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00:00:07

Hey, I'm Ryan Hewitt and we're here at my studio in Nashville, Tennessee, House of Blues, and we're about to open a session I haven't seen since 2003, it's a song by Blink 182 that I've recorded with them called: 'Obvious', originally mixed by Tom Lord Alge. 00:00:22

I have the rough mix that I did at the end of the.. 00:00:25

..at the very end of making that record just before it went off to Tom Lord Alge, so it will be kinda cool to hear that and then see where we can go with this track. 00:00:33

It was all recorded on tape, we had a Studer 827 and an API console in a house in San Diego for a few months and we did all the basic tracks there. 00:00:44

We dumped things into Pro Tools to do vocals and, you know.. so it's easy, but everything else was played on tape: drums, bass, guitars were all on tape. Everything was played as you hear it, punching.. 00:00:58

..and doing things the old-fashioned way. 00:01:00

It's the way Jerry Finn, the producer who did that record wanted everything as the way he did almost all of his record. 00:01:07

It's the anti-organic thing, really.. 00:01:11

..hyper-realistic, where we got perfect drum takes, we wanted everything to be great, Travis would go out there and memorize the arrangement of the song, play it to a click track, we'd cut the best pieces of his performances together, sometimes changing drums from section to section and other times changing microphone levels, turning things on and off so that when we cut the tape together the arrangement that we wanted just happened spontaneously. So you'll notice some things in this song that sort of follow that rule. 00:01:43

And I'll point them out as we go along. But, really fun record to make! The guys were wonderful, completely responsible for my sense of humor, these days, I'm really looking forward to open this thing up and play around with it a bit. 00:01:54

So to get started, why don't we listen to that rough mix that I did and just get a feel for where the song was at when we finished tracking it and sent it out to be mixed, and we'll just sort of pick it up at that point! It's been a long time since this was recorded and it will be really fun to dig back into this stuff and see what we were doing at that point. 00:02:51

Wow, that's certainly a trip down memory lane.. 00:02:53

..kinda cool! You hear a bunch of things going on, you can hear that.. 00:02:56

..that room mic opening up on the choruses, so you can see how it's cut out, it's not even recorded in the verse sections and then it pops on in the chorus, so that's something we did on the tape, I'll show you a couple things with that, later. 00:03:09

We recorded this in a house, not a real studio, so the room sounds are really cool and different from a studio-sounding record but we had all the accoutrement of like a real deal place: we had the API console, we had all of Jerry's gear, we had my small, fledgling pile of gear that I had bought, you know, all those years ago, I think it was in a rack this tall as opposed to all the stuff that I've got now. 00:03:34

But a lot of the things I do have now are influenced by.. 00:03:37

..by Jerry Finn and in fact those Pultecs I have are the serial numbers right after the one he had, and that was much to his chagrin and I bought those during the Blink record and he only had one, I offered to give him one of them before I paid for them.. he said: "no: I only buy things in stereo pairs"; they show up: it's the two serial numbers after his. 00:03:55

And he was freaking out, he got so upset that he couldn't have them. 00:03:58

[laughs] so that was.. that was kinda fun! So all the drums are here, lots of different preamps and compressors to tape, lots of things affected the tape: the way we did the toms was really cool.. he had this method of sending the dry signal off to a BBE processor and we blended that back in all to tape. So the toms, when I'll play them for you in a little bit, will sound already pretty huge, the delays on the vocals, were already committed, I'm sure you heard those in the chorus. I don't remember how he did those but.. 00:04:30

..I definitely heard some filtering going on on those effects that were already printed, so at least we've got that going, for us. 00:04:38

And then, some harmony vocals, some keyboard parts, so, fairly simple song, so typically when I get tracks to mix from somebody I'll have a listen to the rough mix, I insist on them sending a rough mix and that is because I can get a pretty solid idea of what they were thinking about just before they sent a song, to me. 00:04:57

Hopefully they have some resemblance of talent in the mix department so they can put together a.. 00:05:01

..a decent, listenable rough mix that conveys their intention with the tune. 00:05:06

If not, I have to sort of interpret what they send me in an email, typically or we talk about on the phone and I need to take what they've done with their rough mix, what they say they wanna have in the mix and what I like out of a mix and put all those three things together into one sort of cohesive idea and give them something that's gonna be great. 00:05:27

I don't think about what is gonna sound like on the radio or anything like that, I just think: 'what does this song need to do?' 'where does this need to go?' 'where do I need to take it?' If you've watched my template video where I discuss where everything is set up in my sessions, what all my aux sends do, what all my colors represent you'll have no problem understanding where everything's going in the session and what I am about to do. 00:05:51

So, I rely a lot on augmenting my drums with samples, even though I recorded these and I like these sounds, they were really great at the time, I feel like I'm probably going to need some samples, so I have sample triggers set up and then tracks to print those samples to, 'cause I don't like running them live. 00:06:08

And also if someone else ends up with the session, I want my samples printed and my belief is that samples have to be absolutely phase-accurate, every hit has to be perfect and my assistant hates that, because he's gotta go and chop it up and make sure every single hit is the same. 00:06:25

You know: is time-aligned, phase-aligned with the original sound. 00:06:30

So the edges all line up and particularly with the kick drum if those edges aren't lined up then the bottom end will change from hit to hit and I can't have that. 00:06:39

I want my bottom end consistent, it's very important to me. 00:06:41

And.. 00:06:43

..often times a lot of sessions will come with samples that the band has placed in there and I go through and it's like: did you not hear that these are out of phase.. A). 00:06:50

Or B) they're not time-aligned so they're flamming all over the place. Or they're sort of close but the bottom end changes from one hit to the next. 00:06:59

And it's like: these are the details that make I think.. a great mix. 00:07:03

What I'll do now is just pull the faders down and we'll go into detailed work on all of our tracks and build a good-sounding mix. 00:08:09

With this sort of music I generally go for SSL EQs, 'cause that's sort of the sound of punk-pop music if it doesn't work then I find something else but this is sort of my go-to channel strip for drums on these kind of tracks. 00:08:22

A little bit of 75 or so on the kick drum, to give it a little more thump, Travis was using this extraordinarily long, plastic bass drum, his whole kit was that sort of translucent plexi glass drum kit. So there's not a whole lot of low end in there, so we have to compensate for that. 00:08:38

There's only so much I think we can do with EQ, on that, so we'll probably bring our parallel guy into that, which is another compressor with a Transient Designer and an Aphex 204 subharmonic synthesizer. 00:08:50

Let's scope that out and see what we can find there. 00:08:54

So I can lift this kick crush fader and if I go on to this aux send, here, I can turn that up. So let's solo this and see what we get when we push into this. 00:09:06

Just as a side note: I rarely touch any of my parallel compressors: they stay set at the same thing and I can vary what they're doing just by how much signal I push into them, so this will hit the dbx 160 compressor, the Transient Designer, which I will change, and the Aphex 204 which, of course, always changes depending on what the fundamental frequency of the bass drum is. 00:10:11

So that's just the parallel kick bus. 00:10:14

Again, dbx 160X, the Transient Designer and the Aphex 204, so.. 00:10:19

..adding some sub to it, a little bit of snap, some length with the Transient Designer and even a little more smack with that, as well. 00:10:27

Here's the two of them put together. Let's see what.. 00:10:29

..what we need to balance with those. 00:10:56

Now I'll try putting a gate in just to get a little more isolation from that kick drum. 00:11:00

There's a bit of bleed, when we tracked this I summed the inside and outside kick mics. 00:11:06

So they've got a little bit of bleed from the cymbals on there. Let's just try to clean that up a little bit. 00:11:10

It's not gonna be perfect by any stretch, but.. 00:11:12

..we can probably tighten that up a little bit. 00:11:48

That's a pretty good place to start with the kick drum, just gated it a little bit to try to get some more clarity. 00:11:52

So, here's with no gate. 00:11:55

Both the dry signal and the crush signal put together. 00:12:12

It sounds fine, we'll see if that we'll help us later, because we're loosing some of the length of the bass drum with that gate on it that I was kinda liking. 00:12:19

Let's actually turn it off for right now and just see if we need that, later. 00:12:23

So, let's move on to the snare drum and see what we've got in that department. 00:12:42

So you can actually hear, there, there's one of our edits where we used a different snare drum. 00:12:45

So a really ring-y one in that sort of rock breakdown thing and when we go to the vamp it gets like a tighter, less ringy snare drum, so we've sort of employed that all over the place. 00:12:55

So, our snare sound, is not going to be consistent throughout the song. So we just sort of have to ball park that and get it great as an overall kind of thing. 00:13:03

I remember being happy at the time we tracked it with that snare sound, so let's see if we can help that out. 00:13:09

So let's try a gate on the snare and see if we can clean that up, at all. 00:13:12

Get a little bit more definition happening. 00:13:22

There's a lot of bleed happening on this, which frankly I don't remember! What we can do to get a clean gate trigger, and this is a bit labor intensive, but you know, all good things are, I suppose, is: we can manually go through the snare track and gate it by editing out all the crap that we don't want. 00:13:40

And use that to trigger the gate on the snare drum track that we're gonna use. 00:13:44

Does that make sense? I've already done that and I'll show you the track so you can see what I'm talking about. 00:13:51

And it's consolidated, so you won't necessarily see the exact edits, but you can see.. 00:13:56

..and I'll play it for you, you can hear what it sounds like. 00:13:59

Then we'll never hear this again! Basically it's just acting as a trigger for my gate on the snare drum track, so we're gonna make that go away.. 00:14:12

the snare drum trigger track is being sent to the snare-gate bus at zero, pre fader, and then we can come over to the snare top track and open up our gate, set up a little side-chain that will be triggered by that trigger track and we will set that up to look at the snare-gate bus. 00:14:33

So now, if we turn that key on we'll solo the snare top and if we go here, we can listen to the side-chain of the gate which is now that trigger track, check it out: So, this track here is triggering the gate on this track, here. 00:14:51

If we put this into action, here, check it out. 00:15:19

Travis is one of the hardest-hitting loudest drummer I've ever recorded. 00:15:24

He is not ashamed of bashing the crap out of these cymbals. So, you know, it's just plain impossible to get any kind of isolated sounds on these close mics with him, so.. 00:15:35

