Mixing Masterclass with Bob Power [MixCon 2017]

cry for me cry for yesterday cry for me [Music] hi i'm justin coletti from sonic scoop thanks for coming to mixcon i want to introduce you to our next presenter i'm really excited about this one this is a guy who has worked with so many artists that i grew up listening to i mean i look back on my teenage years and i'm like i love that that band i love that band i love that band talking about tribe called quest de la soul erica badu too many artists to mention let's give a big warm welcome to mr bob power please bob is going to be walking us through a real mix that he brought in and he's going to take us through his entire process not only is bob an amazing engineer an amazing mixer but he's also a great educator he's been teaching for a long time at the clive davis institute at nyu so we're really super thrilled to have him just want to give a shout out to our sponsors for this event the reason that mixcon is free for you guys to attend and the reason that's free for you to watch at home on youtube is because of our sponsors and the sponsors for this event one of my favorite plug-in companies sound toys we can give a big round of applause for sound toys thanks to those guys this is completely free and uh we really appreciate you being here for mixcon i'm gonna get off stage and hand it out over to bob thank you um i i just want to talk a little bit before we start about what mixing really is uh these guys wanted me to get right into it and say this is how i do the kick drum and i can see them at the back rogue presenter rogue presenter but i want to talk for a little just a minute about mig what mixing really is you know fundamentally mixing is about musical balances and tonal balances and by tonal balances musical balances are obvious by tonal balances i mean the hopefully somewhat natural distribution of the frequency content in the instruments that are represented in the mix which gets towards the idea of a great arrangement will make a great mix as you guys probably know if you're fighting the arrangement if people haven't apportioned those frequency areas properly by using the right instruments pitched in the same way the right way with the right timbre you're fighting an uphill battle and i think that's what a lot of us do have to at least half the time is sort of trying to untangle something that might have been arranged a little bit better to begin with but so be it that's what it is but again musical balances which are obvious tonal balances which is again a very complementary and pleasant distribution of the frequency content between the different instruments so the listening experiences becomes pleasurable from purely from a sonic point of view you know creating a vibe is important uh and i'll be honest with you uh often if you create a deep enough vibe you don't have to worry about all the other stuff i talked about because that's what's really important but yeah creating a vibe uh and seeing the artist and producers vision uh i can't emphasize that enough uh if you're mixing for yourself that's one thing but if you're mixing for other folks it's not for you it's not for you and you really need to go to the wall for in several ways to a try to suss out what really the artist and producer had in mind and then be through your own chops try to elevate that and take that to a level that they kind of didn't really imagine that it could go there but it's real important to remember that it is not for you if you're mixing you're in service of the music the producer and the artist and then the this sounds real mundane but the x factor can i hear everything i know that sounds really kind of mundane but uh that's what i've been fighting all my life wow i i labor under the assumption that if somebody put something in a production that they meant it so you heard it now it has to be in the right proportion but i'm assuming that they put it there so you would hear it i've been wrong uh but you know just can i hear everything can become a lifetime question itself and if you if you can put together a mix where you can actually hear all the elements you know meaning that they're in the proper perspective but you can just you can still hear everything you're probably going to be pretty far ahead of the game you're probably going to be doing pretty well now some things will be darker some things will be smaller some things will be bigger but if you can hear all those things it's like wow that's that's really something in itself um you know it's tough when you start thinking about the tonal balances the musical balances the artist vision the producer's vision can i hear everything did they intend to hear everything it becomes a pretty complex matrix pretty quickly and then there's the vibe factor which um i have to say i suffered for a long time feeling that if everything else was together that the mix would be great but the vibe was suffering you know ideally the vibe is going to be in the production you shouldn't have to invent the vibe in the mix but it doesn't always work that way and in a perfect world what you want to do is enhance the vibe that's already there take whatever vibe and and elevate it magnify it four times uh another thing just to get our definitions together you can think about the dimensions of a mix in three ways top to bottom which is frequency content side to side which is your stereo field and front to rear which is the depth of the mix and the depth of the mix the the last one is really the toughest one you know top to bottom to get a pleasing complementary set of frequencies for all the instruments to exist in where it's pleasant to listen to that's tough enough left and right the stereo field well it's kind of an easier proposition there's a reason we don't put the kick drum and the snare drum hard right because it takes away the glue of the rhythm section and the punch of the rhythm section front to rear is a little bit more difficult and we legislate the front to rear dimension of the mix via ambience generators volume and timbre of all things generally as something we forget but in nature as things get farther away from you they generally get a little bit darker there's a reason why you know when you saw the cartoons where someone's in the the canyon and they go hello hello hello well you got to remember that as those things die away they don't just get quieter they actually get darker also which is one of the reasons why a lot of delays had high frequency roll-offs so each iteration of the delay would get a little bit darker and again it's not like what happens in nature is everything because no we're making a record here we can do things you cannot do in nature but again knowing the issues of perception and front to rear perception what makes something sound farther away there's going to be a timbral element to that there's going to be a volume element to that and then there's going to be an ambience element to that now the ambience you can think of as the ratio of direct versus reflected sound that you're hearing and you do that by how much you're sending to the reverb how much you're sending to the delay but again think about those three dimensions of the mix and really the last one the frontal rear dimension is what where things get really really interesting because you should be able to listen to a mix it should not be like a flat piece of paper it should almost it's kind of like like televisions now uh i have a 4k tv in the city uh i guess it's led it's real cool but i tell you i don't know how you guys feel it's a little weird for me because i see this layer here this layer here this layer