Mixing Masterclass with Bob Power [MixCon 2017]

cry for me cry for yesterday cry for me hi i'm justin coletti from sonic scoop thanks for coming to

mixcon

i want to introduce you to our next host i'm so excited for this is a guy who has worked with so many artists that i grew up listening to i mean, i look back on my teenage years and i think i love that band i love that band i love that band, talking about a tribe called quest de la soul, erica badu, too many artists to mention. Please give a warm welcome to Mr. Bob Power, Bob will walk us through a real mix that he brought and walk us through his entire process.

Bob is not only an amazing engineer, amazing mixer, but he's also a great educator who's been teaching for a long time at clive davis institute at nyu so we're so excited to have him, we just want to thank our sponsors of this event the reason

mixcon

is free for you to attend and the reason it's free for you to watch at home on and Outube is because of our sponsors and the sponsors of this event one of my favorite plugin companies , sound toys. We can give a big round of applause for sound toys. mixcon i'll get off stage and hand it over to bob thanks i just want to talk a little bit before we start about what

mixing

really is uh these guys wanted me to jump right in and say this is how i do the hype and i can see you in the back rogue host rogue host but i want to talk a little bit just a minute about mig what is

mixing

really you know fundamentally mixing is about musical balances and tonal balances and by tonal balances musical balances are obvious from tonal balances i I mean the somewhat natural distribution of frequency content in the instruments that are represented in the mix, which comes close to the idea that a great arrangement will make a great mix, as you probably know.

Now, if you're fighting the arrangement, if people haven't doled out those frequency areas correctly by using the right instruments, tuned the same way, in the right way, and with the right timbre, you're fighting an uphill battle. up and I think that's what a lot of us have that at least half the time is trying to untangle something that could have been arranged a little better to begin with but so be it that's what it is but again musical balances that are obvious tonal balances which is again a very nice complementary distribution of frequency content between the different instruments so that listening experiences become pleasing from a pure sonic standpoint you know creating a vibe is important huh and i'll be honest with you uh often if you create a deep enough ambient sound you don't have to worry about all the other things I talked about because that is what's really important but yeah, creating an environment huh and seeing the vision of the artist and the producers uh I can't stress enough consider that enough huh if you're mixing for yourself that's one thing but if you're mixing for other people, it's not for you, it's not for you and you really need to go against the wall in various ways to try to figure it out. what the artist and the producer really had in mind and then through your own abilities try to elevate that and take it to a level where they didn't really imagine it could get there, but it's very important to remember that it's not. to you if you're mixing you're serving the music and the producer and the artist and then this sounds very mundane but the x factor can i hear all i know sounds really a little mundane but that's what I have? i've been fighting my whole life wow i work under the assumption that if someone put something in a production they meant it for you to hear now it has to be in the right proportion but i assume they put it there so you can I've been wrong, huh, but you know, I can only hear that everything can become a question of life in itself and if you can put together a mix where you can really hear all the elements that you know, which means they're in the proper perspective but you can still hear everything you'll probably be pretty way ahead of the game you'll probably be doing pretty good now some things will be darker some things will be smaller some things will be bigger but if you can hear all that stuff it's like wow that it's really something in itself um you know it's hard when you start thinking about the tonal balances the musical balances the artist's vision the producer's vision i can esc listening to everything they intended to listen to all becomes quite a complex matrix quite quickly and then there's the ambiance factor I have to say I suffered for a long time feeling that if everything else were together the mix would be great but the vibe I was suffering.

You know ideally the vibe is going to be in the production, you shouldn't have to. invent the vibe in the mix but it doesn't always work that way and in a perfect world what you want to do is enhance the vibe that's already there take whatever vibe and turn it up magnify it four times uh anything else just to get our definitions together you might think in the dimensions of a mix in three ways, from top to bottom, which is the frequency content, from side to side, which is its stereo field, and from front to back, which is the depth of the mix and the depth of the mix. mixing the last one is really the hardest you know from top to bottom to get a nice complementary set of frequencies so that there are all the instruments that are nice to hear on that's hard enough to the left and right of the stereo field well, it's an easier proposition there's a reason we don't put the kick and snare down hard because it takes the glue off the rhythm section and beats the rhythm section back and forth it's a bit more difficult and we legislate the dime from front to back nsion of the mix through ambience generators, volume and timbre of all things generally as something we forget, but in nature, as we things get away from you they usually get a little bit darker there's a reason you know when you've seen the cartoons where someone's in the canyon and they say hello hello hello well you gotta remember as those things get turned off, they not only get quieter, but they also get darker, which is one of the reasons why many delays had high-frequency dips, so each iteration of the delay would get a little bit darker and, again, it's not like what happens in nature is everything because no, we're making a record here, we can do things that you can't do in nature, but again knowing the issues of perception and front to back ace. perception what makes something sound farther there is going to be a timbre element to that there is going to be a volume element to that and then there is going to be an ambience element to that now the ambience you can think of as the ratio of direct vs reflected sound you're hearing and you do it by how much you're sending to the reverb how much you're sending to the delay but again think about those three dimensions of the mix and really the last one, the front rear dimension is what makes things go make it really interesting cause you should be able to hear a mix it shouldn't be like a flat sheet of paper it should be almost like a tv now uh i got a 4k tv in town huh i guess it's led it's really cool but i'm telling you i don't know how you guys feel it's a little weird to me because i see this layer here, this layer here, this layer here, this layer here and it seems to be all these discrete layers receding into place from the plasma that I have in the state, which is more like a movie where you have that smooth gradation of things, there's just no layers, there's just depth there and I think that's one of the things we want to work on in our dimensions. front to back ion of the mix i'm looking at my notes truths they're really getting naughty presenter naughty presenter but this is important again it's not for you it's for the producer and the artist it's not that you don't contribute your thing because that's why they came to see you, be careful with reference tracks, okay, sometimes someone makes a track and they play a katy perry track for me, they want it to sound like that. and you didn't have the best people in the world working on this production who are really, really good at what they do, you can't tell them that, but that's just a danger when people say yes, I want it to. sounds like this well you're not the green one sorry you know but some of the things you want to start thinking about in terms of what your customers want from you or what you want from yourself because a lot of times you've Been mixing your own stuff, you can think Splashy, we know how deep Splashy sounds.

