Transcript

00:45:25 That's all that's going on there.

00:45:18 I basically tucked these in so that we got the effect of the extra hits and moved on.

00:45:15 And it's, they're not even balanced exactly the same because it just doesn't matter.

00:45:08 Pretty standard stuff, and it's the exact same microphones but just the kit and the room version of them.

00:45:04 But without Tré growing another arm out of his forehead, you can't actually play it.

00:44:54 And you can hear without it, it's just an incomplete drum pattern.

00:44:27 Just adding snare inside of the tom rolls in the intro, and then snare and hat inside of the tom roll in the breakdown.

00:44:16 The only other thing with the drums is there is an overdub both in the intro and in the breakdown, and it's just because the part has too many things for normal humans with four limbs.

00:44:09 So it's just the bigger, louder, wider version of what was already going on, which is kind of what I do in general.

00:43:51 Better sound better, because that sounds pretty good.

00:43:25 I said I wasn't really doing too much to the drums because they came to me sounding really good, so let's prove the point, I guess, and what I'm going to do is play you the drums with all of their stuff, and then I'll put all my stuff back in and you'll hear that.

00:43:09 All the guitars, the bass, the vocals get into the rear bus as a complete picture of what they're doing inside the mix bus, but the drums get into the rear bus at a much reduced level, and it's just to get a little bit of rhythmic pumping inside the rear bus that goes along with the drums.

00:43:06 All of the other sends to the rear bus will be at zero.

00:42:59 Either just the kick and snare or the entire drum kit will work their way into the rear bus, but notice this sends it -15.

00:42:42 So the entire drum kit is getting fed into the main compressor for the rest of the instruments, and that lets the kick in the snare and the rest of the kit interact with the guitars in a way that helps a song just sound a little bit more live, and it's something I do on really the more dense rock mixes that I do.

00:42:34 I needed to pull the drums down, and then later on in the mix process I actually added a little bit of the drums to the rear bus.

00:42:29 Basically that was just in case I need to do something overall, which in the intro I did.

00:42:19 So the only other thing that's happening is the room kick snare toms and kit auxes are all being collected down here into a drums aux.

00:42:14 We really didn't want those cymbals sucking backwards, and we spent a lot of time getting the balance of that right.

00:41:59 When the kick and snare are in there, you basically hear the cymbal until the next kick drum and then the cymbal gets pulled down and that was something we're really trying to avoid on this record in general, but certainly on the more up-tempo, energetic songs with a lot of crashes.

00:41:56 You hear the kit below the cymbal.

00:41:51 The decay of those cymbals is very, very different.

00:41:29 So here's with them in, and listen for those cymbals.

00:41:23 Those cymbal hits sound totally different with the kick and snare in the drum compressor.

00:41:12 So we get two bars of dong, dang ducka da, dong dang ducka and then cymbals hits: bang, bang, bang, bang, I’m using “Bang, Bang” it’s the title of the song, how appropriate.

00:40:58 Here's that same stretch without the kick and snare going into the main drum compressors.

00:40:46 Let me go to the end, which should have a bunch of cymbals.

00:40:41 Now the kick and snare are going to get louder, but that's just part of showing this.

00:40:36 So I will put this into the drum crush and also into the fatso.

00:40:25 What I’m going to do is actually add the kick and snare to the stereo drum compressors so you can hear how that’s going to take away from the clarity of the cymbals.

00:40:06 Back-and-forth between the crash cymbals and the hi hat is made much more apparent, plus the stereo imaging of the kit starts to tighten up by using the hi hat mic, so you're not always just going for the hi hat with a hi hat mic, it could be that you're really trying to just sort of re-establish the physical picture of the drum kit.

00:39:42 I'm going to play you the whole drum kit, and I’m going to mute the hi-hat mic, and you'll hear in the verses how the entire drum kit will just lose a little bit of focus when I get rid of the high hat mic.

00:39:36 You see there's just a little anti-harshing EQ on rooms aux, and that's it.

00:39:25 So the toms need to be loud and panned wider than they normally would be, and in this case I needed the high hat mic placed again to move the hi hat back to a certain part of the kit.

00:39:12 This brings me back up to the decision to use the hi-hat mic because the more things you do like this, just using room mics which don't really have a good stereo picture of the kit, the more you then need to reposition the drums.

00:39:05 But what it does is it gives me a stereo thing, and these microphones are very different.

00:38:55 So, what's cool about this is it's two totally different sounding rooms, and it is not like oh, 1 is on the left and 1 is on the right in terms of the physical placement of those microphones in the room.

00:38:43 On this particular song I decided to hardpan the bathroom and the hallway mic, so I made a stereo pair out of them.

00:38:37 Again, this is something they did and I'm assuming that this was balancing against the bathroom mic.

00:38:23 Then here's a microphone in the bathroom, and here's a microphone in the hallway, and there’s just a little bit of inPhase on it.

00:38:19 This was a case of mixing and matching to make the drum kit sound different.

00:38:13 Then, we've got rooms iso, which is actually not used in this session, so let me just make it inactive.

00:38:04 Super pumpy, but really exciting, and that added into the rest of the kit is going to again give us back a lot of motion to the kit, which is what we're looking for.

00:37:56 Put the compression back in, and I’ll show you the compressor.

00:37:46 So if I get rid of the compression and the EQ, you'll hear it's a much more straight-ahead room mic.

00:37:18 And then there is some EQ again to take out some of the harsh midrange and then actually add back in some presence in the room and this would be because the ribbons are actually pretty dark which means even in a section where there is a lot of cymbal work it's not terribly harsh so it's okay to actually add some of that midrange back in and it gives you presence in the cymbals without all the stuff that hurts and covers up the guitars.

00:37:16 I'm not even positive that I did.

00:37:09 We get the sound of this room mic, which is the compression.

00:37:05 That's all that's doing, so they encoded on the way in and decoded here.

00:36:57 Then there is an MS matrix because he was using the ribbons recording MS so he's decoding them here.

00:36:54 It's actually not doing anything in this case.

00:36:48 And you can hear quite a bit more is being done to that, so first of all there is a trim plug and they had, I'm assuming just to check phase.

00:36:27 If there was a bunch more low-end than that I would have high pass filtered out some of it, but it's nothing that's going to make the kick drum go wide or weird or phasey, so I decided to leave that in and then never had to go back and adjust it.

00:36:24 I don't even know what microphones it is, but it just sounds like a good room mic.

00:36:10 The standard room sounds like this: Not a lot going on, and I left the microphone exactly as is.

00:35:55 It's quiet, it's down at -18.4, it's not doing a huge amount, but it definitely helps the drum kit feel glued together and just feel a little more exciting, and it adds to that kind of arena feel.

00:35:49 I was experimenting with bringing it in and out, and just decided it was part of the drum sound so I needed it.

00:35:39 This song, everything after the intro is basically chorus in terms of intensity so this just became part of the drum kit, and you can see there are some breakpoints here.

00:35:26 So you can hear, it's almost acting like a room mic really, and normally what I would be doing is only bringing that in for the choruses of a song, let's say, and it just lets the drums get a little beefier, a little tougher to cut through the guitars.

00:35:04 So let me play you kick snare and kit and toms with and without the dirt.

00:35:00 It's actually acting more like reverb or compression than it is distortion.

00:34:51 It's taking the harshness out of this distortion, and what this drums dirt does is it just adds some glue to the kit.

00:34:37 There is some trash, and there's a filter to take out some of that harshness, and a little bit of compression and that's followed by a very, very broad midrange EQ, which is doing exactly the same thing.

00:34:34 Quite a bit of distortion using an Izotope Trash 2.

00:34:31 I'll talk about the drums dirt quickly now that we've got more the kit in.

00:34:22 So that's what that's doing, and then that's being sent off to the drum crush and fatso as you would expect and it's also getting sent to the drums dirt.

00:34:17 It's just the sound of the metal building up as they get bashed.

00:33:53 When by taking it out you also start to hear the upper frequencies of the cymbals better. So it’s a way of adding top end to the cymbals, some air that’s going to be up above the vocal and above guitars by just taking out the midrange, and these frequencies are dependent on the song, and not because the musical key of the song but because the way the cymbals are hit, what cymbals they're using it's always to do with the cymbals themselves.

00:33:49 You can hear that there is this nasty wash going on.

