SONG 2 - Next to You

Masterclass: Mixing Masterclass - Mixing
1 hour 18 minutes
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Transcript

So we're going to move on to our second song, which is called next to you. Now I've recorded this within reason, but I know a lot of you might be using Pro Tools or maybe you logic or maybe even some other da W's. But instead of mixing this here in reason, by the way, the drums in here, electronic drums, the MIDI drums, using reasons fantastic refill, just called reason drums, I believe just a great, great drum kit within here. So instead of doing this here in reason we're going to export this out and we're going to bring it into Pro Tools. And we'll work on it from there and use the period drummer to play these MIDI drum parts here. So, if you look at reason, I find that the the paradigm is more towards the analog days it's more of an of an analog to mixing consoles isn't the way we used to mix all the time, you'd have a mixing console in front of you.

And each channel strip would have your EQ, maybe some dynamics and some effects ends. And then you go across here to the rack. If I can open up the rack, and look you just got stacks and stacks of stuff here, your outboard gear and all that stuff. So the first song was done here within reason. Let's go ahead and exit out of this. I'm going to quit that.

And we're going to move over to our Pro Tools setup. And what we're going to do is import all those tracks in here. I've already set up the tempo BPM is 77 BPM, and we're going to import those tracks in and also import that that MIDI tracking and have that played by Superior Drummer. Now before I do any of that, we're going to just do a few housekeeping here. This would normally be set up within a template of mine. I'm a big proponent of mixer within templates, but so you can see exactly what I'm doing.

Let's just draw one from from scratch. So we'll go underneath, setup I O, and we'll go over to the third one across here, basses. Now I've deleted all the basses here. So all I have is just the monitor, one and two right here. And what we're going to do is set up a number of buses, we're going to set up for a kind of path, buses, routing buses, and then eight effects buses. Okay, let's start out by setting up some new paths here, we're going to create four stereo buses and these are going to be kind of like subgroups that anything that passes all of the audio through, I typically set up in all caps.

And so what I'm going to be doing is setting up four of these paths and the first one will be main, left and right. The next one will be what we'll call main crash and this will be parallel path to the main left and right that we'll be able to really crush and bring out some body and some harmonics there. And then I'll make up a couple of subgroups. One for my leads, the vocal and then one for my BVs. Okay, so the reason I put these all in caps, and again, this is not anything that you have to do is basically what I'm trying to train you to do is make your workflow your own. And so that way, when you start going into your mixes, and maybe six months later, I bet you can kind of very easily see which are the main paths or the kind of subgroups that your tracks are going to go through.

And then I'll set up eight effects ends after this. So I'll go new path. I'll hit eight, stereo, and there's still buses but In this case, these are going to be effects sense and what I do and it could be totally different from from you, I like to just put these in parentheses so that I know that they are kind of like walk sense. They're like effect effect loops. You know, in the old days, I normally start out with kicking snare crush. Whoops if I could spell and then I have a drums crush as well.

And the difference between that is that I can then bring up the room you know, basically the kicking snare or place through this bus and then we can really crush the heck out of that and blend that back in. And that will just be the kick in the snare but everything else in the kit will just come through this drums crash which is great if you ever want to bring up your symbols or your your room mics and things like that just works out really well. From there, and then to go on from that, I normally go from drums then down to vocals. So the next one I would do is vocal verb then vocal crush again it's a parallel paths or we can really crush that down. And then I have my generic effects things like slap, Echo room and then a stereo spread. There you go.

So that they are my go to biases that I'm pretty much set up in every mix that I do. So let's move on and start importing our tracks in Okay, here we are in Pro Tools, I've imported all our tracks and he just do that only file and you import either audio or the media. In the media, audio mini there and you can see that all of these are audio tracks with the exception of the very first one here, which is our drum track that was playing that reason refill. I've imported it right here right now it's playing nothing if you right click here and open MIDI edits, you can see here all the note numbers, but it's not attached to anything. So these note numbers are playing right into fresh air and not blank anything. We need to insert an instrument across this particular track now one peculiarity to Superior Drummer and maybe you know other instruments as well.

You'll need to make sure this is a stereo ox track when you when you credit you know when you go underneath track and you go here. When you set up an instrument track, make sure that is a stereo one there and I've done that over here. Here's the reason when we insert that instrument across there, if we go to mono, this is a monitor, track and go into Where is as period drum it doesn't turn up at all. And that would be what would happen if this was a mono ox. It's not it's a stereo one. So I can go to multi channel and go on instrument.

And here we go Superior Drummer. And that should pop up perfect. And let's have a listen to that plane. Very cool, I had that solo. So all as many note numbers are happily playing these tracks. Now I've said before, I'm a big proponent of of setting up color coding.

