Mixing Masterclass: Heavy Mixing & Perfecting Your Mix Template with Marc Urselli

How are you doing? I want to start introducing you to our first presenter. His name is Mark Araceli and he is backstage. Can we give a clap to mark clearly? You guys have heard of Mark, so I haven't. I don't need to say much, but I understood. Mark Araceli I think he's been nominated for a Grammy five times and won three times. Mark it's a great run to date. He's worked with a lot of really experimental artists. We are friendly. of accessible experimental encounters, I mean, he has worked with Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Mike Patton of Faith No More, today he will present a mix of a very

heavy

band called work and he is very excited to hear this, we carry. under the hood of a real working mix and show you his process, the tools he uses, how he thinks about approaching

mixing

and Mark is not only an engineer for a long time, but he's also been teaching this stuff for a long time, so I think I'm in very good hands with Mark.

A couple of big thanks. I want to give one to the Manhattan Center for inviting us here and allowing us to see his studies. Can you give Manhattan Center a round of applause? I'm super excited to be here. and I also want to say a big thank you to Mick DSP for each of these events. We have a sponsor and the sponsors are the reasons we can give you free tickets to come and see this and we can have a free video afterwards. Thank you so much. To Mick DSP for sponsoring this. I'll give a shout out to Mick DSP and Mark will use many of his tools and others to guide us through his mix.

Let's stop talking and give a warm welcome to the Ozone dialer. Hi, thank you, first of all I also want to thank Justin Coletti Paulo from Gregorio and David Weiss from Sunny Soup Sonic Scoop and The Deli for having me here. I want to thank Pete Auslan from the Hammerstein Ballroom or the Manhattan Center. I don't know what to call it for having us here, it's a beautiful room. I want to thank Mack Diaz, Colin McDowell, and all the other plugin creators who had us all here, so today we're going to talk about the

heavy

mixing

that I do. a lot of different types of mixes and I work with a lot of different types of people and these are some of the people that I worked with and what I'm most proud of on this list is not a specific artist because I'm a big fan of a lot of those artists, but the diversity.

I'm really interested in diversity. I'm great from Nisha and I'm going to talk about niche versus diversity, but I like working with different types of styles, it's really the main thing. which is why I became a mixing engineer and recording engineer because when I was playing when Ben was 15-17, I couldn't really understand what genre was going on, so I joined a metal band and then I joined a hip hop band or a rock band. Whatever it was, this allowed me to work with all these different types of people in different types of genres and not have to worry about wanjeon and you'll see there's a lot of rock and metal that we'll mainly talk about. today pop singer-songwriter jazz blues world music experimental new music I do a lot of that and the reason why it says john zorn four times seventy is because I have made to this day the last one was yesterday seventy-three albums alone with john Zorn alone, that He's a guy, you know, that's a testament to him more than me.

He just hit record and mix, but yeah, that's basically some of that. These are the three things I want to talk about today, in addition to showing you how to mix one of these analog and digital things and for me it's not analog versus digital, it's analog plus digital. In reality I am a child of the mixture of the two. I love hybrid, so, for example, I work at a recording studio called East Side Sound in Lower. East Side of New York City has been there for forty-four forty-five years, this year we have an analog console with digital control and digital recall, so there is an example of the hybrid of the two worlds coming together now because I work in that beautiful studio and I'm happy and lucky to do it, so I can do most of the stuff I mix these days on an analogue console, although it's a risk, you'll remember digital automation, but obviously today we're going to talk about a mix in the box. but I really think it's the crossroads of those two worlds together that gives us the greatest opportunities today, so whether you know it, it translates to a homebrew setup that I know most of you might be more interested in ​​than an old school analog studio.

It can be having an analog summing box along with

your

digital I/O. I think that's where the magic really happens: when you can take advantage of all the powerful tools and power of flexibility of digital along with the analog studio sound versus live. is something I wrote there because I do both: I am a live sound mixing engineer and a studio recording and mixing engineer, and the reason I mention this is because over the years I have successfully incorporated many mixing techniques. I study in my live mixing process and vice versa some things that I learned mixing wildlife then I applied them in the studio and again you know niche versus versatility, it's like all these things together can absolutely decide that this is what I do .