Mysterious vibey, in truth, you often have to figure it out yourself because your customers won't be able to tell you how many they mix for other customers, okay, so you know what I'm talking about, so I'm not losing. my encouragement here you know ultimately a great recording is a compelling performance of a great song those two things have to be there before you have a great record whether you like what it does or not james taylor could do a great record on a phone because he gives compelling performances of great songs and a lot of times what we do during the course of production and mixing is trying to elevate it trying to take it to another level where it really becomes more compelling um I'm looking at my notes here uh how many of you rely on your monitors with fewer hands than before?

Yeah it's key guys you know it's really key and to be honest there's a couple of things you want from monitors. The term flat is as if nothing were flat. What is flat? i don't want to f lat i want to know what's there without exaggerating any particular area so ideally you know the most important thing for your monitors is that they reveal everything that's there to you, you don't want to work too hard on something that reaches somewhere else and find out there was an anomaly in there that you couldn't actually hear on your speakers the good news is there are plenty of great monitors out there for under ten thousand dollars now you know there's a whole class of things now really between a thousand and three thousand dollars which are pretty good, but know and trust your monitors, they're your ears, those are the most important things you have and again, rather than being good or flat, it's much more important that you know them well. and you know how things will translate back in the 70s guys used to mix there was a stereo speaker manufacturer called ar and there were guys mixing in ar-17 these little stereo speakers with a six or e eight inch woofer two tweeter some people mix with oratons some very

power

ful mixers mix with auratons but they know the response of the speaker and they know how the material will translate so that's very important and actually if you don't trust your monitors then that should probably be on the top of your save list four um what do we have as our building blocks what do we have as our tools there really are two things to audio manipulation there are gain control devices and there are ambience generators that's it now for the audio device gain control you say ok what about an eq? well an eq is a gain device, it only boosts or cuts a very specific area in the frequency spectrum, but it's still a gaming device.

You immediately think of compression, well yes, but there's also a fader, it's a game control device, there's compression, and there's an EQ again, it boosts or cuts a very specific frequency area, creates ambiences, lays reverbs, flangers, choruses. pitch shifters there are also pitch effects but when it really comes down to it those are the only things you have at your disposal gain control devices and ambiance generators pitch based effects to some extent which i put in below of the ambience generators uh you know what we do with these things hopefully number one creates a tonally pleasing sound something that when you listen to it in addition to the music coming to you well it's really nice to listen to and if it's rumbling and if it's jeep stuff. and it's meant to be that way it's going to be nice to listen to on that level if it's a barbra streisand record sorry mick um and it's really brilliant and beautiful in precision and you know that's what it's supposed to be and it's very nice to listen at that level so again totally nice to listen to given the context of what the music is it should somehow reflect the natural sound of the instrument but in this day and a ge that's way down on the totem pole of importance because nothing is natural anymore these days if you are making a jazz record. all of a sudden it gets really heavy and then it goes away when that tone or that dynamic level changes yeah we want to eliminate those things and a de-esser is a perfect example of that you also know digital is really nasty with sibilance what we know. this, uh, seems to make things digital worse, also to me it seems to accentuate the anomalies in the different dynamic and pitch ranges of a person's voice, you know, manysingers will sound very even, good studio singers sound super even tonally and dynamically throughout the entire range of their singing, but for the rest of us, a lot of the time when someone sings high, it will sound very nasal and squeaky, and then they sing low and they sound very dark and bloomy so we want to try and remove those anomalies from getting in the way of our listening experience and then make the elements work in the genre and context of the track, okay and this is all the same from what i was talking about earlier but gender is important uh and i'm definitely going to pick up some techniques in just a second but gender is really important people ask me what your first line of defense really is when you think about where you're going with the mix, I have to say it's the genre. and the sonic emphasis of different types of songs really depends a lot on the genre.