So let's go ahead and do that. Okay, before we actually do that, actually, just bring up the color palette. So we'll be dealing with this and we'll just be selecting these tracks and adjusting the color code to that. Now, there's a really innocuous little setting right up here which links up the track and edit selection. This is a really handy thing. If you select that then what you can do down here is just you can see just drag Dragging across that will bring up the drums right here.

That's not a big deal because I could have just select right there but look at this bass, acoustic guitars and distorted guitars. What is that that's five tracks, I can either shift click you know across here or also I can just drag right across here and you can see them being select on the left hand side and then I'll just select my color there, go into my piano and Bill and do the same thing there. Then go down here and then select both my leads, select a color and then go through my harmonies and select a color there. Okay, we have all of our tracks here color coded and if I go to the sister screen which is mixed just command and equals, we'll get across here you can see at a glance here all of my guitars, bass guitar, acoustic guitars, typically I just set up the light of the instrument that kind of light of the color so you can see these these are darker guitars here then we have some keyboards to lead vocals and background vocals and any master faders main left and right I tend to do in a very dark color like a dark blue or something like that.

I've set up a master fader here so I can meter exactly what's going on into this main, left and right. So let's have a look through all of these and just set up some some basic, like a rough mix here. So, bass is going to be straight in the middle acoustic guitar, I'm going to pan them out, like nine and three distorted guitar, I actually did they, they're actually the same thing all option, click that to get it back in the middle. There's just two different kind of takes. So they're both going to be straight up at the middle here pianos a stereo panel the way wide, the bells or the way wide. lead vocals is be a double set straight down the middle.

These harmonies that's going to be a higher harmony from one I remember and then this is more of a 10 apart, so I'll expand that out just as much. So it'll be a nice spread here. Now, here's what I've learned. If you if you import tracks, especially if they've been normalized, then you are gonna if everything's gonna be unity gain right here, it's going to be very loud, you may want to go back here and you're going to adjust the trim levels, you know, for each of these tracks if it's going to be too loud, I don't think I have a problem here. But I might just bring some of these down. acoustic guitars probably going to be coming down but sorry, guitars about here.

Lead vocals gonna be up I'm certainly going to bring down my my backing vocals and let's see what we have. gays in your pretty brown eyes came to accept came to realize that my wish life can give you oh nice scroll bit further. So here's the double pot I want to bring that down You think the bridges around here cannot be the next. Okay, so that's flat, there's no reverb, there's no slap, there's no compression, there's no nothing. But that kind of gives us an idea of what we can be going on in here. Now one thing I do want to do is remember I set up a nice IO here.

I had a was it kick, snare crush on a drums crushed Now how am I going to be using that? Here's the deal with superior drama, you can actually set up separate outs from this period drama plugin, so you can bring in new parts. Let's actually do that I want to have a separate kick and snare channel right here. So the first thing I needed to do is I'll go down to New and what the heck are Magnum stereo and auks input I want to make two of those. And that's going to be kick and snare. Let's go back to the other mode here and just grab these and I'll drag them all the way up the top just underneath those drums.

So now we have these orcs channels right here. I want to feed them from the sun. period drama. So all we need to do is go on to the Superior Drummer right here. And if we move over to the mixer, you can select we have a kick in and kick out. So if I select both of those, I can set that up to go out of say three and four, the default is out of one and two.

So I'm going to set them out in three and four. Whoops, there's a quick sub there as well. I forgot that, let's do that add three and four. Then I'm gonna take all our snares. And I'm gonna take them out in the next one, which will be five and six. So these are going out to some kind of output.

Where can we feed that into these orcs tracks? Well, here's how we can do it. We go to input here, and we go down to our plug in superior drama, and I want to bring that in from three and four is the kick and snare. I want to bring that in five and six. And if we saw these three then hopefully From the top, we should be able to see the kick in the snare coming up there. Perfect sweat so it gets this quiet part here.

So you can hear the only thing coming through in this in this drum thing is just had a little bit of kick, I mean the supreme traumas that they are so involved in the details of this stuff that they actually have bleed through the various other channels. But for the most part, here's our kick. And here's our smear and if I switch over to mixed mode, you can see now I can have more kick, or I can pick pull the kick out, I can have more snare Yeah. The great thing about that we'll have separate processing there. And we can also do some parallel stuff that we'll set up in a moment. In fact, let's go ahead and set up all of those jimba those buses where were we sorry, right here.

The main and the crash and lead and backgrounds and all of these effects, sends, let's set them all up. Now before we make all of these orcs, tracks, we are going to place them over the right of here. If you ever done this before, whatever one is selected, or if you start making a bunch of extracts, they'll be inserted between here I want them to the right of this man. Left and Right. And that's just the way I set up my console is that I have my subgroups and effects sends all to the right of my main left and right that way, there's kind of a neat division between all of the source tracks, and then the main left and right here and then the various subgroup buses and then also the effect buses across here. So with that selected right here, we go up into track, and we'll go new.