..it's a delicate balance of you know, gating this a little bit, you can change how much you're rejecting those other sounds with the range knob, here, and you can't really get too aggressive you're really gonna hear it through the mix, opening and closing, so we just want a little bit of definition well: I want a lot of definition but there's only so much I can get so let me show you what I'm gonna do: we're probably gonna set it with about 9dB of gating. 00:16:01

I think that should probably be sufficient but let me show you what it sounds like if we do too much. 00:16:15

So you hear the cymbals all over the place when it opens, and that's not gonna be really nice, later. So, let's just set that at a moderate depth of about 9dB, that should be fine, we'll keep an ear out for that, later. 00:16:25

The reason I'm going through all this trouble is, because I want that gate to be perfect, I don't want any mis-triggers, I don't want the hi-hat, or the crash cymbal or the toms triggering that gate to open and he's doing a lot of little delicate work and by chopping out all the crap that I don't want, I can get all of his little ghost notes to open the gate and otherwise I might loose those things. So, since we've got this gate set up already, with this side-chain, why not use it on the bottom snare? So I'm gonna copy it down there, let's have a listen to the bottom snare, real quick. 00:16:55

This is without the gate. 00:17:19

So, here I can get away with a longer release and a longer hold 'cause there's not not as much cymbal bleed happening, down there and the tone of Travis' snare drum really comes from the bottom snare, 'cause that top head is wound up so tight that there's no tone in it. It just like a concrete block, so I'm gonna try to pull a lot of the tone and the low end of the snare drum from the bottom mic. 00:17:40

Which I think was a 57 on the top and on the bottom, so fairly standard setup. 00:17:45

And then I'm also gonna hide this trigger track so I don't have to look at it anymore and mistakenly turn it up and put it into the mix, 'cause that would be a bummer. 00:17:52

Let's put the top and bottom together. 00:18:10

And let's try the SSL channel strip on those, as well, let's see what we can get out of this thing. 00:19:12

So the snare top needed a little bit of midrange to.. 00:19:15

..to make it pop a little bit, in my opinion, I almost always cut out something around 500Hz on snares, it's sort of where the box-sound lies, it's a typical sort of thing I like and then on the snare bottom, I felt it needed a little more crack, you know, 4.5k maybe.. 00:19:29

what's this, like 9 or 10k on the top end shelf, again, rolling out a little bit of 500 or so.. 00:19:35

when we tracked this record Jerry was always reaching for a little bit of 220 on the bottom snare mic and he said: 'always add 220 on the bottom snare!' so in his honor I pretty much always add a little bit of 220 on the bottom snare, just to think of him, he's passed away a few years ago, now. 00:19:48

Let's hear that one more time. 00:20:02

That's a pretty great pop snare sound for me. 00:20:05

The other thing I like to try, we'll give this a shot and see what it does: a Distressor on the bottom snare can be pretty great. 00:20:13

I'll call up my hardware inserts and pop a Distressor on that and see what that does. 00:20:18

What's cool about the Distressor is that the attack and release are so infinitely variable: you can really change the envelope of that snare and make it really just slamming, I absolutely love it. So, let's dig into that and see what we can get, here. 00:21:09

So you can feel that snare drum just thickens up like, you get that snare-iness of the snare the pop from the top head and just like the [sound] kinda sound from the bottom, so that's sort of what I've been going for. 00:21:19

I like to put the gate before the compressor, in this case, and then I like to put the EQ after the compressor, generally, because then I can EQ whatever I want and it doesn't affect the compression. 00:21:29

There are a lot of times where I'll do the opposite, so that specifically it does affect the compression but in this case I like the compressor before the EQ and we'll get into some instances later where we'll do some carving before the compression, to show you what I am talking about, there. 00:21:46

Let's put the kick and snare together, see how we did on that. 00:22:04

That feels pretty good. 00:22:05

When I get my kick and snare sound together I'm thinking about samples, already. 00:22:10

And not only because I want a little bit more consistency but to me the other important thing about adding a sample is it helps that sort of bleed-to-direct-signal ratio. Right? So if I put a little bit of a sample in I'm automatically getting more point on that sound, on the kick and snare in this specific instance. 00:22:30

So, there's a bunch of bleed happening, so there's gates opening and closing and we're gonna put the overheads in so that it will make it less obvious that that's happening but having a sample in there will just give it a little more definition. 00:22:42

Let's carry on, put up the rest of the mics in the drum kit and see how they're affecting the direct sound of that kick and snare, at the moment. 00:23:07

So, the thing I like to start with, on overheads is a surgical EQ. 00:23:10

So I usually go to this FabFilter Pro Q. 00:23:13

Just to cut out the really irritating frequencies. There's almost always something around 3k, that really harsh cymbal range, particularly again with Travis because he hits so hard, and I wound up with a couple of KM-84s as a spaced pair right over the cymbals, that's why you don't hear so much of the drum kit. It's all just cymbals! But that's sort of what we were going for in this style of recording. 00:23:34

So let's just solo up the overheads and pull out these problem areas to see if we can find them. 00:24:25

So there's a few little nodes, in there. There's.. 00:24:27

there's a little boxy sound around 350, some weird harmonics around 3300 and another thing around 6.6k so those are octaves on each other, so that makes sense that that's happening. 00:24:39

So check it out without the EQ and then we'll pop it in. 00:25:07

That's definitely an improvement let's see how it sounds with the kick and snare. 00:25:41

So now let's get into a sort of a macro thing, with the overheads. 00:25:45

One of the tricks I like to use for this to sort of make the cymbals fit in and push back a little bit is to use this SSL channel compressor with a fast attack, fast release and probably around 8:1 ratio to sort of you know, bounce those cymbals a little bit with the kick and snare. 00:26:00

So let's see what we can do, there. 00:26:59

All right, so we're getting better. 00:27:01

And these sounds will all change as the mix progresses and we add other microphones in and see how they affect what we've got going, so far. 00:27:07

At this outro part he's playing on the ride cymbal, we've put a spot mic on that. 00:27:11

Again, just to sort of be able to manually balance these settings. 00:27:15

So, let's have a listen to that mic and see if it's gonna fit in well with the overheads. 00:28:16

There's a severe ringing around 5k, so let's see how it sounds like with that EQ in. 00:28:41

So that blends in, it's not offensive, you can hear what he's playing on that cymbal, so let's let that "ride" for the moment. Forgive the pun! We'll put the room in, 'cause that's a big sound of the record as well and it's gonna add a lot more splash-iness and things to deal with, so.. let's check out the room mic. 00:29:07

The room mic I used was a THE binaural sphere probably about 10 feet in front of the drum kit. 00:29:13

And you can tell I hammered that pretty hard, I don't remember what I used on it, but at least that sound is like, it's very intentional and it's got the elements that we need right off the bat. 00:29:24

And actually sounds better than I remember it sounded. 00:29:26

I think.. so, same thing, this sort of needs a little bit of corrective EQ. 00:29:31

So let's grab this Pro-Q one more time. 00:29:34

Let's throw it in actually with the track and see what we need to pull out a bit, before we do anything. 00:29:46

Sounds to me like it might be out of phase.. 00:29:48

and if not, slightly out, so let's get that, the IBP plug-in.. 00:29:55

and see if that helps us, at all. 00:30:15

Yeah, and you can tell right there, 'cause the bottom end comes back. So let me take this off. 00:30:19

Listen to it as I recorded it, which apparently is incorrect! So, check it out. 00:30:27

You heard the low end from the kick drum went away, there? Let me take the room out and you can hear what the kick drum sounds like, by itself. 00:30:38

And now I'll put the room mic, which is out of phase: listen to the low end.. 00:30:47

you hear how that bass drum just lost of all of its bottom? So, let's put this plug-in back in where I've inverted the phase, here and then I've sort of tweaked this phase adjust, just a little bit off of 'normal', whatever 'normal' is.. 00:31:00

I think I've helped that low end punch through, again, so check it out. 00:31:15

So that's definitely helped our cause, quite a bit. 00:31:18

So now, let's see what's thrashing up our sound a little bit, here. 00:32:00

There's a frequency that's making my teeth hurt. 00:32:28

So let's try popping in one of those SSL channel strips and see what we can make happen with that. 00:32:33

The midrange of the room is where it's really gonna be effective for the drums and then maybe we can pull a little bit of bottom end into the picture from the mic, as well. So check this out. 00:33:57

Cool, so we're getting there, with that stuff. 00:33:59

Pulled up a little bit of low end out of the room which kind of gives that kick drum a little bit of bloom, same thing in this little sort of upper-mid range area to get a little bit of that crack out of the snare, into the room. 00:34:10

Let's move on and see what else we got, here. 00:34:12

When I record drums with a lot of mics, like this, I typically print a drum squash track which is an aux send, from the console that takes the kick and snare mics and sends them off to some kind of compressor and just pounds the crap out of them. 00:34:25

I don't remember what I use, here but let's see what this sounds like, on its own. 00:34:29

And basically I call it a 'cheater track'. 00:34:31

So, when you're tracking you can get as much of a mixed sound, as you can, while you're cutting the track, makes everyone, you know.. 00:34:38

..play a little better and feel like: 'ah, this is a record!', you know.. 00:34:40

Get some little parallel processing going on, right from the beginning, so.. check this out. 00:34:56

Oh, now I remember what this is. 00:34:58

This is a custom opto compressor that Dave Collins, one of my favorite mastering engineer, built for me, and I don't even remember what's in it, I don't know what's in it, I've never opened it up. It's a box with a few knobs on it and it had like an LED to tell me how much compression was happening and it was always lit up, all the time. 00:35:15

And in fact, I took like a Blink 182 sticker and cut a hole in the middle and put it over the LED.. I don't know where it is! Right now it must be in the closet full of junk, so I'm gonna have to break that up 'cause this is really cool sounding! Let's add that into our mix and see what we get. 00:35:50

That punched things up quite a bit, didn't it? I'm really happy with that sound. Jeez! Let's see if we can pull more out of this room, let's try one of these Transient Designer things, let's see if that helps us, at all. 00:36:31

I actually prefer without, so let's dump that. 00:36:34

Let's move, what else do we have here, we got toms.. 00:36:37

..let's see what the toms sound like, here and if we're gonna need to do any processing, to those. 00:36:55