When I started I had a couple different careers in TV and stuff before I started designing, so when I started designing it was in the mid '80s and I was making a lot of dance records in the early days of hip-hop. , then someone brought in a jazz record, so I mixed the jazz record and because I've been doing a lot of hip-hop, the kick drum was king, right? I made a mistake? that if you guys know a Everything about jazz, kick drums, like you know, in hip-hop, it's here, in jazz, it goes back somewhere, so the genre is really very important, what works for one kind of music it doesn't work for another. the frequency spectrum for hearing things in a mix yeah leave room for other stuff ok i'll talk about something in a minute huh about resonant peaks most instruments due to recording process anomalies and the instruments themselves, most instruments have a resonant peak. it often changes with the pitch of the instrument, but it's often present in the different pitch ranges and what you can do is turn up an EQ with a medium bucket not too wide like this not too tight like this and then start sweeping it up and all of a sudden, you'll get to a point where you'll hear this come up like this and you'll back off and it's gone again, well you just found the resonant peak and i guarantee it. especially on th the low end of things, especially between 400 and 100 hertz, if you do that with everything in your mix before you start working is to sweep that EQ and find that resonant vomit where it really shows up like that and just pull it back in just a little bit. little all of a sudden there will be a lot more room for everything else because those resonant peaks won't mask the other instruments it's a big one it works great and again you'll do a lot less boost because I removed the stuff that gets in the way of the tonal evenness of the instrument instead of trying to offset it with a boost here and a boost here and you're boosting everywhere except that resonant peak if you go and take that resonant peak and pull it down a bit everything else will be represented much more evenly um do you need to increase?

Knows? it was like wow could you never do that i dont know how they do it and you know what now i find myself cutting almost all the time and doing very very little reinforcement. If you can get to that, you'll find that your mixes will sound much smoother. a lot less harsh, a lot less lumpy, you know, yeah, you have to bump up the bottom end sometimes if you want a little bit of a hump in the kick or bass in a certain area and yeah, if you want a little bit more, touch the kick if you kick 3k a little bit it will give you a bit more punch that's something you won't get from cutting but particularly with high frequency it will be a lot smoother if you really get rid of all the midrange and low end. that makes it sound boomy in that area and if you remove that you'll find the high end left to be much sweeter and smoother than if you go up 5k which will strip the enamel off your teeth. and there's a whole school and there's a lot of heavyweight mixers that send th Their assistant into the room before they go to work and every element of the mix is ​​passed high or low to remove anything that doesn't need to be there before going to work and particularly going high is very, very important because there's a lot of information not subharmonic but base harmonic below, let's say 150 to 200 hertz which really adds up when you hear one thing on its own and you're like oh that's not too much but when you've got 20 of those things with a lot of spurious information below 150 hertz that doesn't really need to be there it really starts to cloud things up so think about going in before you go to work high pass or low pass everything and this is how which does it, say with a high pass filter, you take the high pass, play the instrument, repeat it, and as soon as you start encroaching into the background of where you want it, you find that you lose that background like that and then you go back until you get You have what you want again, but you leave everything. below that from there because those things really add up and you'll be fighting that cloudiness same with the low pass not everything has to be bright and in fact if there's a lot of 2500 3k on a bass I'm not so sure if that area of ​​frequency will help me define the function of what a bass is supposed to do on the track so think about it before you start working gain control ok everyone thinks about compression as it prevents things get too strong.

I mean that's the radio station thing you know why compressors were first built right for radio stations apparently I'm not as technical as this but back in the 20's and 30's if you were sending too much voltage to the transmitter from the radio station, the transmitter would. it actually blows up i mean there would be sparks and fire and all so that's where compressors started and why they were invented in the first place to keep things from getting too loud too quickly i personally think compres sion makes a couple of different things in a number one modern pop context, it helps us maintain a constant presence in something and you know it's not good or bad, but it's the sound of a pop record that we're used to things having a particular presence on a track and that doesn't change it doesn't go too far and it comes back and goes away if it's meant to sound like that but it's always there, well compression ensures a constant presence on a track the other. that compression works for me and particularly with vocals which i think is really important because it improves the detail of the low level stuff ok i often compress not because of what it does to the loud parts but because it's suppressing the parts loud that I can hear. all the really soft stuff and that's where a lot of the really expressive stuff in a voice goes in all those little internal things that go on inside a voice so it enhances the low level detail you can hear all the low level stuff the other thing we use it for envelope modification, attack modification, sustain, decay elements of a sound and most of that is done with percussion stuff and usually drums but it can be done with guitars and bass as well .

Let me add a couple more things. it seems like most of you mix for outside clients tuning it's not your job it's a producer's job it's not your job to sit there and tune someone's voice it's not your job to figure out how far you have to go before it sounds unnatural and you it takes all the life out of something you know so no sorry don't sit there and tune someone's voice for them that's the producer's job occasionally if I get a track and they wanted a really smooth rb backing wherever real lush and smooth yeah every once in a while I'll auto tune some of the background vocals just to give it that lush because no matter what you do if it's not really in tune you'll never make it sound super lush try not to talk about auto Try not to slap it though and just put it in one setup personally, I use Melodyne especially for my main stuff and I go through it, note by note, I do it by hand, I don't do it by the grid, I do it by my ear because every singer has their comfort level singers know that the range of an acceptable pitch pitch is like this everyone thinks this is in tune there is no range like this and every instrumentalist or singer has their comfort zone about where they live and if you ever tuned a segment of a performance what ends up happening is the things you don't tune start to sound really weird because you took the singer out of their comfort zone on pitch level but one other thing about you know again dsp and conserving your resources is a problem these days unless all the time now computers are much more