here this layer here and there seem to be all these discrete layers going back rather than the plasma which i have upstate which looks more like film where you have that smooth gradation of things just there's there's no layers there's only depth there and i think that's one of the things we want to work towards in our front to rear dimension of the mix i'm looking at my notes truths they really are going rogue presenter rogue presenter but this stuff is important again it's not for you it's for the producer and the artist not that you don't bring your own thing to it because that's why they came to see you careful of reference tracks okay sometimes somebody will do a track and they play a katy perry track for me they want it to sound like that i'm like i'm sorry you're not katy perry you didn't and you didn't have the best people in the world working on this production who are really really good at what they do you can't tell them that but that's that's just a hazard of when people say well yeah i want it to sound like this well you're not el green i'm sorry you know but some of the things that you want to start thinking about in terms of what your clients want from you or what you want from yourself because a lot of times you've been mixing your own stuff you can think of splashy we know what splashy sounds like deep mysterious vibey punchy in truth you really often have to suss that out yourself because your clients won't be able to tell you that how many you guys mix for other clients okay so you know what i'm talking about so i'm not wasting my breath here you know ultimately a great recording is a compelling performance of a great song right those two things have to be there before you have a great record whether you like what he does or not james taylor could make a great record on a phone because he gives compelling performances of great songs and a lot of times what we do during the course of production and mixing is trying to elevate it trying to get it to another level where it really becomes more compelling um i'm looking down my notes here uh how many of you trust your monitors fewer hands than what i did before yeah it's key guys you know it's really key and to be honest there's a couple things you want from monitors the term flat is it's like nothing is flat what is flat i don't want flat i want i want to know what's there without any exaggeration of any particular area so ideally you know the most important thing for your monitors is that they reveal everything that's there to you you don't want to work real hard on something get somewhere else and find out there was an anomaly there that you actually weren't able to hear on your on your speakers the good news is that there's a lot of great monitors way under ten thousand dollars now you know there's a there's a whole class of stuff now really between a thousand and three thousand dollars that are really pretty good but get to know and trust your monitors it is your ears those are the most important things you have and again rather than being good or flat it's much more important that you know them well and you know how the stuff will translate back in the 70s guys used to mix on there was a stereo speaker manufacturer called ar and there were guys who mixed on ar-17s these little uh stereo speakers with a six or eight inch woofer two-inch tweeter some people mix on oratones some very heavy-duty mixers mix on auratones but they know the response of the speaker and they know how the stuff will translate so that's super important and in fact if you don't trust your monitors then that should probably be at the top of your save up four list um what do we have as our building blocks what do we have as our tools you know really there's two things in in audio manipulation there are gain control devices and there are ambience generators that's it now by gain control device you say well what about an eq well an eq is a gain device it just boosts or cut cuts a very specific area in the frequency spectrum but it's still a game device you know you say gain control everyone immediately thinks of compression well yeah but also there's a fader it's a game control device and there's there's compression and there's an equalizer again it boosts or cuts a very specific frequency area ambience generators reverbs delays flangers choruses pitch shifters kind of come into that there are pitch effects too but when it really comes down to it those are the only things you have at your disposal gain control devices and ambience generators pitch-based effects to a certain degree i put in under ambience generators uh you know what do we do with these things hopefully number one create a tonally pleasing sound something that when you listen to it besides the music coming across you well it's really pleasant to listen to and if it's boomy and if it's jeep stuff and it's meant to be like that it's going to be pleasant to listen to on that level if it's a barbra streisand record sorry mick um and it's real shiny and beautiful in pinpoint and you know that's what that thing is supposed to be and it's very pleasant to listen to on that level so again is it totally pleasing to listen to given the context of what the music is um in a way it should reflect the natural sound of the instrument but in this day and age that's way down on the totem pole of importance because nothing is natural these days anymore if you're doing a jazz record yeah removing unpleasant artifacts okay that's a big one to me uh removing eq areas that when a certain pitch comes out all of a sudden it gets really tanky and then goes away when that pitch or that dynamic level changes yeah we want to kind of take those things away and a de-esser is a perfect example of that as well you know digital is really unkind to sibilance we know this uh it seems to make it worse digital also to me seems to accentuate the anomalies in the different dynamic and pitch ranges of a person's voice you know how a lot of singers will sound very even real good studio singers sound super even tonally and dynamically throughout the whole range of their singing but for the rest of us a lot of times when someone sings high it'll sound real nasal and squeaky and then they sing low and it sounds real dark and blooming well we want to try to take away that those anomalies from getting in the way of our listening uh experience and then to have the elements work in the genre and the context of the track okay and this is all the same stuff that i was talking about before but the genre is important uh and i'm definitely gonna get onto some techniques in just a second but genre is really important people ask me well what really what's your first line of defense when you think about where you're going with the mix i have to say it's genre and the sonic emphases of different kinds of songs are really very genre dependent i when i was coming up i had a couple of different careers scoring tv and stuff before i started engineering so when i first started engineering it was in the mid 80s and i was doing a lot of dance records in the early days of hip-hop then somebody brought in a jazz record so i mixed the jazz record and because i've been doing a lot of hip-hop the kick drum was king right man did i mess that up if you guys know anything about jazz the kick drums like you know in hip-hop it's right here in jazz is way back there somewhere so genre is really really important what works for one type of music doesn't work for another one um you know i wrote carve up the frequency spectrum to hear things in a mix yeah make room for other things okay i'll get into something in just a minute uh about resonant