Mixing Masterclass with Jesse O'Brien - Mix Engineer at Red Rocks Church

i wanted to invite jess to just to chat with you guys because he's at red rocks church he red rocks worship you guys probably heard of them um and when you listen to the mixes online it's amazing you go if you go to in-person service at a red rocks campus here it's amazing um so i thought who better to have share some wisdom in the broadcast audio realm than this dude so go ahead and take it away and thank you jake have fun hey how you guys doing good tummies are all full hopefully our brains aren't too full yet if so i will uh have your cup runneth over um yeah so i'm jesse um like i like jake was saying i uh i kind of had the audio team and teams at red rocks church at the campus level and uh more central and broadcast levels so um my week i guess to kind of fill you in what that actually means my week uh at red rocks we do our broadcast service on thursdays usually um where we're we're capturing the whole thing both camera lights um we we do have people in the room uh but it's very known to the people in the room that hey we might mess up on a song so we might redo a couple parts it's not like a sunday service or it's like what happens is what happens um so then we do that on thursdays that's where i'm doing the mixing up in the broadcast booth um uh or the broadcast room rather audio room um i take all the individual channels that adam was talking about by the way let's give it up for adam he did an amazing job this morning [Applause] such a good speaker uh i learned a lot from it hopefully guys hopefully you guys did too um so anyway uh so i take all those individual tracks i mix it down to stereo or left right and that's what you hear online that's embedded with the video um and then sunday uh then we kind of spread out to the campus level so we have multiple locations uh at the campus level at red rocks everything's live except for the message the speaking which was done on thursday so we use rezzy who is out in the hall and gracious with their presence uh to to handle and manage all that streaming and uploading and downloading um to make that happen both for online all of our handles as well as multi-site um so that's what we do live and then so it allows our team to separate them like that it allows our team to kind of focus on online on thursday and then focus on the campus level so we're not spread too thin trying to do it all at once so yeah so that's kind of a brief description of my role there um so but let's get into kind of what we're here um what we're here for learning about online streaming and the wonderful amazing and not so forgiving world of online audio so how how does it differ from live what are what are the things that change what are the things that make a difference what are the things that you can use for both how do you implement both you know mixing live in the room versus online for phones and tvs and cars and headphones right um you know hopefully i can kind of shed a light on how to maximize what you have or with small purchases be able to immensely improve uh your situation so um yeah let's dive in so let me ask you this show of hands let's be honest how many of you guys know what an eq is and have a really good understanding of what an eq does raise your hand okay about half cool what about compressor also about half okay what about a gate all right and maybe the most fun what about a reverb all right so about half across the board it looked like from up here anyway okay so the thing that i think i want to touch on uh is or dive into with each of these is i think you know when you're when you're mixing or you're trying to figure out how to mix you're trying to figure out how to get your your sound to sound better online the first place you go to is youtube and there's some amazing resources out there churchfront being one of them they have some amazing instructional videos on how to do anything and everything that is you know live stream encompassing however the one thing that i always kind of see is not that church french is guilty or anything but there's a lot of people out there online that are saying you should do this you should do this you should do this you should put an eq first and then a compressor and then a de-esser and then a gate you should gain stage like this but there's not too much explanation of why right why do you eq first why do you use a compressor this certain way why do you set the attack of a compressor short or long okay why do you route pre-fader from a bus or post fader um there's a little bit more it's you know it's a little bit more aggressive of you should do it this way but not a lot of explanation of why so hopefully i can kind of fill that void the best i can so let's start at the beginning gain okay what is gain and how does it affect as adam so eloquently said it affects everything after in the chain okay so what is gain well if we really get down to basics uh the signal coming into the console is coming from a mic usually right and a mic is a little teeny speaker okay a little teeny speaker anywhere from a size of a quarter to a size of a dime okay it's just wired backwards okay so the microphone typically works the very same way that a speaker does just opposite okay so if you think physics right a microphone is taking acoustic energy or it's taking a high and low pressure off of a off of an acoustic waveform that's traveling through the air and hitting that membrane of that microphone which is moving that membrane okay that movement generates a very teeny small amount of electricity okay because it's an electromagnet so when it moves in it creates a very small positive energy when it pulls out it creates a very small negative energy okay so that sent down the mic cable into our console because that uh signal is completely reliant on the small energy of a weight of acoustic waveform it's a very small amount of power so the first thing it has to hit is a preamp that you will find in the back of a console or on a stage box okay and a preamp takes that signal and with a gain knob you turn it up okay so you're increasing the positive and negative voltage okay the reason why we do that is because right off a microphone that signal is far too weak to run through eq to run through a digital converter which converts it to ones and zeros so it can go through plug-ins and everything that digital mixer has okay so the first thing it hits is the preamp and that's your gain that's what turns it up so why this is important uh because that's what sets the gain for the rest of the chain okay and a movement there will affect everything after the fact okay so uh once it's gained up um now we can have a lot of fun with it now we can apply effects we can eq we can compress we can do a bunch of different stuff or a bunch of different things that we need to do to make it sound good all right now that leads into the processing right eq compression or time-based uh effects hey it's jake before we continue with jesse's amazing talk i wanted to invite you to our next churchfront live gathering linked down below in the description of this video and if we are running a discount on registration you'll see a discount code below this video as well churchfront live gatherings are an amazing way to experience live training from experts like jesse and at these events we cover a wide variety of worship ministry topics theology technology leading a team musicianship getting your ministry organized and not only will you get to experience these trainings in person you'll also get an opportunity to network with both my team the guest experts who are coming to the event and also other like-minded worship leaders who are going to be at the gathering so click the link down below to learn more and register today looking especially in daws but digital console also also it can be extremely daunting at looking at all the different plug-in options you have a thousand different eqs you have a thousand different compressors you have a thousand different gates you have you know waves makes 100 different compressors right what's the difference how do i know what to use which one's good which one's not what do i use on vocals versus bass versus drums versus any other track i'm recording um now don't let that bog you down audio processing units boil down to three main categories okay you have dynamics base which basically means that processor is altering the volume or gain of the signal in some way shape or form okay so it's purely relying on the amplitude or the gain of it or altering it okay you have eq which is adjusting the frequency content okay if you really want to get deep that is also a form of gain it's just a frequency dependent gain okay everything eq everything that handles or deals with an eq all it's doing is altering frequency okay so all those thousands of eq plugins they're all the same okay they're all eqs and then lastly is time based okay and that is you are copying the signal and playing it back against what just happened okay so reverb delay you're taking that signal you're copying it you're delaying it by a little bit and then playing it back after you just heard the original okay so it's playing with time it's changing the playback time of that signal so all effects reverb delay flanger phaser they're all playing with timing okay so all the millions and billions of plugins out there whether it's on a console whether it's in a daw all fall into these two categories okay so it's it's a really good way to kind of simplify all the options out there now what i want to kind of do is say okay you can buy a console for 1700 or 250 000 right that has all that stuff built in you can buy a dw for minus the computer 500 or a full-blown daw pro tools rig for 25 grand okay whatever you do whether it's a cheap option or an expensive option they all have these three audio units in it or those three