Andrew Scheps is one of the top mixing engineers in the world today. He earned his stripes - and Grammys - by mixing hit records for everyone from Adele to The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Jay-Z to Michael Jackson. For this video, Andrew was kind enough to let pureMix.net observe his in-the-box process while he recreated his mix of the song 'Fly Rasta' by the amazing Ziggy Marley from the eponymous album 'Fly Rasta' on Tuff Gong records.
In this 2+ hour master class, Andrew Scheps mixes the very same Pro Tools session he mixed for the actual released record. Watch as he leads you through to a final mix, all with readily available plugins, explaining every move and every decision, and leaving no stones unturned. If you ever wondered what tricks and techniques are required to make records that sound that great, this tutorial is what you have been waiting for.
This is a major mixing engineer mixing a major song for a major artist on a major label, right in front of your eyes, with full transparency. You will get to download the truncated stems of all the tracks and mix along with Andrew in your own DAW, with your own system and with your own plug-ins.
Parts of this site and some files are only accessible to pureMix Pro Members or available to purchase. Please see below our membership plans or add this video to your shopping cart.
00:00:08 Good morning children! Welcome to Punkerpad West
West in Van Nuys, California. I'm Andrew Scheps.
00:00:13 Today we're going to be mixing a song
by Ziggy Marley called Fly Rasta.
00:00:18 I mixed this for his latest album
also conveniently called Fly Rasta.
00:00:22 So that should make it easy to
find it for you.
00:00:24 And today we are going to be
mixing this song
completely in the box, as the
kids say these days.
00:00:31 We are gonna be mixing in Pro Tools
and we will not be using
any analog gear at all.
00:00:36 The first time it will be turned
into analog audio
from this process is when
you listen to it.
00:00:42 So it should be a fun
and exciting day
and the other thing is what
we've decided to do
is not to deconstruct the mix
I already done
but actually attempt to reconstruct
the mix that I did for the record
so I'm starting with the completely
bare-boned session that I was sent.
00:00:59 Very clean session,
few plug-ins in it.
00:01:03 Then I'll be going through
my entire mix process
both from a mixing perspective
and also just from a listening
and philosophical perspective.
00:01:13 Because that's a huge part of
my mixing
is how things feel and decisions not based
on the sonics necessarily
but based on the emotion that happens
while your are listening.
00:01:23 And then there will also gonna be a few
things we're gonna deal with
which are very specific to the genre.
00:01:30 Ziggy Marley obviously works in
a wide variety of styles
and there's always a reggae element
due to its heritage.
00:01:35 But he can be more in the straight
up pop style or fall back into reggae.
00:01:42 This song is definitely rooted in
the reggae tradition
which is why when I first heard it
I was absolutely terrified.
00:01:49 I feel like I can work in the pop
world and I know what's going on.
00:01:53 The reggae world as much, as I love
listening to it
is not a place I've done a lot work
and...
00:02:00 It's interesting, it's a big weight to
put on your own shoulders,
to go into this amazing musical tradition
and really try to do something new in it
but also be faithful to what
is going on.
00:02:10 It kind of gives you some extra
parameters to work in,
which is exciting and constricting
in a good way, but also completely terrifying.
00:02:19 So I'm gonna play you a little bit
of the song as they sent it and...
00:02:22 you will hear perhaps why I
was so frightened.
00:02:49 So not only is it reggae and
not only is it Ziggy Marley,
the son of Bob Marley.
00:02:54 There are background vocals
by the daughters of Bob Marley
and you may notice the very first
thing you hear it's not even a Marley,
it's U Roy who, if you don't know
he is you need to...
00:03:04 go to Wikipedia right about now.
00:03:06 He is basically one of the inventors
of something called toasting
which is a Jamaican form of
MC and rapping all tied up in one
and he is and absolute legend.
00:03:18 So, that's why I was frightened.
00:03:20 But now I've gotten over my fear and
we're gonna go ahead and mix this song.
00:03:25 The very first thing we're
gonna do is to transform
the session from looking like a bunch
of gray and black audio tracks
into something that is more
workable for me.
00:03:34 One of the main things I like to
do while I'm working
is to have things look familiar.
00:03:39 So one of the main ways I do that
is with color coding.
00:03:42 It's really simple, it's something I've been
doing since colored sharpies were invented.
00:03:46 So, most of my career.
00:03:47 Certain instruments get certain colors
and that way, at a glance, when I'm
looking at the session
I know what I'm looking at instead
of having to read track names
and do anything that could distract me
from what it is I'm trying to do.
00:03:59 So the first thing we're gonna do
is arrange the tracks,
put the colors that I like,
and I guess we will just
start right in.
00:04:06 So the very first thing I see
is there's a click track,
well, I'm not gonna mix the click.
00:04:10 I'm gonna hide that guy.
00:04:12 I like my vocals down at the bottom
of the screen because...
00:04:17 then they're down near the mix
later on.