power

ful and plugins are much more efficient but its a good idea not to turn on autotune and leave it on render to audio and then disable autotune auto so the computer doesn't have to work as hard it will save you a lot of dsp everything will run a little smoother just a couple more things huh the pr Organization pros don't let things don't happen to the pros oh it just happened I don't know what happened no that doesn't happen how many guys back I don't see enough hands guys always have two drives attached to their computer, whenever they are working on their drive. and your b drive works on your a drive and at the end of the day it goes back to b drive do it every day don't even think twice don't drag and drop don't use time machine time machine is really good for backups of the entire system, but it's really lousy for backing up specific files.

I use ChronoSync. It is a great utility. band called backbone right now on drive a and copying that whatever's new to the backbone folder on drive b allows you to save it as a document on the desktop, so if I worked on backbone that day and I'm ready to go, just double click click that i say go copy all the things ended up fine i cant stress that enough and i know you know you should make a backup but you have to do it every day and you have to have two drives plugged into your computer all the time save the version numbers every time you do a major amendment to a mix save it as 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 it's kind of leaving a trail of crumbs how many guys have done something and got Realized it was much better four versions ago yes it allows you to go back and import stuff from those older versions very easily it also allows you when you send stuff to your clients you have a combination called t e love baby baby 1.3 they send you notes about you i have a spreadsheet and i'm not going to go too deep into this but it's a good idea to keep a spreadsheet with your current work ing versions, your clients comments on a particular version and then what you did to change it and then what's the new version and send that feedback to your customers if your customers write to you and say I feel like we're missing this lead vocal sometimes I feel like there's too much reverb on the lead vocal the kick drum isn't Shocking enough, I copy and paste that stuff into a text document and when I send you the revised mix, I put little check marks next to that stuff and send you that. text document two things number one it keeps me in order and i make sure that you really address those things and it will bring up the trust factor of your customers and they will really think that you are listening to them and that you care anyway there is a don't know that In a way it's manipulative, but in a way you don't know that really trusting your customers that you're there to do right by them is super, very important, that's what people will come to you for. we know we all get better at our pace and our own pace and sometimes it's faster and sometimes you'd be doing this for 35 years and you still go home feeling like yes it happens to all of us but it's very important that your clients i know you will go to the wall for them i have to say i am pretty good at what i do but i really feel like my career is a result of my clients knowing i will work much harder than them. enough of that um esther rada i mixed and mastered her first well the first record i had of her was not her first record which was um nina simone covers but completely reinvented with horn arrangements as um afrobeat amazingly top musicians from israel amazing rhythm section the drummer sounded like steve gad it was great it was really really good and super clean and super defined so all i had to do was direct traffic and make sure the music came out in a very dynamic way because it was traditional deal with traditional orchestrations great musicians playing the right parts on the right instruments it was wonderful she sent me a record about a year ago to mix that was really very different and she worked with a not minimalist but very different producer in israel a guy called shus and that he uses a real squonky kind of sound doesn't fill in all the cracks and you'll hear that in this he goes is not this material where e the rhythmic feel is super smooth and super funky all along it's kind of what i call the jerky funk um but that's one thing and that's how it worked every mix you get you have to make a selection right away you have to evaluate what need this mix and what do i deal well with this stuff washow to make very few elements sound as big as possible each one the number of tracks was very low on this there may be 30 voices maybe and a lot of them were doubles for things where you know they put five mics on the piano thanks me only really one of stereo mic cent would work fine but they had a mono mic they had a mic in the bathroom on the piano you know again because there weren't a lot of elements going on I thought ok what you really have to do is make those elements sound much bigger and much more powerful. and very dynamic which is not what people usually think of me as you know but that was my assessment let me touch you on some of the stuff and then we'll start to deconstruct it um it sounds awful in here hey yeah it sounds really awful out there raise your hand cause i'm getting slapped from the back wall stupid little retard game we both can and i don't know what you're doing you're sorry i always found you crying for me oh please you cry for me cry for yesterday, cry for me, cry for yesterday, so you can see I didn't turn that on, by the way, it was them, uh, in the middle, you can see there's not really much going on, but the vibe in this or what I took is what was important was how to give a lot of emphasis to those stuff and make it sound really punchy and dynamic uh also how to make the rhythm elements work because they're a little unusual um I'm going to start moving a little faster and deconstruct a lot of this let me find my instrumental teachers for c True Works with instrumental group masters, which means you should have all your drums finished after all the routing you do.

All drums and effects are output via a stereo bus called the drums. it has a single fader that represents all of those things there are a ton of different advantages including number one it's much easier to drop the stems that way number two you can make adjustments to the overall level of those instrumental groupings without have to get into a bunch of little tiny faders and turn this up a little bit move that a little bit and say wow i think the drums need to be a little louder cool lemme turn that drum master up a little bit more lets you put eq on those group teachers.