00:33:19 Also that harshness is right where the tone of the electric guitars are, so by carving it out you're getting two benefits: one the cymbals don't hurt, and two, just poked a hole in the mix for the guitars so it works out really well, and I'll play you with and without.

00:33:10 Once you start doing parallel compression and all the bus compression, that stuff really starts to come up and that makes you not be able to turn the drums up.

00:33:00 Usually what happens is when you get a rough mix, the cymbals are not that loud, the drums are not that compressed, so any harshness that's building up in the cymbals isn't really that much of an issue.

00:32:56 And what this is doing is just getting rid of the harsh parts of the cymbals.

00:32:47 The overhead, the ride and the hat feed the kit aux, and the only thing going on the kit aux is my usual seek and destroy EQ.

00:32:29 So these four tracks together, it's a really nice picture of the cymbals, and you can hear he's smashing these cymbals and they're going all the time, so this was why I couldn't send the kick and snare into the main drum compressors.

00:32:17 I’m not even sure, we’re never even on the ride so it’s dipped down, its high pass, it's just adding to the overall ambience of the kit.

00:32:12 Ride, not much going on here.

00:32:08 But this song actually makes a lot of sense to be audience perspective.

00:31:54 If you want to have an intimate picture of the drums, you want it to go left to right because that's what the drummer is doing so it's something that probably doesn't matter to most people, but as a wannabe drummer who never even learned how to play drums, I always wanted it to be drummer's perspective.

00:31:41 And it may not be something they've really thought about, but when you see a drummer go around the toms and you're sitting out in front then you want that to go from right to left because that's what you're looking at.

00:31:36 Drummer's perspective but an arena sound is not something most people have heard.

00:31:22 The other thing that's kind of cool about that is it's probably a subconscious queue, and for a lot of people might not do anything, but having audience perspective and then more of an arena sound on the drums just makes that all more realistic.

00:31:16 But they don't, and I have no problem with that.

00:31:09 It also helps with the stereo image of the kit better.

00:31:07 That brings it to the forefront, which is important.

00:30:53 So that's overheads with the hat, and I'll take the hat out and you'll hear that the hat will just sort of disappear into the background of the kit.

00:30:41 Having the close mic gets you some of that detail back that might get lost as you get out to the overheads.

00:30:30 I am indeed using the hi hat track which a lot of times I wouldn't but Tré is one of those drummers who is very specific with his hi hat, how much it's open, how much it's closed.

00:30:28 There's nothing else going on on that track.

00:30:22 So I'm looking for this really to be some air and mostly cymbals and getting rid of low end does that.

00:30:12 I don't like the overheads to be too much of a picture of the entire kit because usually there are phase issues and I get so much out of the close mics that I don't need to get my snare sound out of the overheads.

00:30:09 They've done a low shelf to get rid of some low end, that's fine.

00:30:06 They've done what I would normally do.

00:29:54 Moving on to the rest of the kit we can get through the rest of this pretty quickly.

00:29:46 Instead of you feeling like you're sort of sitting next to the drummer you feel like you're in an arena with the drummer, which on this song is absolutely the point.

00:29:43 That reverb makes a huge difference in the feel of the kit.

00:29:23 I just want you get to the sense of size and when we get to the breakdown of the song over here where the toms are really busy.

00:29:18 It'll be very quiet on a quieter track because I don't want you to hear the pitch shifting.

00:29:13 I use this on almost every rock track that I do to varying degrees.

00:28:54 It's a little bit of that grainy almost nonlinear ambience and I'm getting that out of an ambience preset on revibe, and I'm filtering on the way in case there’s some cymbal bleed and I'm doing a bit of pitch shifting on the way out and that's what gives it that sort of PA Stadium thing as opposed to just a nonlinear reverb.

00:28:34 And then I am sending them off to my tom reverb, and so I got rid of their studio verb in place of my reverb, sort of doing the same job but this is again kind of a stadium reverb so without the reverb.

00:28:32 It's just a different way to do it.

00:28:15 Because I don't want the toms to necessarily obliterate the rest of the kit, but they need to be loud and they've got to cut through the cymbals, so this L2 just sort of keeps them in check while also giving me a place where I can just crank this threshold slider around and get more level out of them without having to just turn them up.

00:28:05 What this L2 does is it allows me to make the toms louder in the balance of the kit without there being these huge spikes that are then going off to the drum compressors.

00:28:01 It's really just taking the sound of the toms that they had gotten and going further with it.

00:27:43 From there the toms are being routed into the Tom track from my template which is adding yet more 100 hertz just with a different pultec model and some 5K.

00:27:37 The length of the toms is really cool and the EQ is what's really helping make that length.

00:27:25 There's a beautiful decay to this low-end as opposed to it just ringing which can happen especially in a drum pattern like this.

00:27:17 So it's all about this low resonance ringing but what's great about the way the toms are tuned is it's actually very controlled.

00:27:03 After that little bit of EQ to bring out some attack, then they had actually added a bit of hundred just to get some more low-end.

00:26:58 I think it's what really makes the drums work on this song in a really interesting way.

00:26:53 This is much more like toms through a PA as opposed to a natural sounding close mic.

00:26:50 This feeds into this idea of stadium drums.

00:26:48 It's almost scooping them out Which is actually kind of cool.

00:26:28 Well it adds quite a bit of the tone, and I would normally do this with something like pultec, things like that and I think I may have actually rerouted back into my pultec, so this is something that they had used.

00:26:09 they get used a couple of times for fills in those spots they need to be very, very loud and what they had been doing was they had a studio reverb which I took off, one of the few times I actually got rid of some of their processing, they used the CLA drums plug-in which worked really well.

00:25:54 Toms are going to a stereo aux, which I will now unmute, and let's solo up the toms.

00:25:51 There is nothing super exciting about that.

00:25:49 All they had on were gates.

00:25:38 Next were the toms and again, to avoid having playback errors while I was working on this song, because it's at 96K, there were a lot of tracks, a lot of plug-ins going on at one point, I've frozen these tracks.

00:25:34 That's what that clipping does on the snare, something I do on almost every mix.

00:25:29 It just sounds more alive, makes the reverb just sound more energetic in a way.

00:25:20 You can hear how much just that little bit of clipping on the snare drum really opens it up and what it really does is it makes it hit the reverb in a much better way.

00:25:05 Other than the lo-fi, there’s very little going on here.

00:24:56 So it was a way of making the drums get all of that extra added compression to it, but in a way that made it sound cleaner which is very important.

00:24:51 Once I get the whole kit in I can actually add the kick and snare to that compressor and you'll hear the difference.

00:24:45 So by keeping the kick and snare out of the main drum compressor it kept cymbals from pumping.

00:24:38 So even though, by my standards, this mix is not crazy loud, it was making it sound like we were smashing the mix a bit too hard.

00:24:28 And sometimes it's every bar or something like that, and what was happening was the impact of the kick and snare getting into that compressor was making the cymbals pump.

00:24:15 And the reason for this is because the drums are very loud, play very, very fast and there's a lot of cymbal work going on in the choruses, both in terms of crash rides in spots but also just crashes to accent things.

00:24:06 In this particular mix though rather than sending the entire drum kit to them I decided to only send the overheads and the kit to them.

00:24:01 Actually, they're unlinked, and they are parallel compressors for the entire drum kit.

00:23:56 But there are basically two stereo compressors that are multi-mono.

00:23:43 The thing about the kick and snare on this song is I kept them out of the main drum compressors, which is my drum crush and my fatso, which is the Fairchild 670 and the Fatso.

00:23:31 I've got sends off to my normal stuff, which is the drums dirt, which is my big distortion thing to make drums bigger and then also to the kick snare crush.

00:23:20 Then I put a lo-fi on it, which is what I do, and then there's a send off to their reverb, which is just that little room reverb I showed you before, that nonlinear.

00:23:15 They had done some EQ to get rid of a little bit of ring, which is always a good thing.

00:23:12 The main snare track, there's very little going on once again.

00:23:09 So, that track is just in the intro for ambience.

00:22:44 So, actually, let me turn the speakerphone on and I'll play you that too with and without that reverb because it was much more about having distance to the drums than anything else.

00:22:23 It was just that I needed a little bit more of the snare in the intro, and I added a bunch of reverb to it so that in the intro the snare has a very unnatural sound to it but through the radio what that did is moved the drums just much further away.

00:22:19 But without the speakerphone plug-in on there's no point in even going through that.

00:22:11 Very simple again, "Bounce," they had a snare top, snare bottom, and the only thing that's happening is I made a copy of the snare just in the intro.