peaks most instruments because of the anomalies of the recording process and the instruments themselves most instruments have a resonant peak it often changes with the pitch of the instrument but it's often there throughout the different pitch ranges and what you can do is raise up an eq with a with a medium cube not real wide like that not too tight just about like that and then start start sweeping it and all of a sudden you'll get to a point where you'll hear this thing come up like that and you'll back off and it'll disappear again well you've just found the resonant peak and i guarantee you especially in the low end of things especially between 400 and 100 hertz if you do that with everything in your mix before you actually get to work is sweep that eq and find that resonant puke where it really comes up like that and just pull that back in just a little bit all of a sudden there'll be so much more room for everything else because those resonant peaks won't be masking the other instruments it's a big one it works really well and again you'll do a lot less boosting because you've cut out the things that are getting in the way of the tonal uniformity instrument rather than trying to make up for it with a boost here and a boost here and you're boosting everywhere except that resonant peak if you go and take that resonant peak and pull it down a little bit everything else will be a lot more evenly represented um do you need to boost you know i used to read about guys like like real experienced heavy engineers and they say i hardly ever boost eqs i almost always cut and i was like wow i could never do that i don't know how they do that and you know what now i find myself cutting almost all the time and doing very very little boosting if you can get to that you'll find that your mixes will sound a lot smoother a lot less harsh a lot less lumpy you know yeah you got to boost the low end sometimes if you want a little hump on the kick or the bass in a certain area and yes if you want a little more tap on the kick if you kick up 3k a little bit it'll give you a little more tap that's something you're not going to get via cutting but particularly with high frequency it's going to be a lot smoother if you actually get rid of all the mid-range and low end that's making it sound boomy in that area and if you pull that away you'll find that the high end that's left is a lot sweeter and smoother than if you crank up 5k which will take the enamel off your teeth you know pretty quickly high pass and low pass there's a whole school and there are a lot of heavyweight mixers that send their assistant in the room before they go to work and every element in the mix they high pass end or low pass to take away anything that doesn't need to be there before they go to work and particularly high passing is really really important because there's a lot of not subharmonic but base harmonic information below let's say 150 to 200 hertz that it really adds up when you listen to one thing by itself you go oh that's not too much of that but when you have 20 of those things with a lot of spurious information below 150 hertz that doesn't really need to be there it really starts to cloud things up so think about going in before you go to work high pass or low pass everything and this is the way you do it say with a high pass filter you take the high pass you play the the instrument you loop it and as soon as you start to encroach into the bottom of where you want you find you lose that bottom like that then back off until you get what you want again but leave everything below that out of there because that stuff really adds up and you'll be fighting that cloudiness a lot same thing with low passing not everything needs to be bright and in fact if there's a lot of 2500 3k on a bass guitar i'm not so sure if that frequency area is going to help me define the function of what a bass is actually supposed to be doing in the track so think about that before you get into work uh gain control okay everybody thinks about compression as it keeps things from getting too loud uh kinda i mean that's the radio station thing uh you know why compressors first got built right for radio stations apparently i'm not real technical like this but back in the 20s and 30s if too much voltage got sent to the radio station transmitter the transmitter would actually blow up i mean there'd be sparks and fire and the whole thing so that's where compressors first got started and why they were invented in the first place to keep things from getting too loud too quickly personally i think compression does a couple of different things in a modern pop context number one it helps us keep a constant presence on something and you know it's not good or bad but it's the sound of a pop record that we're used to have things having a particular presence in a track and that doesn't change it doesn't drift away too much and come back and drift away if it's meant to sound like that it does but it's always right there well compression guarantees a constant presence in a track the other thing that compression does for me and particularly with vocals that i think is really important is it enhances the detail of the low level stuff okay i often compress not for what it does to the loud parts but because it's clamping down on the loud parts i can hear all the real soft stuff and that's where a lot of the real expressive stuff in a vocal goes on all those little inside things that happen inside on a vocal so it enhances the low level detail you can hear all the low-level stuff the other thing we use it for is envelope modification right modifying the attack sustain decay elements of a sound and most of that's done with percussion stuff and usually with drums but it can be done with guitars and bass too um let me put up a couple other things again many of you it seemed like most of you actually mix for outside clients tuning it's not your job it's a producer's job it's not your job to sit there and tune somebody's vocal it's not your job to figure out how far you should go on that before it sounds unnatural and takes all the life out of something you know so no i'm sorry don't sit there and tune somebody's vocals for them that's the producer's job occasionally if i get a track and they wanted a real smooth r b background thing where it was real lush and smooth yeah occasionally i'll auto tune some of the background vocals there just to give it that lushness because no matter what you do if it's not really in tune you'll never make it sound super lush try not to speaking of autotune try not to slap it on and just put it on one setting personally i use melodyne especially for my lead stuff and i go through it note at a time i do it by hand i don't do it by the grid i do it by my ear because every singer has their comfort level singers you know the the range of an acceptable in tune pitch is like this everyone thinks that this is in tune no there's a range like this and every instrumentalist or singer has their comfort zone about where they live and if you've ever tuned a segment of a performance what ends up happening is the stuff that you don't tune starts sounding really weird because you've taken the singer out of their sort of comfort zone on the pitch pitch level but one other thing about you know again dsp and conserving your resources is an issue these days unless so all of all of the time now the computers uh are much more powerful and plug-ins are much more efficient but it's a good idea not to put autotune on and just leave it on i render it to audio and then disable the auto auto tune so the computer doesn't have to work so hard it'll save