And if you remember, we set up a dozen of those buses. I've already got one down here, so a dozen minus one is 11. We're going to make 11 stereo ox inputs Blam, all they go out right here. So here's how the routing or goes all of the, the source tracks here all go out to the main they go through the main left and right bass which feeds this orcs right here, the main left and right bus goes into here. Now what I want to do is tap off a copy of this to go into this neighbor right here. Let me just name that that is main main crush.

Okay, so we have set up a bus for that if we go on the bus main crash remember that. So here's what's going on and I've got the defaults and if your preference is to sit at unity gain every time I make up a new sim so basically a copy of this will just be going off into main crash and add job is to have that picked up over here. Main crash. So now if I just play something you can see it's coming out Here at unity gain and coming into this crash last year and our job was to be able to be to put a compressor insert that across here, we'll deal about a deal. You know, while we're doing this a little bit later on, but just want to kind of show you the the signal flow here. So a parallel of the main left and right comes off here.

We'll put a compressor on that later on, then the next one across here, this will be lead, this will be a subgroup. And whenever I do sub groups, I normally do them in all caps. So that'll be the lead across there. And this will be at the Viz and we'll bust them out of the BVs. So then what we'll do across here on our lead vocals here instead of them going to the left and right across here. Where will they go?

You bet they are going to be going to the lead. That's going to be going out to the lead. And then this is fed in there. And then the output of that is going to go to the main left and right. So let's see if this all works. Actually, where does vocals start?

Around here? So around seven, okay, so let me go back here and play that a GIS in your pre round I see the lead is going across here game. While do that, the idea is that we're grouping both of these to go across the lead and then Then we can add a global EQ compression or whatever on those leads. So instead of doing that individually here, it's not that big a deal because when we have two tracks, but over here on our backgrounds, we'll have four backgrounds that's not a lot maybe we had a three part harmony or triple that'd be nine of these tracks. It's a lot better way to go is to send these over to our BBs and then I BVs over here, a fed by the BBs and then go out to the main left and right now from memory the the bridges around here so we should get to here this is in your pretty brown eyes came to came backgrounds cannot be the next.

Again while we're doing that, because we can then do common things to all that backgrounds. It's not like I said, it's not a big deal for just a couple of days. But boy, if you have a lot of backgrounds, you don't want to be chasing your tail placing the same inserts across here. Why not just subgroup them over here to our backgrounds and then do some common things right across there. Now after we go to our lead and backgrounds, the next one over here will be at kicking snare crush and all nine that now it is an effect so I put it in parentheses. Again, you don't have to do this but it's just a way for me to remember that this is an effect send And that will be going out to the main left and right.

Next one will be drums crush, going out to main left and right. Next one is vocal verb going out to my left and right. Vocal crush out to my left and right. And the last few are add generic effects like slap Now this is why I'm a big proponent of, of setting up templates. So you don't have to do this every single time. But I figure, this is something you might want to see.

And then you can decide exactly what you want to use all the time and maybe you'll have different templates. Maybe you'll have like a rock template. You know, with more of a room thing. Maybe if you did valid thing, you'll have more holes and things like that. Last one will be spread. So here we are, and whoops, that needs to go to left and right.

Here's what I do is Hey, just double check everything going on here. So we have a lead coming from the lead, and that's fed across here from the lead here that goes out to the main left and right, the BBs, you can see there's an output goes out through that bus gets fed into that one goes left and right. And then we have various effects across here. And the last thing I'll do is I'll solo safe. A number of these, so when we do some soloing over here, these things won't get muted. So whoops, it's not option.

Sorry, it is command. That's right. So also save all of these and we should be good to go. Okay, so with all of that set up, let's start adding some effects across here on these various effects ends because no one's gonna Hang on, is that we, whenever we send anything across from here, like for example the kick and snare crash, right? I'd want to send that from here. Kick snare crush.

It's up to be unity. I'll do the same thing over there. Kick snare crush. So both of those, a copy of them because it's set up as unity here, is siphoned off and goes over and feeds into here. But why are we even doing that unless there's something on here. So that's the whole idea is that then this affects orcs here will then have something on it.

In this case, this will be a dynamics and we'll put a speed of 76 on here and when Do a crush bus. You just want to exaggerate the attack and release short as possible may attack as long as possible on the release. And let's actually have a listen to that. So we can solo the kick and the snare, and I'll bring this crush all the way down. Me check everything I think that's good. So let's start off at, I don't know, say, nine.