00:22:06 Moving on to the snare drum so that we can move on to the rest of the kit so that we can move on to the whole song.

00:21:54 This was an "in the moment the whole track is playing, what I do with the kick drum, Let me EQ it a little bit in context," and it turns out that adding that little bit of 60 dropped it down below the bass.

00:21:50 This was not a decision I made talking about it in this way.

00:21:33 So while this kick drum starts to sound maybe a little less aggressive because I've dropped the impact down below where it normally was in the tuning of the drum, what it's doing is it's actually dropping it down below the bass and allowing me to carve out space for both of them in the low-end.

00:21:27 It's really important to actually hear the players in amongst the tracks.

00:21:21 Those are three elements that are there as much as the drum part, the bass part and guitar part.

00:21:08 It's not enough to just sort of have the bass in the song, and I don't mean that you mix the song inappropriately, but you need to hear Mike's bass playing with Tré's drumming and Billie Joe's guitar playing.

00:20:56 That's one thing about working with a band, and especially a three piece band or even a four piece band, when the players are very distinctive it's very important to hear each player.

00:20:41 There’s something I really like about the un-EQed kick drum but what I found, and I'm pretty sure that's why this EQ stayed this way was that it was more about how the kick drum worked with the bass because the bass is very busy, and it needs to be very well defined and you go to hear the entire bass part.

00:20:33 So you can hear it just focuses the attack of the kick and gives that bloom a little bit more of a low-end feel instead of a lower mid feel.

00:20:20 So I'll play you with and without this EQ.

00:20:05 I follow that with my very usual lo-fi, which is a little bit of a clipper into a Scheps 73, which gives me some EQ, very, very minimal EQ, so there's some 60 Hz and a tiny bit of 12K just to open up the kick drum a little bit.

00:20:02 In this case I believe I kept almost everything.

00:19:41 I can do it in a different way that will work out better for me in the long run." I'm more than happy to keep all the processing that's there as long as I listen to it and know what it's doing, because the only thing I don't want to do is try to undo something that's being done with more processing when I could just back out of the processing that's there.

00:19:33 So when I get a session from someone like Chris, I am very loath to take away things unless I really feel like "okay, I see what he is going for.

00:19:25 He's really, really listening to the center of the midrange of the tone of the guitar and how it's working with the part, and he's exactly the same way on the drums.

00:19:18 It's astounding how much care he takes and how meticulous he is, and it's not in a way that doesn't matter.

00:19:01 It's actually evening up the kick quite a bit, and I think with someone like Chris who's such a meticulous tracking engineer, I mean I've very seldom seen anybody spend as much time just on the balance of the microphones on a guitar amp.

00:18:42 They had done some work on the drums which I left for the most part, so with the kick drum they were using an alloy for some dynamics, I don't think anything crazy.

00:18:23 So leaving the room mics to be ambience but building a very tight ambience on the close mic gives you all the flexibility you will ever need to figure out how much of the attack of the kick and snare do I need, and how much of the roominess in the feel of the kick and snare do I need? In terms of plug-ins on the kick and snare, we’re pretty straight ahead here.

00:18:17 Now you could slide the room mics earlier but then you're going to start to get into phase problems between kick and snare the toms and things like that.

00:18:07 And there are time differences between the room mic and the snare mic, and it will start to smear the attack of the snare or possibly even give you a flam as you turn it up.

00:18:01 If you're relying on room mics for ambience you're also relying on microphones that are much further away.

00:17:58 It also helps to keep the snare more present in the context of the drum kit.

00:17:51 It's like having a room just for the snare, and what that gives you is a lot of control over how roomy the snare is going to sound.

00:17:26 It's just length for the snare drum and then a bit of EQ that pops some mid-range out on that very quickly play kick and snare together muting this reverb and you'll hear how dry the snare goes, which as we build up the rest of the kit would really be a problem if we left it completely dry.

00:17:21 These guys had already set up one that's using the AMS RMX16.

00:17:17 It's not to make the snare sound like it has reverb on it.

00:17:09 This is something that I do to lengthen the snare and make it just sound a little less dry in the context of the full track.

00:16:36 But I had a huge pallet of cool sounding rooms that, depending on the speed of the song and how if they were being played and how the cymbals were pumping and things like that, I could really change the ambience that the kit was living in so we'll hear all that, but let me start this going down to kick and snare very quickly so I can just mute these three auxes to take the rooms, the kit and the toms out and you'll hear pretty straight ahead you can immediately hear that there is reverb on the snare.

00:15:56 Then there was stereo room, then there was an AEA R88 stereo room, then there was rooms iso, and so this is two iso booths and they would just open up doors and put mics in, and then they had a microphone in the bathroom and microphone in the hallway so they were taking advantage of all of the different acoustic spaces within the studio they were working in, and every song got a different balance of these rooms and what was really cool about that is while we still had the same close mics, the kit would be tuned for the song and so the sound of the drum kit would change a little bit but for the most part the drums were very consistent for the whole album.

00:15:50 Then they had overheads, hat and ride, and that's really standard close mic set up for rock drums.

00:15:39 There was the usual complement of close mics, and again I've bounced the kick and snare, but was just kick in and out and a snare top and bottom, 2 floor toms and a single rack, single mic on each one.

00:15:28 It was just a way for me to route stuff conveniently.

00:15:27 In this case I didn't really do it.

00:15:10 The easiest way for me to know how they were listening was just to make all of these internal buses, route them through auxes to my mix bus, and then I can hear exactly what they had and just by adjusting levels on the auxes that I made I could re-create their rough mix if I felt like I needed to.

00:14:51 So three stereo outputs, two main rhythm guitars and then a bunch of miscellaneous stuff including the solo, which in this case is almost a rhythm solo and then the vocal was going to a stereo track here, the lead vocal, and then there was a vocal 2 and vocal 3 which were the two different sets of background vocals.

00:14:46 Guitars were coming out of 1, 2, 3 outputs on this.

00:14:39 Kick, snare and then three stereo of the toms, the kit and the rooms.

00:14:38 So eight outputs for the drum.

00:14:27 And then there was a kit aux, I didn't make it pink, which was overheads, hat ride, there was a Tom's aux and then there was a room's aux.

00:14:23 We'll just deal with the bounced kick and snare, but those were going through auxes.

00:14:17 There is not much going on on the individual kick and snare tracks themselves that they didn't send to me.

00:14:08 I didn't need the individual tracks with the speakerphone automating it was taking up a lot of DSP, I was getting some playback errors every once in a while, so I just committed to it.

00:14:00 So there was a kick and a snare aux, which I've actually got inactive here because I just committed the kick and snare.

00:13:54 So I rebuild the monitor section of their console inside of ProTools just with aux faders.

00:13:45 So now then I can add an aux here that picks up that bus, and instead of going to physical output I can route it directly to my mix bus.

00:13:38 And what I did in the I/O set up was to uncheck the box that makes those output buses to make them internal buses.

00:13:36 The bass was coming out of one mono output.

00:13:28 But everything was kind of grouped into some output so the guitars would be coming out of a few different stereo outputs.

00:13:24 So basically faders at zero but they move around every once in a while.

00:13:14 Basically they were monitoring out of I believe 16, possibly 24 outputs of ProTools onto a desk and into the monitor section of the desk.

00:13:10 These pink tracks, and I think I made them pink all the way through.

00:13:05 The only thing I'm going to say about the set up is you're going to see that there are a bunch of auxes in the session.

00:12:48 I'm actually just going to leave the speakerphone sample out and we're not going to talk about the intro anymore because there's actually no difference in the way I mixed the drums and bass in the intro than I did in the band intro which is the next section.

00:12:41 All of the contrast is coming from the filtering and the distortion and then the added bonus of a little radio tuning sampled and stuff like that.

00:12:21 So I'm going to actually kill the speakerphone now and play you that same intro and you'll hear that the band sounds almost identical to the band after the intro.

00:12:05 I could have done a lot of automation on the tracks themselves, but the band had actually put the speakerphone in place and I just tweaked a little bit and then as the mix progressed we worked on the sound of it and it just seemed like absolutely the best way to do it.

00:11:27 Basically all that happens is some vocals here and then guitars, bass and drums just like they will be in the rest of the song are playing through a speakerphone that then goes away and that goes a little something like this.

00:11:22 So we’ve got a pre-intro and then the intro intro before we get to the first verse.