categories and they all do it similar if not the same way okay so is there one that's better than the other well one could argue yes but i'm here to tell you that you're really paying for options okay you're not all that much paying for quality per se now the thing that's also important to understand is a digital console is a daw built into a console okay so what makes this different than this the box that it's in okay this is just a computer in here it's just a computer running the plugins the eqs and the compressors you know on this console plus some tactical faders and knobs to instead of a mouse okay this is doing the same thing all right so they are the same internally they're very much they're very similar they're doing the same thing they're taking analog signal converting it to ones and zeros and altering it in some way shape or form based on those three categories okay now let's talk about let's kind of a good overview of what these things are actually doing okay let's dive into eq how do we use eq why is eq so important why as adam said why do you cut lows from vocals or lows from acoustic guitar or lows kind of from everything but bass and kick why do you do that uh why do you boost the highs on things why do you seek and destroy i like that i've never heard that adam you seek it you find it you spike it you find that frequency and you kill it how do you know what frequency to find why do you do that well the best way i can i like to speak in metaphors right so how i look at mixing in general and eq eq is probably the one of the most important processes of audio out of those three categories eq is priority for me that's number one and the reason why it's so important is when you have audio coming in on multiple channels okay let's say you sold the kick drum cool the only thing you're hearing is the kick drum okay so it's easy to make it sound heard it's easy to make it sound present it's easy to make it have thump it's easy to make it have a right all those things are fairly easy to achieve because that's the only thing you're hearing okay but as soon as you start injecting more sound in with the kick all of a sudden all that detail can kind of go away why is that what happens there well think of back to the physics side of things right microphone captures a sound wave translates it into electrical energy well a speaker does the same thing but off opposite it takes electrical signal and turns it back into acoustic now physically a speaker can only move in one direction at one time right he can only be moving forward or backwards okay and there's no in between the only in between is a a travel it's traveling it has to be moving so how do you take two signals let's say you have a kick drum and bass how does a speaker able to play both of those signals at the same time if that speaker can only move in one direction at one time okay it's com basically what's happening is it's combining those two waveforms and playing the difference okay so if you were to look at can we go do the ableton let's see my ableton chops here i remember how to zoom okay so if we were to look at let's say this this is keys an hour to zoom way in okay we have two different waveforms here okay now each of these waveforms are moving differently now what does it mean when that that uh if you can see this zero line right here okay so on the speaker or when the signal is moving above the zero line it's essentially the speaker movement that speaker is pushing out you're literally looking at the movement of the speaker when you're looking at this waveform okay now so when it's generating one signal it's fairly easy for that speaker to do okay because that speaker can only only move one place at a time now what happens when you add a second waveform so let's say we had a low a low end waveform the low end waveforms are very long right so you have this low waveform well what happens when i add a high frequency to it that's moving like this very fast and not big and long so what happens if i add the low end plus the high end basically it does this the high end is moving as the low end is also moving so it takes those two waveforms and combines them and plays the difference okay which is all fine and dandy if all you're combining is a low frequency and a high frequency but what happens if you combine a low frequency with another low frequency right you have a big long waveform plus another big long waveform right on top of each other how does that how does a speaker do that well it doesn't very well okay it doesn't work very well so essentially this is where we get into phase okay and phase is where you have two waveforms that are combining either they're moving together or they're moving opposite okay in general we want them to move together because that's how the speaker is able to continue moving if they're moving opposite so if you have one waveform going up while the other is going down the speaker just cancels out it stops moving it plays the difference it it kind of just fights itself okay that's called phase cancellation and when that happens you lose signal you lose power that the speaker is not moving very efficiently or at all all right so you can see these keys these waveforms are moving relatively similar we have they're moving up and down together now this is the same source okay what happens when we have a kick that's moving up and down but the base is moving down and up well now when you combine those together solo they're going to sound amazing when you combine them together now all of a sudden where'd my low end go now i don't hear low in the kick or the bass well because they're fighting each other those signals are moving opposite of each other so that's where that little phase button on a console zero with a cross through it really comes in handy if you flip the phase it's basically taking on whatever channel you're on and flipping everything that's going above the zero line it flops it inverts it so now it's going negative so now you can flip one or the other it doesn't even matter which one and now they'll move together you'll get a much more fuller more solid sound um all right full circle how does that play into eq well this is just again we've only added two signals together we've added kick and bass well what about acoustic what about electric what about percussion what about that low synth vocals everything else that's in the mix okay now we're taking what was a simple setup one or two sources and now we have 30 sources all combining together and trying to be played out of one speaker that can move it one direction at one time how how how does that work well you end up with a very complex waveform that's playing the difference of all these signals playing back together so inherently there will always be phase problems right because there is no way that you can combine 30 signals 30 different wave arms together and have them play back perfectly right have that waveform be perfectly represented by the speaker unless you had 40 different speakers okay all playing a different source so eq is a roundabout way of managing phase coherency between all your channels okay your focusing frequencies for the different sources so that the the speaker can do the best job it can possibly do at actually being able to somewhat coherently play back a waveform of 30 signals combined together if that makes sense okay so how does that work well let's take kick and bass again okay that's a common problem with a lot of mixing right kick sounds amazing together our kick sounds amazing by itself bass sounds amazing by itself when i combine them all of a sudden they don't sound so amazing they don't complement each other well well that's where maybe you end up cutting some lows out of the kick to allow for the low end of the base to take priority of that speaker okay so the phase is still happening the phase cancellation is still happening you're just minimizing it between those two channels right by eq you're pulling low end out of the kick so that the low end of the bass can speak a little bit better now soloed it sounds thin it sounds a little papery sounds a little smacky a little metally as adam said right and it's not as gratifying you're listening that kick is kind of trash like i'm not i'm not proud of this sound but with the bass all of a sudden the puzzles connect the puzzle pieces connect right now this happens across the board through the whole spectrum from low end to low mids to mids to highs it's most noticeable in the low to low mid area so that's where you're gonna be finding yourself fighting to make room for all the channels okay um does that make sense so far any questions are you guys falling asleep yet okay so um so that's you know a thing to kind of think about wrap your head around using eq to create a clean sounding mix okay and you can use any eq to do this you can use your car stereo that has treble mids bass it can be as simple as that you can essentially help yourself create a better mix if you only had one eq per channel with treble mids and lows you can get pretty far with a good sounding mix okay and it's the simplest eq known to man all right so when you have all these plugins with all these options and all these bands and i can i have a band i have an eq with 20 bands my goodness if you're notching that much out of a signal maybe you should think about re-recording it or getting it better at the source okay but simplify it simplify what it's actually doing okay all you're doing is adjusting frequency okay so that leads into my second point about eq there's two ways to eq a track there is the sonic identity of a track okay so you're eq'ing to make it sound a certain way i want this vocal to be brighter i want this guitar to be bitier i you know fill in the blank fill in the adjective right how do you want this track to sound i want this bass to be thumpier or grittier or you know whatever right you're