you a lot of dsp everything will run a little bit smoother just couple more things uh organization professionals don't let things don't happen to professionals oh it just happened i don't know what happened no that does not happen how many guys back up i don't see enough hands guys always have two drives hooked up to your computer always when you're working your a drive and your b drive work to your a drive and at the end of the day back up to the b drive do it every day do not even think twice about it don't do drag and drop don't use time machine time machine is really good for system-wide backups but it's real lousy for file specific backups chronosync i use it's a great utility carbon copy cloner or chronosync two backup utilities that basically chronosync lets you say i want you to copy from the backbone folder i'm working with a band called backbone right now on drive a and copy that anything that's new to the backbone folder on drive b lets you save that as a document on the desktop so if i worked on backbone that day i and i'm ready to leave i just double click click on that i say go it copies all the stuff over okay can't emphasize that enough and i know you know that you should back up but you need to do it every single day and you need to have two drives hooked up to your computer all the time save version numbers every time you do a major amendment to a mix save it as 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 it's sort of leaving a trail of crumbs how many guys have ever done something and realized that it was much better four versions ago yeah it lets you go back and import stuff from those earlier versions real easily it also allows you when you send stuff out to your clients you have a mix called i love you baby baby 1.3 they send you notes on that you i have a spreadsheet and i'm not going to get too deep into this but it's a good idea to keep a spreadsheet with your current working versions your clients comments on a particular version and then what you did to change it and then what the new version is and send those comments back to your clients if your clients write you and say i feel like we're losing this lead vocal at times i feel like there's too much reverb on the lead vocal the kick drum isn't punchy enough i copy and paste that stuff to a text document and when i send them the revised mix i put little check marks by those things and send them that text document back two things number one it keeps me straight and make sure that i actually address those things and it'll bring up the confidence factor of your clients and they really will think that you are listening to them and care anyway there's there's a no i you know it's in a way it's manipulative but in a way it's not you know you really the trust of your clients that you're actually there to do the right thing by them is super super important that's what people will come to you for you know we all get better at our own rate and our own pace and sometimes it goes it's faster and sometimes you'd be doing this for 35 years and you still go home feeling like yeah it happens to all of us but uh it's really important that your clients know that you'll go to the wall for them i i have to say i'm pretty good at what i do but but i really feel like my career is a result of my clients knowing that i will work much harder than they will uh okay enough of that stuff um esther rada i mixed and mastered her first well the first record that i had of hers it wasn't her first record which was um nina simone covers but completely reimagined with like um afrobeat horn arrangements incredibly the best musicians in israel incredible rhythm section the drummer sounded like steve gad it was great it was really really good and super clean and super defined so all all i really had to do was direct traffic and make sure the music came off in a very dynamic fashion because it was traditional arrangements with traditional orchestrations great players playing the right parts on the right instruments it was wonderful she sent me a record about a year ago to mix that was really really different and she worked with a not a minimalist but a very different kind of producer in israel a guy named shus and he uses real kind of squonky sounds doesn't fill in all the cracks and you'll hear that in this he kind of leaves it's not this stuff where the rhythmic feel is super smooth and super funky all the time it's kind of what i call the jerky funk um but that's a thing and that's how it worked uh every mix you get you sort of have to do triage right away you have to assess what does this mix need and what am i up against well with this stuff it was how to make very few elements sound as big as possible each one the track count was very low on this there may have been 30 voices maybe and a lot of those were doubles of stuff where you know they put five mics on the piano thanks i just really one decent stereo mic would do just fine but they had a mono mic they had a mic in the bathroom on the piano you know so again because there weren't a lot of elements going on i thought all right what you really have to do is make those elements sound a lot bigger and a lot punchier and very dynamic which is not what people usually think of me as you know but that was my assessment let me play you some of the stuff and then we'll start to deconstruct it um it sounds horrible up here uh if it sounds really horrible out there raise your hand because i'm getting the slap off the back wall little delay [Music] stupid game we both can and i don't know what you're doing are you sorry [Music] i always found you [Music] cry for me [Music] oh [Music] [Music] satisfy you cry for me cry for yesterday cry for me cry for yesterday so you can see there's i didn't turn that up by the way that was them uh in the middle you can see there's not really that much going on but the the the vibe in this or i what i took is the important thing was how to give those things a lot of emphasis and make them sound real punchy and dynamic uh also how to make the groove elements work because they're a little unusual um i'm going to just start moving a little faster and deconstruct a lot of this let me find my instrumental masters by the way you should work with instrumental group masters meaning that you should have all your drums end up after all the routing you do all the drums and effects come out through one stereo buss that's called drums bass guitars keys background vocals effects and scratches or whatever pads lead vocals you should have a single fader that represents all those things there's a bunch of different advantages to that including number one it's a lot easier to drop stems that way number two you can make adjustments to the overall level of those instrumental groupings without having to go into a bunch of little tiny faders and move this up a little move that up a little and say wow i think the drums need to be a little louder great let me just move up that drum master a little bit plus it allows you to put eq across those group masters often it's like wow this sounds really great the drums aren't just quite bright enough well do you want to go into each individual drum and brighten it up and worry about if you're doing it too much or this or is it changing the sound too much or just go to your drum group and open up the top a little it's a lot easier to do things that way so you can see i have kit master base master key master background master lead vocal master one other thing about this it's super important try to have your ambiences discreet to the instrumental grouping that they are active on meaning that your drum reverb only used for your