00:11:12 It's basically on the mix bus and the bypass is automated when we hit the actual intro of song, this gets bypassed.

00:11:02 The big thing about the intro is there is a speaker phone plugin that is generating noise as well as doing all of the filtering and distortion and compression on the intro.

00:10:56 And actually, in fact, let me talk about the intro first so we can get that out of the way.

00:10:51 So, what I want to do immediately is break this back down to the drums and we're going to start building the song up.

00:10:32 There are stand-alone videos that go through my template and how I bring it into a song, so please, if any of this seems to go by a little bit quick, or you're wondering like, "hey, but what's on that track?" and it's something from my template, go check out the other video and that should bore you to tears about it and you'll know everything that there is to know about it.

00:10:21 So, that said, I'm going to skip over a lot of the technical stuff, especially in terms of the way I've got the session set up and the way my template works and things like that.

00:10:13 So, there were a lot of revisions, but the overall sound of this track stayed pretty much the same from the very beginning.

00:10:10 Re-singing little bits of the song and sending it, just updating stuff.

00:10:02 First of all, we were changing up the voices in the intro so there was a lot of that, but there were a lot of little tiny details, cleaning up guitars and holes, things like that.

00:10:00 We did many, many revisions of this.

00:09:54 Then the vocal and the drums, I think I got those really close the very first mix that I sent.

00:09:43 I would get mix notes about the intro saying "let's turn the intro up 4 dB." And I knew it's because they were just clip gaining at 4 dB and they thought, well, okay that contrast is good, and that level went back and forth a few times.

00:09:36 So those are the three elements that sort of stood out to me, and they actually became things that we worked on quite a bit.

00:09:28 So it give this huge sized almost orchestral sound to the toms and things like that in the context of a really fast rock song.

00:09:18 I just worked on it sonically until it worked, but I think what's cool about it is it's almost a nod to the fact that Green Day are a stadium punk band.

00:09:10 So it's, I'm over-thinking it now because I'm backtracking, so this wasn't something I decided to do in terms of the concept of it.

00:09:01 So you've got this up-tempo fast strumming punk song, but in this almost stadium context.

00:08:50 There's actually more processing on them than I might otherwise use because I felt like the way to get through that part of the mix was actually just to go over the top and to have them almost be stadium drums.

00:08:41 And when we go back and look at the drums on their own you'll see that I've actually gone a little bit further in terms of having them be stadium drums.

00:08:36 It's another thing to have them sound really good completely on their own.

00:08:30 It's much easier to make drums sound big in amongst guitars and bass and vocals.

00:08:21 So, I knew that was going to be a challenge, and then the monster version of that is the drum fill in the middle of the song.

00:08:12 So, you can run into all kinds of problems with compression, especially on the mix bus where your vocal will sound different and jump in level.

00:08:00 And it can't jump in level, because what will happen is you're hitting all of your 2 bus processing with the loud guitars, as the cymbals go slamming through the chorus, the loudest part of the mix, and then it all goes away and your vocal is there.

00:07:49 And so, what that means is, you have to have a vocal that sounds good, not in amongst the drums and the electric guitars, but sounds really good on its own.

00:07:46 So, all of a sudden the vocal is incredibly exposed.

00:07:37 The small one is, at the beginning at the first chorus and at the end of the song, the track breaks down and you're left with acapella vocal.

00:07:33 Then there were two challenges, and I knew they were going to be challenges.

00:07:27 And then all of the sudden that thing goes color, and it's as if the screen got bigger.

00:07:19 You've spent so long in black and white that you get used to that perspective on the art that you're looking at.

00:07:17 It's just like going to color in the Wizard of Oz.

00:07:05 Even if you don't have a massive level difference, it makes the listener have this sort of idea of the sonic universe that the song is going to live in, and then you explode into full 3D.

00:06:55 But, that's the extreme version of it, but what is great about having a small, filtered intro is it draws the listener in.

00:06:27 And when I first bought that record I was listening to the vinyl, because that's all you would buy at that point, on my Radio Shack turntable, and the speakers were mounted on the wall with like a screw in the wall, and then you'd hang the little plastic speaker, and baby cries, I turn it up, turn it up, and then all of a sudden the first chord of the first song hit and I jumped so much that I hit the speaker, knocked it off the wall and it bounced onto the vinyl and scratched it and I had to take it back and tell them it was defective.

00:06:19 The ultimate example of this to me is the beginning of The Wall, the Pink Floyd album, where there is a very, very quiet baby crying.

00:06:14 So, that's a great opportunity for dynamics and to blow people away.

00:06:10 You've got a small intro that then goes to a large song.

00:06:03 The three things that really jumped out to me when I heard the rough mix were, first of all, the intro.

00:02:28 So, let me play you the song, and then we'll start ripping it apart.

00:02:22 It's got a couple of features that made it very interesting to mix, and by interesting I mean terrifying.

00:02:19 And it's a very aggressive song, and as you'll hear, because I'm going to play you the song now.

00:02:14 So, it's not classic one and a half minute punk, but it's up there.

00:02:09 I think we're at three minute and twenty-seven seconds, and that's because there's an intro and a guitar solo.

00:02:03 It's just an up-tempo, fast, short, let's check the timing here.

00:01:54 We were a Bay Area punk band, and let's do some of that too, because we are still that band.” And, Bang Bang, as you're about to hear, is a screamer.

00:01:49 They weren't in any way trying to get away from it, but I think they were sort of thinking like "Yeah, man.

00:01:33 I mean, I was working on all three at the same time the way I usually do, but "Bang Bang" was definitely the one I wanted to focus on because it felt to me as though these guys were trying to just go back to sort of the pre-epic Green Day.

00:01:25 So, they sent over a batch of three songs, and one of those songs was "Bang Bang.” And it's actually the first song that I really dug into.

00:01:08 So I was sitting at home in rural Worcestershire, and I got a text from Chris Dugan, Green Day's long time engineer, who I've known for quite a while, saying that the guys had been working on some music and they were getting ready to mix and weren't really sure exactly what they wanted to do, but that my name had come up and they wanted to hear what I would do with it.

00:01:02 And I think that they just decided they wanted to hunker down in their own studio in Oakland.

00:00:54 And then they decided that they were going to make a record themselves, and it's their first self-produced record in a very, very long time.

00:00:50 They've been around for a really long time, but they've just taken four years off.

00:00:45 I think they are celebrating their 25th anniversary as a band or something crazy like that.

00:00:43 Obviously, they've been around for a long time.

00:00:40 Kind of an important song and an important record for these guys.

00:00:30 So, much more importantly, today we are here to look at the mix that I did for Green Day on their song, "Bang Bang,” which is the first single off of Revolution Radio.

00:00:26 Just none of the good bits.

00:00:19 Though we are monitoring through the center section of the Neve, so we are in fact listening to the Neve console.

00:00:09 We are back here at Monnow Valley Studios in Wales, home of all of my really nice analog gear, and once again we will not be using it in this video.

00:00:00

Next on our list is bass.

00:00:02

Very straightahead.

00:00:03

There is a DI and then two different amps, an SVT and a Bassman.

00:00:08

And obviously Mike's a great bass player, and Chris is a great recording engineer, so there's not a lot going on here.

00:00:16

They were being collected into a mono output on the session they sent me, so I'm collecting into a mono aux.

00:00:24

There is a Decapitator for a little bit of color.

00:00:28

Then there is a Fatso, and this is because I got a session to mix once and someone had put a Fatso on the bass and it sounded really cool.

00:00:35

And I just saved their settings.

00:00:37

I don’t even remember who it was.

00:00:39

It sounded cool so every once in a while when I'm not sure what I want to do with the bass I'll just pull that up.

00:00:44

And then there's an EQ, which is something I use quite often on bass and guitars.

00:00:48

It's a Helios model and UAD has one, Waves has one.

00:00:52

I've been using the Waves one lately and adding either 700 or 1K on the bass is just the presence as well as using the 60 Hz circuit of the Helios.

00:01:03

In this particular mix I’m actually adding 1 dB of it.

00:01:06

Normally that can just sit at zero.

00:01:08

As soon as you switch it in there's resonance and it's just because of the way the filter circuit is built.

00:01:13

You have some sort of feedback in the crossover.

00:01:16

I don't know exactly what the topology is but it will resonate at around the frequency that it's set to so this can add a lot of really cool low end to the bass.