I'm going to do it and there's a big advantage to that, which is mainly the fact that people are going to get to know you much quicker, they're going to know that. Oh, that's the guy who does all that. I'll call him because this is what I do. What I'm doing, but if you're able to learn from different worlds and apply all that knowledge in one place, then that encompasses all of those opportunities, then I think you've got the fifth year that everyone is looking for and that's basically why I like not to pigeonhole myself into wanjeon rrah even though today we will do the heavy mixing, but I also like not only rowing with John, but also working with technology and experience in different types of worlds.

Less is more. There is one of the three main things. that I'm going to try to drive home today except when it's hot, no because obviously if the customer calls you and says I need more, the scenario won't be like well, really less is more, so we'll do this mixture less than air but no less is more because I'm a fan of keeping things simple and streamlined now you can have a thousand plugins you can have a thousand tracks you can have six kick drums on the same songs these are some of the things that What you received in the mail doesn't really mean it makes it better because those six kick drums are going to give you some phasing problems, even you know, in that et cetera, there's always a reason why I could say less is more, but if you keep it simple.

You will have a lot of fun doing what you do. We had this repeat conversation from Hammerstein when Pete does some AC/DC stuff. I'm jealous and I couldn't do, he was like he was telling me how. It sounded easy and great there, and in his opinion, that was because there were four people on stage, so if you have four people on stage, I just want to see them both the other night at MetLife. The same thing, you have four people, the amount of energy. of those four guys is so huge and it's not just because they have a great PA, it's because there's a kick drum and a bass and whatever two guitars, that doesn't mean you should always do all four, that you shouldn't do overdubs. for example, I'm not advocating that that just means that if you keep in mind what the end result should be, you can use that to not be distracted by the possibilities of too many things going on, whether it's the number of tracks or anything else, the other spot.

I want to do this and this is really my personal philosophy. Everything I do in a mix has a reason and I do it for a specific reason. I don't really do things just to do them. I mean, I'm all about experimenting and I Experiment, but once I've decided what I'm going to do, I'll do it because it has a reason and a purpose, so if at any point today you have a question, I don't know if we're ready. ask questions during or only after, but don't hesitate to ask because chances are if you see something on my screen it's because there's a reason, if you see a certain route that you don't understand, chances are there's a reason for it and it's not just there by chance and then the last point I'm going to make is that it could be because I was born in Switzerland, but organization is absolutely key in everything I do, my mixing sessions are very well organized whether you know That means color, it means naming it. it means everything and the reason why that's so important is because I like, you know, sometimes I work on four or five records in the same week if I don't keep things organized, even down to where it's stored, where the copying is done. where the backup is saved. the backup is that at the end of the week I won't know what I'm doing, so that's the session I mixed a couple of months ago, it's less than four minutes long and has less than 10 tracks, so you know even if you're Not as organized, you won't get lost in it, but in the same week that I was mixing that I was mixing this now, if I'm not organized in this, I'm going to get lost very, very quickly, it's over 120 tracks.

I don't know if you can see it, but you can see it here on the bottom left and it's over 80 minutes long, it's because it's an opera piece, but I do you and Cheney's composer, who actually won a Pulitzer Prize for this one organization. is absolutely key, so today I'm going to show you two things: I'm going to show you the

template

I made for mixing in the box, of course, and then I'm going to open a great band session. I think you'll enjoy that if you're here on this panel, even if you don't know the band, so the path, the

template

that I'm going to show you is something that I've created over the last 10 years. years since I started mixing in the box, I'm very proud of this jig because there's a lot going on and it allows me to start a mix at any time and know that I can get anywhere I need to with that mix regardless. what questions or requests come from the artist, so my template is 5.1 ready, it's stem ready, it's ready for anything the client might ask and I have a lot of inactive things in it and I just activate them like I go, but the Having everything ready puts me in a position to be ready for whatever I need to do and puts me in a position to be versatile and flexible while keeping all my things organized, which is why this is my template here.

The reason I have a 4.3 is because I've been working on this for 10 years. Every time I make an adjustment, I make a new version so if I need to go back to a previous template or something. What I'm doing in my current template is not working. I still have that option, so when I get a mix from clients, the first thing I do is if it comes from a professional to produce a frequent session, obviously, I don't need to do much. but if it's a logic session, the first thing I do is use this software called stereo mono Iser, which I recommend you use because many people who use logic and send me their tracks will send me stereo tracks of everything even if it's a bass drum. mono and that's a software that will allow you to just drag all those tracks in here, it will check the phase and the stereo image of the files and depending on the settings, it will spit mono out of everything if it's a mono track. and it will keep its terry, of course, if it's a stereo track.