So now, I started talking earlier about how we tracked, the toms.. 00:36:58

..so the tom trick I was talking about that Jerry Finn developed, was: taking the microphone off, let's draw.. here's a drum. 00:37:06

I'm a terrible artist.. so here's a microphone. It's not a mallet, here's the drum.. 00:37:11

we take the signal from this microphone, we go into the console, we're gonna have 2 channels, here. Right? So, this is the mic channel and this is the BBE channel, here. Right? So, we come out of.. 00:37:27

..this is the console, we'll call this the mixer. 00:37:32

We come out of the mic channel and we go actually into the BBE.. 00:37:41

..and then we come back into that channel, on the desk. 00:37:43

So this will be channel 1, this will be channel 2. 00:37:46

We flip the phase on the BBE and then this sum goes to tape. 00:37:54

Right? Now, the other thing that happens, here.. 00:37:58

..before it goes to the BBE, in fact, here we go.. this is me being completely out of order.. 00:38:05

..we go to a gate.. 00:38:10

..and the trigger input.. 00:38:13

So this is our drum, remember? We have a little trigger that sits on the drum, like a DDrum trigger or something. Any sort of piezo sort of pickup will work. 00:38:22

We bring that into the side-chain of the gate. 00:38:30

So, this is opened only when you hit the drum, so there's no bleed from anything else, this is a physical pickup on the shell of the drum. 00:38:39

Right? I can make this a little prettier. 00:38:41

Put some lugs on it. 00:38:44

So, trigger goes into the gate side-chain, and then when that gate opens, it feeds the BBE, which goes boom! You know? It's a subharmonic synthesizer, it does an excitement on the top end, you can see it there, in the rack. 00:38:58

There's like a low contour control and a definition control. 00:39:01

Wind that shit up! Just turn them both all the way up. 00:39:04

That's the setting! It's all you need. 00:39:06

And you take, go into the BBE, go back into the console, you sum these two signals together and voila'! You have an awesome tom sound. 00:39:13

Huge! So, it will work with any sort of exciter like this, the Aphex 204 works fine, there's some older Aphex that work. The BBE 822, the newer one, works. 00:39:23

But if you're doing something other than a 422 make sure it's out of phase. 00:39:27

Or I should say: check to see that out of phase sounds best. 00:39:31

For the BBE, I don't know why but electrically it's out of phase with the dry signal so you have to flip the phase there to make it sound awesome. 00:39:39

Otherwise it's gonna sound rather pathetic, so.. 00:39:41

..double check that when you try to do this little setting. 00:39:44

So, let's listen just to this big fill that goes across all the toms, I'll show you what these sound like, fresh off the tape. 00:39:54

Here's a low tom. 00:40:03

When we cut this, of course we did it to tape and we did this sort of Roy Thomas Baker thing, where we just smash the toms on the tape. 00:40:10

So, they're a little thick-sounding so let's see if there's anything we can do to clean those up a little bit. 00:41:49

Yes, so just cleaning that mud a little bit, rolling off the extreme low end, so it doesn't shake the woofers excessively, and just cleaning up that mud where each drum has its own little resonance, that's not gonna happen and then adding a little bit of attack to the top to get a little bit of that point on the drum. 00:42:05

In fact, just for fun, let's try putting Transient Designers on these, 'cause that's something I would normally do. See if that helps us, at all. 00:43:00

Yes, so this Transient Designer helped us poke that attack through, you know, that wall of room sound that's happening in the chorus, here. 00:43:07

You'll also notice that I manually went and gated all the tom hits. 00:43:12

You know, sometimes I'll go back and touch these up as I just did, just sort of depends on what the bleed situation is with the drums, but I generally like to have things pretty tidy and clean. 00:43:22

And, I'll reach in and tighten all these up, manually. Rather than trying to do it with a gate, 'cause all sorts of other things can trigger the gate like we were talking about with the snare, so I'd rather it just be very consistent, do the same thing every time. 00:43:34

This is another thing my assistant does in preparation, for when I mix these songs. 00:43:39

Let's step back for a second again and hear what we've got at the beginning of the song. 00:43:58

Let's try throwing the hi hat mic in, I think that's the last of the close mics and then we can see what we can do with parallel processing, so here's the hi hat. Again, Travis is just wailing on that thing, so let's see if we even need it, first of all. 00:44:10

Here's without the hi hat mic. 00:44:17

Pretty darn loud, so let's see if we add it, if we're helping us or hurting us. 00:44:32

I think that's actually helping us, it's giving us a little bit of detail, it's not harsh.. 00:44:36

I used a Beyer 160 ribbon, on this record, so it doesn't have that harsh crap on the top end, and I'm kinda liking that, so.. 00:44:44

let's listen one more time, see if we got in a good place 'cause he does some more detailed hi hat work, later in the song. 00:45:23

That's working out well, we'll see how it plays with the instruments, later 'cause all this is for not.. 00:45:27

..if it doesn't work with the guitars and bass and such. So, It's vibing pretty good on its own, let's throw in this room mic that happens in the chorus. 00:45:36

As I was talking about before, when we cut this we intentionally arranged things to happen at different places, so.. 00:45:42

..you heard that snare drum change, earlier, now we have a room mic that comes on suddenly, in that first chorus. 00:45:48

And we did that by editing the tape, erasing pieces that we didn't need, so on and so forth. So, check it out when it comes in. 00:46:11

Ah, it's starting to sound familiar! That's what I remember from the record, so this, if I remember correctly, was a Royer 122 about 25 feet from the drum kit around the corner of the house. 00:46:22

Like in the, you know, he was set up in the living room, I think this was like the mic was in the dining room or something, so the chimney, I believe, stood in the way of the direct sound from the drum kit. 00:46:32

And then of course I probably hammered it with something like a Distressor or whatever. Check it out on its own. 00:46:44

It's a bit thick in the bottom there so let's see what happens if we pull a little bit out. 00:46:48

Again, going to my favorite little surgical EQ. 00:46:51

But let's do it with everybody happening so we know how it's affecting the bass drum sound.. 00:46:55

..with the whole picture. 00:47:38

Yeah, so we're gonna need to pull out a little bit of that cymbal business. 00:47:53

What I'm looking for out of that mic is kick and snare so I want those to be the predominant sounds in that room, get like a lot of explosive energy out of those two things, so.. 00:48:01

..let's listen again and see if we got that. 00:48:16

That's feeling pretty good! It's effective, we want it to be obvious as the song is titled, that.. a new thing has started there, so.. 00:48:23

I think we're in pretty good shape. 00:48:25

Now, let's listen to the whole thing, here, let's listen to a verse and a chorus and see how we've done. 00:48:55

So, pretty good shape. There's a little bit of beef lacking from the the kick drum, for lack of a better term, so let's get a sample going. 00:49:06

I got my trigger track, here, as I had in my template and we can come over here to the kick drum, kick trigger is already on, it's at unity gain, it's panned to the left which, for the Slate Trigger plug-in will trigger the sound and the right side of the Trigger plug-in is what suppresses, going into the side-chain of the trigger. 00:49:25

So if you want something to trigger the sound, you put it to the left, if you want it to not trigger the sound, you put it to the right. 00:49:30

So, that's what we've done here. We can open this up and see what I've got available. 00:49:36

I put all my favorite kick drums, in here. 00:49:39

Let's set this to go out of the drum, so we can hear it, real quick. 00:50:15

That's my go-to sound for a punk-pop kinda thing, it's got that little typewriter-y kinda top end that I need and then it's also got some sort of beefy low end. 00:50:23

The combination of two different kick drum samples. 00:50:26

What I like to do is, bus this to a track, so I'll use my 'Kick Trigger Print' bus which is already assigned here, got a track ready to go.. 00:50:37

..put that fader up and put it in input, I'm gonna print it.. 00:50:40

..we're gonna go away and come back and you'll have it. Check it out. 00:50:44

Boom. There it is. 00:50:46

Ok, so, suffice to say I've printed my kick drum trigger, let's see what that does for us. 00:51:20

So let me play you the kick drum by itself. 00:51:40

So we're adding a little bit of beefy low end, little snappy top, let's add the kick drum crush check and I think I put.. 00:51:49

..I did not put the kick sample in there. So, but let's add the kick crush where we had it and then we can add the kick sample into the crush track. 00:52:11

And then we can hear everybody together. 00:52:24

Kick drum is poking through real nice, now. 00:52:27

And we have the same thing available to us on the snare drum. 00:52:30

So, you've gonna have to trust me, I've printed my snare samples, we'll pop that in, I've also printed a snare room sample. 00:52:40

So, check it out. Here's my snare sample, by itself. 00:52:47

Because Travis' snare on its own is really poppy and, you know, sort of cutting, I wanted something that's a little beefier and longer-sounding. So, we're gonna try this one in there and then, because we like the sound of room on his kit, but maybe want a little bit of a cleaner sound on the snare, let's see if this room sample will help us. 00:53:10

That should be kinda interesting. So let's hear everything in the drums, without any samples. 00:53:22

His snare drum sounds really good. Let's see if our sample helps us or hurts us. 00:53:39

Yeah, it adds a little bit of.. again: that sort of beefy sound, it's like superhuman drums. That's how I think of samples. So let's try the room sound and see if that helps or takes away from the vibe of the real room that we have. 00:54:00

Yeah, I don't like it for this song. I thought it was gonna be cool but I'm gonna ditch it. So let's put that away. 00:54:05

Let us also now try the snare crush track, that we've got. I'm gonna solo that up we'll pop some stuff into it and see what we get. 00:55:29

The snare parallel is going through my 1176 and then the second channel of the Transient Designer and the second channel of my Aphex 204. 00:55:36

So, the compressor's obviously compressing, that setting rarely ever changes, the Transient Designer is giving you a little bit of attack, a little bit of length and then the Aphex 204 gives a little bit more bottom end and a little more edge on top. 00:55:51

Let's try blending that in and see what we get. 00:56:35

That's pretty rocking, that sounds like a Blink 182 track! So, I'm pretty excited about that and we haven't even gotten to the other stuff that I can put on the drums!