I'll bring this up. Let's feed that input a little bit more. So he had that crushing. That's just crushing. I might bring that maybe to one So that's just the kick in the snare just by themselves. When this siphoned a copy across here, then we can absolutely crush that, knowing that we're not going to be living here.

But we can bring it up just to bring some fullness to that kick and snare. You hear that? This gets a little stank here. Now we can do the same thing with the rest of that kit. So here's the rest of the kit here. Well, we send it off to now I wouldn't send it off to the kick and snare crash.

I want to send it off to the drums crash, because I want to have independent control and so that came across here. To the same thing I'm looking at the, I don't know, maybe minus five or six DBS in terms of the gang reduction. So here's what we got. That's just the kick and snare and the rest of the kit. If I want to bring up the crush of the kick in the snare. I can do that with the rest of the kit.

So do you hear how the room comes up there? without adding any reverb in like that, it just brings up a sense of that room. And by the way, whenever I bring up these two kind of obscene levels, I'm not saying I'm going to it's going to live there. But I always exaggerate that so you can have a listen to this. But this whole idea of side sideband, or parallel compression on the kick in the snare, but come over here, which I completely crushed. And then the rest of the kit, which goes through this walks over to add drums crash, which also has a completely crashed bf 76.

And the trick is you just want to have a very short attack, very long release. The whole idea is that there's just it's, it just smashes those drums which brings in all sorts of, you know, great overtones You know, it just distorts it in in the nicest possible way. So let's get to the bridge here and have a listen to how that sounds. Stop angry kick and snare and more of the room. Great. So let's do the same thing with the vocals.

I have solid up add to lead vocals and our so our background vocals taken us to the bridge. And same thing we're going to be routing a copy of all of these vertical cross across here And that has brought all of these a parallel, copy them across to our vocal crush. And we're going to basically do the same thing here, we're going to bring up a bf 76. By the way, what I did in preparation for this tutorial is I took out all of the plugins that was that I had that with third party, because I know some of you might just be using this stock Pro Tools installation. And so instead of me showing, you know, a bunch of exotic compresses that I have, I just thought I'm gonna do this just with the stock plugins. And so that way you can completely you can duplicate exactly what I've done right here.

So, short attack, long release, I'm gonna drive that in. On this particular compressor, there's no threshold you bring down you just drive your input into That fixed level threshold and so let's have a listen to how that plays out. Dreams cannot be the next I mean blended in the body UI yesterday brand new days just big. So you can see the cameras actually having maybe a little bit too much. Want to see that between five and 10? I'd say well, he that again.

I don't know dreams cannot be there next to you. So say bad yesterday, your brand new days. Some of that is this guy and it's got Keep in mind that I've got no EQ on this, no compression at all. But I'm immediately getting results with this with this crash right here. So they, the three crush buses I've had odd. That's right, the main crash.

Let me set that up. Same thing. Now again, if I had a bunch of different compressors, I really would advise you to go you know, if you have a ton of different compressors, just experiment and find out which ones that you like that do that do the job. Well, I would normally not set all of these the same one, but this should work fine. So now let's hear the entire mix. And remember that this main crash is siphoned off from the main bus, and it has a crushing, short attack lung release.

Compressor right here. So let's have a listen to that. Blend in the crush brand. So you can see we've got a number of different crushes along here we have the kick and snare, which is just crushing, kicking snare across here, this is doing the rest of the kit. The vocals are all crushed as one and then the main, sorry, the main level, the main left and right across here has a parallel bus which you can drive a little bit of that in there. Again, I wouldn't be certainly bring it up to unity.

I'd be just bumping it up a bit just to kind of glue parts of that That mixed together. Okay, so that's all of the parallel compression. Let's look at our standard kind of like more standard effects, which will be our vocal verb, slap, Echo room and spread. So let's start out with adverbs, which is vocal verb, and also our room right here. Now, a trick that's been used back, I don't know is an apocryphal story or what that they call it the Abbey Road curve. But a number of people over the decades have found that in terms of verbs, a good thing to do is to filter some of the frequencies off before they hit that verb.

And so what we will do is underneath this vocal verb, I'm going to bring in an EQ we'll bring in our seven band EQ here. And here's what I want to do. I want to be dealing with at a high pass filter and low pass filter, basically Simply rolling off the low end and rolling up the top and the first thing I do is make it a very, very steep curve, both of these, I'd pop them in. And then you can move that along here and I don't want my revert to be seeing anything less than now, I don't know, maybe 100 or so hertz, maybe even higher. And the same thing, I don't want to have the really shrill things, hitting that verb as well. So I might knock that down to about five K. So this particular curve here, a lot of people call it the Abbey Road curve, but it's a great way to clean up your reverb.