I'll show you later, we'll log in and I'll show you my process for doing it, but I'll start with the template. I'm going to open that up and show you what I do, so this is my template. I'll make it smaller so you can see all the clues. You basically have

your

usual type of what would be your groups or VCA on a session or on a mixer and then you have a couple of additional things which are this VCA print and this PCB CA print is basically a Visia, you guys are familiar with DCA . I guess if they're not CAS, they're a form. so you can control multiple tracks in Pro Tools without having to adjust the volume of all those tracks individually or even as a group, so you can have a group assign a BCA to a group and then you can change the volume of everything by the reason It's called a print because that's going to be the level that I'm going to send to the final mix for the final print and the reason why that's important is because the final print has some degree of compression and I want to make sure that I don't push the compressor. too hard or that I push it hard enough, so to speak, the PC is my BCA for parallel compression, and when I do that, I don't do it all the time and then like I said, these are all the tracks, there is a signal track which is for when I use sine waves to fatten up the kick drums, something I do often but not always, and then there are the reverb returns for the drums, the reverb returns for the instruments, the vocals, the choruses, the delay returns , the effects buses and then there are these three final trees for the final tracks, which are basically two Traxxas arcs and two tracks that I also print into my mix.

Now the important thing about this and why I do this is because there will always be a mix that is a reference which is what I sent to the clients and then there is a mix that I sent to the mastering engineers, which has to give them enough headroom and therefore it is much morequiet, so Mack DSP, who sponsors this panel, makes this ML 4000, which is a multiband limiter basically that I use on the final stage and then as you can see, I don't. I don't know if you can see the garbage retention on the - I mean, this is not just a factory default, but what I normally do is start with a threshold of -10 on one and then half on the other and again that it can change and it can also change with the level of the printed VCA, so basically to be clear, all these clues that you see in green are added to these. two buses at the bottom that's why there is Sigma in the name the sign Sigma in Greek is the sign for some and that's why these are for me the buses that add that and that that are printed now let's talk about complements the plugins are of course everyone's favorite tool and as you can see I have a lot of them, they're all inactive because what I do is I start, I import this template into whatever I make them do and then I decide, based on the music, the genre, what the track needs, what to use.

I'm going to have different priam options or, I mean, sorry about the drum reverb. I'm turning on all of these for you, but obviously it would only be one or the other, so I have an avid space, I have a revolver DSP per neck and I have the Abbey Abbey Road Plates waves, so these are three of the reverbs that I use with more frequency for instruments and by the way, less is more, which means I'm a fan of keeping reverb counts to a minimum. I'm not really a fan of using a different reverb for everything sometimes that works, but if I think about things in terms of what it would sound like if I were doing this in the room and if I were doing this in the one room that a lot of my recordings They are still found today.

Like if there was a reverb or two, there wouldn't be like 10 different reverbs, so for the instrumental tracks, which can be saxophones, guitars, whatever, I have my revolvers again with different settings and then for the vocals, I usually start too with a revolver. I'm turning them all on so you can see what's happening on the lead vocal. Some de-essing is always useful, almost always useful. Then there's my delay vocal chain, which isn't actually chained, it's one or the other, but a lot of these plugins are. our plugins that allow you to really focus on what kind of delay you want to do sometimes most of the time I just want to repeat so I don't worry I just use Avid's big delay because if I just want a repeat of a no word, I don't need to go all out, but if I want something full or Spacey, you know, echoboy from soundToys is one of my favorites, this is the one I bought recently and I haven't used it much, but I'm a fan of tape delays, so that's a great wave crystallizer tape delay, it's another thing when you want to have really spatial effects with delays or all that, and then this is a multi delay also from Avid.

The same thing will be here on the backing vocal delay and then ultimately there are my effects channels for effects. These are basically wild cards that I use when I want to have a special effect on something and really my first choice for that is the great Soundtoys effects track, really if a client says to be creative. in this mix or give me some crazy delays or give me some crazy effects, that's my first choice because you really can't go wrong with that, but there are many others that I also use to get some of these assets back again. another company that I really like is called Melba Productions, it's a German company that makes great plugins, editing between stutters, iZotope, one of my favorites for special effects like breakup effects and stuff like that, a bit of an enigma and then my other delay that I like it, I mean, no. delaying the connection what I like is this, you see.