It's often like wow this sounds really cool. The drums are not bright enough. are you doing it too much or this or is it changing the sound too much or just go to your drum kit and open up the top a bit its much easier to do things that way so you can see i have master kit master base master key background master lead vocal master another thing about this it's very important to try to make your ambiences discrete from the instrumental grouping they are active in which means your drum reverb is only used for your drums and coming out from the drum master bus su uh The voc lead vocal reverbs and delays are only used on the lead vocal and cause them to come off the lead vocal bus.

What that does are several number one things. fin And the other thing is you know how sometimes you do a one voice solo and go wow that's really cool except I hear the box on the vocal reverb that takes it away so if you have the dsp try to keep your discreet atmosphere generators. the instrumental grouping that they're in and again you don't have issues like uh you drop an acapella and you hear the snare on the vocal reverb a little bit that'll take away because it sucks when that happens so let me uh let me mute these guys and let's start at the core which is the drums sorry i'm an r b guy that's the way i think one of the weird things about this mix is ​​if there's a kick drum i don't have it. i know if it's very prominent um there are toms that take the function of the kick let's see um called them toms is it really serving the function of a kick it has atom resonance which is actually a problem i don't think i have ever done a track with acoustic drums that tom has been playing on for the whole time.

It hasn't been a nightmare because of the resonance buildup of those things and the masking that does. I'm trying to think if these are actually live toms or not. let's see how i dealt with the main one here um wow i'm not doing too much uh i should be going high and i'm not and i lied about the drive i'm driving oh but you know what's cool guys i'm doing uh a shelf but starting at 500 .so really everything from the midrange type to the upper midrange I'm busy just to get a little more definition in the drum without it yeah you can hear the attack a lot better. so um let's see he had another mic and uh c 4m i guess it's an overhead mic let's listen to that just oh that's helpful i didn't do anything because i didn't need it but it helps definition without that, yeah that's pretty cool, I didn't do anything because I didn't have to, it's really all in the mid-range and upper midrange, so it really helps to find the uh, the kick a little bit.

Let's see what this is about. Why did I put a modulation delay on this? Let's hear that I get the feeling that I put in a couple of very short millisecond delays to deal with the phase that might have sounded a bit out of phase compared to the originals. I might have made it a little longer to give it to you, you know? it's meant to be an ambient mic and it got rid of some of the phase issues oh let's see what else is ok now i have i routed this stuff to a bus i named tom beat and i'm using 1176 what am i doing that's probably just to kick it up a notch and what i wanted to do was accentuate the attack huh yeah so i have the slowest attack i can and the fastest release i can by the way fast attacks on compressors is the most quick to take all the life out of your music now i'll tell you you put a quick attack on people let's say how fast I don't know that knob is here but let's say 10 15 milliseconds on a voice what you'll find is the voice will always stay on its place but you take all the life inside it you know you've done the gain control so you can always hear it perfectly but you took all that internal drive out of the voice what you want to do is enhance what the singer wanted to do but give it a constant track presence and fast again. attacks you'll always hear it but it takes away some of the momentum that singer had now this again is very slow attack very fast release the reason the release is so fast is because the beats are really on and I want the compressor . to bounce back to zero before the next hit comes the other thing is a quick release on percussive elements which brings out the shrill nature of that just makes it distort a bit more in a good way let's listen without the compressor. with that yeah it definitely makes it a little bit more a little bit more exciting and again a very slow attack to let the attack go through a very quick release so when it acts it goes back to zero before the next hit comes you see if I slow down the release it basically just takes the drums and brings it down because it's a very active beat and the compressor never has time to go back to unity gain.

Look at the much more dynamic quick release now again because by the time the next hit hits you'll want the compressor back to zero. The attack modifies the envelope, well what happens is that it lets the natural attack of the instrument through and then suppresses it. Now, actually, it hasn't made the attack any stronger. steeper because the level of the attack compared to the sustain level is higher, you're basically lowering the sustain level, so it will seem like the attack is enhanced, makes sense, but it definitely increases the e? excitement factor again without it with it now that's a silly hit because it also got louder it always sounds better but it definitely sounds a lot more powerful a lot more dynamic let's see then I bust that into another stereo bus called toms and ambience I guess I don't know why I did that, huh, but I did a little more corrective EQ.