If you're getting a lot if you're hearing your reverb, and it just seems to be popping on all the sibilance things like that. You might want to bring that down so the reverb doesn't see any of that sibilance and that way because the problem is that if if it pops out in the SS and T's you might Want to back down that reverb, but then the rest of it doesn't seem affected and you kind of lose that room. So just a way to kind of pre. Yeah, just pre filter that before it hits that reverb is just a great way to go. So that's the pre filter before it hits through a verb and I'm just going to bring up the standard D verb. And we'll deal with you know, whether that's going to be, you know, a plate or whatever.

But that's the magic kind of potion before you hit the verb. And I want to do the same thing over here in our room. And in fact, if I've done all that work over here, I could go over to this one here, and I want to copy those settings and then go across to this one here and I can paste those settings. And so that filter is already there. Then we can add your return after that, So you can see the, the flow is that these are effects loops, that vocal verb and also the room. That's why personally I just like to have them in these parentheses.

So I know these are kind of my effects. And then all you do is that go across here and any of these channels that you want to feed into that vocal verb and you just go down to the settings here. So for example, your lead vocal, you want to send that out to the bass to your vocal verb, and that is usually guy Normally, you would normally not set that so therefore that would remind me to bring that back down. So if you want to add some of that reverb to that lead vocal track, then you can do that that siphons that off to this vocal verb, which goes through the filter, which then goes through the verb. Okay, now I've set up all of my effects. Remember that though, all the ones that were in print parentheses over here, and that they kick, snare and the drum crush At bf 76 is in there, the reverb had to remember that Abbey Road curve and then the reverb after that the vocal crush had a bf 76 there now the slap as just a very short delay and 55 seconds on the left 110 seconds on the right there and then terms that EQ are distinct that up to an eighth note and just with a little bit of feedback then the room had the Abbey Road curve there and also the I shouldn't need to change that.

I'll get into that in a second but we'll make that a whole lot shorter that will be more like a room like you know, maybe one a bit seconds or something like that. We'll have a listen to that. And then the pitch shifter here. Here's where if you ever need some spread on your backing vocals or that another one here is that A bell on here which I will decide to spread out between the left and right speakers. A trip has been used to be committed not the beginning of time but certainly know that Evan tide harmonized and things like that quite often, if you just if it's the same principle bases a 12 string, why does a 12 string sound so much richer than a six string guitar? It's because those minute different pitch variations really and what choruses do, all that stuff is just that if you have a little bit of detuning, then a little bit of delay, you can spam things out very wide.

So on the left hand side here, I just linked that and set that out to be minus 10 cents. So cents is 100 of SME time so this is a very, very fine it's not like transposing and like that. It's just very, very finely bring out On the left hand side, slightly flat on the right hand side, slightly sharp, and then putting a very short delay around 20 milliseconds, you know, the length of a delay that we can actually perceive is around your town 20 milliseconds. Anything before that it tends to meld together. So if you have around 20 milliseconds, you can see that it's a slightly different thing. And it will just widen it out a whole lot more, if you like, you could give them slightly different milliseconds to accentuate that a little bit more.

So you can see that is all of the effects. We have the crashes then we have the verbs which have the filters in front of them and various delays and then also this pitch shifter. And then all you would do is just go across here on to all your source tracks and you will decide what you would stand out to all of these some of these a kind of no brainer. In terms of the drums over here, if you wanted to add a little bit of the room, then you could do that you go to the bus and go down there to the room. And I could do the same thing with the kick and the snare. By the way, these levels would be way too loud.

In fact, I'd probably just bring them down there. And in fact, you can change this and make your, your preferences to either count up as unity, or else at minus infinity. So these are all these settings here. In fact, let's do that. Try remember where it was preferences. Mixing.

That's right, send defaults to minus infinity. So now every time I set up one of these sends, it will default to that and I'll bring that up. So what else here base I'm not gonna be sending that to any of these here. acoustic guitars? No, maybe I'd send some room to them. Notice now that that is minus infinity, so it's all good.

Room. I definitely want to add some spread to my distorted guitars and maybe a little spread to my acoustics as well. Okay, so off camera, I did a few little changes here. I said, realizing Why am I sending out all of these individual vocal parts out to the vocal vocal crash and all that stuff when I could just be doing that through the subgroup. So I brought those two subgroups across here on the left hand side. So we have lead and background vocals.

If you remember the, the signal flow before it was these go out to the lead and then it goes out to the BVs In these subgroups get fed by those. And so now here's what we have. We have vocal crush slap, vocal reverb and echo on the background. We have vocal crush, vocal reverb and and spread. And then across here we have the kick and snare, crush, then the rooms and then over here on the on the drums. I just have the drum crush that can bring up enough ambience just just from that.