00:01:24

So I'm going to play you the bass tracks individually with everything still on, and then we'll go through what I'm doing overall.

00:01:30

Here's the DI.

00:01:38

Just adding a bunch of presence to that.

00:01:45

And that's not because I think that it sounds better with that.

00:01:48

What it is is I'm using that DI track to get the sort of intimate part of the bass sound, which is the sound of the strings themselves as opposed to the thundering bass tone that is the rest of it.

00:02:00

Then here's the first of the amps.

00:02:12

And here's the Bassman.

00:02:20

A little bit dirtier and obviously added together those 2 amps are just going to fill out the low end because the low-end is going to be completely in phase, but the midrange will be a little bit different so we're going to get more low-end, a little more solid.

00:02:33

It will also even out.

00:02:34

This particular bass track is pretty even note to note, but just having two recordings of it will even it out because the notes that are quiet, unless it's the bass itself, aren't going to be the same amount quiet in every amplifier or every microphone.

00:02:56

Adding the DI back into that you start to get more definition.

00:03:05

And that definition sort of acts like aggression.

00:03:08

The more you can hear the attack of the note, the more aggressive the bass will sound.

00:03:11

Sometimes, especially while recording there are people I've seen who feel as though the more distorted something gets the bigger and more aggressive it will sound.

00:03:20

And the reality is the more distorted something gets the less attack it will have, and it can quite often get less aggressive and especially in the track you start to lose all of the rhythmic element which is where the energy and aggression will come from from something like that.

00:03:35

So it's actually sort of a cleaner bass than you might expect on this track, but it will pick up distortion from the guitars in a way.

00:03:44

So it's much more important that you can hear exactly what it's doing and it's the driving pick on the strings that's making it happen.

00:03:51

Now that we've got all three tracks in I will show you what's going on with these overall plugins.

00:03:58

So the Decapitator.

00:04:10

Pretty subtle.

00:04:11

Just a little bit of drive on there.

00:04:13

That is then followed by the Fatso.

00:04:27

It actually has the feel of parallel compression to me.

00:04:31

So it's bringing the low mids to the forefront and it's really evening everything out.

00:04:35

And then, last not least, the EQ.

00:04:50

What's interesting to me about this, and it's why I love this particular EQ, but just EQ in general, to me this makes the biggest difference to the bass sound.

00:04:59

It obviously sounds very very different with the Fatso, but the Fatso is just making it a bit more of what it already is.

00:05:05

This little bit of EQ at 700 Hz and then the resonance at 60 is turning into a really exciting bass sound as opposed to just a really good bass sound of an exciting performance.

00:05:16

So check that out again.

00:05:29

There you go.

00:05:30

EQ is much more than just frequency shaping.

00:05:34

It can really change the character of stuff.

00:05:37

And that happens on the toms.

00:05:38

It can happen on anything really, but I think it's really apparent there.

00:05:42

And then this is getting sent off to the rear bus.

00:05:45

While we're here I'm going to back and show you what I was talking about before between the kick drum and the bass drum.

00:05:52

I'm going to play you a bit of the verse, which is when the drums are the tightest so you're not going to be distracted as much by cymbals.

00:05:59

And what I’m going to do is bypass the EQ that is on the kick drum, which if you remember from before was sort of dropping the low end of the kick drum down lower.

00:06:09

So it's a little less aggressive when you listen to it.

00:06:12

It's a little rounder, it's more of a bloom.

00:06:14

What it's also going to do is allow the kick drum to live underneath the bass almost completely.

00:06:19

And like I said before this was not something where I decided like: "okay, who's going to live where and whatever?" This was probably after all of the instruments were in and I felt like I was losing the kick and the bass was a little muddy.

00:06:32

So I went up to EQ the kick drum and that fixed both problems.

00:06:35

So let's see if I'm right.

00:06:50

But I think you can hear exactly what's going on.

00:06:53

The kick drum disappears into the bass.

00:06:55

Where as if I get rid of the bass and we listen to the kick drum without it, it's probably not so bad.

00:07:08

You hear less of a difference when we only listen to the drums.

00:07:13

But when the bass is in and I toggle this EQ.

00:07:28

1.9 dB at 60 Hz is making a massive difference in the drive of the drums.

00:07:35

This is another vote for EQing in context because it would be very easy to work on the kick drum a lot, soloed up, or just in the context of the drum kit and then because you've spent so much time on it you assume that is the best the kick drum is ever going to sound when it doesn't matter what the kick drum sounds like, it matters what it feels like in the rest of the song.

00:07:56

And this is a really good case for the EQing in context.

00:08:00

This brings us to the guitars which you can see there are quite a few guitar tracks but in reality it's pretty simple.

00:08:07

So I'll take you through these one at a time, and you'll see that we build up the main guitars out of just two sets of rhythm guitars.

00:08:13

They carry most of the song.

00:08:16

On this entire record there were three main guitar tones and it was just three rigs that Billie and Chris set up and tweaked and had there available.

00:08:27

And they're very different sounds but they go together to act as one rhythm guitar.

00:08:32

What that shows you is how ridiculously good a guitar player Billie Joe is because these were not tracked at the same time.

00:08:40

They were tracked separately because sometimes the pick slides will just be on one set of guitars and not on the other.

00:08:46

But their performances are so tight that it works like it's a single guitar performance.

00:08:50

So first of all what they called the park guitar, and I'm not even going to guess as to why things are called certain things.

00:08:56

This is the Park New.

00:09:06

It's two performances hard panned, exactly the same set up.

00:09:09

I believe the same guitars on both of these.

00:09:12

But you can hear how great all of the attention to detail is there.

00:09:16

All of the strumming and the muting and all that is happening very, very precisely.

00:09:21

Now let me play you the second part of the main guitar tone, which on this particular song is called the Park Saul.

00:09:35

Very, very different sound.

00:09:38

Again, here's Park New.

00:09:44

And here's Park Saul.

00:09:50

And together.

00:09:58

All the presence from the Park New and all the body from the Park Saul, and what also will happen is as you get into things like a little later on where you have the chugga, chugga, chugga, the muted strums.

00:10:17

On the individual guitars those strums sound like: So that's a lot of the ring.

00:10:30

That's about the attack and the ring together.

00:10:32

On their own they both have a lot of that midrange ring, and it's going to be too much.

00:10:37

Together they even each other out, and it just becomes a really cool sound.

00:10:45

This really is meant to be one guitar tone.

00:10:48

It's four performances, one of each hard panned to each side, and that's it.

00:10:53

Now what's going on on the auxes.

00:10:55

So guitar one is the Park New.

00:10:57

There's not a lot going on.

00:10:59

They were using an iZotope Nectar, which I believe has some saturation going on.

00:11:14

A little bit of saturation and then a Radiator.

00:11:17

So I think basically this might've been one of the first songs cut.

00:11:20

They're still dialing in the tone.

00:11:22

Came back to it later and thought, "well, we can actually go a little bit further with it." So the Radiator is only in the choruses.

00:11:28

It's out in the verses.

00:11:37

So I'll play the transition going from verse to chorus.

00:11:47

So we pick up some level which is never a bad thing.

00:11:49

It saves me having to ride it up, but we're also picking up a little bit of harmonic distortion, which is what the Radiator is giving you.

00:11:56

And then our old friend Helios.

00:11:59

And on these I'm adding 1K, which is actually a bit below where I would normally add.

00:12:03

I mean on guitars I would usually be anywhere from 1.4 to 2.8.

00:12:08

Every once in a while 3.5, and then this 60 Hz thump here is acting like cabinet thump to me.

00:12:15

So I’ll show you this bypassed, and then in.

00:12:33

It just sounds like so much more than EQ to me.

00:12:36

It makes me very happy.

00:12:37

I love this.

00:12:39

Looking at exactly the same stuff on the second guitar, this is the Parks Saul, the kind of darker one.

00:12:44

Just a tiny bit of EQ to get rid of some harsh stuff that they had done, and then again I'm using the Helios this time at 1.4, which is a very standard frequency for me for rhythm guitars.

00:12:57

It brings out the tone of the notes and a little bit of the attack, but it's below where all of the noise would be.

00:13:04

I'll show you this guitar with and without.

00:13:21

Just night and day.

00:13:22

And here are these two guitars, and I will show you them with and without both of the Helios because it's kind of huge.

00:13:28

So this is with.

00:13:47

It's a little punkier, but it's also much, much smaller and having this extra depth to the guitars just has them keep up with the bass and drums that we've already made that much bigger.