I just turned this on and it starts counting. That's because I want to be honest with my clients, so when my clients ask me to charge them by the hour, I run this, so every time I work on this. session whatever the session is, the countdown will start and I don't know exactly how much time I have spent on this mix this company this plugin is made by a company called Hoffa, also a German company. I use their plugins mainly for mastering when I do mastering, you know, I'm mainly a mixing engineer, but these days I also do some mastering, they have software that allows you to do a DDP master, which is the final stage after mixing and the MLA links 8,000, which is the elder brother.

The ML 4000 is an 8-band multi-band limiter. If I need a little bit, usually the ML 4000 works for me, but if I need a little more control over something, then I use the ML 4000, so that's my basic template. To start a mix with any song I am going to show you the rest of the tracks that are currently inactive so you can see what other possibilities I am reserving these yellow tracks here are the stem tracks so when a client wants Stems then I have this and it is ready so you can send to all these yellow tracks here currently idle and again the stem bus here, all of these are already pre-routed to record only with the s tracks, so the drum stem will only record the output of this drum track to above.

Here it's okay, the way I do it is with the additional sins, so if you look at these additional shipping paths, that's what I'm doing on all my power paths, so it says your battery power because I have this battery bus that goes to this battery power track. and then I'll make all of these active real quick so you can see them. All these tracks called Sigma are doing TV mixes and instrumental mixes so when I'm done with a mix and the client has approved it, I can simply record enable these tracks press record and in one pass do all my roots do all my instrumental mixes do all my acapella mixes do all my TV mixes in one pass I don't need to rerun everything and I need to commit I can just press record and I have everything done at the same time and then these blue tracks at the bottom are my tracks 5-1 ready to go, obviously, this is what you know, you can't really do it in a two-track setup, like we're doing here, but I'm ready for it.

I can make your front, your back, your sub, all from one template. I load this on tracks I don't need, they will remain inactive. I will activate the tracks that I do need and I can do everything. the client wants, I'll show you the eye input output configured for this because like I said before, everything has a reason and I'll check it out. I'll give you a couple of examples of that, for example, I'm one hundred and twenty-eight. buses I need one hundred and twenty-eight buses no, no one in their right mind us, but I'll show you why I have 128 buses when I have a track.

I just made a new track. I'm going to want to send this track to one. of my buses, whether it's a drum bus, if it's a drum track or the percussion bus, if it's a percussion track. Now if you do one hundred and twenty-eight buses in your eyes, I've set them up when you go here, you'll see them all here and the advantage of this is that I can just go to my second page and have all the buses that I've set up for me. If I didn't do the one hundred and twenty-eight tracks I would have to do, I would only see the first of these two. menus and then I would have to go down here and find mine and go back up because I probably went through it until I found my drum bus, that's a trick of why everything has a reason.

I open this. I ignore the one that goes by 128. Only use them if I do other things that are not covered by my template, but my template covers everything I need to do. Here are all my buses, so if the material is the audio track I'm currently working on is a bass. I'll send it to my bass offspring. Sorry bass bus, that also goes to my bass, so everything is constantly plugged in and running. That's an example back to IO. Another thing I've done is use small special characters. To make it easier for me to identify something without having to look at my computer, so I told them about the Sigma symbol for adding things together, but I also used the circled P and the copyright C for my danger compression.

I've used the trademark circles for all my reverb and this little three star symbol that I have no idea what it is, but that's my delay symbol. The reason I do it is because when I'm on the track I often work, you know, you can work with different zoom levels, but I work with small levels. I like it so I don't have to scroll too much between the hundred tracks that I usually say, so let's say this audio track is what I'm currently working on this and I want to send it to a reverb when I send it to one of my reverbs, let's say that it's an instrument and I'll send it to the reverb instrument when the track is small.

All I'm going to see is the R, so I know that's a reverb send, not a delay. If I also send it to a delay, it sends that little star symbol that it had. I see the three little stars so when naming my IO. set up that way I can instantly see if it's reverb or if it's a delay or what other instrument it is if it is if I'm sending is that FX bus I was telling you about then obviously I'll see the first letter effects, but that allows me to add a look, knowing if on that track I have a reverb or I have a delay or something else and what might be the same thing applies to those lead tracks and the parallel compression tracks and the lead tracks and I have this little arrow here at the end of those and these kind of arrows at the beginning of the 5:1 all that translates to being able to see what's going on, and I have the little note symbol at the output, as you can see. means that's an output that will actually make music, everything else is internal, it's digital, it doesn't make music until I see the little symbol that you know I added in the I/O settings and then here again this will make music and it's the sum of all that is just an example of how I use different characters to make my mix readable at a glance another thing I do and you know why I said everything has a reason is to prepare these two tracks the way they are.