At that time, let's listen. I'll explain this curve, can you see this quite strange? right um let me before i start playing around with this let me save the settings as one so we can get back to it um let me explain what i did here uh i am increasing to 100 to really get the bigness of the bottom right but i am also doing the which I call a poor man's high pass filter below it again this is a six band parametric so there's no filter on the low end but you know what happens if you go down like this to 31 there's nothing below of that so it's going to act as a high pass filter with this curve here and if I if I don't take that away you'll see it go really crazy very fast the bass resonance thanks guys again every time you boost you know how many things you're going to want to turn up the bass on the kick drum what else i'm sorry yeah you know that sort of thing um as a general rule of thumb like again i'm not perfect and this doesn't always work but as a general rule of thumb if increase the low end, say around 100 or 80 hertz, I'll almost always pass it high below. that's because there's not a lot of secondary stuff that really interests you especially with something that's as active as an 808 that goes boom boom every once in a while yeah you can get away with having all that 40 and 50 hertz in there and actually you can hear it with something like this boom boom boom boom if you've got 50 hertz in there all it's going to turn into is this kind of drone that's going to really mask your low end another thing I'm giving away all my trade secrets but every time you increase the area that I really want to hear the low frequency in this case, it's 102, well I meant to say 100, but I didn't quite get it. pull out the woofiness that would work and right on top of it and it happens a lot listen without the cut you know what a wolf he is he's right here and he talks about a resonant peak that's about it but almost i this is a really good technique if you boost your low frequency on anything just above that kicks up a peaking eq and you hear where it's freaking out right there wow that's great im getting the benefit of the hundred hertz without the wolf right above huh i go a Go back to my preset and you know it's not a bad idea if you have a setting that you think works but you want to play with it, save it so you can always quickly go back to what you had. a second setup can abm very quickly something else that's real Alright um hover over the skip button, it's not that relevant here, but with compression it definitely is. you don't know which is which and you hear a bar one way, click on it, listen to a bar another way, go back to the first way, go back to the second way and you really get a very objective reading very quickly as to whether you're doing something right or you don't know a lot of times you say ok i don't know if this is exactly right helps you close your eyes cycle a short segment hover over the bypass button close your eyes press cycle then kick it in and out and very quickly you'll see if this is actually doing something that is desirable ok let's fast forward time flies i can't tell i don't think the slap is on track i'm listening to the bay slapped stuff it's like 90 milliseconds it's a lot of fun um this is really driving the track so i felt like it was kind of important huh i used huh Studer tape sim throughout what i found huh do you guys have any tape sims like this yeah the atr is quite s amazing, you know what really focuses? the midrange very quickly just like the physical version the student brings the low end and it will heat things up and take some discomfort out of the attack transients again you can choose a different tape formulation I'm lucky I come from the days of tape and i know what these different formulations of tape really sound like so i can go a little fast i think i just got this ua compressor and it's pretty transparent so i was using it like this. the tape squeezes it a little tape compression a little more compression to increase it let's take a look at the compressor envelope just to see what we're actually doing it's a pretty short attack and uh auto release don't know me j I just got the piece so I was messing around with it but again this drives the track and it's funny now that I look at this mix I did a lot less than I normally do things just came together in a way that it seemed to be. working so i didn't mess with that huh the bongo bathroom that wasn't helpful i didn't use it um again with this kind of let's see what we did for the vibe here um tom room short oh you know what i did this is actually the new waves h uh it wasn't new at the time it was new the age reverb i was just trying different things with something like this i would go with a really fast room or even non-linear to give it that raucous touch because you just want to get a little excited about this you know how non-linear things tend to get um noisy because that's that you hear periodicity in the um reflections uh we don't hear that on this but let's see without the ambiance with that yeah we're getting a bounce off the reverb i think there's some pre-delay , so that's cool, okay, uh, the catch isweird in this, uh, it's almost like a dub trap where it comes in four, let's listen. wow look at that slow attack fast release i really want to increase the attack on the snare let's listen without that ok we have some gain so it sounds a lot different let me increase the output so it sounds the same can you please? can?

Listen to the difference in attack, you guys can see when I'm clipping and stuff, you can also hear this is really loud, yeah this wasn't recorded very carefully, huh, and an ear for noise and stuff. loud if I feel like it gets in the way of hearing things I'll actually go through it and cut it or shut it down or remove it something like that but this track was loud enough you know there's a lot of kinetic energy in this track that that really isn't i thought that was too much of a problem um you know i didn't do what i said actually saved the settings before i tweaked but ok and let's see the equalizer on this ok nothing here let's see three wow look which I'm ramping up to 620 What a weird area but you know what's going to give the midrange a little body on attack to the snare itself let's save it as snare one and let me show you what that pop gun guy is doing. because there's no bottom in the box and there's enough competition in the high end that I really didn't want to boost the high end that much so I wanted to give it a bit of punch and this was one place where it seemed kind of sounds like a pop gun uh let's go back to what we had ok here we go thanks and check this out i'm actually down 2500 let's see what's there that's why i'm down to 2500 it's tough as hell and that's it without the 2500 pull down well you know what sounds good by itself but part of me I think I need to make room for other things.