drums and have that come out of the drum master bus your uh voc lead vocal reverbs and delays only use those on the lead vocals and have those come out the lead vocal bus what that does is several things number one when it's time to print an ins uh acapella or instrumental you just mute that stuff and you're fine the other thing is you know how sometimes you solo a vocal and you go wow that's really great except i'm hearing the snare drum in the vocal reverb it takes that away so if you have the dsp try to keep your ambience generators discreet to the instrumental grouping that they're on and again you don't have problems like uh you drop an acapella and you hear the snare drum a little in the vocal reverb it'll take that away because that sucks when that happens so let me uh let me mute these guys and let's start at the core which is the drums i'm sorry i'm an r b guy that's the way i think one of the weird things about this mix is i if there is a kick drum i don't know if it's very prominent um there are toms that take the function of the kick let's see um he called them toms it's really it's serving the function of a kick it does have the resonance of atom which is actually a problem i don't think i've ever done a track with acoustic drums where it's been tom's playing throughout where it hasn't been a nightmare because of the build buildup resonance of those things and the masking that that does um i'm trying to think if these are actually live toms or not let's take a listen and see yeah it is uh it is um so let's see how i dealt with the main one here um wow not doing too much uh i should be high passing and i'm not and i lied about the boosting i am boosting oh but you know what's interesting guys i'm doing uh a shelf but starting at 500. so really everything from the sort of mid-range through the upper mid-range i'm taken up just to get a little more definition in the drum without it [Music] with it yeah you can hear the attack on it much better like that um let's see he had another mic on it and uh c 4m i guess that's a microphone overhead let's listen to that by itself oh that's helpful i didn't do anything to that because it didn't need it but it helps the definition without it yeah that's really nice i didn't do anything because i didn't have to it really it's all mid-range and upper mid-range so it really helps to find the the uh the kick a little bit let's see what this is about why did i put a modulation delay on this there's another um there's a rca it was ribbon mic on the same toms let's take a listen to that i have a feeling i put a very short couple of millisecond delays to deal with the phase of that it might have sounded a little phasey against the originals i may have made it a little longer to give it you know yeah it's meant to be an ambient mic and it took away some of the phase problems oh let's see what else okay now i have i've routed these things to a bus that i called tom beat and i'm using 1176. what am i doing that for probably just to punch it up a little bit and what what i wanted to do was accentuate the attack uh yeah so i have the slowest attack i can and the fastest release i can by the way fast attacks on compressors are the quickest way to take all the life out of your music now i'll tell you you put a fast attack people say how fast i don't know that knob is over here but say 10 15 milliseconds on a vocal what you'll find is the vocal will always sit in place but you take all the inner life out of it you know you've done gain control so you can always hear it just perfectly but you've taken all that inner push out of the vocal what you want to do is enhance what that singer meant to be doing but give it a constant presence in the track and again fast attacks you'll always hear it but you'll take away any of the push that that singer had going on now this again is very slow attack very fast release reason the release is so fast is because the beats really active and i want the compressor to recover back to zero before the next hit comes the other thing is a fast release on percussive elements kind of brings up the raucous nature of it it it just makes it waffle a little bit more in a good way let's take a listen without the compressor with it yeah definitely makes it a little more a little bit more exciting and again very slow attack to let the attack go through very fast release so when it acts it comes back to zero before the next hit hits you'll see if i slow down the release it basically just takes the drums and turns them down because it's a very active beat and the compressor never has time to come back to unity gain watch fast release much more dynamic now again because by the time the next hit hits you want that compressor to come back to zero very slow attack now how does a slow attack modify the envelope well what happens is it lets the the natural attack of the instrument come through and then clamps down on it now it hasn't really made that attack louder that would be an expander but it gives you the impression that that attack is more pronounced because the the the level of the attack compared to the sustain level is greater you're basically taking down the sustain level so it's going to seem like the attack is enhanced does that make sense uh but definitely ups the excitement factor again without it with it now that's a sucker punch because it got louder too it always sounds better but definitely it sounds a lot punchier a lot more dynamic let's see i then bust that to another stereo bus called toms and ambience i guess don't know why i did that uh but i did some more corrective eq uh at that point let's take a listen i'll explain this curve can you guys see this pretty weird but i'll show you in a sec without it wow huge huge difference right um let me before i start messing with this let me save the setting as one so we can get back to it um let me explain what i did here uh i'm boosting at 100 to really get the bigness of the bottom right but i'm also doing what i call a poor man's high pass filter below it again this is a six band parametric so there's no filter on the low end but you know what if you pull way down like this at 31 there's nothing below that so it's going to act like a high pass filter with this curve right here and if i if i take that off you'll see it gets real wolfy real quickly the low end resonance thanks guys again anytime you boost you know how many things are you going to want to boost the low end on kick drum bass guitar what else sorry yeah you know that kind of stuff um as a rule of thumb like again i'm not perfect and this doesn't always work but as a rule of thumb generally if i boost low end say around 100 or 80 hertz i'll almost always high pass it below that because there's not a lot of that sub stuff that you're really interested in especially with something that's this active if it's an 808 that goes boom boom every once in a while yeah you can get away with having all that 40 and 50 hertz in there and you can actually hear it with something like this boom boom boom boom if you have 50 hertz in there all it's going to turn into is this kind of drone that that's going to really mask your low end another thing i'm giving away all my trade secrets but any time you boost the area that you really want to hear the low frequency on in this case it's it's 102 well i meant 100 but i didn't get it perfectly i almost always cut just above it and what that does is it gives you that 100 hertz emphasis on the low frequency but takes out the woofiness that would work and just above it and it happens a lot take a listen without the cut you know how wolfy that is it's right here and talk about