00:13:57

From there these two guitars just go off to the rear bus.

00:14:00

It's no mystery.

00:14:02

They're joining up with the rest of the gang in the rear bus to interact and make everything happen.

00:14:09

So then after those two main guitars, they had a third stereo aux called guitar 3 which was collecting all the rest of the guitar tracks.

00:14:16

So we've got a few different things going on, and I just kept them all going through guitar 3, because why not? The first thing is you've got a sustaining guitar that's used in the intro and then again in the chorus and the breakdown.

00:14:35

And then later on in the chorus this becomes a third rhythm guitar.

00:14:44

So, here I'll play you the three guitars together just in that chorus.

00:15:01

Here's without the third guitar.

00:15:08

So what this is it's just a lift to the second half of the second chorus, and without hearing in context it doesn't mean a whole lot.

00:15:15

But what it means is you continue a section but you actually do get a bit of a lift.

00:15:20

So going from the first half of the chorus to the second half.

00:15:31

Just come back that much stronger, gives us a lift halfway through, and harmonically it's also changing as well.

00:15:37

The other guitars are really just used in a couple of spots.

00:15:41

So I'll go through them quickly.

00:15:44

We've got guitar 9 down here, which in the intro.

00:15:53

Along with that drone in the intro it's joined by two sitar tracks, which I'm assuming is the Electro-Harmonix sitar pedal but it could've been a Coral sitar guitar or perhaps it's sitar itself.

00:16:04

I really don't know.

00:16:05

And that gives us the base drone, and by base I don't mean bass frequency, I mean base in terms of the arrangement.

00:16:13

This gives us the drone that goes through the breakdown.

00:16:27

Really good chaos.

00:16:29

It's kind of swirling around underneath the guitar melody.

00:16:33

The guitar melody is on these vaporizer tracks.

00:16:51

They are actually working alongside of one of the two main rhythm guitars, which is still playing in that section plus this guitar 8 track right here.

00:17:12

Then these vaporizer guitars down here along with what's left on the Park Saul track in the breakdown go together to give you a melody and then also some of the rhythmic stuff that comes in halfway through.

00:17:41

And then along with that we've got one low octave drone: As well as: Basically what we've got is a lot of droning material, which I will now play all of them together.

00:18:06

And they're moving and they're different and they're a little bit sloppy, which is very cool so it gives you this bed of harmonic chaos in a way, which really sets up nicely underneath the very precise rhythm and melody of the guitar melody as well as the vocal which is then doubling the guitar melody and with this really busy tom pattern underneath.

00:18:43

And then finally on our guitars all we've got is the solo section, which is basically just taken from these two guitar tracks here and it was bounced through a plugin.

00:18:55

They were automating a flanger and I guess just in case I didn't have the same plugin they went ahead and bounced them.

00:19:01

so the solo sounds like this.

00:19:16

Nice really midrange-y feedback-y Flanger, but the point of that, is that those guitars are riding on top of standard rhythm guitars, so we're back to having the Park Saul and the Park New.

00:19:30

So together, along with a couple of little drone guys, this is what you've got in the solo section with the guitars.

00:19:51

So you still have the foundation of your standard rhythm guitars.

00:19:54

So as opposed to just putting a Flanger on those guitars, adding that extra guitar gives you complete control over how much of the Flange effect, how it's going to effect the midrange of the guitars.

00:20:04

Otherwise if you tweak the Flanger on the rhythm guitars themselves, everything else changes.

00:20:09

This way all you're worried about is the balance between the Flanger and the rhythm guitars.

00:20:14

That completes the band.

00:20:16

I know it looks like there are a ton of tracks, but it's drums, bass, guitars, and in most of the song we're looking at two guitars which are playing the exact same part.

00:20:24

So now is a good time just to hear what the rear bus is doing.

00:20:28

I'm going to put the drums and bass back in, and the bass is being sent to the rear bus and all of the guitars are being sent to the rear bus just on their auxes, so it's a really simple routing.

00:20:38

And let me play you a chorus with the rear bus.

00:20:59

Right, and without the rear bus.

00:21:16

Obviously when I mute the rear bus the drums come up because they aren't as reliant on the rear bus for their level in the balance, but you can also hear that the guitars just change character completely.

00:21:26

They go from pumping to sitting there, so this is just that shared parallel compression.

00:21:32

Now what I'm going to do is go back up to the drums to my main drums aux, which you might remember from earlier, I'm actually sending to the rear bus.

00:21:43

So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to play you that same chorus section and I’m going to mute and unmute this send.

00:21:49

And what you'll hear is the interaction between the drums and the guitars will change.

00:21:53

The drums will get a little bit quieter, but it's much more about how the strumming patterns and the kick and snare go together.

00:22:15

In some ways it's subtle, and in some ways is one of the most important things going on in the mix.

00:22:20

I just feel as though it goes from being a pretty cool sounding jam to being on fire, and it's that little bit of getting the rhythmic drum kit inside the bass and the rhythm guitars, which have a lot of rhythm to them already, but they have a much more steady rhythm to them.

00:22:39

Where as the kick and snare have that more loping rhythm, and by having that loping rhythm inside the rhythm of the strumming that you get on the bass and the guitar, it just completely opens up the groove.

00:22:50

So let me play that for you again.

00:22:52

Hopefully you'll hear it and like it as much as I do.

00:23:10

I think maybe what we'll do now before we go to vocals is I'll just talk about the 2 bus processing.

00:23:16

This is almost exactly the same as every other mix that you may have seen me do.

00:23:22

If you haven't seen any of the other videos of me doing mixes you can also go look at the standalone video about my template again.

00:23:29

I believe this is exactly the same as what is in the template.

00:23:33

So this is from the same era.

00:23:36

We start off of the 33609.

00:23:38

I'll just hit play so you can see just how hard we're hitting it.

00:23:48

So you can see this is actually on the quiet side for me.

00:23:51

Normally on a really loud track at the loudest point I would be hitting at 4 dB of gain reduction, and we're barely at 3.

00:24:04

The first thing is that I think we've managed with all of the parallel stuff going on inside the drum kit and in the rear bus to get all of the sort of excitement that I need, and I don't need to get as much of the glue out of this compressor as I normally would.

00:24:20

But it's also there was a very conscious decision to not have this record sound smashed.

00:24:25

So it can sound dirty, and it can sound compressed, but it can't sound smashed.

00:24:30

So we backed off on the stereo bus of quite a few the mixes more than I might have normally if that wasn't brought up as a specific issue.

00:24:39

But we just wanted to make sure that the cymbals stayed clear, and that's what this does.

00:24:44

By not hitting this as hard the cymbals don’t pump as much.

00:24:48

So that's the compressor.

00:25:04

Better with, I would hope you would say.

00:25:06

What follows is a 670 model, and this is just for color.

00:25:11

I'm not going to go through all of the settings again because I've done that in the standalone video, but we're not compressing here.

00:25:17

If these needles move at all it’s just some stuff leaking into the detector circuit.

00:25:21

But I don't think this mix is loud enough for that to happen.

00:25:24

So this is a little bit a harmonic distortion.

00:25:40

And along with the harmonic distortion comes a little bit of level, which isn't a bad thing but it's something that when you're learning how to mix is something you have to be very aware of.

00:25:49

All of the modeled hardware that's giving you harmonic distortion is going to give you a little bit of level and some manufacturers give you more level than others.

00:25:58

So you've got to be aware of how much is level and how much is the actual sonic goodness when you're using something like this.

00:26:04

I'm not afraid of the level at all, but I need to know that I'm actually getting the benefit of the harmonic distortion.

00:26:10

Because if I'm not, get rid of the plug in and just turn it up.

00:26:14

Next is our usual stereo EQ in mid side mode.

00:26:18

A little bit of shelf here, and the only thing that's different here is first of all I’m not using the stereo width on this mix, and I think what was happening was it was starting to sound a little unnatural.

00:26:30

This one doesn't have any of the stereo widening.

00:26:33

It's got my 1.3 dB shelf at around 8K, and then I'm also using this bass shift, and this I'm actually going to show you.

00:26:41

What that's doing is a little more of what the EQ on the kick drum was doing is it's shifting that low end focus down to the thump of the kick drum as opposed to the constant low end of the bass.

00:27:06

It really just helps pull the kick drum out of the mix and let it rhythmically drive the song which I think helps the song move much, much faster.