I don't want something that has that much high frequency and you know that's going to get you in trouble if you have something that's out of control and has a lot of high frequency. you'll be chasing it through the mix with everything else, so I'm very wary of harshness or grit in the high frequency on any element. I usually try to get rid of things like that on individual items and then if I need to I'll put it back later I'll put it back but if I left this I would have been fighting that upper midrange trying to get everything else to hold up to that it's alright let's see what else we got trap delay effects let's see what we did I probably did a pitch to the trap delay let's listen wow that's cool uh let's take a look and see what it is it just makes it a little more exciting in that build up and by the way I automated my arena. in contact those lines don't make dots and move the lines that's not music I know you really want to treat this like a musical instrument and two things will happen if you work and play number one it will feel so much better your movements will feel better because you're actually doing them and number two is much faster and if you don't like what you did with apple z and you do it again so try to work in touch and that's what i did with this now let's see what happens next ending though it's a little weird um you know i wanted kind of a crescendo feeling at the end so i just wrote the delay time and it had a little bunch uh that's funny it goes down just before it rises that may have been just a wave of my hand that wasn't accurate take a look look at the time oh no i went good so i went down then up it's really a nice way to add some kinetic energy to mixes so your delays modulate like this, it's okay, and it's in the lo-fi setup and you probably have a lot of the high-end types you don't know about. and your delays to have the same tonal content as a dry thing, why not just copy the high frequency dry thing with delays? to do is when you filter out your delays and your reverbs, if there's less high-frequency content in those things, you focus on what you should be focusing on, which is the dryness itself, you know mixing is like fixing where you're at. re-legislate the allocation of listeners from what is supposed to be the primary level of interest the secondary the tertiary area whatever you know and so on but that's really what you're doing and again it's exactly like organizing where you are legislating for the listener how they are supposed to perceive those elements and it's not the one that's on the fifth level, it's imperceptible, no, it's just that it's on the fifth level of importance and it assumes that proper level in terms of the arrangement and the treatment. ck itself ok uh long cheat long effects i probably did a cast at some point um a cast most of you know this but a cast is when you send something to an ambiance generator just for a moment let's see effects huh no let's see level mute yeah , I did a few pitches here so there were hits that were open so I thought I might use a long verb after that let's check this out it's cool the reverb sounds like it's viera lowering tone at the end. don't think it was intentional um wow that's interesting um you know i wear it it's fun i used to hate deverb i go back to ways you know there wasn't much to wear at first but it's so crap i've really come to like it -Hat ambience track not that useful but whatever i had it but i took it out just to give th e uh the hat a little bit wide normally not a problem but again not much going on on this track so really I needed to fill spaces without the ambience, let me go to an active part with the ambience mic, give some side to side Dimension and let's see what we're doing, wisely, you don't know much.

I'm basically getting rid of most of the low end, oh that's why you can hear all that other schmutz in there now with the high pass and low frequency roll. it was a lot cleaner again if there's any non-essentials get rid of that stuff that's building up on the track and oddly enough I'm not pushing the top end actually let me save this I'm actually getting rid of some range upper mid 2300. that area will start to compete with other stuff very easily and again i think i thought i wanted to remove that competition you know early on in the mix i really want to make sure nothing is that loaded in one area of particular frequency that I'm going to have later I have to keep boosting everything else in that area, so again I tried, I think I talked about this at the beginning, trying to remove frequency anomalies on a particular instrument, oh, oh , and Devil Lock oh I love this utter rubbish y'all use this um in the beginning. at first I thought I can't wear that you know it's too serious and now I'm like oh I have to have it I have to have it and I think I did this just to really up the excitement factor in the hat let's listen without it oh oh my gosh yeah now release it quickly again for the reasons I said before if this is a rhythmically accurate part and it's getting compressed I want it to go back to unity gain before the next attack sound toys love you if you're listening to the mix control is nice but there needs to be an output level control on this thing because as soon as you start to crank this up a bit with the mix control it seems louder i don't know if it really is but it sounds louder and the only way you can make an accurate reference as to whether something sounds better or not is to have it as the same background, you guys know psychoacoustically, if one thing is a little louder than the other and you play both, you'll think the more strong his It sounds better so if you had a master output level control on this I'd be very happy for that I don't know if you guys use this but you'll find it with the mix control as soon as you start mixing any of the super shredded signals of this compressor it's louder right away but it definitely adds the emotion value, a lot of bullshit in there i can, it sounds like guys i don't know drop their phone or something right?

Let's listen and guys, whenever I have multiple elements that make up a sound, I break them down into a single fader, whether it's stereo or mono, it makes your life so much easier, you'll be faster, it won't take a thing. time and it gives you a lot more control over t it and again if you want to make it brighter you don't have to worry about making one part brighter and then the other part brighter you can make both brighter. non linear on this I'll tell you a great use of pitch plugins is to make claps sound fuller that's ok and generally you don't want to go higher you want to go lower you know it's fun to spend years learning how do you eq a clap i always thought oh wow do you make it sound better if you add some high mids or high frequency to it no the real part of a clap is in the mid range it's not really the cac so the pitch shift really it helps that and makes them sound bigger without it with that you know and again i went down more with that just so you know they sound like manly claps but that's what you want out of something like this i'm you know i'm kidding but but i want this chunk chunk chunk I want a great feel on that um and then the non linear come on Take usually they get kind of loud or noisy non linear reverbs for percussion stuff you can almost hear it as a zipper effect but in this case I wanted Make the track will sound as loud and energetic as possible. listen with it without it with it you know that's the non-linear reverb it's really a bit weird but it seemed appropriate and I think what I said at the beginning wasn't happening much on this track so I really thought I had to up the emotion and the raucous level of the thing just to make the track pop out and that non-linear would really help without it with some kind of metallic tank but again i think it works in the context of the track there is a plate but i think it only sends once as soon as we see uh actually you know what i didn't use uh i should have removed it but i didn't use it well let's keep waving and this is a case where this track was very noisy or you see what i did there's still noise there and again i sent this to a sound like a turntable, i have it tagged room, but it sounds like a play to me, um, by the way, name your buses in your sends immediately like that was a really important thing, i think it was in pro tools 10, where can you do er right click you know if you have something here right click on it and you can rename it hello you're not doing that. as you assign something you know say you have your uh bus 12 sending to one of your reverbs name it right away it makes your life so much easier you no longer have to think oh what bus was it sending you know it was really tough, right? bus 12 going to that vocal reverb and you scroll up and down the page no it's great that you can name things right away let's take an extra low tom every once in a while there's a great tom let's listen and what what i did was um it says dunk gunk gong ok so i thought it would be kind of cool for me to have kung gong you know have the pan thing let's listen i can't hear it up here it goes like this or did i actually miss the move come on i should be panning i don't hear that much um again just to give it a little more kinetic nature you know beware of wild panning elements they get very annoying very quickly and especially if they're rhythm elements actually they can take the beat off, they can slow it down, yeah, you know, pan.