you're trying to achieve the sonic identity for that track okay that is valid what is more valid is using the eq the second way which is how am i making this track fit in the mix okay that is a more important way to think about eq than to think about how how do i want this track to sound okay think about the priority you should think about how is this fitting in the mix then when i get it fit in the mix decently then it's like okay now how do i want the identity to be how do i want this track to sound in my mix okay but that's secondary and i think a lot of people get tripped up with they think that's priority and then they end up gratifyingly eq'ing all the tracks the way they want the individual tracks that sound but they've put little to no attention on how those checks sound together okay nobody hears stuff soloed nobody cares about how it sounds solo'd they do care about how it sounds together all right um all right let me pull up eq uh i have one here oop i went away all right so when we look at eq we look at the frequency range okay so off to your left of an eq is your low frequencies and then to your right is your high frequencies right pretty common everybody knows that um now to continue further on making room for tracks in a mix okay the problem with sound is all these instruments cover a wide range of frequency right your bass can hit all the way down to the lowest humans can hear which is 20 hertz all the way up to i mean it can excite stuff all the way up to 15k okay which is three quarters of the auditory spectrum that humans can hear okay so a lot of people think oh base is the base it's only the base no bases a wide range of frequency okay we hear the low end the most out of it but it is exciting frequencies in that upper range okay now why this is important is like well as adam said you have to prioritize the you have to manage your frequency content for each track okay so where do i need the bass to be in the mix well i need the bass to be the low end of the mix okay so it might be something that you're focusing the eq so that the bass sits more on that low end area and doesn't sit in that top end okay but maybe you want it maybe you want some grit all right but this is merely for me making a point uh acoustic guitar for instance all right acoustic guitar when people hear acoustic guitar in a mix and there's a lot of other stuff going on they only really care about the stringy right it's i like to think of acoustic guitar as a tuned shaker okay i don't need a bunch of body i don't need a bunch of low end unless it's the only thing in the mix okay unless it's acoustic vocal only then i need all that content down there because it's playing the role of the rest of the band that isn't there okay but if i'm trying to smash it in with 30 other tracks i need to thin that thing out because all i really need from it is the tuned shaker i need the the bright stringy that has a pitch okay so i'm going to pull out a lot of that low end so that it doesn't clobber the base it doesn't cloud or the low end of the vocals doesn't cloud with the low end of the electric guitar so on and so forth okay electric guitar same sort of deal especially over driven electric guitar when you start chunking on an electric guitar there's a lot of low end that can happen with that a lot of low end really subby meaty thickness that's going to destroy the low mids of your mix or it's going to just clobber everything down in that range so it's important it's a good idea to kind of roll that stuff out or cut it out or notch it out now don't take this as like oh well that's easy i just the bass needs to be low so i'm going to low pass all my high end and only make that low acoustic i'm going to make only high okay you have to be tasteful with it because you do want some low end like in the acoustic for instance or it's going to sound way too stringy too brittle okay but put some thought into it now this leads me to my second thing or well leads me to a thing i've said second like three times okay so on an eq we have our gain per band so in general it's a really good idea to cut most of the time okay because every track typically has too much content too much frequency content okay so if i'm boosting if i'm saying oh you know i don't hear the low end in my in in my base i want more i want it to i want to feel it you know intuitively you're going oh we'll boost low end right i want to add low end or a kick i want i want that to punch i want to feel on my chest a little bit so you boost low end okay well what you're really doing is you're just adding to the problem okay and you'll get into what's what i call as volume wars with yourself where you going you get a mix your faders are all kind of in the middle and you're going i want i want more thump in my kick so you boost low energy kick and then you're going well i don't really hear the bass guitar anymore so i want to hear more of that so you boost the end of the bass guitar like well now i don't really hear vocals so i'll turn those up but now i don't really hear guitar i'll turn those up but now i don't really hear acoustic uh you know what that tambo track that's really important in this chorus i don't hear it turn it up before i know it your faders are all all the way up and you're left with the same mix okay you've just essentially had a volume battle with yourself and now your board's clipping your mix is probably worse and you didn't get anywhere okay so that's where cutting is really powerful okay think to yourself what does this track need less of rather than thinking what does this track need more of okay you can essentially achieve the same thing you're thinking oppositely okay so if you're like i want this track to be brighter no this track has too much low end so i'm going to cut low end and i've just essentially made it brighter but by cutting low end and removing issues out of a mix problem frequencies right um cool so that's eq in a nutshell um it's easier said than done though okay i'm not insensitive to that you know i've been mixing since i was 19. so that it's kind of all i know how to do um if the world ended i'd be worthless but i can eq a kick drum um but it is something that is achievable and it is something that takes practice it takes ear training right the more you do it the better you get i'm sorry to say but there's just no quick fix okay there's no it's just like learning a keyboard it's like yeah you know i can learn how to play a song mary had a little am that doesn't mean i can play fair elise or whatever amazing piano song you can name right it takes practice you get good at it right the more you do it the better you get um so i implore you to practice mixing do a mix and church is an amazing location to practice okay here's how you practice take your mix home and listen to it in your car on your earbuds on your phone on your laptop on your home stereo on your tv take it home and review it's really reviewing revealing how bad your mix is okay and it doesn't go away okay i have some of the worst days just i'll take a mix home like man i just ruined this low end of this mix just wasn't there didn't get it the next week it's amazing all right what did i do how can i repeat that right and the only way i'm doing that is taking it home and reviewing when you're mixing in a single space whether that's a studio whether that's a live room you're you're kind of blinded on how your mix sounds you know how it sounds in this room but you don't know how it sounds anywhere else and take the take your favorite song your favorite sounding song you play it on your phone it sounds pretty good play it on your earphones sounds pretty good play on your laptop sounds pretty good how do they do that well they took it and listened to it on all those devices and made subtle tweaks and tried to find a happy medium between all of them you can't focus a mix on a specific area and expect to sound amazing on the other but you can find a good happy medium between all all the sources or all the destinations rather okay so take your mixes home practice review be honest with yourself um you know still to this day i every weekend i take what i mix in the service and i listen to the car now i'm not saying you have to listen to the whole thing again in your car or wherever else but just put an ear on it okay it can be it's you'll things will pop out immediately oh the base the kick isn't really quite right the hi-hat's a little too hot i don't like the high end of these vocals the verb's too loud you just notice these things right away and you take little mental notes of going okay next week i'm going to tweak that next week i'm going to bring this down okay over time you do this for a year or two years i promise you your mix will be a lot better than when you started just by listening to it at home don't only rely on the location that you're mixing to judge your mix okay um all right everybody good yep really good question um [Music] i'd say about 85 aggressive okay so what that mean you know it's a really good question basically saying you know when do you address these issues if you hear them right if you're in the middle of a service do you take time or and and do you potentially reveal a problem in the middle of a service to address this issue um yes yes within reason and tastefully okay you can get away with a lot of little sneaky things that nobody will notice but will make the mix better while the service is going on now if you're making broad stroke adjustments those should be taken care of before you get to that point right in rehearsal so if you're you know i like to think of it as like i like to do all my course tweaking my heavy lifting stuff my heavy eq my heavy i'm rolling a bunch of stuff off my you know i'm roughing it in essentially during rehearsal okay um and then during the service and even the first couple songs usually the first couple songs don't sound as