00:00:00

Man, I don't even know if we need to go to this stereo drum crush! But I'll show it to you anyway! I always have this stereo drum crush parallel bus set up, typically it's got my hardware Chandler TG1 Limiter on it set to the limit switch and usually the fastest release but it would depend on the tempo of the song. In this case it's a pretty quick tempo, so it's set to the fastest release. 00:00:22

Let's see what it sounds like when I start throwing things into that limiter. 00:00:25

I'm gonna hit the 'Flip' button on my console so I can just have faders to send into that aux send, so check this out. 00:01:18

So let's listen to the drum mix and we'll pop this in and see what it sounds like. 00:01:52

Lots more fun, it brings the details forward a little bit more, makes the drums a little more aggressive-sounding, so I'm gonna roll with that, let's see what happens, then. 00:02:01

Another trick I like to use is a little limiter on my drum bus, looks like I'm getting hot, here. So, let's actually look at that real quick, make sure I'm not blowing things up too bad. 00:02:36

So that's in pretty good shape. 00:02:38

Another trick I like to use is this distortion bus so let me show what I typically do with this and see again if this is gonna help us or hinder us. 00:02:46

I flip the faders into 'aux send' mode so I can send into that distortion box. 00:02:51

Which is.. Culture Vulture. 00:04:00

Let's see what happens if we pop the toms into that mix. 00:04:17

So this could be interesting.. 00:04:18

let's see what this does if we add it to the drum mix, so I am gonna flip back to fader mode.. 00:04:24

So now we've got a little sound happening with our distortion box. 00:04:27

I've done like a litte pre.. 00:04:29

..EQ going into it, 'cause we don't want it distort the bottom end too much and there's always something happening around 500 and also don't want to distort too much of the top end. 00:04:37

This is the EQ going into the distortion box, then we have the Culture Vulture which I showed you a second ago and then another little EQ at the end so, actually real quick, 'cause I really didn't deal with that too much, let's just solo that distortion box, again. 00:05:26

All right. So now, what happens if we add that into the drum kit? So it sort of helps me out with that, like, sort of mid-rangy aggression that I like a lot. 00:06:02

So, again: let's let that ride. 00:06:04

I think that's pretty much all I wanna do at the moment for the drums, I know that's a lot, it's a lot to take in, lots of parallel things going on, some EQ, some compression, some distortion, that sort of thing. I think we can move on now, let's hear a few other things in the track. 00:06:19

And make everybody work together.. 00:06:56

We've got this DI and we've also got an amp, one of the things I like to do is make sure that the timing and phase response between the two is optimal. So, I put these IBP in-between phase box -tools, on here and see what happens. 00:07:27

And as it turns out we don't really need those. 00:07:29

I think I tracked the bass with an IBP and made sure that that was pretty tight when we cut it. 00:07:35

We're in good shape, there. 00:07:37

And then, what I like to do with the bass is, you'll see, is I take the two tracks, put them on a bass bus and bring that through two different aux returns, which I may or may not use, both of them, but they're there, ready to go. 00:07:48

I usually try to start with just one bus and I'll do my EQ and compression routine to it and see if that works and if I have any issue with low end then maybe I'll pop that other bus on and I'll play with that a bit. So, this song sounds like it might benefit from my little bass chain which is a dbx 161, it's an unbalanced version of a 160, same thing, and actually mine has a balanced option on it, a balanced modification, and then into my Moog EQ that's been my sort of go-to chain for this sort of punk-rock stuff, so let's fast-forward to the end of the song, where we have more aggression and see what happens. 00:08:29

This is just a random setting left from some other record. 00:08:31

So let's see what it does. 00:09:26

What I look for out of the Moog is really aggressive mid-range, it's got this really great sound around, like, 700-800Hz, something like that. I can't even see the numbers from where I sit, so I don't really care I'm just sort of listening, and, that's all I use the Moog on, it's the bass, so it's.. 00:09:41

..it's in the right frequency range, most of the time. 00:09:44

I think there's something around 3k, something like that to add a little presence to the bass. 00:09:48

Then the low end is probably set around 120 or so to get it above that kick drum, let the kick drum have the low end of this record, 'cause it's moving pretty quick. 00:09:57

There's a few dB added on each one just to sort of.. 00:10:00

..to taste, whatever sounds good. 00:10:02

The 161 is usually set to like 4:1, no output gain, you know, the threshold is set to wherever and right now it's hitting about 4dB of compression or so. 00:10:14

We'll see if that even works, let's see if that happens with the drums and if it's the right choice, and if it's not we can go somewhere else, but typically this is.. 00:10:21

..this is the sort of sound I like on this kinda song. 00:11:14

Arguably the whole low end is the kick and bass in this kinda song, so the other thing I like to consider when I am dealing with bass drum and bass guitar on a song like this, is processing them together through a hardware EQ and compressor, so I haven't yet kicked on my Manley or the API 2500 that I have on my drum bus, let's get guitars in there and then deal with that, make that decision. 00:11:40

Let's have a listen to the guitars: there's three main guitars: left, center, right, as Jerry always almost does and I've got those bussed through my Manley Pultecs over there and we'll see if we need those. We recorded these guitars.. 00:11:55

..the typical process for this record was trying two different amps at the same time, through two cabinets and each of those cabinets had two microphones on them. So, a total of four mics that we would sum on a Neve BCM10 through a Manley Pultec already and then going to tape. 00:12:10

So, we may or may not need those guys, we'll see.. 00:12:13

we'll see what these sound like. Let's just solo up, real quick, the two main guitars. 00:12:20

Left and right. 00:12:37

Pretty big and disgusting-sounding. 00:12:40

[laughs] in a good way! Mostly. But.. 00:12:43

..some woofiness going on, in the bottom, we need a little more definition a little more note out of it so, again, what I would start with is a corrective EQ with my friend, over here, first thing I'm gonna do is chop off all the bottom end like that.. 'cause that doesn't matter. 00:13:11

Now I gotta find where this mud is happening, there needs to be a real narrow band cut on this low end stuff. So let's see if we can hone in on something down here that's really troubling me. 00:13:40

Yeah, so there's that frequency. It's just like this [sound] all that subharmonic crap that we don't need in the guitars. We want them to be like biting and cutting, not [sound] that's not what we want, here. 00:13:52

Let's just copy that over to the other side, 'cause it's really the same sound, pop this into the track with the bass and the drums and see what else we need to do with them. 00:14:23

Actually not too bad! I think we can get a little more definition out of the mid range to get some bite and some note and there maybe a little more mud we can cut out, but the main thing is that the bass and the guitars are playing pretty much the same thing throughout the song. So we want to make sure that, that they're playing well, together. 00:14:41

And, of course, with the drums but that's not as much of a concern. 00:14:45

So let's hear the bass and the guitars, right now. 00:14:59

So we gotta remove some mud from the guitars, that's stepping all over the bass. 00:15:04

Same sort of thing, I'm gonna be really boring and go again with an SSL. 00:15:09

Let's listen to one side and see where that mud is. 00:15:59

Yeah, so we cleaned up a bunch of stuff around, I don't know, it's probably 6-700Hz, boosted a tiny little bit in the bottom end to keep us, you know, from lapping off too much of it but at the same time I'm filtering out some low-low stuff at 70Hz with this filter, which sounds different from the filter on the EQ 2. 00:16:17

So, different vibe, we just needed a sharper cut on that bottom end to get rid of that subharmonic garbage that happens with massive amps like these. 00:16:24

Let's copy that setting over to the other side and hear both of these tracks real quick, by themselves. 00:16:42

That sounds pretty loud and exciting, so let's put that in with the bass and drums and see how things are working out. 00:17:15

So you can see they're playing a little bit better with each other, so like the guitars aren't stepping on the bass, you can distinctly hear what the bass is doing. 00:17:22

Although I think we can actually get a little more definition out of that and maybe cut a little bit of mud out of the bass which is just sort of this wooly sound happening again that I am not happy with let's see if we can hone in on that, real quick. Let's just solo it up and the great thing about this EQ is it's got this spectrum analyser so it helps us find these problem areas. 00:17:56

So what I like to do with the bass is I cut out a little bit where the kick drum is sitting and in this song the kick drum is like between 60 and 80Hz. 00:18:04

It's thumping down there so we don't want the bass guitar stepping on that, too much. 00:18:08

So we'll do a little cut there, also I roll off the extreme low end, I mean, isn't that the ..isn't that the saying of.. 00:18:16

..of pureMix? 'High pass everything'! So, lots of high pass filters to really keep things clean. 00:18:44

So that's a little more happening. 00:18:45

And you'll remember that on the guitars I cut out something around 700Hz which is where the meat of the bass lies. 00:18:52

And I'm gonna go over here on the bass and I'm gonna boost a little more with a narrow curve. 00:18:56

Right in that vicinity to try to help us get a little more attack on it. 00:19:01

Now, we're gonna try using my Aphex buddy, over here, which I reserve exclusively for bass to try to get a little more attack out of it. 00:19:08

So, let's solo that up. 00:19:10

And add a little bit of this guy in. Usually he winds up around -10, it depends entirely on how much you send to it and then what the return is doing, because it's a dynamic processor, so let's see what we can get. 00:19:42

So you can hear it, when I was sending too much it was distorting, we wanna make we don't distort it in a bad way but we get a little bit of fuzz, a little bit of edge on it, as well, so.. 00:19:51

we can sort of manipulate the balance of the send and return. 00:19:54

Incidentally, if you haven't noticed, this is a parallel send, I'm sending off of the bass bus we've combined the two bass channels into a bass return and then we're sending again off to the Aphex over here which is gonna go out of the bass output, to my summing bus. 00:20:10

Before we add it to the mix, let's listen to it with and without the Aphex. 00:20:13

So here's without, first. 00:20:26

You can hear when it goes up the neck, it gets a little grindier, a little nastier, 'cause that's getting up into the guitar region and we wanna make sure he's a bit more distinct and there's a few fills he does through the song, I wanna make sure those are present. Let's hear with everybody, again. 00:21:16

So I think we're getting close. 00:21:18

I've got one more guitar to put in here and that, we usually put in the center. 00:21:21

In a Jerry Finn production. 00:21:23

And let's see what this guy sounds like, by himself. 00:21:43

So, you know, he's playing the same thing as the other guys in that little breakdown and then he goes to an octave part that just plows right through the outro. 00:21:51