00:27:16

One of the things to be aware of when you're mixing a fast song is, does it feel fast? Because it's very easy to slow the song down especially with parallel compression.

00:27:25

You can completely change the groove because your homogenizing in a way, and by taking the very fast strummed guitars and basses and homogenizing the mix in that way, you've got to bring the kick back out because it's the less constant pattern of the kick and snare which makes the song move.

00:27:43

Next is this little collection of Slate stuff.

00:27:46

I was using this because it came to me on a mix and it, I don't even think it was on a Green Day mix, it was on something else and it helps the kick drum come through and on this mix I'm also using a tiny bit of their high lift.

00:27:59

This is some top end EQ as well as a little of whatever the virtual channel is doing.

00:28:04

It's harmonic distortion, but it does it in a way that makes the kick thump sound better to me.

00:28:08

So here's with and without that.

00:28:24

Just a little more aggressive overall and a little bit brighter.

00:28:28

Then we've got my usual happy face EQ, which in this case is the UAD Pultec adding almost 3 at 100 and adding a little over 3 pretty wide at 10K.

00:28:54

We can see, again this is a case where EQ sound like a lot more than EQ.

00:28:59

It just, everything sounds more energetic with it.

00:29:02

And it is just EQ.

00:29:03

There's no hidden dynamics going on but it's bringing out the frequencies where stuff is happening as opposed to the midrange slab that's built up.

00:29:12

And then last but not least, the Oxford Limiter.

00:29:16

It's probably doing quite a bit of gain reduction because were not compressing that hard so a lot of transients are making it through.

00:29:22

This mix isn't as loud as some mixes, so it's not going to be quite as much, but I’ve seen this go you know a good 6 dB, that kind of thing.

00:29:30

This has the inflator circuit built in so 47% of curve.

00:29:37

It's some inflator.

00:29:38

Slow attack, fast release, turning the gain down the way in.

00:29:42

I don't know why.

00:29:42

That's the way it is in the template.

00:29:44

It just stuck that way, and my output level is set to the highest value where the red light doesn't turn on.

00:30:00

The inflator is doing what the inflator does, plus that little bit of limiting is really helping to tuck the snare back into the song.

00:30:06

It's kind of starting separate otherwise.

00:30:08

And I'll play that for you again.

00:30:21

Helping put everything back in a package, so I guess very quickly I could just bypass everybody, and you can hear what all of these things, which as I take them in and out one at a time, you can hear what they're doing but it's all a little bit.

00:30:35

But the combination of all of these together is a huge amount.

00:31:01

And there you have it.

00:31:02

My two bus chain, it's just what my console sounds like for this particular song.

00:31:07

So last but very much not least are vocals.

00:31:11

The vocal arrangement is very simple.

00:31:13

I'll actually go through background vocals first.

00:31:16

These tracks here are just the samples of recordings of fake newsreaders saying some stuff.

00:31:22

Not very important.

00:31:23

We don’t have the speakerphone going now, so there's no real point in checking those out, but you heard them in the intro.

00:31:28

For the actual background vocals themselves, they would bounce them together into stereo pairs of backgrounds which is awesome.

00:31:35

So for me, I'm not dealing with 12 tracks of backgrounds that have been balanced since they were sung, but I still have a ton of tracks in the session.

00:31:44

They've gone ahead and bounced them.

00:31:46

So, we've got a couple of different sets of background vocals.

00:31:49

I’ll make them both bigger so we can see what’s going on.

00:31:51

This is set one.

00:31:56

And second group here.

00:32:01

Basically a double.

00:32:02

Put them together, you've got a nice little group.

00:32:07

Obviously favoring one group a little bit more than the other, because we don't want it to sound like too many voices but these tracks just go through and are doing all of the answer vocals.

00:32:24

They sound great.

00:32:26

They've got some EQ, and this again came from the band.

00:32:29

They’ve got CLA -76, all buttons in, but with kind of a faster attack.

00:32:35

All the distortion you're hearing is coming from this compressor really.

00:32:39

So let me play you just this one with and without the compressor.

00:32:52

Huge amount of the character of these vocals is coming from the compressor, and that's the same on the lead vocals as well.

00:32:59

And then they’re using the Redd Desk to just give some presence.

00:33:11

So all that crispy top end that we got from the compressors being brought out by this EQ, and also taking away a lot of the low.

00:33:21

Exactly the same chain on the second group.

00:33:24

Then those two background vocal tracks are collected down to this aux, which has a CLA vocal plugin on it and is doing quite a bit.

00:33:39

So you can hear all of the effects that are on the background vocals that are coming from this plugin, and again this was sent to me like this and they sounded great.

00:33:47

I think I probably tweaked some settings on the CLA vocals and I may have tweaked the 1176 a little bit but not much because they just sounded really good.

00:33:55

All right, and there's one more track of background vocals, and what this is is the harmony that goes with the leads.

00:34:00

So rather than the answer vocal, it's the tag of the chorus.

00:34:07

And it's exactly the same type of thing.

00:34:10

There’s the CLA Vocals on it, which without: It's just doing a lot of great processing, compression plus a little bit of slap, and that's pretty much it for the background vocals.

00:34:26

When you look at what I'm doing with them, it's all the exact same stuff I always do with them, and if you watch the template video you'll see everything that's going on here.

00:34:35

I'm not using the Pultec, LA2A, Pultec chain at all on either the lead or the background vocal.

00:34:41

So the background vocals are coming in here, they're going straight through the Phoenix for a little bit of stuff, going through the R Vox for a little bit of other compression stuff, and then they're hitting the L2 which has just been in my template forever.

00:34:57

So that's it.

00:34:59

And then they make their way down to the combiner, which obviously if I was trying to save real estate or make my session less complicated, I can get rid of my Pultec Chain, move all the sends up to this track, and everything would be fine but why bother if it sounds good? And on this session I'm using the stereo vocal crush which is 1176 with all the buttons in.

00:35:20

I am using the send to the rear bus, I’m using a little bit of the Aphex, which gives us some top-end.

00:35:26

I'm using a little bit of my vocal reverb which on this session is probably still the plate which was the default, yep.

00:35:32

Still plate A on the UAD Plate.

00:35:35

Just a little bit, not much because there are quite a bit of the effects coming from the CLA plugins.

00:35:40

A little bit of the spread which is my dual 910 micro pitch slap, and the slap which is the Bucket Brigade Delay.

00:35:47

So what I can do is bypass all of this stuff and you hear a massive difference in the vocals themselves.

00:35:54

So while I'm using a ton of processing that they sent me with the CLA Vocal plugins and things like that, there's still quite a bit within my template to help shape those vocals and get them ready to be part of the much louder mix that they're now going to be a part of.

00:36:16

All right, and here's with all my stuff back in.

00:36:25

They're much wider, they're brighter.

00:36:27

Most of that is going to be the stereo vocal crush and the rear bus.

00:36:31

So here's just the vocals with the effects that I added.

00:36:39

And here's with the rear bus And the stereo vocal crush.

00:36:47

The stereo vocal crush is bringing out a lot of the gritty stuff because it's that all buttons in 1176, which if you forget what that looks like, it looks like this.

00:36:57

All buttons in slowest attack, fastest release, just some sort of unity gain-ish gain structure, though in all buttons in mode.

00:37:04

All bets are off in terms of gain.

00:37:07

And then the rear bus is what's going to make it interact with the rest of the song and because of how processed they were through the CLA 76 plugins I'm assuming that's why I never needed to reach for the Pultec because the Pultec LA2A Pultec chain is what will kind of smash them into a little package that makes them poke through distorted guitars.

00:37:29

That was already happening with something else so I didn't need to do it.

00:37:33

Lead vocal.

00:37:34

Very, very straight ahead.

00:37:35

There is a single lead vocal and a double.

00:37:38

The lead vocal itself has a little bit of EQ just to suck out some sort of buildup in that 500-1K range.

00:37:47

Then it's got an all buttons in, faster attack, very fast release 1176.

00:37:54

This is a lot of the vocals sound is this compressor so looking after it, there is some slap that's being used later on in the song, and then there's some EQ I'm using to get rid of something harsh.

00:38:05

But just listen to the vocal forgetting about what's coming after this track, and I'm going to bypass this compressor.

00:38:20

All right, now we're going to bypass that compressor on both the main and the double.

00:38:33

All of that super aggressive distortion is coming from the 1176, and it's one of the reasons I love the 1176.