a resonant peak that is it but almost i this is a real good technique if you do boost your low frequency on anything just above that raise a uh peaking eq and listen for where it's getting woofy [Music] right there wow that's great i'm getting the benefit of the hundred hertz without the wolf that's just above it uh i'm gonna go back to my preset and you know not a bad idea if you have a setting that you think is working but you want to mess with it save it so you can always get back quickly to what you had plus if you have a if you have a second setting you can abm real quickly another thing which is really great um put your cursor over the bypass button it's not so much relevant here but with compression it definitely is put your cursor over the bypass button cycle a very short segment like a bar close your eyes click it on and off bypass and bypass in so you don't know which is which and listen to one bar one way click it in listen to one bar another way back to the first way back to the second way and you'll really get a very objective read very quickly as to whether you're doing something good or not you know a lot of times you say well i don't know if this is exactly the right thing is it helping close your eyes cycle a short segment put the cursor over the bypass button close your eyes hit cycle and then kick it in and out and very quickly you'll see is this actually doing something that's desirable okay let's move on time does fly [Music] i can't tell i don't think the slap is on the track i'm hearing the stuff slapped back off the bay it's like 90 milliseconds it's real funny um this is really driving the track so i felt like it was kind of important um i used uh the studer tape simulation across it what i find uh do you guys have any tape sims like this ua stuff yeah the atr is pretty amazing um you know really focuses the mid-range very quickly just like the the physical version of it the studer brings up the low end and will warm things up and and lop off some annoyingness in the attack transients again you can choose a different tape formulation i'm lucky that i come from tape days and i know what these different tape formulations actually sound like so i i can go a little bit quickly i think i had just gotten this ua compressor and it's it's fairly transparent so i was using it like that let's take the things off [Music] with the tape tightens it up a little tape compression a little more compression to punch it up let's take a look at the envelope on the compressor just to see what we're doing actually it's a pretty short attack and uh auto release i don't know i just got the piece so i was messing around with it um but again this drives the track and and it's funny i now that i look at this mix i did a lot less than i usually do things came together in a way where it seemed to be working so i didn't mess with it uh bongo's bathroom that was not helpful i didn't use it um again with this kind of let's see what we did for ambience here um tom room short oh you know what i did this is actually the new waves h uh not new at the time it was new the age reverb i was just trying different things with something like this [Music] i would go with a real fast room or even a non-linear to kind of give it that clacky raucous thing because you just want to get some excitement going with this you know how the non-linear stuff tends to um clatter because that th that that that you hear periodicity in the in the um reflections uh we don't hear that in this but let's let's see without the ambience with it yeah we're sort of getting a rebound off the reverb i think there's some pre-delay on it so that's pretty cool all right uh let's the snare is weird in this uh it's almost like a dub snare where it's coming on four let's take a listen wow look at that slow attack fast release i want to really punch up the attack on the snare let's listen without it okay we have a gain thing so it's sounding real different let me raise the output so it kind of sounds the same [Music] can you you can hear the the difference in the attack right you guys can see when i'm bypassing and stuff you can also hear that this is noisy as hell [Music] yeah this was not recorded with a lot of care uh and an ear towards noise and stuff tracks are very noisy if i feel like it's getting in the way of hearing things i'll actually go through and cut it up i or gate it or denoise it something like that but this track was raucous enough you know there's so much like kinetic energy in this track that that really i didn't think it was much of an issue um you know i didn't do what i said which was actually saved the setting before i amended it but that's fine and let's look at the eq on this okay nothing here let's see three wow look at that i'm boosting at 620. what a weird area but you know what that's going to give a little body to the mid-range on the on the attack on the snare itself let's save that as snare one and let me show you what it's doing that kind of pop gun thing because there's no bottom on the snare and there's enough uh competition in the high end that i really didn't want to boost up the high end that much so i wanted to to give it some punch and this was a place where it seemed like kind of sounds like a pop gun uh let's go back to what we had okay there we go thank you and look at this i'm actually pulling down 2 500. let's see what's there that's why i'm pulling down at 2 500. it's harsh as hell [Music] and that's about it without the pull down of 2500 well you know what it sounds okay by itself but part of my thinking is i need to leave room for other things i don't want something having so much high frequency and you know that'll get you into trouble if you have one thing that's out of whack that has a lot of high end on it you'll be chasing it through the mix with everything else so i'm very wary of either harshness or um spittiness in the high frequency on any one element i usually try to get rid of things like that on individual elements and then if i need it back later i'll i'll put it back but if i left this in i would have been fighting that upper mid range trying to get everything else to stand up to that okay let's see what else we got snare delay effects let's see what we did i probably did a throw to the snare delay let's take a listen [Applause] wow it's kind of cool um let's take a look and see what it is just making it a little more exciting in that build up and i i automated my sand by the way work in touch those lines don't don't make little dots and move the lines that's not musical you know you want to actually treat this like it's a musical instrument and two things will happen if you work and touch number one it'll it'll have a lot better feel your moves will have a better feel because you're actually doing them and number two it's so much faster and if you don't like what you did apple z and you just do it again so try working in touch and that's what i did with this now let's see what happens at the end though it's kind of weird um you know i wanted a crescendo kind of feeling at the end of the thing so uh i just wrote the delay time and had a little group uh it's funny it gets lower just before it gets higher that may have just been a move of my hand that was not exact take a look take a look at the time oh no i went right so i went low and then high it's really a nice way to add some kinetic energy to the mixes to have your delays modulate like that okay um and it's on the lo-fi setting and i probably have a lot of the high-end rolled off guys you don't want your delays to have the same tonal content as a dry thing why don't you just copy the dry thing high