You'll see these are the only clues here that I'll hide very quickly so you can see them very well. These are my four main tracks that I also record and as you can see it says NC mix V dot zero. one and the bottom one says C mix V dot zero one the reason I have the dot zr1 is because that will be the first mix I will send to the client when I am happy with it when the client sends me change requests what do I have to do I'm going to save my mix as mix two and on these two tracks I'm going to create a new playlist and this will automatically say V dot zero two so I don't have to rename everything because it's already named correctly by the way NC means uncompressed C means compressed that's just my way of calling things so let's say the call is this song is called song one I'm going to call that song one and I'm going to call that song one so now this and this has two names, song, one uncompressed mix version, one song, one compressed mix version, another when I make a new mix the song title will stay there nothing will change except the version number of my mix and then I can easily export it to an mp3 delivery.

I sent it to the client and everyone will be happy. Any questions about this before continuing. Yes, very good question. The question for those in the back who haven't heard it is how do I handle the reverbs assigned to various instruments, say a drum and a guitar when I run. It's an exception, and to answer your question, I'll have to run them separately, but the reason I set them up that way is because I have a drum-specific reverb, so I'll never put that on. the guitar and then I have an instrument specific reverb that will go into everything else, but the truth of the matter is that I'm not going to add reverb to everything and usually the instrumental reverb that I have set up will probably only be used on guitars or any precautions and if there's an opportunity where I use the same reverb for, say, drums and guitars, then I'll run one or the other again after I've done the final pass, but it usually doesn't happen.

By the way, I also have a reverb stem here when I run the stems, so I can run those reverbs, dry those tracks and also run the reverbs for posterity, yes, everyone, or should I repeat myself, so he was asking, he was asking how to do it. handle levels of mixes that I sent to clients and that I sent to the mastering engineers because I was having problems sending tracks that are too interesting for the mastering engineers and how to handle a correct answer is that these two buses here did the In the first , the two selected tracks will handle my mix going to the mastering engineer, so if I'm using the ML 4000, I'll have this threshold set much lower than on thenext two tracks, which are at least two selected now where my ml 4000 is set to minus 10, so I'm compressing this a lot more.

This is the mix I have and this is the one I captured with a compressed c4. This is the one I'm going to send to the client exactly what I'm sending the client a nice, attractive mix that's going to give them a good idea of ​​what a master mix is ​​going to sound like. It is not intended to replace the master mix, although there have been cases where my clients have gone into math rooms like I like your mix better. I thought about using it. You know it's there. If you like it, you can be the sole judge of that, but generally I do both mixes so the client can hear what it will sound like for two reasons. you have the client who says oh I just put on my iTunes and it doesn't sound as good as the Jay-Z track, you know, that's why I send them the hot track and more importantly, sometimes you'll send your mix to an engine for a mastering engineer what they will do is master and that will really alter the balances of the instruments within your mix, so if you give the client a great mastering preview of what the mix will be like, they will already know how it will look. compresses will be applied to the different instruments in the mix because if you don't hear that, you know the dynamics resulting from an uncompressed mix can give you a different impression of what the mix is.

The iMac really listens to the hot mix because I want to know how the decisions I make in the final stages will play out, and if you noticed. here are two things you may notice, one is that my uncompressed output track is muted and if I even have the volume down, the reason I do that is because sometimes during the mix I find myself muting a bunch of stuff and then mute option and then everything muted, including that track that I don't want to listen to because if I listen to that it adds to this and obviously distorts everything, so as a double safety, I have it muted and I have the level turned down. yes, I mix by monitoring my compressed mix all the time, I'll eventually review it at the end, but the actual decisions I make when monitoring the compressed mix to know how my moves will translate whether I'm mixing at home or in the studio.

I use speakers that I have professionally calibrated and use them with or without a subwoofer. In the studio I have three pairs and at home I have two pairs, one pair has a subwoofer and the other does not, and I make sure that my My decisions are as correct as they can be in an untreated space that is my house, obviously, the studio It is treated very low. The question is how high should I mix. I mix very low for two reasons and obviously I don't want to. to go deaf and B my mixes, I mean, mixes in general will be more, how can I say that the human ear acts as a compressor?