good as last because i i've been tweaking the whole service all right um but that's just kind of the nature beast hopefully that it's not that drastic of a chain hopefully the drastic changes have happened in rehearsal and you're only fine tuning during the actual service but yeah don't feel like you can't touch once service starts yeah yep yep um yeah really good question um you know when a mixing is a very active thing okay don't don't assume that it's like oh set it and forget it and it will be this blanket perfection across every band that ever walks on stage it's not it will never be bands change instruments change drums the sound of drums tone changes all everything changes which alters how those frequencies are sitting with each other how those eqs are interacting one bass player might dig in a little hard one bass player might have a bit more aggression on his pickups right the sparrow might be really round and smooth and reggae sounding okay so that eq that i'm using for one is just not applicable for the other um now hopefully in in the in the church world that's kind of the blessing right a lot of situations it's kind of the same setup or relatively the same okay so when you're making fine-tuned adjustments over a few years in general that band has yeah the drum set has relatively stayed the same the players are relatively the same and when you start working with a a few different players you start to learn their tone you know that this guitar player has a real bright fender-y sound where this guy has a warm gibson kind of maybe muddy sound right and you just know it ahead of time so you generally can you know what eq you're going to be doing before you even walk up to it okay but it takes playing with musicians and learning their style and learning their tone cool so let's uh let's uh talk about game structure we kind of skip to eq which is very important gain structure is also really important um and then i'll touch on mix structure what are we looking at at a time we good okay all right so gain structure what is gain structure uh or gain staging a lot of people call it you're managing the overall level of every track and the level of all these tracks combined okay i like to think of it as traffic some some like to think of it as water okay water flowing through pipes or traffic flowing through roads okay so in denver we have our traffic grid if you will is we have streets running north and south and we have streets running east and west okay so the streets running north or south we have kipling we have wadsworth we have federal we have sheridan colorado bellevue we have a bunch of streets running north and south think of those as your individual channels okay kick drum sheridan snare drum federal right all your individual channels going north and south on the city grid let's hypothetically say that all the traffic was coming from the north and going south okay so they're all one ways going north to south and my gain knob is the traffic cop at the top all the way up north going all right you guys can go stop you guys stop you guys can go stop okay he's allowing traffic down the road okay that's your gain knob you're allowing that signal to flow down all right so along the way of this of these north and south roads could be chick-fil-a we'll call chick-fil-a our eq okay so our traffic stops and goes through the drive-through lane at chick-fil-a and because chick-fil-a is christian chicken can i get an amen they handle crowds amazingly better than any any place better than churches most the time okay so they're just real efficiently getting those traffic right back out on the road right back heading south okay that's your eq okay your signal got interrupted went through an eq and then continued through the channel okay now all these all these roads are going north south there's traffic flowing all right then we have our big interstate and our big interstates running east to west okay all these north to south roads get on to the interstate okay because they're going to kansas they're going out east east whatever it is for you guys okay so they're everybody's traveling to kansas so they start going north to south they go through chick-fil-a get some meal get some eq get on i-70 to head to kansas okay now i-70 is a bigger road right it's two to three to four lanes sometimes it can handle some traffic but it can't handle too much traffic okay so if all these traffic cops on the north side of town are letting too much traffic in if you're only allowing one north-south road onto i-70 yeah there's all the room in the world for that right i-70 will never get jammed up but what happens if you let 30 north and south roads at full capacity all the traffic onto i-70 what happens traffic jam okay and traffic stops so we get a red red means clipping okay we got traffic jam we have too much signal hitting the master bus okay or i-70 all right so we have individual channels i-70 is our master bus that's our main fader going out to the speakers okay so i-70 has a limit just like the individual tracks do when we're setting our gain we're getting healthy level but we're not letting it clip okay the gatekeeper of those north and south roads is the okay now big misconception with faders a lot of people think faders turn things up right it's like oh turn that up turn that up hey bring that fader up turn it up no a fader is a faucet it's allowing stuff to pass through or not okay so a lot of people call it an attenuator because that's what it's actually doing it's not gaining anything up it's allowing it to pass through okay so the gain knob is what's getting the gain that goes into the fader that you have down okay and that's the traffic i'm going like nope can't go through here stop okay when you bring that fader up saying all right a little bit can go through not not everybody just one card at a time guys all right when you bring that fader up to zero that is the traffic cop stepping out of the way and all the traffic can go through okay so that fader is doing nothing okay it's not stopping anybody it's just allowing that signal straight through as much as that gain knob is set to okay so when you're doing a mix and you have all these individual channels feeding your mix and all of a sudden you notice your main bus is clipping a lot of people think oh we'll bring the fader to the main bus down wrong why that's wrong is because all you're doing is there's a traffic cop at the end of i-70 going stop all right you can go through you can go through you can go through ideally you don't want a traffic cop you want them to step out of the way right so your master fader you want to set to zero and it just lets this traffic through as long as you've managed the traffic okay so if you're clipping your master bus the fix is not bring the master fader down the fix is bring all your individual channels down relatively so you're not feeding as much into your master fader or i-70 all right make sense kind of a stretch i know okay that's gain staging okay so from the beginning of where the signal starts from the microphone or microphones all the way out through the master bus out to your speakers hopefully you have good gain stage okay now this really plays an important role because when we start talking about eq'ing remember how at the beginning i said that eq is just gain right it's frequency dependent gain okay so if i took an eq flip to the ableton real quick if i took an eq and boosted everything all right and let's uh make these cues a little broader okay so i did that with my eq i essentially just turned the fader up right because the curve of my cue the relationships of the frequencies for that individual channel are relatively the same they're just all louder okay so when i see eqs and you know i look at a lot of oops a lot of eq sometimes and it's like it looks something like this and they've done a good job of cutting not boosting which is awesome keep doing that but in general their eq is like down here it's like okay all you've done is you turn your fader down right where the more effective and healthier thing to do with the signal is all right let's maybe keep this curve and just bring it more back up to the center line so the eq is doing as little as possible but still essentially changing the frequency relationship that makes sense okay so how that relates to gain is well this is essentially a form of a gain knob so if your mix is all clipping and you go to try to boost something because you want more low end you don't have any room to it's all red you already have a traffic jam on i-70 so now you're trying to inject more traffic by boosting something on a track and you're not getting anywhere all you're doing is just clipping your master fader more okay so if we do a good job of managing that traffic or managing our gain staging then we have lots of headroom we have plenty of room on i-70 to fit more cars if we need to okay it allows your mix to it allows you options to fix your mix to eq and to to do the things you need to do to make that mix happen if you have no head room you just don't have those options those options go away okay all right um lastly what time am i supposed to end sorry i don't know okay i think that inadvertently means you're already past your time all right so let's talk about what mixing is okay what does it mean when you do a mix and how you know what are you actually altering what are you changing how are you how do you make something sound good like what are you what are you doing when you're mixing okay are you just moving faders and eq to to do something it's like no to me mixing is a pretty visual thing for me okay there's a lot of colors involved and there's placement okay to me mixing is like painting a picture you're drawing a picture with sound okay now bear with me here let's say my stage from this side to this side is my stereo field typically you're mixing out of two speakers