00:38:41

It is one of the most versatile compressors ever made.

00:38:45

There are lots of compressors which have more controls, let you get to more things, but you can shape sort of within the realm of what that compressor sounds like.

00:38:55

Whereas all buttons in, or even just a combination of a couple buttons sounds totally different than a lower ratio when the compressor is working its normal mode.

00:39:05

The attack and release times can completely change the character of this compressor.

00:39:10

It goes so fast and so slow that it really starts to introduce distortion and things like that instead of just being more or less compressed.

00:39:19

Great compressor.

00:39:30

Pretty awesome and then this slap is something that they had built, and I really liked and actually I think I probably saved these setting somewhere to use somewhere else.

00:39:38

But here's with and without their slap.

00:39:50

So it's not only slap, it's also some of the dirt you're hearing which is quite cool.

00:39:55

And then I just have a tiny bit of de-harshing going on here.

00:40:08

And just like some of the other EQ we talked about like on the overheads, by taking out this tiny, tiny slice of 2.4 K, it's opening up the bottom end of the vocal and part of that is because of how it's hitting compressors further down.

00:40:22

But it's also subtractive EQ as additive EQ.

00:40:25

I could have just put in a bunch of low-end, but that's not really what I wanted to do.

00:40:29

I wanted to take care of something it was a little bit nasal, but in doing that you then can you hear the rest of the frequency spectrum of the vocal.

00:40:36

So once again here's with and without.

00:40:48

Night and day and for a pretty tight queue coming down 5 dB at 2.4K you wouldn't think would have that kind of impact on the rest of the frequency spectrum of the vocal.

00:40:58

But huge to me.

00:41:00

We go from there down into their vocal chain, which had, I think I probably put this de-esser on.

00:41:07

This is just the best place in the chain to do it.

00:41:09

And then it’s followed by just another CLA Vocal.

00:41:11

So there's quite a bit here.

00:41:13

We'll hear with and without.

00:41:25

This is just the next stage in getting the ultra-compressed distorted sound which is what they wanted, and this is kind of the world that Billie's vocals live in for this whole record.

00:41:36

But there are just different sort of extremes of it.

00:41:40

This is definitely one of the most aggressive distorted versions of the vocal, and there are much more open versions and obviously there's an acoustic song where the vocal is very natural sounding.

00:41:50

But this compression, sort of verging on distortion, even if you don't go all the way to distortion is kind of what his vocal sounds like.

00:41:59

And there are sort of characteristics sonic signatures that vocalists who have been in bands for a long time have.

00:42:05

Not all of them do, but Billy definitely does with his vocal sound, and that comes from the compression but it's exactly the same thing as Anthony from the Chili Peppers always singing on an SM7.

00:42:16

He sounds great on a 251 or a C12 or a U47 because why wouldn’t he? But it doesn't sound like a Chili Peppers record.

00:42:23

Put an SM7 in front of him, it sounds like that.

00:42:26

Put this kind of compression on Billie's voice, and it sounds like a Green Day record.

00:42:31

It's just part of it, and it's a huge part of it.

00:42:35

So again, since we have that sort of level of compression and processing, before we even get into my normal tracks, I never needed the Pultec.

00:42:43

Again this could be inactive and I could cut out the middleman and move these sends up, but instead I have a second de-esser.

00:42:52

So there's one before the CLA and then there's one after, if you follow the way the signal path is going.

00:42:58

This is purely because I was de-esing and then I need to de-es some more.

00:43:03

This isn't like some cool trick, it's just I needed to control probably more the CHs in the THs were popping out more than Esses, and this was just the place where I could grab them best.

00:43:16

If you grab them too early in the chain, then you're not taking care of the artifacts of the heavy compression.

00:43:22

If you grab them too late in the chain, all of the heavy compression has made them the same level in terms of what the detector circuit can look at as the rest of the vocal.

00:43:31

So there's nothing for it to grab onto.

00:43:33

So I ended up having to grab it in the middle and then later on.

00:43:36

I'll play that first line with and without both de-essers.

00:43:51

This is sort of like that EQ thing.

00:43:53

By taking those Esses out a little bit it lets the compression distortion come up a little bit, and the vocal just sounds a lot more even.

00:44:05

They're probably both grabbing all of the Esses.

00:44:13

It's very different for me just cranking the range on one of them because I'm catching one before this processing and one after.

00:44:22

After that, once again it is all the exact same stuff that I do on the background vocals and on every other mix.

00:44:29

There's the stereo vocal crush, the rear bus, the Aphex, the reverb.

00:44:34

There's not that much spread, and then the slap is actually out on lead vocal only because we've got some delay here with some tight reverb and some slap delay.

00:44:44

We also have delay coming from the Kramer Master Tape.

00:44:49

The last thing we needed was more delay coming for me.

00:44:52

What they had set up, whether I tweaked it or not, was more than enough for this song.

00:44:56

But just again, really quickly, even getting rid of these effects is a huge difference.

00:45:13

It's not just level.

00:45:15

You can hear the difference in the breath before his first words, so check that out.

00:45:19

Here's with.

00:45:24

And here's without.

00:45:33

It's really helping bring everything that's good about this vocal to the forefront and tame all the rest of the stuff so the breaths can be really, really loud but not jumping out.

00:45:44

So now that we've everything in, I actually want to go back to one of the first things I mentioned was this huge drum fill going into the outro of the song.

00:45:52

Terrifying! Terrifying because you are now going to expose everything you've done with the drums for everybody to hear, and it has to work.

00:46:01

And remember I was talking about the sort of arena size of the drums, and I think that over-the-top crazy arena sound is actually really cool in context.

00:46:11

So now, check out as we go from the full band screaming along to just drums and then back into the band.

00:46:19

All of those reverbs will be noticeable to you but they all go together to just be big bombastic drums, which is like: "holy crap what am I hearing?" and then we're back into the song to finish out.

00:46:39

Though hardly the most natural sound in the world, but I think it's awesome.

00:46:42

I love the way those toms sound just natural enough that you know it's not a sample.

00:46:48

It doesn't sound weird, but there's so much stuff on them that they're like cannons, and that's a really cool feature of the song.

00:46:55

So it made me build the drum sound in a slightly maybe more effected way than I might have if we didn't have this exposed drum fill.

00:47:05

But then in the context of the song I think it made it really, really cool because you do have the spot in the middle where there is a lot of toms in the breakdown.

00:47:27

And any drier than that and I feel like the toms and the snare might've started to sound small, and I probably would've been going after getting that kind of sound anyway.

00:47:35

Purpose building it for the drum fill informed the rest of the song, which worked out really well.

00:47:41

So now that we've got the vocals going we can go back to one of the things I mentioned at the very beginning which is the exposed vocal.

00:47:47

It happens going into the breakdown, it happens at the end of the first chorus, and it happens at the very end of the song.

00:47:52

So let me play you the very end of this song.

00:47:59

What you can see is were automating this slap inside of the song, and that comes on for the end because one of the biggest problems you have is things going from wet to dry or dry to wet and the effect balance changing.

00:48:13

It has to sound appropriate.

00:48:15

If it sounds different than what you thought it sounded like inside the track it can be very, very distracting.

00:48:21

But the other thing is it can also jump up in level, and it's just a difficult thing to come through and basically just with clip gain and with effects I was able to make that work.

00:48:37

But if I turn off the slap that's coming in and I bring that vocal up to the regular level and just let the vocal play.

00:48:50

It’s distracting. It no longer feels like the roomy arena of the song, but having that slap in the whole time was making the chorus too messy.

00:48:59

So having the slap come and go and having the clip gain come down just makes the vocal sound like it continues.

00:49:12

And that's it.

00:49:13

It's sort of seamless in a way, but you're doing it by actually having stuff change and that's the key to me for all my parallel compression on the drums, using the drums dirt sometimes only in sections, using the Pultec sometimes, and again I'm not using all of these tricks, if you want to call them tricks on every song, but it's the ability to change the sound of something so that for the listener it sounds like it doesn't change.

00:49:37

And pretty much that's it.

00:49:38

It's just a great arrangement and a great performance of a scorcher of a song so there are the arrangement tricks in a way of having the small intro, of having the breakdown with the totally different harmonic sort of feel to it by having the sitar drones.

00:49:53

You've got your drum fill, but in general it's just a really good rock song played well, and hopefully I just made it loud enough so everybody could hear it.

00:50:02

And that's it.