It's the only organism you know, a biological organism that acts like a compressor if you send it too much volume. It will compress what you are listening to. I do not want that. I want to hear my mix uncompressed. I'm already compressing it. I don't need my human ear to compress too much, so if you mix low and I'm not saying I'll never turn up the volume, it's especially important when you're mixing bass because the bass, like the kick drum, you know, you can't feel or hear the bass of the same way as when you have a subwoofer or when you have it turned on. up, so I'll start my mix, do it if it's a drum set, you know, if it's a rock band with drums and bass, etc.

I'll start it loud, get the balance between kick and bass, add the drums at that point. I'll turn it down and stay at that low level for the entire mix, whether it's two hours or ten hours, I'll stay at that lowest level and it's especially important for ear fatigue because if I'm mixing a song for 10 hours my judgment it's going to look cloudy by the 9th hour or the 3rd really if I'm mixing at high volume, so yes of course mix low, you'll hear everything better, you won't change your perception with the compression than your human.

Hearing adds up and you last longer not only that day but in life. Don't know. I honestly don't know if there is a difference between bouncing and printing. I didn't know there was a discussion about that. I guess it sounds the same, so I didn't know if there are different people who think otherwise. I always print for two reasons, number one is I'm going to end up with two down here on this track and on this track I'm going to end up with two. waveforms that will give me visual feedback on whether I'm compressing too much if I start to see everything square, even if it sounds good, that's too much, you don't want to see a block of, you know, square wave waveforms, so I'll change a little bit my threshold, you know, and the other reason I print is because if I'm mixing that 80 minute song that I was showing you earlier in the screenshot and the client wants a change and wants to say it's 75, I don't do it. do.

I don't have to reprint the entire 75, you know, 80 minute runtime. Q I can just print from minute 74 to minute 78 whatever section the client wants a change to and then I can merge, consolidate and I have a finished mix. Now this argument is a little less important today is that you can commit tracks in Pro Tools 12 or when it started, but until Pro Tools came up with that feature with the commit function, you had to reprint everything. in real time and so imagine how many passes of that 80 minute opera that I mixed I had to do how many times I would have had to do it if the client asks me for seven changes eight times seven that's like you know hours and hours just printing mixes So, obviously, if the client wants the full violin in the whole opera and then you have to reprint it anyway, but that's why I print.

Well, I have the multiband limiter set to minus 0.5, so that's my upper limit that I never go to. zero if that answers your question, but in the uncompressed version it doesn't even come close to that being really my safety ceiling. The reason I have minus 0.5 is that I went to this great panel at the last IES in New York. Forgot the guys name but it will, he did a demo of how tracks that are sent at 0 DB mastered at 0 DB will end up on streaming services like Spotify etc. and they will sound worse than tracks that are mastered live or already know the ceiling.

It's minus 0.5 since that panel which was October 2nd. I started putting that as my maximum limit for everything. I'm no longer going to 0 DB if the client wants to go to 0 DB with the master engineer, so you know, that's with them, but I want to make sure that if my mix doesn't get mastered and it goes to iTunes and all that it sounds the best possible so that, hence that, Celie, but to better answer your question, when I open the song, you will see what the two forms of waveforms look like and you will see that in the uncompressed version I don't actually press as much, that the mastering engineer decides and I mainly look at the waveform but I also look at the gain. reduction meter on the ML 4000 or whatever I'm using as my final stage, so on my compressed version this will probably go down to minus 4, but on the uncompressed version I barely want to see it as not.

I want to see the gain reduction at all and the reason I still have it on is to make sure I never go above the zero 5 point, but I'm not really doing much gain reduction on that mix, well this en Why do I have the VCA printed? The first thing I'll do is Alice. Once I import my template into the song I'm mixing, the first thing I'll do is create a whole group that has all the tracks, assign them to this print VCA and then if it hits something too hard, before I even start mixing , I can delete everything and I want to make sure that that way I can always control my gain stage.

At any point, so I don't want to start too much, I usually start at -10 on all the tracks, you know, that way I know I have headroom, if I find myself pushing too much against that headroom, then I'll enable it, you know. I'll use that print VCA to bring everything down a little bit more and something else, since you mentioned I'll show that I have an extra safety net on this other one, inserts F to J, I keep them hidden because I don't use them. many, but if I want the extra sealing of protection on my f2j inserts, I have my favorite compressor, which is a set of active G voice channels, which has a very small two to one ratio, you can see where my mouse is and a threshold of minus six, so basically I'm barely compressing, but those instances that I just multi-enabled are on all my buses drums percussion bass guitars keys strings horns vocals whatever is on the track, by the way, obviously I don't have all the tracks and It's an extra step I take to make sure I never overexert myself on any of these buses individually.