your left and your right okay now i have eq i have volume okay i have this other thing called a panner which allows me to pan between left and right or left and right for you guys okay so how do i use these things where do i place things in my mix why do i place things in my mix okay now live it's important a little bit less important uh because a lot of rooms are built mono uh where it's just point source so they have all the speakers are just playing the same signal so you don't even have stereo okay so in that case that kind of goes away but in broadcast all tvs unless you have like an old school click click click tv okay that's mono but all tvs uh most phones now are stereo headphones are stereo laptops or stereo they all all your destinations are stereo so it's very important to think about your stereo field now this is where you get into the creative part of mixing this is the fun part of mixing this is why i love it and this is like the dessert of the job okay so how do you how do you structure your mix how do you place things well i like to think of mixing as a three-dimensional box okay so think of you have it's a box you have front you have back you have left your right and you have everywhere in between okay so when i'm panning let's say i'm not using any effects yet any time-based effects okay when i'm panning my stereo field is very one-dimensional okay i can go left to right and anywhere in between but i haven't gotten into back and forward yet okay so with no effects my mix sounds very two-dimensional so i can hey i'm lead guitar i'm gonna stand right here okay so if i'm listening right in the middle of the two stereo or the two speakers it sounds like i'm coming from right here not fully out of that speaker not out of that speaker but more on this end okay i've panned it about 45 degrees okay if i painted all the way over to the left now i'm right only coming out of this speaker okay so i can essentially place instruments anywhere along this line i can say all right i'm i'm the tambourine guy this is me shaky shaky shaky okay i'm electric too holding down the rhythm just bar chords for days okay i'm the lead singer look at me and my tight jeans okay i'm the background singer i'm just backing up this dude who's kind of full of himself i'm the third guy who's probably not even in the mix okay uh i'm the lead guitar player who's almost almost as big as ego as front man over here but not quite as much and i don't know i'm the i'm i don't know who am i base oh that's a hard one i don't want my bass on the left side only but i like where your head's at that's like a 1950s move okay so anyway you can place any of these instruments now what's important to understand with this is symmetry okay it's very important to have a symmetrical placement of your instrument so if i have a lead guitar player over here okay i don't want my rhythm guitar player here okay because now my mix sounds left heavy guitar so now i have this like ball of guitar on the left side that's you know kind of distracting right what would be better is if i had lead here rhythm guy here now it's like ooh cool i'd see this guy over here and hear this guy over here and you can even match it with where they're on stage a little bit okay i also don't want to have my lead singer over here hey guys look at my tight jeans and my hair uh cool but then the people over there don't really hear lead vocals all that all that well okay so i don't want to have my lead singer over here i want the lead singer to be right in the middle okay so you want to achieve symmetry now you have some sources that are mono and some sources that are stereo what do you do with those okay mono sources never downplay the importance of a mono source okay i prefer a mono source or a stereo sorry keyboard players stario stereo guitar players okay because i can really very specifically place them where i want okay i can with stereo but now with stereo sources so let's say keys have a left and right output i have two sources okay it's not just a mono that i can pan one way or the other now i have two so i have to decide what to do with these two sources now the default is oh just paint them wide the left side of this piano goes over here or right for you guys and right goes over here okay usually that's good not all the time though okay the thing with that though is if you listen to the piano in stereo it is a very monocentric sound meaning it doesn't sound like it's wide it sounds like majority of the sound is still right in the middle even though i've panned them wide okay so keep that in mind stereo guitar players same exact thing the only thing that's stereo is your effects your guitar is mono okay so even if you're going through your amazing big sky verb okay that does sound amazing that's the only thing that is stereo but what it does if i take your signal at the board and pan it wide well now i just plopped you right on top of the lead vocalist and your effects are wide but now you're clobbering the lead vocalist okay so i haven't done a very good job of placing you and i'm fighting trying to make the lead vocal and the lead guitar work together better with eq where sometimes it's just like hey put them over here now you don't have to eq as much you created space for the lead vocal and the electric guitar but that also means collapsing your effects a little bit okay this is why i like sorry i keep pointing you on our way i don't you probably don't play guitar uh this is why i like mono guitar because i can just place them and i'm not sacrificing i'm not taking as beautiful wide effects and smashing them down to one side or the other now this is a two-dimensional space right i haven't added any effects so you know i've created a really good two-dimensional mix but how do you get into the world of depth in your mix okay when you listen to a really good record close your eyes you listen on headphones or whatever it sounds vivid you hear oh that little part's coming from over here oh there's that weird guitar that sounds like it's in a basement way down way down there somewhere all right oh that weird vocal guy is way on the corner lead vocals like right up front but he sounds huge okay they've achieved a three-dimension three-dimensional space in their mix okay this is where the box comes in how do you do that how do you create that space well hypothetically let's say you've done a really good job of managing your eq okay so there's room frequency wise for every channel you've done a really good job of placement panning and you've done a really good job of gain staging so you have plenty of headroom to play in okay let's say hypothetically those are all taken care of how do i get my lead vocal or my third background that's probably out of the mix anyway okay how do i get him to be heard but not overpowering anything else but still i can hear all the detail on what he's doing okay well eq is a big one you've made room for him so now i can bring him way down but i still hear exactly what he's doing okay but also effects so simply put lead vocals right up front and center third harmony guy i want him in the back more verb all of a sudden he does this in the mix okay he comes way back and if you get a lot of verb and now you're starting to deal with like 10 second decay verb right hey guys okay throw a big huge wet verb on something and turn it way down it sounds like it's coming from back here okay and also by doing that i've just defined the boundaries of my stereo of my three-dimensional space right so now my space sounds this deep because i have something back here that sounds this far back all right now i can place anything by the amount of verb and the length of verb in this stereo field both with panning and effects right so now i have a lot of space to play with now and i'm having trouble getting every track heard because the frequencies are fighting a little bit now i have another tool to separate them to keep them away from each other okay and i've achieved a very vivid sounding mix okay now again this takes practice a lot of listening in your car listening on headphones getting a good set of studio monitors can help this okay but don't depend on that too much because that can give you a lot of false hope and there you go now if you really want to get deep into it you can also kind of achieve height okay in your mix so now you have left and right with panning you have depth with effects verb mostly but delay too sometimes it's kind of fun with delay if you want to make it sound like there's a big fat wall right here take your lead guitar player or a guitar player maybe the noodle the noodle guy that's doing all the noodling not quite a lead but not quite a rhythm just kind of noodling right uh pan them over here hard left and then put a quick slappy delay over here it sounds like there's a wall right here now even though he's over there it sounds like it's coming out of his amp and smacking this wall okay so it just created a space in my mix that's out of the way of the vocals right over here the vocals still doing this thing right down the middle clean and clear this isn't even messing with them but it now it sounds like i have it almost makes it wider sounding than just panning left to right all right so that's what i you know that's one thing to really kind of think about think of your mix get out of the gear a little bit okay a lot of people get caught i was like oh what what's the rate eq what's the rate compressor what's the right whatever should i use you know the stock eq should i use this fancy waves eq okay do i need this this cool new plugin no probably not okay think of it as you're painting a picture you're arranging the sound in your stereo field to be percented well all alright um and there's a whole bunch of art in all of that right all the way down to just the kick all the way down to the snare how do i get that snare to just be gushy and but