Let's see if we actually need this. Hang on. What's he playing in the chorus? He actually needs a little bit of beef. 00:22:21

He's thinner than the other guys. 00:22:22

That's sort of typical with what we used to do on this record is the guy in the middle needs to be a little thinner to give up some space to the bass and to the vocal kick and snare, all the other stuff that's happening in the middle. 00:22:33

So typically I pan this guy off to one side or the other, just a little bit, to keep him sorta from stepping on all this other stuff, that's centered in the mix. 00:22:41

I think Lord Alge would have my head for that, 'cause they go: left, center and right! A little love from the API, might be just the thing we need. 00:23:32

That's pretty sweet. 00:23:33

Let's hear what he's doing here in the breakdown and make sure we're still cool. 00:23:56

See: I liked what he was doing here in the breakdown when they're all playing in unison but he sort of disappears when he goes to that octave, so I'm gonna just clip gain that up a little bit. 00:24:06

Let's see if that helps us a little bit. 00:24:08

So that I don't have to do much automation later, it's just ready to go. 00:24:37

Yeah, that feels a little better, to me. 00:24:38

We need him to speak a little bit more. 00:24:40

I think that would be pretty cool. 00:24:42

So now we've got this whole rhythm section pictured together, the next thing I like to do at this point is to get my hardware stuff in.. 00:24:50

into the mix. So, On the drum bus, I have my API 2500 and that goes into the Manley Massive Passive on the bass bus I don't have anything, 'cause I like to do that with the hardware insert that we used, which was that dbx 161 and the Moog, that's like, going out of Pro Tools to the hardware and then back in so if you have Logic you can do the same thing you know, it's a sort of universal concept of using hardware as an insert. 00:25:16

Now, on the guitar bus I have the Manley Pultecs and we'll see if we even need those on this mix, like I said, when we recorded them the guitars already went through that Pultec, so I don't know that we need a boost in the same available frequencies that we have on that box. But we shall see! So let's just let it rock, from the top. 00:25:35

I'm gonna go and try some stuff with the drums, on the 2500 and the Massive Passive and we'll see if that helps us or hinders us. 00:28:17

The 2500 today is not doing what I want. 00:28:21

I'm not really loving it, because it's just, like.. 00:28:23

it's pushing the drums further back than what I want today. 00:28:28

Had I mixed into that from the get-go, maybe the sounds and the balances would have been a little bit different.. 00:28:33

but given what I just did today, I'm not gonna use it and that's actually pretty rare, I almost always have that on my drum bus, so.. 00:28:40

maybe you know what? Lemme try one other thing on that 'cause there's maybe another way to use it. 00:28:43

So, let's try this. 00:28:45

If we come over here to the API 2500, it's got this setting that's called 'new' and 'old' and 'new' is a feed-forward compressor, where the side-chain looks at the input of the compressor and.. 00:28:57

..grabs that as the signal that it's going to compress, so 'new' is a very aggressive sound, that's what the SSL compressor does and several other boxes. 00:29:07

When you set it to 'old' it's looking at the output of the compressor, so the sound that the side-chain is getting has already been compressed so it's really lazy and slow and it's not as bite-y like a feed-forward compressor will grab the front of the note, the front of the transient, the [sound]. 00:29:27

The 'old' mode, sort of lets that transient go through and then has a softer knee to that compression, so.. 00:29:33

..let's see if it sounds like something in the 'old' mode. 00:29:36

So here's the 'new' mode. 00:29:37

Let's solo up the drums so we can concentrate on this part. 00:29:41

And I think what would be cool is to listen to the chorus.. 00:29:44

..and see what happens, 'cause the chorus was the part that I didn't like what the compressor was doing. 00:29:50

We'll listen without it and then I'll pop it in. 00:29:59

Just pushes the drums back and that's not what I want. I mean I want a roomy-sounding drum kit but I want that kick and snare to smash through the room so you get a feeling of close-mics with space around it, if that makes any sense at all. 00:30:12

So here's without and when I pop it in, it's gonna be in the 'old' mode. 00:30:28

This actually makes the room kind of more explosive, I think! Let's hear that in the mix. 00:30:46

I think I prefer it in! That's pretty dope. 00:30:48

Usually on my drum bus I go with the 'new' mode but today the 'old' mode is working! And, you know, I use that on occasion but it's not always the thing, but today.. 00:30:57

..that's a really cool sound! I like that a lot! What I didn't explain was what I was doing over here with the Manley Massive Passive. 00:31:05

So that's on the drum bus. I've added a bit of 47Hz here on the bottom with a bell that's fairly broad so it's picking up realistically from.. 00:31:16

..from like 30Hz to maybe, you know, 80 or 200Hz, something like that. 00:31:20

Just adding some beef to that drum sound. 00:31:23

The bottom of this feels really good on drums, my favorite EQ for that then I've added a bit of upper mids, 2.2k again on a broad bell, this is sort of 'overall tonality' for the drums, that's how I look at this and then we've got a bit added on the top, 8.2k shelf that's sort of a Pultec feel, you know, 8.2 on a Pultec is amazing on snare drums so why not put it on the whole drum kit? That's what I say! When I get into drums that have way too much sub action going on I'm not afraid to put that low cut filter in, again, just on the whole drum kit, to help me out. 00:31:56

I think the next thing I like to do, once I've got the whole rhythm section together is dial in my stereo bus. 00:32:02

Let's see if the Smart is going to help us again, today. 00:32:06

Or not! Let's go to the loudest part of the song, go to that breakdown bit into the end of the song. 00:32:12

We're gonna start without the compressor and then I'll pop it in my sort of typical setting and see what happens. 00:32:49

So, there's the sound of rock, man! The SSL bus compressor takes everything and goes: [sound] makes it nasty and angry! It pulls the snare drum down, a little bit but I typically set up my mix before the bus compressor with my snare drum too loud, anyway. So this sorta helps me put that mix back into perspective. 00:33:08

And then the next thing I like to try is to see if this NTI helps us out on the top end. It feels like the mix is a tiny bit dark, right now so let's see if this air band helps us out. 00:33:20

So we'll start without it and then we'll add it in. 00:34:05

So you can sort of feel how the top end just opened up, like there's this magic air now, happening around the drums and the guitars but without getting too nasty and shrill. 00:34:15

I think the next thing would be, let's just throw this verse guitars in, so we have something to balance the lead vocal against. 00:34:20

These are pretty simple and very cool, I actually remember doing these: we recorded these sounds, this little part, into Pro Tools, we used a flanger, actually we used like the Dynamic Delay that comes with Pro Tools and I.. 00:34:38

..I put some modulation on it when we recorded it and we sort of made a flanger out of it. 00:34:43

We did these chords first, then I put this on in post and then we printed it back to tape and made a stereo kinda flanger sound. So check this out! Let's see what this sounds like with the band. 00:35:25

This is gonna need a little bit of help to poke through this stuff, so.. 00:35:29

..I think the answer to this one is gonna be, let's try this API, I think this might help us out. 00:35:56

Yeah, that's gonna help out. We need to trim a little more bottom end off, I think. 00:36:00

And I kinda wanna nasty this up, a bit. So let's put a little nastiness on it. 00:36:32

That's more like it. And I think we can squeeze it a little bit, to.. 00:36:36

..to make it.. 00:36:38

..a little more sustain-y. 00:36:39

If that's a word. 00:36:41

Something simple.. probably an LA3 will do, for that. 00:37:11

That's feeling fine. And the other thing I think we should try is.. 00:37:13

..it's a stereo sound, so let's try widening that thing out, a little bit. 00:37:35

The other thing that could be interesting is, I've got this chorus, set up on an aux, down here, as part of my template, that's got some width on it, too. So it's got this Dim D and the stereo width plug-in, here. 00:37:48

So this is like a model of an old chorus. 00:37:51

So let's see if that helps us or just makes it ridiculous-sounding. 00:38:36

Yeah, that's feeling pretty right. 00:38:38

And then next on the hit parade is this acoustic guitar, this just sort of strumming.. 00:38:55

I'm inclined to sort of smash that up, a little bit. 00:39:14

And then also probably.. 00:39:16

..mash it. 00:39:18

This Decapitator is one of my favorite things. You can add a lot of grit to it, without being obnoxious. 00:39:46

It's only to add a bit more bite out of it let's try something else. Let's try a 1073. 00:40:12

So now we've got this, thrown into a plate, it might be a little bit much, but you never know 'till you hear it in the track. 00:40:25

Another thing that might be cool is, to give this a little bit of an echo and try something interesting on this. 00:40:33

So let's set this up to be a Roland Space Echo -sort of sound make it a little nasty and something like an eight note, maybe get a little crazy, spacey vibe, here. 00:41:08

So now we've got sort of a spacey vibe on the guitar to take up more room and to bloom into something with that other phase guitar. So we if put those two things together, let's hear it with the track. 00:42:07

Yeah, so that's doing what we wanted. I mean, you don't really wanna hear that, as like: 'hey there's an acoustic guitar strumming, back here!' it's more of a sparkly kind of thing. 00:42:14

And we can maybe get a little more aggressive with that echo, let's try that. 00:42:33

Take a little of that modulation off, maybe. That little wobble.. 00:42:36

it's going a little bit fast. 00:43:10

That's pretty cool.