The reason this is also important is because when we finally get to the comments it says drum stems, that's creating a stem, so I want to make sure that that stem doesn't distort on its own, you know, because of that. I also have that extra G channel when I'm making tracks, these tracks are currently inactive here, where all the names have the word PC, that's for parallel compression. I don't do parallel compression all the time, but when I do this I slightly shade. The tracts shaded in light green are already ready for me to do parallel compression, so if I want to enable them, I can activate them.

Let's say I want to enable all of them, but let's say I want to do parallel compression. on the drums I already have this enacted, you'll see in direction 8 to E. I have on all those tracks. I have shipments ready for that again. I want everything ready to go. I don't want to waste time thinking about rile routing, which is why I spent a lot of time on this template over the years, so I want to do some parallel compression on the drums. Brilliant. I'm going to turn on this PC drum track. I'm going to activate this shipment.

Shipping PC battery. this is the amount that I'm sending to the parallel compression bus that's right below and then I choose how to do my parallel compression and again I have a bunch of plugins that I like. I have the Mac TSB Ultimate Chan Ultimate. I think it's called the definitive channel. Then I have this one too from Mac PSP MC 404. I have SoundToys Decapitator, which is great for parallel compression. I really like that I have Ozone 7 and I have the dynamics limiter from that German company. It merges the productions I mentioned. These are all my favorite compressions. plugins that I use only for parallel compression, although my favorite compressor, as you know, for a normal channel is usually the G channel and to that extent I want to show you something else that is really cool, some of you may not know this, but there are two.

The places in the protos where you can set a preferred plugin that you use all the time will appear here, so these are my two plugins that I use the most on any session channel G is my Mac DSP has everything compressor gate EQ Low pass pass so I can do whatever I need to do on any regular track that I do on that and then I really like this final dynamic EQ made by Melda Productions. The reason I like it is hard to demonstrate without audio, but if you had audio, I would see basically how you can choose to view an ultrasound or just an analyzer and you can view that here and then choose which bands you want to compress or excite to what degree you want to compress. and this is an active compressor.

The following ESP also makes one which I just got from them and I'm trying it out but until I use it full time this has been my go to and it's really great because of the visual feedback you get you'll see it in this in this Eliezer , you will see that you will actually see two waveforms, one is the non-waveform, but whatever you call or output from an analyzer, you will see the one before and the one after and you will see how the active equalizer @ you are affecting the way the signal you're sending yeah, well the question is this is all in the box.

If I'm using hardware to track a curve well, first of all, I'll say that when I track. I'm a purist. I'm all for as little signal as possible, as short a signal path as possible, so when I track, I use the preamp. Pro Tools microphone. I don't even go through the console to print, but to print the tracks. I'll check the console for analog summing of all the Pro Tools returns, some summing through the console and if I'm summing through the console, I'll do some EQ on the console as well, but I print as cleanly as I feel.

Record as cleanly as possible so you know I don't make any decisions I might regret later. Yeah, when I'm mixing in the Box, let me open a song and I'll show it to you because it's easier to answer. these questions I'm going to open this song twice because we're running out of time, but I want to show you the two versions that were sent to me. This is the version. You know, this is basically what the band sent me before I did anything. And the reason I open this is to answer the question from the gentleman over there.

If it's like I said, I'll use a stereo mono Iser if it's a session if it's based on logic, but if it's tracksthat I. They sent me like this, the first thing I do is look at what the band, the group, the artist is, do they have plugins in the proto session, do they have inserts, do they have volume moves that have mute automation, something like that. Sometimes I've been in open sessions where you know there was something they didn't want and they didn't shadow it, they just did muted automation and then I mix with something they didn't want you sent us.

For me it's like yeah but it was badder and I looked at the tracks and it's not muted but it has some weird mutilation so the first thing I do is I look, I scroll through the volume, I do that and I'll make my waveform like smallest possible so that if there is volume automation of any kind, I know it's there. I will look at the silence. I'll look at the panoramas after looking at all that, assuming all those lines are direct to answer your question. I know. the band hasn't done anything they want me to keep.