also have clarity and have uh you know and be heard and not be muddied up by everything okay that's effects eq they all play into each other all right start using the solo button less don't use that solo button the only time you should use a solo button is if there's a problem if you're like man there's a buzz coming from somewhere nope nope nope bass always the bass player okay other than that when you're mixing you can use the solo a little bit but not too much never forget how it sounds together okay get out of that habit it makes a big difference it forces you to kind of live with the tracks together and how they're influencing each other how they're playing off of each other all right everybody good okay um i wanted to touch uh on vocal tuning i think you had a question earlier on on how do you switch keys okay uh and also just quick pros and cons of both using digital console versus daw for live streaming um auto tune so in the digital console world if you're using auto-tune you have to be using it with an external like sound grid wave sound grid or literally running it through a computer and back to get that auditing plug-in so how do you switch keys without going vocal one d minor vocal two d minor vocal three d minor right how do you just switch them all okay because the last thing you want to be doing is that's the first rarest he's in b-flat and that ruin the song okay uh in waves sound grid if you're using a digital console you basically have to set up snapshots to do that so uh you are whatever your session is saved saved as you save that then you isolate you recall isolate all the plug-ins except for the tuning plug-in which means when i do a snapshot or scene change all the plugins that are isolated don't change the only ones that actually change are the tuning plugin so then you create a snapshot for c c sharp d e flat so on and so forth all the way up um and then so that's one way but the problem with that is you can't really do song to song scene changes right because you've basically you're you're only using this the the snapshots to change key okay in the daw world um you're setting up automation lanes i had tacos i'm sorry so same sort of deal on the vocal track in the daw now this also kind of leaves any other thing when you're using a daw to mix i highly recommend not using it to record as well okay you want to have a separate system to record um for various reasons reliability being a big one this being another one okay so if you're not using it to record you're just passing audio through it then you're setting up automation lanes so i've set up automation lanes on my vocal tracks four c c sharp d right all the way up the scale so then i'm just clicking markers any time the key changes and it switches all the tuning plug-ins okay but with that the transport's never moving where if you're recording you can't do that okay i can't move my transport because it's just rolling okay um that's really the only way that i figured out how you can change keys both in live console and daw now quick pros and cons about versus uh dw okay console consoles are more reliable i'm sorry if you're a dw fan it's just the way it is they are far more reliable than daws dws are just notorious for crashing okay now you can just workflow wise you can do stuff that really minimize that but ultimately they are computers there are programs running on computers which crash okay so they're more reliable um not to say they don't ever not function but most of the time you turn them on they're working okay you don't have to worry about authorization you don't have to worry about did it connect to the internet to find my account so it authorizes this software like a diw okay so they're more reliable they're a little bit more straightforward they're more tactile it's like this is coming in here it's going to this channel so they're a little bit easier to look at sometimes where a daw is open source you can arrange anything any way you want which can make them fun if you know what you're doing in them but also really daunting if you don't because it's a clean slate um cons with digital consoles is they're limited okay the people at behringer or midas or yamaha or ssl or digico right they are doing their best to try to accommodate the needs of a live environment right so that when they design these they go right they're they're going to need outputs they're going to need auxes they're going to need eq's they're going to need compressors they're going to need whatever okay the problem is they're never going to think of everything because sometimes a lot of times things come up that's specific to your location to your band member to whatever right so they can be a little bit limiting um you'll find sometimes they're like i wish i could do this i wish i could do this so you just can okay but i will say they get a lot right okay for the most part you can do a lot with a digital console nowadays now you know just if you're new to someone new to it think 15 20 years ago where the digital consoles were relatively new you had consoles that were nice live consoles and you had a gain knob you had an eq and you had a fader and that's all you got and a painter okay if you wanted fancy de-essing or compression you had to get a rack and buy a compressor or a de-esser or a gate put it in this rack but you only got one use it wisely do i put it on the kick do i put on the snare i don't know but choose one it's not like a plug-in where you can like i wanna know every single channel okay so 20 years later now i have a console that's seventeen hundred dollars that has all of it on every channel that's amazing twenty years ago this console and an analog console would have cost 150 grand the functionality of this what this can do okay which is a lot you can do a lot with this okay um daw but it is limited within that especially when you get a broadcast mix like adam said you can't drum replace you can't do drum replacement tuning is hard you need a separate device that runs with it to do the tuning um you know so there's some some limitations verb and effects can be limiting in here unless you buy a separate unit that does a better job at it but again you have to buy a separate unit okay dws highly functional okay they're open you know as far as like routing schemes so yeah they're open source you can route anything to anything times a hundred okay where these are limited you only have so many buses you only have so many auxes eq so on and so forth so reliability that's kind of what you're paying for all right you're losing a little bit of function but you're gaining a lot of reliability okay dw is your gaining function but you're losing a little bit of reliability now i use a daw i used to use a yamaha cl5 for broadcast it was great console you could do a lot of stuff it couldn't do a lot of stuff also so you know we found ours my i found myself going man i wish i could do this i wish i could do this too many times right now the cool thing is a yamaha cl5 i think it retails for like 30 grand okay pretty expensive console now in the grand scheme of like big live sound applications that's really actually relatively cheap when you're talking about 100 grand plus digital consoles right but still pretty expensive i we sold it i bought a whole pro tools rig a full-blown pro tools rig not just on a laptop for 25 grand so i actually saved we made five grand just by getting rid of that console and now we have an amazing daw okay so you know dws are generally going to be cheaper up front but be ready to be a a plug-in expert plug an authorization expert and a bit of a computer tech okay because it comes with prop inherent issues with that sort of stuff authorizing plugins and software in general okay now the other thing is they can maximize reliability with a daw is keep the machine clean okay most computer issues are because of the user okay most of the time when someone goes my computer's slow it's like well maybe you shouldn't have 40 tabs open on safari at the same time that you're live streaming all right keep it clean use it for one thing if you can now you know a lot of times you're using it for multiple things and i get that but even within that you know don't use it as your personal computer too don't be checked don't be using it for email and saving your pictures and saving your videos and all that kind of stuff all you're doing is clogging the thing up okay i like to think of a computer as a big file cabinet right and imagine you had a file cabinet and someone that's ocd that organized it and everything's in perfect folders nicely labeled anybody could open that thing up and be like oh i know exactly where yeah you know camping 2018 pictures are because they're right there it's labeled and then you have a worship leader over here with his file cabinet and it's just he just throws it in he's like ah there's a whole stack of stuff in here documents pictures why who knows what they're they're just full if you talk about efficiency if i was tasked with hey can you grab that one document from one of these which one do you think i'm going to find it faster in computers are the exact same way keep them clean keep the file structures clean label your folders label your files keep them nicely and organized be able to open your computer and know exactly where a file is every single time okay that's going to keep that machine running clean and efficiently it's going to allow programs like ableton pro tools logic studio one it's going to allow them to run better faster quicker more reliably all right so you can do things to keep keep the reliability up on the dw because god knows they need it all right um cool any questions yeah so sound check now uh sound chess can widely vary depending on the church and and the the rehearsal time period that you guys have um at red rocks uh we rehearsals so let's say we have a service at nine typically rehearsals