00:00:00

I think the next thing we gotta do is get into some vocal sounds, here. 00:00:03

So I've split these vocals up, he's got just a singular vocal down the middle, in the verse, got Travis barking off to the side and then we've got four of Tom's vocals in the chorus, make up a big gang kinda thing. 00:00:14

So I've got two of those panned in towards the middle, two of them panned out towards the edges to make that a nice, thick picture of chorus vocals. 00:00:22

Let's check this out. 00:00:24

Let's pop them up and see what we get. 00:00:45

He's struggling to be heard so obviously we gotta hammer him down a bit [laughs]. 00:00:49

First thing I gotta try, 'cause I just got it, we gotta try it! A hardware insert with the Chandler RS124. 00:00:55

That's a pretty meaty compressor and Tom's pretty thin.. 00:00:58

..sounding, so if can get something thick on him maybe that'll sort of help.. 00:01:03

..help him compete with those guitars. 00:01:05

I just gonna set this up in a little bit of a loop and see if we can make this not too annoying. 00:01:34

So just for the sake of comparison let's try an in-the-box 1176. 00:01:38

There's a couple of them that UAD makes that I really like, there's Revision A, which is the old, you know, blue-stripe, class A thing and there's the revision E, which is a later.. 00:01:48

..I think it's still class A but it doesn't have the transformer output, I don't even remember what the deal is. 00:01:53

The A is softer-sounding and the E is brighter and more aggressive and that's the last thing we need on Tom's vocals so let's try the A. 00:02:00

'cause maybe that will warm him up, a little bit. 00:02:19

Yeah, I mean that sounds good but I think that the RS124 sounds better. 00:02:23

So let's pop that guy back on. 00:02:25

And then the other thing I've got on that analog insert is a Rupert Neve Design's 5052, which I think is a really good sounding EQ. 00:02:33

So, let's pop that in and see if we can, again, sort of help him in the low mid department. 00:03:17

Yeah. So, that's feeling pretty good. So, I am adding a little bit of 100Hz on a low shelf I got a little 1.5k on him to sort of make him pop out a bit, that's it for over here. Oh, and it's got that little 'Silk' button, the red is, I think, a low end transformer saturation kinda thing. 00:03:36

And that's like helped pop him up. 00:03:39

The other thing that's sort of like, you know.. 00:03:41

..that's become the de facto thing for vocals, is to saturate them a little bit. 00:03:45

So it helps them smush them a little bit more. 00:03:48

So let's try that out. 00:03:49

We didn't record these vocals to tape so they don't get the benefit of that saturation so, the other thing I like to use is this Phoenix plug-in. 00:03:59

That can help kind of impart another nice tonality thing to him. 00:04:02

I'm trying to tame that.. there's a little nasal shrill thing that he's got. 00:04:06

Let's see if we can help that out, a little bit. 00:04:08

These get more aggressive as you turn the dial, over here. The DarkEssence is pretty gnarly and we can turn up the balance of the process, here. 00:04:17

With him I'll probably start with this one. 00:04:52

I'm not really feeling it, on this one. I don't know that we need it anymore. 00:04:56

That one 124 is smashing it pretty hard and just keeping him in line, just making him really intense, 'cause the thing you can do with compression is: you can really flatten an emotion with it or you can really emphasize and make it angrier by using really aggressive compression and that 124 is certainly no subtle box. 00:05:14

I think that we can carve a little bit out I think there's something happening in the the low, low end, that we gotta get rid of. 00:05:20

We'll need to de-ess him a little bit. So let's.. 00:05:23

..actually we'll pop this after the compressor. 00:06:00

So just taking out a little bit of mud from down here 250-ish the region between 2k and 3k is where you get the presence in the vocal and it's just a question of how much and exactly where. 00:06:11

This seems to sort of work for him and it's also mitigated that little edgy thing that he's got, up there. 00:06:16

The next thing I like to do is pop a little de-esser on him. 00:06:19

My favorite is the Fabfilter, I've been using it a lot lately. You can get pretty aggressive with it and is very transparent. 00:06:27

I just use very simple settings, almost always the default sort of works for me. 00:06:32

Let's check that out. 00:06:49

You can hear immediately and see on this graphic, how this thing is just selecting the 'S' and knocking them out and when I first put it on the threshold was way too low and it gave him a bit of a lisp. 00:06:59

We definitely don't wanna do that. 00:07:01

We just wanna put those 'S' back in line with the rest of the vocal. 00:07:04

The interesting thing is to try it at the end of the chain after you've done the brightening EQ, if you have any, or at the beginning of the chain, and sometimes I've gotta knock out so much 'S', I got one at the beginning and one at the end. 00:07:16

Compression can sometimes exacerbate 'S' problems, sibilance problems and of course you wanna get that vocal nice and bright but doing that, of course, brings the 'Ss' back up so sometimes you need to put a de-esser at the end of the chain, too. 00:07:28

Let's move it to the beginning and put it before the compressor and see if that's better. 00:07:49

Yeah, see: that sounds more natural to me so I think we should probably leave it there. 00:07:53

Yeah, it's funny.. when.. 00:07:54

..when a vocal is recorded poorly there's a lot of stuff you gotta do there's a lot of carving you need to do to pull out any kind of room anomalies, chesty things, artifacts of poor mic placement or poor mic choice and in this case we had a really nice mic, we spent a lot of time getting the vocal sound formed and we had him in a very neutral room, so there aren't many of those issues to deal with. We can hammer him and he's not bringing up a plethora of bad ambience, behind him. It's a pretty dead-sounding vocal. 00:08:29

And that's usually what I go for when I am recording you know, a pop kinda thing. 00:08:33

I use those SE Electronics shield thingies to keep more room out of the vocal mic because my philosophy is: the.. 00:08:41

..deader you can make that vocal the blacker the background to that vocal the more in front of the mix you can get that guy or gal. 00:08:49

Obviously there's a lot of situations where you don't wanna do that when you want it to sound organic and natural and live like the person singing with the band rather than in front of but in this case you wanna get that vocal right up on top of everything on top of the mix, on top of the world, really. 00:09:06

So I have this post behind my monitor here, in the studio, and I imagine the singer's head sitting on top of that post and if he's not up there, or she, then I haven't done my job, yet. 00:09:15

I need to hear every single word that guy is saying. 00:09:19

Diction is very important, it's a big part of producing a record but you know, if I am just mixing the song I don't really have any control over any of that and I gotta take what I've been to make it the best that I can. 00:09:31

The next thing, once we have sort of a vocal sound, is to figure out what the effect is gonna be, what does he need to be surrounded by. 00:09:38

Sometimes it's nothing at all, bone dry. 00:09:41

Like some Avett Brothers records I've made, or Chili Peppers have barely any effects on the lead vocal, at all. 00:09:46

But this thing, because the band is so big, he needs a little bit of space around them. 00:09:51

I'm thinking a short bright room might be the way to go, so I have my room send set up and I usually go with this Valhalla Room to start. So let's see what my sort of, you know, beginning setting is. I have to have a short bright room, I made a little preset for myself at some point. 00:10:10

Let's see if that's the thing or if we need to go elsewhere. 00:10:38

Rather than that, let's try a little slap echo instead.. maybe that'll be cooler. 00:10:44

So we'll turn this off, go back to our vocal channel and bring up our slap send. 00:11:08

You know, it's funny.. that's blending too much with the band, so I got another idea. 00:11:13

Let's go back to our room sound and get a different plug-in going. 00:11:19

A sort of combination of an echo and a room this thing called the Cooper Time Cube. 00:11:25

The '70s sort of echo box that's actually a physical echo box. It's a bunch of garden hose coiled up in a box and you send it through a speaker, there's a speaker on one end and a.. 00:11:34

..and a microphone on the other. That's essentially what it is. 00:11:37

And there's another preset on here, usually I'm against presets, this is kind of a cool thing. I think the 'bright room' on here, when you set it up to 'Wet Solo', can work really well. 00:12:23

All right. That is what I want. 00:12:25

Now, the other thing that's happening here is: we printed an echo so let's get that into the game. I should actually put him up here. 00:12:34

Get him going out of the lead vocal outputs and see what he brings to the party. 00:12:52

So that's gonna be cool, what we need to do with that is cut off a bunch of top end. This is too bright. 00:13:12

Ooh! That is pretty weird, isn't it?! You know, the disterning sounds in a rock song like this, in a pop song, is the snare drum and the lead vocal, so.. 00:13:58

we got sort of a.. like a really cool Travis Barker snare drum that's super identifiable, Tom's voice of course is very distinctive and then we got like this cool room sound around him that sort of melds him a little bit with the drums, 'cause the drums are pretty roomy in the verse, subtly, and now Tom's got this sort of space around him. So he can conceivably be in that living room.. 00:14:21

..with Travis. And then, when we get to the chorus we'll find something else to put, in there. 00:14:26

But, speaking of Travis, he's got a little vocal part in the verse and let's see what he's got going on. 00:14:43

Well, whoever recorded that is a jerk! 'cause that is really dark! We're gonna go with this SSL EQ but the first thing I should put on here is, I'm gonna mess him up a little bit with some distortion. And this one vocal I don't mind soloing. 00:15:03

So obviously he wanted to sound sampled, he was into major hip-hop stuff, at the time, so this is sort of a little subtle part but kinda mess this up, a little bit. 00:15:17

Let's see, so that's pretty close. 00:15:36

That panning is kinda wonky, we did that in the rough mix but it's kind of annoying, right now. 00:15:41

So we're gonna let him sit on the right side. 00:15:52

Maybe he can use that little slap business. 00:16:32

And I think I can smash him up, a little bit. 00:16:58

Cool! I mean: more or less, I think our verses are pretty happening. Vocal sounds good to me, Travis is good, got a little slap on him just to sort of push him out of that speaker, a little bit. 00:17:11

I think we're in good shape. The only other thing I wanted to try is see if we can stereo-ize these delays, a little bit to make them just bloom a little bit more. 00:17:20

So, let's just solo those and see let's see what we can use, I think there's a setting in Echoboy that's like a widener kind of thing. 00:17:35

Stereoizer. 00:18:19

Yeah. 00:18:20

That's what I was looking for, just to get it out a little bit from behind the vocal to spread him out a little bit. 00:18:27

Let's see what we can bring to the chorus party, here. 00:18:31

We got four vocals we panned them out, just a little bit and then a lot on the third and fourth stack and then I've put them into a bus, so actually what we need to do, we need to get all these effects onto the bus, so I don't have to mess around with sending them off of each guy. 00:18:48

I can just send them from the whole combination of vocals. 00:18:54

And in fact we can turn all of these off, here. 00:18:58

Deactivate these. 00:18:59

Let's see what happens, here. 00:19:52

So I wanna pan in the first two guys down the middle, so it's like a lead and a double and then third and fourth stack I split hard left and right. 00:19:59

So we continue to have that emphasis of the center with the lead vocal and then two guys join him from the sides. So, we just sort of go from the verse with the vocal here, to this chorus with a whole bunch of dudes singing, so it sort of opens things up, widens it up, there's a million ways to handle that, but.. 00:20:16

..this felt right, like when I had him panned out like this and then like this I lost my center image and that kind of you know.. makes me a little unnerved listening to that in a studio. 00:20:26

