'll just tuck that in because if i start tying myself into too many decisions really quickly i might and i like working quick but i might end up with oh i just spent ages making a drum sound which i'm not happy it's doing a little bit of a state of flux and i kind of like that but you know what we could do i'm not i'm not really ready to put decapitator on that yet i'm not but maybe just a generic maybe this is a maybe just for schnitz and schniggles maybe just some generic compression you know transient designer could be on there hmm now i'm going to leave it and i'm just going to turn it down ever so [Music] slightly all right let's do one last giveaway eric would you mind making me a cup of tea um but you know i don't do the chocolate tea until after the giveaway because then you won't be able to do the giveaway okay so one last giveaway so this is for a year's membership to the academy if you're not a member yet please join down below could you hit the like button there is a join button there by the way if you want to join us um the other thing is please download these multitracks and you can follow along with me and try making your own decisions and seeing what works for you um so um please download the multitracks and join if you haven't all that kind of good stuff and hit the like button so what hmm i think we talked about daws or how you record um i don't know what you mean by faisy [Laughter] [Music] so just hear the bottom snare mic is that too loud for you yeah okay so um the what was i gonna say um what about yeah monitoring how are you monitoring do you i will have some pg tips karen yeah um you know um i think i think yeah how are you monitoring i know we've talked about this before but how are you um monitoring do you monitor on headphones do you monitor on speakers what is it you monitor on and what are they if they're headphones what models do you use if they're speakers what models do you use we'd love to know and there's no right or wrong answer there's just your answer and eric will pick somebody at random all right [Music] [Music] please send me some yorkshire tea i love yorkshire tea and i've got some of it and i do drink it but i'm definitely um definitely a big fan of uh bg tips i grew up on it you know [Music] little lonely [Music] so this is getting older [Music] yeah there's so much more we can do so why don't we just do some really basic bits and pieces let's just take our let's do some grouping here so the next thing you know because chase is an acoustic guitarist i come over for this him playing though i think it's me only because you know we changed the groove in it a little bit um i don't remember anyway it doesn't matter he's a fantastic acoustic guitar player so it may well have been him because he's wonderful all right so i'm gonna group these and just put them together and let's just do a little compression on this and but before we do compression because let's just make sure that there's no excessive low end even though it might be inaudible high passing is really the next thing we're going to do so i'm just grabbing an eq i'm going to go to about 100ish you can tell there's just a little extra all which is unnecessary and i'm going to [Music] so that's just a general eq over the acoustics barely did anything but just cleaned up the low end just a little bit let's see how it sits with the base now [Music] [Music] [Music] oh yeah that's the yamaha i think it's definitely me playing because it sounds like it sounds like a groove i would play but it also sounds like the ll-16 acoustic okay so let's think about the same thing with the electric guitars so i'm just going to grab those electric guitars and see all i'm doing here is like basic stuff but it's important basic stuff just cleaning up the low end you know i'm not going crazy on the high passing and all this stuff but you know we one of the things we talked about in that five rules of mixing was the fact that you know mastering engineers were like ah what's going on everybody's sending in you know small you know um local mixers and stuff like we're sending in stuff because there was all this don't high-pass you know rubbish going on and um luckily it dissipated because there was a lot of lack of clarity um but you all i'm doing here is just cleaning up the low end i'm not doing i'm not removing or taking away low end from instruments i'm cleaning up the low rumble and excessive stuff that is going to fight our base guitar i just think the bass guitar still needs a bit more rounded um but i'm not going there yet until i clean up the low end to find out so here's the electrics i'm going to go up to about 100. [Music] once i bust them [Music] well that's really starting to show is in the verses it's so much better in the verse have a listen because now you hear the bass and the electrics get together [Music] [Music] okay so do do do do i think the next logical thing and we we will be finishing up after this it's the last one who won by the way what are they what did they use uh jasper van der zwaag i totally probably may watch that but just by one um okay good use biodynamics biodynamic biodynamic headphones cool i do love biodynamic headphones um okay let's oh we need to add those acoustics into our acoustic one for the chorus let's just group those acoustics if i could only spell it right hey [Music] chorus [Music] so we're going to do two more things before we finish up and that means we're going to group the electrics we haven't done anything eq compression wise to the lead vocal at the moment we're just clinging up and a lot of people myself included will go to the lead vocal a lot earlier than i'm doing here but i know this track it doesn't get too dense i'm not quite so um concerned because we're not compressing and eq'ing everything so crack so massively that when we come to the vocal we're like oh no how do we fit it in none of that chaos is gonna happen so so this is a heavy guitars and frankly i'm just going to do the same thing i'm going to wipe off super super lows and i'm going to listen to it with the bass [Music] they're really just energy see i want the mids up and i will bring up the mids a little bit but i'm also a little concerned because i haven't done any vocal yet so i don't want to get in there and like you know [Music] i'm just high passing about seven or eight k gently you know they just i don't need not that there is much but it's just low passing it removing the excess not excessive but unnecessary highs [Music] the heavy guitars i can tell you um just for those of you i'm i'm not even sure if these are going to stay in the mix what i might do is use the dis and do something different because i've got all of these um i've got all of these synths and stuff and listen to them [Music] see as soon as i turn those heavies off i prefer it it just you know but anyway i'll tuck them down but just make a mental note that these may not be in the final mix or i might take those dis and do something creative i feel like that just sounds like dumb thing you do when the band the first it sounds like a first idea doesn't feel instinctive it just feels dumb [Music] the other thing i could do is crush the living schnitzel out of them and just make them go and energy