start at seven on the dot so everybody's there earlier or so they're ready down beats at seven okay um sound check we go through a quick line check which is just hey kick snare toms really more to make sure i got the signal less to make sure it sounds good okay there is you know you're constantly tweaking as you go um and if there's an issue then it's like hold up keep playing that snare that type of thing right but the idea isn't like a full sound check where you're starting from zero and building a whole mix hopefully at this point your mix is real relatively dialed in right like like i said church is amazing in the fact that it's somewhat consistent from week to week so you can really kind of fine-tune your mixes as you go so you're not having to do it's not like a a show downtown that you see where there's five acts and it's like they got 15 minutes to clear the stage get the band up and get them sounding decent which is never really a thing because they only have 15 minutes to start from scratch with church you have weeks with this relatively same instruments same drum set at least which is a huge part of it right so you know so you're not you shouldn't really i mean if you're having to start your mix over from scratch which sometimes is good to do i would do it on a separate day if you can don't do it before sunday because that that's just a lot of stress um so it's just a line check that we do and then they run through the all the songs and it's really more for the worship team to get their parts down more than it is for me to get now within that i'm tweaking as i go but um but yeah and then we'll do just like transition stuff so if you know we're going from bumper video into the first song out of the first song into a video we'll rehearse rough rehearse those and then we're ready for service yeah totally anybody else no such thing yeah yep yep so uh i'll tell you a quick story um well first of all always have a plan b okay if you're using a dw to do your broadcast mix uh hopefully it works most of the time okay if it does fail have a backup plan have a copy of the front of house console's mix ready to patch okay or just know in your head hey if this fails i need to patch my mix into this or the front of house mix into the stream as quickly as possible okay while i either a get my dw back up and running or just bail on it all together and that's gonna be our mix at least people can hear something it's better than silence now story behind that i didn't do my due diligence one day and it didn't have a backup plan and i was using pro tools and this was you know so usually we do our live broadcast on thursday which isn't really a live it's a captured so if that were to happen it doesn't matter because i'm multi-tracking it and i'll just fix that spot if it if it failed uh but this we were doing a live worship night and it was live live live to facebook uh live to facebook and youtube and all the handles right so rehearsal goes well band sounding good i'm stoked about it i'm stoked on how things are coming through and sounding we start we're live halfway through the first song a little window comes up on a computer and it's like cannot find authorization for pro tools please check your account to resolve the issue we'll give you five minutes to save and close halfway through the first song and this is like a 10 song worship night live to facebook and what makes matters worse is we put a tv up on the front row with like scrolling comments so the worship leaders can like follow along and sing it right yeah yeah so you know where this is going so i had to i either had to wait five minutes so it can quit for me or just quit and log in try to get ilock and authorization so i did i was down for eight minutes which seems like eternity in that situation got it author actually no i couldn't get it authorized so i had a demo version of pro tools like a 30-day demo version authorization in my account so i use that to get it back up and running got up and running eight minutes later and you know of course as they're going in that eight minutes i can't hear anything can't hear anything people are going well check your internet connection i'm going to sorry guys uh so it does happen the real issue with that is i didn't set in place a backup plan right where what i should have done if i were thinking a little more clearly or if i kind of planned it ahead of time i should have gone into dante patched the main mix out of our front house console into the live stream at least until i got to running and then switched it back but you know in those moments you don't think too clearly that's why it's important to kind of plan those things or at least have a plan in the back your head run through the motions of doing that switch so when it comes it's not so like deer in the headlights i don't know what to do right now okay um so yes it will fail just like if a console crashes you'll lose you'll lose everything all right but that's the reliability of a digital console that you're paying for they're a little bit more reliable now however that knock on wood uh that's the i've been mixing in a daw for a year and a half every weekend and that's the only issue that's the only fail that's happened and it wasn't even a crash it was an authorization basically pro tool you have a choice with pro tools you can authorize through the cloud or through a dongle i lock key and i for some reason chose the cloud so it would periodically check online in my account for authorization while i'm using pro tools and you see it happen and even i you know hindsight's 2020 but periodically through that year you'd see it pop up like checking authorization and i'm going like that's going to bite me one day sure enough it did so i've since moved it onto a dongle which is physically plugged in the computer so it doesn't need internet connection it's not relying on signing into your account nothing like that it's just there okay but it hasn't actually crashed it hasn't actually like cpu overload down um leaves me the last thing because i i think i'm probably done now i feel like okay but uh opt you know the other thing about mixing and why you you know i i really push to stay away from the big fancy plugins right big fancy plugins look impressive they can do a lot of cool things but i'm convinced that they're really just kind of unnecessary for live broadcasts anyway and the reason is is two reasons a they're pulling you away from the fundamental principle of mixing right use your ears make room with the frequencies okay and any parametric eq can do that okay uh and two they're using system resources unnecessarily right so if you pull up a big fancy waves 10 band eq that might be using five percent of your cpu just that one instance okay whereas a stock plug-in is using like 2.25 of your cpu and you're generally achieving the same thing okay and like i said earlier if you're reaching for that tenth band on an eq maybe you should move a mic get a better sound from the source okay um now with that be said it does happen you got to do what you got to do you got to carve things the way you got to carve them i get that okay but keep it simple keep your mix simple keep it set up simple you know my mix at red rocks uh is a relatively simple mix there's not crazy fancy routing i'm doing drums with some additive stuff out of compression stuff that's the fanciest thing i have as far as routing scheme i'm using two reverbs two in the whole mix and a delay okay i'm not using 10 different reverbs i'm using two okay so keep it efficient keep it clean it's going to make your mix cleaner okay verb that's a big thing effects a lot of people think i need this big fancy verbs i need 10 of them because every instrument requires a different verbs like no if you set it up like an old school analog desk where you had one reverb unit okay you'd use an ox and you controlled how much verb was on was on a track by how much you're sending into the verb on each individual tracks but you're only using one verb you're not putting a verb on every single channel set your daw up like that use an ox feed a verb that's your verb okay so i have a short and a long verb for my whole mix everything you hear online two verbs and a delay all right keep it clean keep it simple use stock plug-ins okay they're powerful they're really powerful and they're really efficient with cpu okay so part of the reliability that i have with my daw is i have a cpu meter that i'm constantly looking at and if that goes above 25 i've failed okay don't get up to 40 50 60 okay because theoretically you're going oh i still have 40 left i'm good to go no no no one spike will crash your system you're too close 60 i like to think is more like 90 or 95 on a computer because if that cpu gets spiked all of a sudden or if you know it's checking the network status and it requires some cpu usage outside of your daw boom you just spiked it crash okay if you keep it to 20 20 you're usually pretty good i've been really solid with that knock on wood okay um by using stock plug-ins keeping my mix simple uh just doing a good job managing frequencies gain staging and a good use of effects all right cool yeah i know well so i'm really glad you picked up on that i was gonna say something um i as we all know i've told speakers till i'm blue in the face hey uh so when you're holding the mic down here nobody can hear you and uh when you're coming to me and going like hey uh so i feel like i'm really quiet in the house can you turn me up yeah do this so walking up here and i don't speak publicly really ever so i'm like all right i gotta practice what i preach and hold this mic right here so yeah i'm glad you picked up on that cool any questions or anything yeah so cpu so uh the cpu of a computer is the brain it's what's doing the processing for any task that the computer is doing so in the dw situation every plugin that you add every eq verb it's