frequency with delays is a no-no i just don't like it at all you know the other thing that allows you to do is when you filter your delays and your reverbs for that matter if there's less high frequency content on those things you focus on what you should be focusing on which is the dry thing itself you know in a way mixing is just like arranging where you're legislating the listeners assignment of what's supposed to be on the primary level of interest the secondary the tertiary quarter area whatever you know and on and on but that's really what you're doing and again it's exactly like arranging where you're legislating for the listener how they're supposed to be perceiving those elements and it's not the one that's on the fifth level they is imperceptible no it's just that it's on the fifth level of importance and it assumes that proper level in terms of the arrangement and the track itself okay uh long snare long effects i probably did a throw at some point um a throw most of you know this but a throw is when you send something to an ambiance generator just for a moment let's let's see uh effects no let's see level mute yeah i did some throws here so there were hits that were out in the open so i figured i could use a long verb after that let's check this out it's kind of cool the reverb sounds like it was lowering in pitch at the end of it i don't think that was intentional um wow that's interesting um you know i use it's funny i used to hate deverb i i go back a ways you know there wasn't a lot to use early on but it's so trashy that i've really gotten to like it um i honestly i find it very handy for kind of trashy small rooms that you want to splash out of it like almost like a non-linear all right let's check let's move on the hi-hat loop now they gave me a hi-hat ambience track not that handy but whatever i had it in but i did pan them out just to give the uh the hat some width normally it's not an issue but again there's not a lot going on in this track so i really needed to fill up spaces without the ambience let me go to an active part with the ambient mic gives it some side to side dimension and let's see what we're doing eq wise you know not a lot i'm basically getting rid of most of the low end oh that's why can you hear all that other schmutz in there now with the high pass and the low frequency roll off just a lot cleaner again if if there's something that's non-essential get rid of it that stuff builds up in the track and interestingly i'm not boosting the high end i'm actually let me save this i'm actually getting rid of some upper mid-range 2300. that area is going to start to compete with other stuff real easily and again i guess my thought was i want to take away that competition you know early on in the mix i really want to make sure that nothing is so loaded up at a particular frequency area that later on i'm going to have to keep boosting everything else in that area so again trying i think i talked about this early on trying to take away the frequency anomalies in a particular instrument uh oh and devil lock ah i love this thing total trash you guys use this um at first at first i was like i can't use that you know it's just too severe and now i'm like oh i gotta have it i gotta have it and i believe i did this just to really up the excitement factor on the hat let's listen without it oh my god yeah now fast release again for the reasons i said before if this is a rhythmically accurate part and it's compressing i want it to come back up to unity gain before that next attack sound toys i love you if you're listening the mix control is nice but there needs to be an output level control on this thing because as soon as you start to put in this a little bit with the mix control it seems louder i don't know if it actually is but it sounds louder and the only way you can make an accurate reference as to whether something sounds better or not is to have it as the same bottom you guys know this psychoacoustically if one thing is even a little bit louder than the other and you play both of them you will think that the louder one sounds better so if they had a overall output level control on this i'd be really happy about it i don't know if you guys use this but you'll find that with the mix control as soon as you start to mix in any of the super crushed signal from this compressor it's louder right away but definitely adds the excitement value right a lot of schmutz in there i can it sounds like the guys i don't know dropped his phone or something right um it sounds like he dropped in on the tom all right claps let's take a listen and guys anytime i have multiple elements that are making up one sound i bust them bust them to a single fader whether it's stereo or mono makes your life a lot easier you'll get faster at it it won't take any time and it just gives you a lot more control over the thing and again if you want to make it brighter you don't have to worry about making one part brighter and then the other part brighter you can make both things brighter okay so uh left claps right and claps left now i have uh pitch and non-linear on this i'll tell you a really great use of pitch plugins is to make claps sound fuller okay and generally you don't want to go higher you want to go lower you know it's funny coming up for years learning how to eq a clap i always thought oh wow you make it sound better if you add some upper mids or high frequency to it no the real the chunk of a clap is down in the mid-range it's really that not the cac so pitch shift really helps that out and makes them sound bigger without it with it you know and again i went lower with it just to you know sound like manly claps but that's what you want out of something like this i'm you know i'm joking but but i want this chunk chunk chunk i want a real big feel on that um and then the non-linear let's take i i generally they get a little clanky or clattery non-linear reverbs for uh percussive stuff you can almost hear them go like a zipper effect but in this case i wanted to make the track sound as raucous and as energy filled as possible let's take a listen with it without it [Applause] with it you know that's that's the non-linear reverb it's really kind of tanky but it seemed appropriate and i think what i said at the beginning there wasn't a lot going on in this track so i really figured that i had to sort of up the excitement and raucous level of the thing just to make the track come off and that that non-linear really helps without it with it kind of tanky kind of metallic but again i think it works in the context of the track there's a plate but i think it only sends every once in a while let's see uh actually you know what i didn't use it uh which i should have taken it off but i didn't use it all right let's keep on going shaker and this is a case where this track was really noisy so you see what i did there's still noise in there and again i sent this to a sounds like a plate i have it labeled as room but it sounds like a play to me um by the way name your buses in your sends immediately like this was a really big thing i think it was in pro tools 10 where you can right click you know if you have something right here you right click on it and you can rename it hello it's not doing it um let me option huh that's weird but as soon as you assign something you know say you have your uh bus 12 sending to one of your reverbs name it immediately it makes your life a lot easier you no longer have to think oh which bus was sending you know that was that was really rugged is it bus 12 that's going to that vocal reverb and you'd scroll up and down the page no this is real nice that you can