As a group, I think that we can squeeze these guys a little bit. 00:20:31

Let's try the 1176 and see if that does what we want. We might need a few things before that. 00:21:06

Obviously we're gonna need some some de-essing, here. 00:21:08

So I'm gonna do that on each individual channel rather than the group. 00:21:13

So that each one can have its own you know.. personal de-esser, if you will! And in fact, I'm just gonna grab this setting from the verse vocal and see if that works, here. 00:21:26

I wound up taking the side-chain of this de-esser and opening it up all the way to the top, 'cause there's occasional little mouthy bits that the de-esser will kick, I want those to be pulled down. 00:21:36

I open up the top of that, as much as I can. 00:21:38

Let's see if that helps us. 00:22:11

Yes, that helps a lot. 00:22:12

Now, one actual production trick for this sort of thing, which I didn't know at the time is, when you're stacking vocals with lots of 'Ss' is: try to have them sing it without the 'Ss'. 00:22:22

You know, sometimes you can go in there and chop off the 'Ss' if it stays as annoying as it was earlier, we might go and do that and see how it sounds. 00:22:30

So, let's just go back to what we had right now and hear that again. 00:22:51

So, we're in good shape, there. 00:22:53

I think we'll go back to my trusty SSL EQ. 00:22:56

We gotta thicken him up a little bit, you can hear how that EQ just put him right up on top, little bit of mid range, probably around 2k on this one, little bit of upper, tippy top 10k shelf, little bit of low end of 150-ish and a little cut around 300, that's usually where the problem area is on vocals. 00:24:01

What he needs now in the chorus, some space again, some love from the atmosphere. 00:24:06

We've got this printed echo, which I don't know if you noticed, but I've been clip gaining up so it's in a competitive volume for that part, it may need to get a little bit louder, still.. 00:24:16

..and then, because it's sort of mono-ish, we spread it out but it's still not, like, this massive, like: 'Hey, I'm a chorus!' so, let's find another echo to throw into that mix. 00:24:27

Now, my sort of go-to sound for choruses, in a pop song, is this digital delay Echoboy has. 00:24:36

And in this sort of song, I'm probably gonna go with a quarter note, 'cause we are at half time, let's just give it a go and see what happens. 00:24:57

And so we can concentrate on that, let's chop out, let's cut this guy for a moment. 00:27:31

So, I've actually switched acts in this echo and rather than doing that really clean, crystal, digital delay emulation, I've gone with the MemoryMan emulation, so it's more of a darker, dirtier kinda thing. 'cause that digital thing was poking out too much. And this needs to be, again, like this sort of.. 00:27:49

..like dry ice on the floor. Like you are in an arena and there's this sort of mist around the vocal, rather than this obvious, like: 'Hey, here's an echo!' So, this sort of disappears into the guitar mess, a little bit and I like what that's doing. 00:28:04

And then I went into this little style-edit thing, here, and added some diffusion to it so it makes it sort of reverb-y and change the wobble to be from a Square Wave, which came with this emulation, to this random sort of movement. 00:28:17

So I think we'll let that roll, for the moment, let's slap this other delay, back in, the one that we printed and see how they combine. 00:28:39

Perhaps a little bit less of the 'new' echo. 00:28:58

All right. 00:28:59

Two or three more things to put in: we got this little low synthesizer that happens in the chorus and that sort of just makes a big earth-shattering low end kinda thing. 00:29:10

Let's go listen to what that guy is doing and what he brings to the party. 00:29:28

That guy needs a little squeeze and a little love. 00:29:32

Let's distort him a little bit so we can get some harmonics happening. 00:29:37

Usually, for distortion, like.. 00:29:39

..that kinda thing I usually go to the Decapitator in the 'pentode' mode 'cause that seems to give me a lot of harmonic love. 00:29:49

So here's without it. 00:30:05

That's gonna give us a little bit of excitement. 00:30:07

And then.. 00:30:09

give it one of these.. 00:30:20

Take away that tippy-top edge thing that's just noise. 00:30:23

Let's see what he does, now. 00:30:41

Yeah, so you know: we'll just stick him in there, he needs to make a little bit of an impact but not ruin Mark's bass part, over there. Which, at that moment is just a whole note anyway, so it's all sort of adding up together in a nice way. 00:30:53

The other fun, impactful thing we got in the chorus is this bell and its reverb and then a little tambourine, that sort of thing, it's a little flavor for the chorus, so again, back to the ProAcs and let's have a listen to these guys, over here. 00:31:25

You gotta give it some of that grainy, grainy top end. 00:32:05

A couple of strange harmonics, in this one. 00:32:07

Actually let's loose the Decapitator. 00:32:09

Just take off some top end. 00:32:13

There's this weird harmonic happening down here, I think these are samples so, you never know what's gonna happen with these. 00:32:23

Oh, and that's the echo chamber we made and you can hear the buzz [laughs] from the room! We made that echo chamber in the bathroom and the Pro Tools rig was in there too, so there's a [laughs] a little bit of fan noise, bleeding into that! So, let's do the same sort of curve. 00:33:42

So, the last I think I guess we gotta put in the chorus for this first half of the song to be complete is this tambourine. 00:33:48

We got a stereo bit of tambourine, we got a stereo reverb, so let's check those out and see what we've got, here. 00:34:10

Something weird that we made. 00:34:12

Let's just see what that sounds like in the track. 00:34:15

I know that I wanna make this tambourine longer, so let's get our Transient Designer on here, 'cause that's a bit too spiky, I can tell already, it's gonna be something like that. 00:34:45

And I think we can ruin that thing a little more with our friend the Decapitator. 00:35:08

The thing I want that reverb to do is go really wide. 00:35:12

So let's get our friend stereo WidthMan going! Moving right along in the song, a handful of things left to do. 00:36:20

Let's get the flying saucer guy in here, this was a cool effect that I made with my Yamaha analog delay that I had just bought before that session and I was dying to use it on stuff, so there's a handful of places on this album where that guy sort of makes some weird effects, and this is one of them. 00:36:37

I don't remember what we fed into it, but there was something happening that was pretty fun. 00:36:41

Check this out. 00:36:57

[laughs] That was pretty fun, at the time! That panning I really do like, so.. 00:37:02

..we're gonna leave that and we're gonna get our little corrective EQ guy here, chop off a bit of the top end, I think. 00:37:10

We may need to put him in some kind of space... 00:37:47

you know, that bright room is not good for that. 00:37:50

We just need a little sort of generic space. 00:37:53

I want just like some ambience. 00:38:31

We got that little guy and then there was an 808 here, that kind of explodes at the bottom with that little alien landing. 00:38:39

Let's check that guy out. 00:42:07

So now we got that B3 added to the outro. 00:42:09

Just as a pad, you know, kind of a thickening agent, if you will, 'cause as we saw earlier, we got these two left and right guitars and then that center guy drops out of you know, chugging along with the heavy guys and goes up to an octave part. 00:42:22

We've added a B3 there to sort of help anchor that sort of aggressive mid range in that part. 00:42:28

We got another set of vocals from Tom, this is sort his little refrain that happens in the end and I've put those all onto a bus, here, so we can actually turn off all these effects sends. 00:42:40

And those will just happen from here. 00:42:42

'cause I'm lazy! I like to re-use things, I like to keep things simple, I'm gonna copy what we did for the chorus vocals.. 00:42:49

..see what happens when we use that same sound on this vamp vocals. 00:42:54

We'll definitely change something 'cause it can't be identical, obviously if we EQ in the same way and they're.. 00:42:59

..happening at the same time we're gonna have some interference from those two parts. So, we have to make something on this set of vocals that's gonna distinguish it from the other set, when they start piling up on top of each other in the last sort of chorus go around. So, let's have a listen to those and see what we got. 00:44:26

So I think these guys can benefit from a little bit of distortion/saturation kinda business. 00:44:32

For vocals I like to do this Ampex model on the Decapitator so let's see if we bump that up a little bit. 00:45:12

So that's definitely helping out! And we're gonna copy these de-essers down here, also. 00:45:17

I hope I don't need a de-esser on this microphone. 00:45:48

Vocal's feeling pretty good, it's sitting on top of that wall of guitars, I've put it into the lead vocal crush to sort of center it, a little bit, anchor it in the middle, we've added a little bit of doubler effect, so in this session I'm using this Soundtoys Microshift thing just a really simple chorus kinda thing. 00:46:05

And then I widened it out, a little bit. 00:46:07

It just thickens that up. 00:46:09

A little bit. 00:46:10

I gotta find something like some space to put it in but we don't wanna use that lead vocal room that we're using in the verse. I think we need something a little more special. 00:46:20

And I'm thinking something splashy for this.. and.. 00:46:23

I don't think it's that Lexicon 224, I think what could be cool is that EMT 250. 00:46:29

So many permutations that we can use it's kinda ridiculous! I think want something bright, so let's try that.. 00:46:37

..I can hear what this does. 00:47:18

All right, so that's feeling pretty cool. 00:47:20

Let's see if we can do an echo on this, also, without getting too messy. 00:48:48

So I think we got a good party going here. 00:48:50

The last guy we gotta bring to the party but the most important, my good friend, Mark Hoppus. 00:48:56

So, he's got a little harmony part on the chorus, starts out just being the second and fourth lines and then the end, it's everywhere! Let's hear what he's contributing and get him up into the mix. 00:49:37

He's a little thick-sounding. No offense, man! Let's squeeze him a little bit, to get him havening and situated with our friends that are in there, already. 00:49:48

Let's hear everybody, together. 00:51:10

You probably saw there, I was throwing a bunch of effects at Mark, similar stuff to what's on the lead vocal just to sort of keep him as part of that sound, to glue him to Tom, there. 00:51:20

Put a little bit of double track on both Tom and Mark in their primary chorus parts. 00:51:26

Also shoved him a little bit into that lead vocal crush parallel again, to keep him a little 'floating on the top', there. 00:51:32

Vocals are sitting loud and proud, makes me happy, I think that's pretty much everybody in the mix, at this point.