relying on the computer's brain to crunch those numbers to do that work to create the sound that that you're altering right so the cpu monitor is showing you how much capacity is left in that brain so it's basically saying like you're using ten percent of what you what this brain can do right now oh oh no cbu so it's it's the processor in the computer oh it's pro tools sorry i'm sorry it's pro tools it's its own has its own cpu meter within pro tools yeah yeah the daw itself usually has some sort of cpu readout um and then if it doesn't you can look at like activity monitor which is built into a mac just to kind of have a always view your cpu if if that meter isn't built into the daw but most have them built in so you can always monitor yeah yeah yes yes okay so so gain staging right take us back to that so we're back to i-70 okay we're at our mix fader let's say we've done a really good job of gain staging so if you've done a good job the meter of your master out we'll just look on ableton right here this guy i don't know if you can see it this meter right here so just like any other track like adam said you're shooting for three-fourths of the way up or around the yellow as on the individual channels as well as your master fader okay so the idea is on the loudest biggest choruses of the loudest sound if i'm right here under clipping but a healthy level okay that's a really good spot to be in that's what we call mix level okay that's where your mix should be and in the studio world we call that mix level okay now if you put that right out onto the stream it's gonna seem quiet okay um because mix level is not mastered yet okay so one of the big things that mastering does uh is bring the level up now in the digital world you can't go above clipping no matter what program you're using no matter what device you're using clipping on one thing is clipping on everything okay there's no there's no like secret software i'm using that allows me to get louder without clipping okay clipping is clipping across the board so if i'm clipping on this meter here i'm clipping everywhere or everywhere after this is getting a clip signal so how do i get it louder online mastering okay so mastering what does mastering do in the recording world when you're doing an album a similar process you take all these individual channels you record them down you perfect them at some point you do a mix a studio mix though right you're taking all the individual channels and you're bouncing it down to a stereo mix you're taking that meter and recording it so now you just have a stereo file okay you send that for every song to the mastering engineer okay so the mastering engineer doesn't have all the individual files he can't turn up the kick drum he can't turn the vocals down he can't all he has is that stereo file okay so what a mastering engineer's job to put it simply is he can eq and compress the stereo signal that's all he can do all right so how does he get it louder well when when you're mastering something you're basically fooling the ear into thinking that it's louder okay the pers you're changing what's what we call the perceived loudness okay so how do they do that well your ears are a very human sensor okay they're very imperfect they change depending on mood depending on tiredness depending on altitude okay uh and they hear they're not very clinical at all okay they're probably the opposite of clinical okay they're moody your ears are very moody and they hear stuff in a very average level okay so they're not hearing like a meter views so when you see a meter hit and spike your ears don't hear that way they didn't hear that spike they heard that the meter went like that the audio actually went up to here it was loud for a second but your ears only heard this okay the reason they do that is for protection they're protecting themselves okay they don't want to hear that full level because you'll destroy your your hearing all the mechanisms in there you'll you'll hurt it or you'll lower the life of them okay so they have all these built-in protections to limit that that sound right so mastering engineers play into that okay so they hear a more average level um which means they kind of round out those peaks as as you're hearing them uh so when i have a mix that's at mixed level basically what a mastering engineer does is he puts a limiter on that mix okay and what a limiter does it's a compressor all limiter is is a compressor that has a threshold and he sets the threshold just below clipping okay and i mean just below clipping so if this i don't know if i can't make this bigger i think oop there we go yeah okay so if this is clipping right here well it's hard to see let's say the very top of this meter is clipping mastering engineer will set a limiter like there so just under clipping okay to get technical it's like anywhere as small as 0.1 db below clipping okay now what a limiter does is it says okay here's my threshold i'm a device that that turns things up down mostly okay so when audio comes up and hits my threshold i'm going to temporarily turn it down so it stays below my threshold okay so i'm constantly counteracting the audio that's trying to go above my threshold and a limiter is just that that threshold is hard it does not let anything through so it turns it down whatever it has to do to keep it below that threshold so a mastering engineer takes your mix that's healthy but not close to clipping and it turns it up into that limiter so the more it turns it up the more that limiter has to work to keep it below the threshold but technically i'm never clipping i'm never going above clipping okay perception though it's starting to sound louder because my ears hear average level they don't hear the full they don't hear the clipping or they don't hear the the peak value okay they hear average so i'm essentially changing my average value i'm increasing my average value even though i'm not going above clipping right so on the meter it never clips but all of a sudden my meter is just like pegged just looks like it's solid okay and it sounds louder to us so that's what's happening that's what should happen for your stream okay because think about this iphones earbuds tvs you name it the devices we use to hear content on are designed to listen to mastered material okay because anything you purchase back in the day albums cds anything you purchase spotify or whatever else all that content is for the most part mastered okay uh some aren't some protest against it but 99 of stuff is mastered so all these devices are designed to play back stuff at mastered level audio so they respond and they perform better when they're being delivered mastered audio okay so at the end of my chain before it hits streaming i'm not just leaving it at mix level all right because it'll still sound good you'll just find that it's quiet okay and on the phone that you can only turn up so far it's not far enough usually okay where if it's mastered or limited up it it it just works a lot better the other thing to get really technical with it is just like video that goes to youtube uh it gets data compressed right so what you're seeing on your screen right off the camera you have nice rich deep blacks right your darks are really dark you're like the contrast is really nice you stream it to youtube all of a sudden like oh my gosh i see all this grain and pixelation happening in the darks okay it's because that video is being data compressed being squashed so that they can quickly and efficiently stream it to whoever needs it with a questionable internet connection right audio does the same thing they do the exact same thing to audio and what how do you counter that on camera you light it up really well right you light things up really well which hides that pixelation from happening it still happens it's just hidden a little bit better okay audio is the same way when i get nice hot level that encoding that happens or that data compression that happens is still happening but uh it's hidden a little bit better where if i have really low level audio there's not that much content for those very destructive uh encoding processes that are happening to grab so it just does a worse job you you know you're it's accentuating the issue okay so that's why it's really important to master i know i haven't touched a lot on that but after you do all the mixing master that audio get it nice and hot and even if you know don't smash it you're not just like destroying your mix but even just a little bit of compression two or three db if it's that limiter is hitting about that much it'll go a lot further on the streaming world it'll sound a lot better it'll be fuller it'll feel better on a phone when you turn it up it'll come up to where generally what you're used to it coming up to with streaming services great question though yeah anyway yeah dude that was awesome yeah thanks guys a big thanks to jess for speaking at our last churchfront live gathering i want to invite you to register today for our upcoming gathering i'm going to put the link down below at thechurchfrontlive.com that's where you can learn more about the event and make sure you look at the description below this video if you want to take advantage of any discount codes we have available for registration if there's a discount code available you will see it next to the link if there isn't one then you'll just have to wait for next time if you found this video helpful hit the thumbs up button share it with your friends in worship ministry i can't wait to hear how this training helps you improve the way you mix for your worship ministry thanks for watching see you next time you

Channel: Churchfront

Views: 128,946

Keywords: churchfront, worship leader training, worship ministry school, jake gosselin, worship tech training

Id: pXRq2oIaFXw

Length: 105min 32sec (6332 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021