and bring them up but at the moment i feel like it sounds like bad kind of mid 90s alt rock not cool mid 90s rock [Music] travis if this is a dense mix i'm scared for you yeah i mean it's it's really just a pair of acoustics some keys and a pair of electrics um you know it's just about balance and you don't you don't pull turn everything up equally um you know it's about like do you want just like little elements in there for energy you know but you know if you take out uh drum samples and uh effects on vocals you're about 30 tracks so certainly not a dense mix 30 tracks and you've got dis remember of these things so maybe even 28 by modern standards really not a dense mix even when i was working on 24 track tape you'd bounce like eight or ten things together in stereo you know so yeah definitely if 30 tracks are not a dense mix [Music] okay so um let's put in the piano [Music] so this is where we you know because of the piano i knew that there was going to be an element of like i got to get some rid of some of the excessive low end again i'm not soloing yet but i also need to be bright enough to cut yeah i agree with the 90s rock it's like it you know how like a lot of the 90s stuff was just like you know somebody wrote it on acoustic guitar and then the electric guitar player would just mimic it and that's fine you know and at that time it was forgiving but i need something to be a little bit more instrument so i'll probably that they'll probably get muted um but you know when we call this up again in a few days i might just take those di's and do something different with them if if i can you know to me we have a piano we have um you know all of these different pads that might make something together that's interesting again i might mute you know [Music] [Music] cool yeah there's some clarity stuff that needs to go on i think with the arp arpeggio part here [Music] absolutely love it i'll probably widen it i might get rid of some um super super lows and stuff like that well thanks yeah i really like focusing on the piano more than the uh the heavy stuff so what you watch i'm going to do is i'm going to mute the heavy guitars leave the piano as the focus let's have a quick clean up of some of these low pads i don't want to put the arp into the low pads i think they need to be treated differently but let's just create a low pads our pads kind of group here so actually so this synth two and the up are gonna be gonna treat them differently so what i might do then is just take my synth group turn it off or you know what you can do is go to your go to your synth group and take those two elements and just remove them okay so now let's make that just call that synth pads because it's essentially what they are there's that one here which may get removed as well but let's i'm going to treat them all as one for the time being because we're going to get rid of some of that excessive lows nothing too crazy just kind of an eq 2 first of all see that's more interesting and better than the heavy so you know what i mean [Music] so [Music] i'm keeping this muted for the time being hmm [Music] yeah that that high frequency pad is a little annoying it's interesting this is my favorite thing still to do the arpeggio is fantastic [Music] but this is the point of the mix it's like we're making these choices you know [Music] i guess the part is over the dreams are gone so this is [Music] so this is the high end on some of those pads was getting in the way of the movement of the acoustic guitar and the up because i want this up to be a little brighter overall and move and i also want these acoustics um here to just kind of add movement you know i feel like i'm i don't they're great [Music] because what we have there is those electrics those kind of mid-rangey you know marshall with the wah pedal sound on there [Music] great well fantastic thanks ever so much for joining us for this uh couple of hours here i think we've got something that we should be able to open up with fresh ears and uh you know do some sort of clarity um yeah we took the pads we removed everything up above about seven or eight k because they're getting in the way of high end of the cymbals high end of the acoustic guitar we muted the heavies guitar because they just seemed like bad old 90s we want you know chase is young we don't want it to sound like a you know somebody in their 40s reliving their days of the 90s you know what i mean it's got to sound like a young artist that's you know working with more modern stuff and keys and you know you've got to be sort of aware of this plus it's also too cluttered to have too many ideas it wasn't that there was a lot of parts it's just that there were some conflicting ideas you know you can have three instruments and they can sound amazing together you can have three instruments and it can sound cluttered if they're all playing different grooves and fighting against each other it's not a density of parts it's a density of ideas and it might be that we mute some stuff still we might still mute some stuff but this is our good static mix with some basic high passing i mean total you know what do we got uh one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 plugins we've got 19 plugins and a static mix and it's a good starting point [Music] [Music] that's quite all right robert i'm with you i am with you it's not an ages thing what i'm saying is like you know when you're working with an artist as a teenager you want to make sure that they sound young and fresh and you don't apply we don't apply our old ideas to them or if we do if you want the 90s or we want the 80s we do it in a fresh twist that makes it sound relevant rather than so authentic that you're like oh this guy or girl sounds old it's that's what it is it's like how can we make it fresh and young and youthful and exciting anyway there's more stuff to do thanks ever so much for uh tuning in the last couple of hours most importantly please please please download the the snare's still not done we're still working on it obviously and you haven't watched a long anyway so this is the way we mix you sort of make decisions make along you don't tie yourself into one position and go down to sound you know we we've done a few plug-ins we've done a static mix and there's still things to do and plus of course no one person's ever gonna think what you did is good everybody's gonna have their opinion and they're the right and you everybody else is wrong that's the way it works anyway it's all good uh thank you ever so much for tuning in i really appreciate it please download the multitracks and thank you ever so much for watching and um yeah do your own mix um download the mix i'd love to hear it see what the the the way you do the snare um that'd be very exciting and everybody else the same challenge you know go and download the multitracks do a mix um you and we'll see you ever we'll see you soon we'll probably i don't know next week we'll come back and open this up and do it again so long farewell ravida zayn or

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 30,100

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

Id: Xs1Nk0955nU

Length: 117min 45sec (7065 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021