Then acoustic guitar, we have our room and spread an echo and room on our distorted guitar. And then the bell I had that set up as spread. Now another thing I did on my main left and right outputs is I had, this is something I normally do just to give yourself a lot of people call a smiley face EQ, where you just add up, add some low end and you add a little top end here. Yeah, hence the smiley face thing everybody likes he'll bit more bottom a little bit more top on there. And if I can place that across my main left and right, then I don't necessarily tend to go down here into my tracks and start messing around with that because a lot of that work is done there. The very last thing I placed after that is the maximum limiter.

Now the settings I have here, I normally just nudge that down just off the off the the ceiling, maybe minus point one minus points recent like that. And then you just start pulling down your threshold. And you'll actually see it kind of a histogram here of how much level is coming, how much of the time you are coming in at this level. So you can see that every now and again, it's very rare that I'm in the six Amanda living down here. So typically what you want to do is pull down that threshold until you start seeing a little bit of gain reduction here and just have a listen to how the perceived loudness and then that'll show you how much that has been made up, let's play from the top. If you bring that down a lot, you'll get some distortion.

So you don't want that around minus six, something like that. We can hear the bypass came. There's my wish. Oh, so this is kind of the broad strokes in terms of the routing. We'll get into correcting anything on those source tracks in a moment. But can you see how all the routing goes we have our vocals going in subgroups which had most of the processing in terms of the effects, which go over here.

And then these effects, these are being fed the same bus has been effect across here. And that's where we add all these these effects right here. So and we just have a little bit of EQ and also some limiting on there. It's also sent across to a parallel, the main crash, which has our bf 76 here with a very short attack and long release. So that's kind of the main routing, that's the kind of the main go to routing I normally go to. Now let's go through each of the tracks individually and EQ them, maybe add some compression as we start to build this mix.

Okay, let's go instrument by instrument across here. We'll start off you'll notice that everything I have here is bypassed. Just go each instrument. I have the kick drum Solid, let's listen to what that sounds like. So I'll um, bypass that. And here's what I've done other things, any dynamics going on here, it's mainly just the EQ here.

And Surprise, surprise, we have a bunch on our fundamental, a little bit on a smack about beta and little bit of air on there. Let's just bypass this. So that's a little bit more in your face right there. I brought that up as p kick. And then, by the way, all of these presets I'm going to be using I've saved them off into Pro Tools file, so look for the prefix P, and you'll know the other ones that I used in this project p for productivities. Okay, so that's the kick drum there.

Let's go ahead and go over to a snare drum. And let's see what's going on here. Again, I think as much dynamics here, but we've just added a little bit of a body of the snare Little bit of snap at a snare and a little bit of air. So let's have a listen to this. This is the the side stick right now. Without it, here's with it.

Let's hear that in conjunction with the kick and snare. Again all this will be thickened up because I have actually let me make that. Sorry, bring that up. unmuted and bring this one up and unmute that as well. And let's have a listen to this the kick in the snare. And there's that crash over here.

So it's just getting a little bit of crustiness to that kicking snare. It's starting to sound like a real kit. Now. Okay, the rest of the kit, I don't have anything going on there except the drum drum crush there that is being sent out over to this that said, Listen, I think I need to do anything EQ ng on that at all, I think is pretty good straight out of the box. So now let's go ahead and go over to add bass guitar. And I've done a couple of things here, I brought up a compressor limiter on that and have also brought up a, an EQ there that needs to be an bypassed and that's what's going on here.

Let's listen to the compressor limited, nothing really special there, about a three to one ratio brought up that threshold. Let's see what kind of gain reduction we're looking at there. So it's averaging around, maybe between three Five and six dB gain reduction. Now let's bring up the EQ. So that's flat. That just gives a little bit of bias you can hear a little bit of that thing and noises will they let's see that with the drums starting to sound good.

Okay, let's move on to acoustic guitars and what have I got going on, they're probably just me and bypassed that okay taking all the boxes out of there taking adding a little bit of body down below, and a bit of mid range and also a little bit of air. So let's have a listen to those Now add a little bit of amis to that in a little while, but in terms of EQ, that's working well. And then the distorted guitars, I just wanted to add a little bit of kind of bias into the mid range right there. So you can see that that's set around 4k, and we're bumping about six was at about six DB up there. Let's have a listen to the distorted guitar coming up anytime now. Maybe they're a little bit further into the song.

Let's have a look there. distorted guitars probably around here probably around 20. Okay. So let me start off from there. step a little bit of cutting edge on that guitar and you know just by itself, it kind of sounds a little harsh but it's living in a place that will sit well with all the rest of the other stuff. So let's bring everything else up.