name the stuff right away let's take a tom low extra every once in a while there's a big tom let's take a [Music] listen [Music] and what i did was um he says dunk gunk gong right so i thought it'd be kind of cool to i to have kung gong you know have the thing pan let's take a listen [Music] i can't hear it up here [Music] it's going like that or did i actually miss the move let's [Music] it should be panning i don't hear it that much um again just to give it a little more kinetic nature you know be careful of wildly panning elements they become very distracting very quickly and especially if they're groove elements they can actually take away from the groove they can diminish it yeah you know panning elements i tend to use especially with auto panners and and sound toys makes panman which is really cool i tend to use that to give some movement to pads and harmonic instruments that may be somewhat static and it's a great vibe thing too let's see what we're doing here eq wise wow look at that you know what i didn't do my my high pass like that but i will now i'm boosting up a 118 and then i'm cutting i'm cutting in the mid-range again normally what i do can you guys see up here normally i would have gone just higher than this and pulled it down so i didn't get the wolf part of that happening [Music] and let's take a look at the and i have a feeling i did this again to enhance the attacks [Music] without it [Music] with it a little more snap crackle pop particularly on the second hit and again at the beginning i was talking about using compression for envelope modification and that's it you got to be careful because it will get spitty meaning that if you enhance the attack portion of the percussive element too much it will get very fatiguing to the listener after a while and it'll start to what happens with a lot of percussive attack transients that come at your ears your ears tend to shut down to protect themselves i don't know if you've ever listened to something that's very percussively oriented with a lot of activity with very fast transients after about two minutes of that you'll stop hearing so much detail in the audio because your ears tend to shut down and that's about the only time i would use a fast attack on something is to take away that that spittiness at the at the beginning of the signal and look i used the man american reverb um manny i've known manny i i worked at the enterprise a lot in the la in la in the 90s and mandy manny was my assistant he'll do well one of these days do you guys know i mean he's really huge now it's great he's a really sweet guy too but i must have just gotten this and i thought okay let me try and see what it sounds like i tend to go with my more conventional stuff i tend to go to the same pieces a lot especially with reverbs and delays just because i know what i'm going to get and working at a reasonable speed is something that you have to do things are much better than they used to be you know imagine working on an analog mix with 64 tracks you know in a real studio with a big console that anytime you wanted to isolate something and eq it or prepare it you had to keep rewinding it [Music] you know it's a lot faster to work now in the digital realm it's really one of the nice things all right let's see background vocals okay you know there's a reason we're not hearing that because i have my masters over here again i can't emphasize this enough get into a standard routing thing where you end up having one fader for each instrumental group it'll make your life a lot easier in fact andrew scheps who's a real brainy guy apparently has a mixed template set up and i i should do this myself because i kind of do the same things each time where he has all that stuff set up in a template and when he gets a new session he just imports that bus and i o structure into the new session so he already has a drum box he already has a bass bus he already has a guitar bus set up um background math i've been away very unlike me i don't do like that much but it's kind of cool um let's see where they are i've been away you ever find that with big sessions you end up scrolling up and down the session to find what you're listening to um all right let's let's listen again again i i used to throw on this and i uh i did it via a mute rather than level now this is the kind of stuff that's actually kind of hard sometimes to do in touch because sometimes the latency on your system is such that your moves will always be a little bit late you guys use h delay yeah trashy as hell right it's great um echo boy also just because it's so adaptable and you can do so much with it so quickly but yeah so let's take a look i wonder why i only did it on the first one [Music] oh i did it on every other one yeah it would have gotten kind of dumb i've been away a way away i've been away away away away there's a little back and forth to it now where it's not happening all the time uh let's see what else we did on these guys um background vocal two that's funny that i did so much so little processing to the individual elements but i did most of it in the um in the group on the background let's take a look wow look at that i'm cutting some of the mid-range and upper mid-range again the idea is i just didn't want a lot of competition in that area let me let me save this setting bg1 let's take a listen uh let's bypass it i've been away okay now you know why i cut the upper mid-range harsh as hell right much better and in fact we could actually do well by cutting a little 300 i'm hearing a little bit of buildup down here you know what ends up happening is if this is loaded up in the 2500 range which is that kind of brassy nails on a blackboard thing if we pull that down there may have not sounded like there was too much two or three hundred there before but now that we've changed the tonal balance it's going to sound wolfy because we've changed the proportion of the different frequencies in the sound so let's listen again yeah that's the area where i now that i listen to the mix i'm like okay i could pull that back a little bit i've been away again you know i'm not after bigness in this i'm actually after um definition and having it sit into the track you know if you bigness usually comes in the bottom uh that's some that's where something will sound big but you got to be real careful because you can't have everything sounding real big and let's let's take a look at the i've compression away not doing much just really controlling the peaks [Music] i've been [Music] cool it's i love that it's like a dub track now i really like it with the drums and the background vocals guys thank you very much i appreciate you being here right bye you

Channel: SonicScoop

Views: 1,389,275

Keywords: Bob Power, De La Soul, Erykah Badu, D'Angelo, Macy Gray, Soundtoys, MixCon 2017, MixCon, SonicScoop, Tribe Called Quest, Ester Rada, The Roots

Id: cHxMsawJsTc

Length: 79min 24sec (4764 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Theskyis256k]

I keep seeing this thumb in prompted posts. I keep thinking this is a screenshot from Mr show with David cross dressed as the Kentucky fried chicken colonel

[u/JohnPym]

Watched this last night an even though I've been mixing for a few years now still really useful - thanks!

Main thing I took from it actually was mixing without an analyser on and finding resonant peaks by ear with a medium Q sweep - I remixed some drums I'm working on at the moment with this method an the difference was quite big so would recommend people try it!

[u/On_The_Move]

This guys a master of his craft and I’m putting this in them I must watch list. Thank you for the post