Items I tend to use especially with auto panners and sound toys make panman which is really cool. I tend to use that to give some movement to pads and harmonic instruments that can be a bit static and that's a great thing too. Let's see what we do. I'm doing here eq wise wow look you know what I didn't do my my high pass like this but I'll do it now I'm raising a 118 and then I'm cutting I'm cutting in the midrange again normally what I do can you guys see up here normally I would have gone It's a little taller than this and I lowered it so he wouldn't get the wolf part of it and let's take a look and I have a feeling I did this again to improve attacks without him with a little more snap. pop particularly on the second hit and again at the beginning I was talking about using compression for envelope modification and that's about it you have to be careful because it will become spit out which means if it enhances the attack part of the percussion element too much , it will get very listener fatiguing after a while and start to what happens with a lot of percussion attack transients coming into your ears your ears tend to close to protect themselves I don't know if you've ever heard something that's very geared to very active percussion with very fast transients after about two minutes of that you're going to stop hearing as much detail in the audio because your ears tend to close up and that's the only time I would use a fast attack on something to take away that irritability at the beginning of a the cue and the look i used the reverb from man american um manny i have met manny i worked a lot in the company in the in the in the 90s and mand and manny was my assistant he'll do fine one of these days, right?

I know I mean he's really huge now he's great he's also a really sweet guy but I must have gotten this and I was like ok let metry and see how it sounds. I tend to go with my more conventional stuff. I tend to go to the same pieces a lot, especially with reverbs and delays, just because I know what I'm going to get and working at a reasonable speed is something you have to do, things are so much better than they used to be, imagine work on an analog mix. with 64 tracks you know in a real studio with a big console that every time you wanted to isolate something and rig it up or set it up you had to keep rewinding it you know it's so much faster now to work in the digital realm that's really one of the good things ok let's get to the background vocals ok you know there's a reason we're not hearing that because I've got my masters here again I can't stress this enough it goes into a standard routing where you end up having a fader for each instrumental group you it will make life a lot easier in fact andrew scheps who is a really smart guy apparently has a mixed template set up and i should do it myself because i do the same things every time you have all that stuff set up in a template and when you get a new one session, you just import that bus and I structure ourselves in the new session, so you already have a snare drum, you already have a bass bus, you already have a guitar bus rra set up um background math I've been away much different than me I don't like it much but it's kind of cool um let's see where they are if I've been away have you ever noticed that with the big sessions you end up scrolling up and down the session to find what you're listening to. through a silence instead of a level now this is the kind of thing that is sometimes a little hard to do on contact because sometimes the latency in your system is such that your moves will always be a little late you guys use h lag yeah crap like Hell it's great um echo boy also because it's very adaptable and you can do a lot with it so fast but yeah let's take a look at it I wonder why I only did it on the first oh I did in all others, yes. it would have gotten a little silly i've been away away i've been away away away there's a bit of back and forth now where it's not happening all the time uh let's see what else we did with these guys um background voice two it's funny that he processed so much and so little to the individual individual elements but i did most of it in the um in the group in the background let's take a look wow look at i'm cutting some of the midrange and the upper-midrange again the idea is that just didn't want a lot of competition in that area lemme lemme save this setup bg1 let's listen uh let's get over it I've been out good now you know why I cut the upper midrange hard as hell so much better and in fact we could actually do just fine cutting a little bit of 300.

I'm hearing a little bit of buildup here. You know what ends up happening is if this loads in the 2500 range, which is kind of brass nails on a slate if we pull. It may not have sounded like there were too many two or three hundred down there before, but now that we've changed the tonal balance it's going to sound like a wolf because we've changed the ratio of the different frequencies in the sound, so let's listen. again, yeah, that's the area where now that I hear the mix, I'm like, okay, co I might take that back a little bit.

I've been out again. You know I'm not looking for greatness in this. In fact, I'm looking for a definition and make it sit on the track. You know if your greatness usually comes at the bottom. that's where something will sound big but you have to be very careful because you can't make everything sound very big and let's take a look at compression i have away not doing much just controlling the peaks i've been great it's I love that now be like a dubbing track. I like it a lot with the drums and background vocals. boys. Thank you so much.

I appreciate you being here. Bye bye.