I have a lot going on the piano, I think I just add a little bit of air What's that? Yep, sure enough, there's one there I called p air, which is based around 12 I think, yeah, 1212 k. Okay, so let's listen to all these in context. Good. Now I've not done anything with the bell. I'll just spread that out a little bit further, then in terms of the lead vocals, and they how many back was they all go across to these subgroups. So here's where I'm gonna be doing some stuff with that.

And I brought up something just add some air takes out a little bit of that boxiness and add a little bit of bottom and the I call that P vocal. And there might be a little bit yeah, there's a two to one ratio, compressor on there as well. So let's and bypass that and bypass this one here. I also have just a little bit of compression here a two to one as well. On bypass that and bypass that and let's have a listen to these just in context. So I do need to have the seller as well.

I guess could a group these but this will work. Can I hold your little hand? Never let it go. A bypass that listen to that. Well, I hope you'll understand. I hope you chase down every dream a little bit of gain reduction now.

Hear that? Mainly because, well, I'll give you one free that's helped along with that vocal crush on the need. Can you promise me one thing So how's that sound with everything has the US wrong by new chapters appear. And I've added some things here. Let me just mute all of those for a moment. And we'll go left to right in terms of these effects.

Okay, we've added some of the room along with these drums. So listen to that. Of course that gets fed through that orcs which is coming into this room here and let's look what's going on here. We have the Abbey Road filter before that, and then we have medium size room about one second. And I've said that as a p room you'll find that in your files is the base. Also when I added over that room to the acoustics so just sit in that some net sign kind of environment.

Spread how much wider that becomes when you add that spread Just a little bit, a little bit of that room. The Open your neck, basically done the same thing over here. Let's unmute those. And whatever I had those set up as should be about the same. Correct. Okay in terms of the piano, there's nothing going on there, the bell, here's where you can really hear that.

That spread working. So we'll start from the top and listen to that bell. Now no spread. Bell will come here in a second and I'll spread it out. Now I don't know whether you heard that. Maybe I said about nine came to except maybe it was about five.

So solid that so you can hear that in action. So here's just the roll Bell you can see there's no inserts across here, he'll we'll just be adding the spread which right now the standard is at zero or sorry minus let's bring this up so you can just add some flavor to that. And if you remember that goes through the ox, which comes into here which has that pitch going minus 10 and plus Plus 10 and little tiny delays I mean 20 milliseconds 26 milliseconds. They're not echoes they're just gives it a little bit of difference between the left and right so it can spread that out and obviously, the more you wrap that out the the wider that that will be so let's have a listen to this and kind of how it's coming together. gays in your pretty brown eyes. So that's that's about eight.

And what we'll do is we'll unmute these and have a listen to what's going on. So I'll bring them all down our wrap them all up one at a time. So me so that and the two leads and we should be hearing that skis in your pretty brown eyes. So I have a crash, except I want to have that cane or realize that my wish, I want to have that at UNC. So therefore, you know, a complete copy of this subgroup of these two tracks will go over to a vocal crash, and then I can dial in how much vocal crash arrived from over there. So that's set up to unity.

The slap will certainly not be new. Let's listen again. He's in your pretty brown eyes. I came to except came to realize that my if you remember that goes over to a slap which is a 55 and 110 over there. I mean these numbers right You can mess around them a little bit actually were set up to link so we could turn that off. But you get the idea it's certainly under 100 milliseconds.

So actually what was that piece slap that I had? So that 55 and 110 so it just kind of ping pong back and forth on fact I just make sure that you are Your feedback is very very low There are also gets a little symbol like flashing anything else gays in your pretty brown eyes. I came to except came to realize that my response is simply the line you only need will lie hope you find love. I hope you find grace I hope many more smiles, Lana. So the nice thing about the reverb is that it's it's just only the middle part of that vocal verb Remember that before we're rolling off the bottom and rolling off the top, so we don't get too much other stuff that pops out because if you hit something in law in your register, like you know, any piece of software or sibilance up on the other end, sometimes your verb can just pop straight out.

Yet, there's also some arguments that you could even maybe put a compressor on there so that any peaks in your reverb would, would get leveled out, you want that in the last of your chain in that vocal verb. So that's bringing up there then the echo is in your pretty brown eyes, came to least came. So that's more like you know, a space echo kind of thing. It's not something you'd want to have a whole lot of it but you'd be surprised at how how it just fills out your vocals. And quite often, if you stop in the middle of a song, you know, if you just if you're playing around, you stop and you hear all those echoes Wow was all those echoes there but they really do help. So let's have a listen to how all this sits in the mix GIS in your pretty brown eyes came to except on sound good came to realize that my wish for you simply the life can give you oh nice and so do basically the same thing there that was at Unity so this one certainly needs to be at Unity the vocal verb how much Let's set that up a little bit off unity you might want to have a touch more on backing vocals and then spread.