If I see some volume automation, I will judge whether it is a volume automation that I want to keep or not and why I want to keep it because if it is just volume automation, for example, to make the guitar solo louder, I will redo it myself, but If it's some kind of weird special effects automation that the artist is really attached to, I'll ask you to do it exactly the way you've done it. either you stick to it or you're open to other things, but not if they say they're stuck. Then I'll know that when I import mice, my template is the only track I don't want to mess with the volume for.

Once this is done, I do everything I said all dead end and once I say once done, I mean once I see that there is no automation of any kind that I should keep and if there is, I will make sure to keep it. I'll set all my exits and entrances to no entry or exit, that way I can start over. then I'll click on the math clue. The reason I do this is because when I import my template it will go there after that track. I click on import session data and I'll click on that option.

All of this imports all of these tracks and that's when I can really start mixing now, of course, I saved my template so that it has all of those plugins active, but the point is that when I open it, it will start with everything inactive with these yellow tracks hidden. it's my tracks, you know, I saved the template which I shouldn't have, but it's okay, I have black backups for everything, but the point is I was only seeing the green tracks appear and my... and my 2 bus tracks appear , this is kind of what I would see with all the plugins inactive and then I can start mixing.

What I can do is select all the batteries. I go here, I look at my drums and I can start working on things, okay, so this is it. now the same mix so I'm going to open after them. I have done all that. This is a gang called orc. Then I'll play. I'll play the track first. You guys can rock and then we can. We'll talk about the questions you have. The band is called Orc. They are a great band. If you don't know, you should check his past. It's Pat Mastelotto from King King Crimson on drums calling out Edwin from Porcupine Tree on bass.

This guitarist called. Carmelo pbut one where he plays with a band called Marcus, we are quite popular in Italy there. I don't blame you for not knowing them here in the United States and the singer's name is called, stays or Lawrence is positive for Nazari. and he played in a band called Ibaka so the four of them got together this is their second album it came out two months ago the song is called dirty rain the album is called soul of an octopus it came out on a British label called rare noise and it's a really good band tree of justice all my dreams have been covered my soul one - soul bwong Stingo this man stripped him Walter - real was steamed his mother's drain why is this so, so first thank you, you should see this record because It's a really great record, so the first thing I did, or at least on this track, when I mixed the drums, was make sure they were in phase so that there wouldn't be any kind of faith cancellation.

For that I use this plugin called M auto-align made by Melba Productions it's a great plugin, there are a couple of plugins that do this so I have this plugin on all the tracks and then I have my trusty G channel on all the tracks doing the What I need. do on all these separate tracks of this drums, this is one of the rare no, I don't want to say rare cases, but these days I record most of the material that I mix because I work in this beautiful studio in downtown New York called The East Side sound, this is an example where I didn't record the tracks.

I think Pat from King Crimson recorded the drums in his home studio because he lives in Austin and the bassist lives in the UK and the other two live in Italy, so it's definitely one of those projects that came up, you know, I I joined across the ocean, so when I'm not recording anything myself, which is the point I'm trying to get across, I'm even more careful and make sure things are oriented cohesively and aligned. because when I record on myself, I know I'm going to take precautions to make sure everything is in phase, this is the drum and you'll see I've got a little bit of reverb on the snare and a little bit of reverb. on the hi-hat and I have this sine wave on the kick drum and on the floor tom and that's really all there is other than of course the EQ that I did through the G channel on the different sections of the drums that I'm a big fan of muting toms with sidechain sidechain to make sure you're muting based on frequency and not just level so you don't miss hits and that's why it looks like this.

It looks a little strange because it looks like I'm cutting all the treble and around 150, which is obviously not true. It's just a sidechain filter for the gate. There's a bit of electronics on this track. There are bass. There is a bass delay at the beginning that they printed. because they were happy with that, that's just the intro in the middle part, a bunch of guitar tracks, less is more, like I said at the beginning, as you can see minimal automation, the busier automation you see on this one is just a sent reverb. to make sure that or the delay feel to make sure that I'm hearing the delays on the words that I want to hear repeated and not just on everything, but other than that, it's minimal, there's a little bit of automation. here for those who are lucky enough to be sitting in the middle, you will hear it, the rest of you, bad luck, that's just yours, you know, when the organ solo and the organist start there is a little slide that really goes from left to right in your in your mix, which are things like that, you know the taste, but no, I'm trying not to exaggerate anything, so now that the session is open, you have discussed.

I think all the accessories I have used are wonderful, thank you very much for walking. us through your process