00:00:00

So when I get ready to start automating stuff, I wind up putting a lot of things away, hiding a lot of tracks so that I have less faders to contend with and scroll through on the desk, here. 00:00:11

What I do is, I make a couple of markers. 00:00:15

I call this one my 'All Tracks View'.. 00:00:19

..so no time properties and we wanna make 'Track Show/Hide' so we've got everything visible that we're using and we can OK that and actually I make this one 98, all the time. 00:00:31

And then we can get rid of a bunch of tracks, so now my drums are basically just one fader, that VCA is gonna control the whole drum kit. 00:00:38

So I'm gonna put all this away, just hide them, you don't wanna make them deactivated, of course 'cause we still need them to play and then because this stuff is not that important I'm gonna stick this at the bottom of the session, below the vocals. 00:00:55

'cause we don't really care about those. 00:00:57

The bass is going to this sub-group so I can hide the bass tracks, I can hide the Aphex, 'cause that's a post fader send. 00:01:04

We have all these guitars, keyboards, lead vocals, Travis' BV, we don't need Tom's vocals anymore. 00:01:14

And we don't need the other Tom vocals. 00:01:18

And again this is just hiding them so things are a little more streamlined and I can move about the session much more easily. 00:01:25

We're now down to, I think, 16 faders. 00:01:28

Yeah, more or less. 00:01:29

Plus a few for those percussion elements. 00:01:31

They're not gonna really do too much movement. 00:01:33

Really the automation for me is.. 00:01:35

..is about creating that emotional roller coaster, so the song goes on this journey. The arrangement is great so the balance front-to-back, in a static manner, conveys the whole song, it's fine like, you know.. 00:01:47

..it's a good rough mix but now, is when we're gonna sort of amp things up and make it really slam. 00:01:55

So I'll put my Drum VCA up here, at the top. 00:01:57

So my first fader is always my drum group. 00:01:59

I can always bank back and forth and I know that when I grab that first fader it's gonna be for the drums. 00:02:05

We must make our group, a little marker, and we can call this 'Mix Tracks View' and hit OK. So now, if we need to look at other tracks I can just hit '.98' and he's good to go. 00:02:18

One should be '99'. 00:02:21

I always make the start of the song marker number 1 and the end of the song marker number 2 so I can always go to the top and when I want to print it I can hit '.1.', '.2.', and I have highlighted the whole track. 00:02:32

Ready to go. Easy. Very small trick but Makes my life nice when.. every song I work on I can go back to the top with just a couple keystrokes. 00:02:41

The first I like automating in a song like this is the drums, I sort of make the arc of the volume of the drums through the whole song and then everything else just sorta follows that and surfs along, so.. 00:02:51

..we got all the drums assigned to the VCA and we can just crank to that. 00:02:55

Usually I do it in one pass unless I mess something up, but I've memorized this song, pretty well. And I know pretty much where everything needs to go. So, without further ado! Pop everything into 'Touch'. 00:05:51

So, drums feel good when I make them explode into those choruses, gonna make sure all the fills are just popping out like they should be so that big fill, I think in the second chorus, the.. 00:06:00

[sound] like that's gotta be fucking loud! So, I think we achieved that, but - you know.. 00:06:05

it's an iterative process so I'm gonna do the drums, I'm gonna do the bass and the guitars and the vocals and then of course we just nip'n'tuck things as we go along. 00:06:13

We'll get to as much of that as we can and get as final a mix as we can. 00:06:18

It's never really done, you know? [laughs] We can come back to this, next week and it's like: 'Oh! Maybe we should do a little more of that!' And that's what recalls are for, but.. 00:06:25

..you know, you follow your instincts you do the best you can and what you think is right and you step away, come back, fix it some more. Actually what we're gonna do is we're gonna group all the guitars together so I can sorta ride those together. 00:06:44

And I am gonna cheat even more so we can have this intro really explode, we're gonna turn this guitar down a little bit at the front. 00:07:53

So the drums I do top to bottom and the rest of the stuff it's kinda like a sausage, you wanna squeeze it from one end to the other, to make sure that it's all working together, I suppose. So, I take a lot of breaks from this part and make sure that the parts, you know, you spend a lot of time on the intro and then the verse and then the chorus, make sure that those transitions are working. 00:08:12

And we'll come back here for just a second, make sure this is happening right at the front of the song. 00:09:29

Yeah. 00:09:53

When we made that phaser sound we wanted it to be like a dive-bomber going into the chorus. 00:09:57

Sort of ride that guy up. 00:09:59

Make sure he just: bam! ..it just drops that chorus! So here's a part I thought I was gonna make this louder but it shouldn't be but I think what we need to do in that little, tiny interlude, as annoying as it is, we gotta automate a little EQ to make that pop and do something interesting just for a split second. 00:13:02

I'm gonna rock a FilterFreak, here. 00:13:04

Make that guitar small. 00:13:09

Go with a high pass filter.. 00:13:26

I'll automate that. 00:17:54

Basically what I'm doing is sort of manipulating that static balance and making things just sort of bounce, like I wanna be bouncing in my chair when the.. 00:18:02

..when the handoff happens to the chorus, I wanna be like: yes! You know? And like.. 00:18:07

..jumping up and down like people in the stadium, so.. 00:18:10

that's what gets me off during mixing and makes me really excited, just making everything sort of swell and move and have excitement to it. 00:18:18

You know, generally I start with the drums and you can see there's some.. 00:18:21

there's some fairly big rides, a couple or three dB going into choruses to make sure that shit just drops! And same things with the bass, the guitars.. 00:18:29

..you know, the way this particular song drops into the chorus is like everyone just hits a diamond, hits a whole note, there. 00:18:35

And we want that to just be loud and proud but let the vocals poke through it so sometimes I'll push the front of that chord and pull it back and then the vocals go away and that chugging part comes in so I'm gonna push him up, again. 00:18:47

They're not huge, massive moves, as you can see but you can feel they make a big difference to what's happening, what's important, what's audible, what's not and what you're concentrating on, 'cause there's a famous person who said: 'we don't walk away humming the drum fill.' So, I want vocals up front and then when there's no singing you want something else to happen, 'cause if it's just sits there, static, it's like: 'ok, well.. 00:19:11

that loud guy singing to me up front has gone away.. so.. 00:19:15

for a split second, I might be bored!' [laughs] ..and God forbid that happens! So, bring the guitar part up, bring a bass fill up, bring a drum fill, something that's happening can be pushed just a little bit to keep that low from happening. You want, like, once the song comes on, you want energy happening from somewhere, all the time. 00:19:33

During these rides I'm making a lot of little, tiny sort of micro moves. 00:19:38

If we zoom in on the drums, for example, we can see you know.. there's a lot of little, like peaks and valleys, little bumps and these are just sort of helping to exaggerate all the exciting things that are happening to help the groove push, to help the dynamics, the explosiveness, 'cause remember, on our bus we got a bus compressor sort of keeping a lid on things that keeps it even and I wanna push into that, push against it a little bit. So that's something exciting pushes through that lid, so to speak, and you know, leaps out and kicks you in the face. So, in this case, when that chorus drops everything just goes like.. swarms up and because, again, how that.. 00:20:18

for that chorus hits, with that whole note it hits and then it sits and then it comes back at you with this rhythmic part and that's what all these rides are sort of helping to emphasize. 00:20:30

So, to show you what this automation is doing I'm gonna play you the beginning of the song through the end of the first chorus with all my automation moves and then I'll roll back, I'll turn off all the automation, there's a button here that says: 'Auto Suspend'. 00:20:43

Turns everything off and we can hear what happens when you just have a static mix, so check it out: here's with all the automation, up through the first chorus. 00:22:19

You can hear, when we get to that chorus, it's just kinda like.. 00:22:21

..you know.. 00:22:22

..it's a chorus, clearly, 'cause things change but it's not like jumping up in level. And when it gets to the chorus in this kinda song, it needs to just come out and kick you in the face. 00:22:31

So, that's what we are achieving with the automation, feels good to me, I'm at a point where I would send this off to the band, now. So, I'm gonna print it, you can see here, on my print track, I've got this little Pro-L thing, and this is to make the mix loud when I send it off to the band, so they hear it as you would, you know, after a little bit of mastering, I shoot for around, between -10 and -8 on this meter, here, at the peak of the song, at the ending. 00:22:58

Let's print the mix, we'll listen down and we'll do this little loudness thing. 00:25:48

So when I'm printing a mix like this at the end of the day I'm printing it without any of this loud stuff that you see here, on the screen. 00:25:55

This is straight off my Burl A/D converter. 00:25:57

I make sure that I got at least a couple dB of headroom so the mastering guy has something to work with. 00:26:01

And then I listen through the Pro-L. 00:26:04

Once I've printed it, I'll take that mix and I'll copy it down to the track below while the track above still has the Pro-L on it. So I dial that in, get the settings I like, make it as loud as I feel is necessary and then I take that setting and I copy it down to an Audiosuite version of that plug-in. 00:26:21

I go to the channel plug-in, copy the settings, and then I go to the Audiosuite and I paste it, in there and then I process the copy of the mix that's on the track below. 00:26:35

That goes through its thing.. and.. 00:26:38

I name that with an exclamation point at the end. 00:26:41

So it denotes 'this is the loud track!', right? Exclamation point for 'Loud!' And then I'll export that as a 16bit 44.1 file as an mp3 at 192k and send those off to the client. 00:26:55

Some people like getting an email with mp3 so they can hear it on the phone. 00:26:59

Other guys like to download a CD-quality version of it, so they can hear it in all its glory. 00:27:06

It was really fun to go back to the song, it's been a long, long, long time since I heard this track. 00:27:12

I make it a point not to really listen to my own mixes and my own recordings and things like that, it's.. 00:27:16

..it's an interesting thing when you go through a career making lots of music, you know, tastes change, skills change, processes change. 00:27:24

I certainly wouldn't have mixed it like this, had I had the opportunity to do it, at the time, it would have been a different experience and, you know, different methods and things like that. 00:27:31

It's great to bring these tracks into my own studio and have a crack at it. 00:27:35

It's pretty cool! I'm gonna send this off to Mark and see what he thinks. 00:27:38

That'll be pretty fun! Thanks to him for allowing us to use this track and I hope you guys enjoyed it and got some useful ticks and tricks and tips and ticks and stuff like that if you go out and play in a field, so.. 00:27:51

take it to your studio, try it out and let us know how you do! Au revoir!

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