I would like a little bit of that as well. So let's have a listen to that. Voice 66 was around the bridge shout out your dream. Something good cannot be the next Today a brand new days. Let's realize this one was bypassed. It's nice having this color coding here you can see at a glance whether things are bypassed.

But this is seems to be working out pretty well. All the signal flow is everything pretty much goes to main left and right except these leads and background vocals they go across to here and all the processing goes on here, this channel strip and some compression there, a little bit of EQ across here in these various ones here and then on the main left and right, we have that smiley face EQ and that limiter In fact, let's have a look at this limiter and see how much we're shaving cannot be Then next, yeah, that was probably a bit low. I just want to start tickling this stuff here rather than you know, if you start crushing, you will definitely get distortion. So maybe something like that like minus five or something like that. Let's see if we can bypass this cannot be there next. Yesterday a brand new lighting.

So all of those various effects, the spread the Echo, slap and all that stuff. That's, that's all set up over here. But now we have basically three sets of crushes that we can bring into this mix the kick and snare crush the drum crush, and also the main crash. Let's put them pull them all out and listen to what we have and start adding them innovation. cannot be the next brand new. I think I said that before that'll bring up the room and then that vocal crush is probably good about there and then the main crush which is parallel off here, let's have a listen to how that affects the mix.

Cannot be the next to save. Yesterday a brand new day is the future. So in your Can I be there next to you? Can I hold your little hand nifa never let it go. Well, I hope you'll understand. They mainly, I guess sounded pretty good.

I think we've done pretty much most of the work that could be some automation, that will will listen to the song from beginning to end and make some notes about exactly where various things can get automated. Some of the things that I like to automate is the level of crash. So if it's in a more intimate part of the song, you can bring that down, and then just bring that up. If you want to punch a chorus, you can ride those, if the drums are really you know, there's a lot of smashing around some Those things that you really want to accentuate that you could do that with a drum drum crush. I'll go ahead and start doing some automation and we'll have a listen to them. Now in terms of automating, you can automate every little channel, if you'd like any of these tracks, what I tend to automate more than anything are things like subgroups, if you want to ride your vocals up a little bit, maybe your background vocals more than anything, I tend to ride these parallel buses.

And I'll concentrate mainly on the drum crush here and also the main crush. And so basically, to automate these things is very, very easy to do. You just go to the particular channel that you want, and you set this up to write and then you just hit play, and then you start moving that up and around. And then when you come back, you just set that to read. So I've already done that with my drum crush and also my main crush so let me switch Over to the track view. And you can see here's all the automation for the these various buses, the main crash, you can see what's going on here and also the drums crash.

So let me just explain why I did what I did. So rather than me go through and, and demonstrate all of that will actually play it back and you better seal the fader moves, but basically the main crash only to have that up and also the drum crush up at the top of the song because a lot of stuff is going on. I want that nice and nice and fat. But then when it comes down to from the moment eyes gaze and you're pretty brown eyes, everything kind of comes back as a bit more intimate. So I wrote that down a little bit here and then started bringing that up as it started getting into the chorus. I started doing the same thing with the drum crush right here.

And then you can see it comes up for the chorus and then it comes back for that Dune Danna part. Want to bring that right up, and then back again, I want to pull it back down. And as that builds, I want to bring up the main crush to that chorus level again and then it goes through to the bridge part which on a punch even bit more and you can see that reflection both of that and then it comes down to the part with Can I be there next to you just with the acoustic guitar that's very, very intimate. I don't want that crushable I bring that down. I also there's very little drums go on there anyways, that doesn't really need to be pulled down. And then it comes back out to the end of the song so you can see exactly what's going on in terms of these and of course, you can double click on these and and change any of these you can get in a minute nitty gritty detail.

But basically I've recorded that in there. If I go back into the mix thing here with these all slapped auto Read. Let's play the song from the top and check it out. gays in your pretty brown eyes came to accept came to realize that my wish for you simply the life can give you oh I hope you find love. I hope you find grace I hope many more smiles land on that sweet little face as you do your pet that one favor from you Can I be the next to you cannot let it go. I hope you understand.

Wow Can you promise me this cannot be the next Do us wrong by new chapters appear? Uh, no, you'll be open you'll never have fear with your heart open wide. Throw all caution aside. My hope is that life will bring joy to your heart, that your dreams will come true and you'll never depart from your destinies. I wish nothing but the best for you but cannot be the next Can you promise me promise me one as you cannot be the next grand cannot be there next Can I hold Julie nifa never let it go. Well, I hope you understand while I gave you one Can you promise me one?

Promise me one thing cannot be the next cannot be the next cannot be

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