00:04:20 So we're gonna move those down.
You can see lots of tracks flying by
and we'll talk about all
of them as we go.
00:04:25 I'll jump back up to the top here...
00:04:28 Background Vocals, I should have
dragged those down
with lead vocals.
00:04:36 Let's see. Do we want them above
or below the lead vocal? Below.
00:04:41 Why not?
OK, Drums. That's what's supposed to
be on the top.
00:04:46 Looking really quickly I can see that
we've got one drum kit here
and then we've got a drum overdub.
00:04:55 I don't know what that is yet
but at the moment I'm not gonna
color it anything different
because I really don't care.
00:05:01 We're gonna pretend that's
all one thing.
00:05:03 So, for me, in sharpie, drums
are black.
00:05:07 In Pro Tools they are this dark purple,
because it's in the bottom left hand corner.
00:05:11 It's really easy to find.
00:05:12 And black is for things that
don't get a color.
00:05:15 So, that's the way I see it.
00:05:17 Moving down, we've got something
called 'Lightning'.
00:05:22 So, normally while I'm doing this,
by the way
I'm cycling the song, because...
00:05:27 We'll talk about this more in
depth in a minute
but I actually love hearing
the rough mix,
and in this case the session was sent
with everything routed to one stereo bus
and that's what they were
using for the rough mix.
00:05:40 I absolutely wanna hear why they
thought the record was ready to be mixed.
00:05:45 And the only key to that is
to listen to the rough mix.
00:05:48 Sometimes you listen and you realize
they wanted to mix because
they were just sick of working
on the song,
but with most people who make
records more than once,
they're done because they think
the song feels great
the arrangement is perfect, all the
overdubs are done,
and the performance is amazing.
00:06:06 So, I need to get a sense of that
out of the rough mix.
00:06:09 I would have this playing.
00:06:10 If I did that you wouldn't hear
me speak.
00:06:11 So let's pretend the mix is playing
in the background.
00:06:14 I would actually just move over here,
solo the 'Lightning'...
00:06:19 Say: "Hey, it's lighting".
00:06:20 Alright, that's a sound effect,
there is no color for 'Lightning'.
00:06:24 For now let's make the lightning
this purple.
00:06:28 I don't know why. But that's
something to do.
00:06:31 So again, the song would be
cycling. Here we've got a lot of percussion.
00:06:35 With a lot of edits.
One of the reasons
I didn't wanna start
completely from scratch is
while we were working on
the song
this percussion arrangement
took shape.
00:06:45 When I first received the song,
all of these percussion instruments
went all the way through the song,
with the idea that once we sort of
built the track we'd decide
what we needed to use. I'm starting
with the final arrangement of the percussion.
00:06:57 But sonically, I've striped it all back.
So, let's see.
00:07:00 There's quite a bit of percussion,
actually.
00:07:02 All the way down to here, and
I keep hitting the wrong key here.
00:07:07 Here's a percussion, percussion
is brown.
00:07:09 That should be obvious
to everybody.
00:07:12 If you don't know why, I can't
explain it. It's too complicated.
00:07:16 There's really absolutely no
reason for it.
00:07:18 Other that it was a color
sharpie that I had laying around.
00:07:21 And I was coloring the console.
00:07:23 Then we've got a bunch of brass
and there's actually some very
interesting stuff
that we will deal with it
later to do with the brass.
00:07:30 All live horns recorded in a great
sounding room
which we will listen to
separately later.
00:07:35 Live instruments, because most
of what I work on has a live rhythm section
those are very set color for drums,
bass, guitars, piano, that kind of thing.
00:07:43 Then sometimes there's string
overdubs or horn overdubs, whatever.
00:07:46 So there's this sort of range of
red to purple. That's too bright.
00:07:50 I don't like that.
00:07:51 Those look like horns to me now.
Really simple.
00:07:54 Easy to deal with.
00:07:55 Bass is blue. I don't need to even
talk about that anymore.
00:07:59 Guitars are green. Obviously.
00:08:04 And on this particular song I probably
just leave everything green.
00:08:10 Because there aren't that
many guitars.
00:08:12 If I'm working on a song that
has a lot of guitars
then I'll start to use variations
in the green, because again...
00:08:17 It's not just because I'm crazy,
though I am.
00:08:21 It's because I want to be able
to glance at the screen
and know what's going on.
00:08:26 Not say: "Oh, that's one of the
fifty green tracks. Which one is it?"
Generally I will shade my guitars
from heavy being the darkest green
to the cleanest guitar all the way up to
acoustic being the lightest green.
00:08:40 In this case, we only have two
guitars, and as you can see
one of them ended up not
being used at all.
00:08:45 We'll just go with one green there.
00:08:47 Then we've got some keyboards. And
again we don't have a huge number of keyboards
so I'm just gonna give them all
this dark purple. Which is kind of
the same as the 'Lighting' but
that's fine.
00:08:58 I'm not gonna get confused
between the lightning and the keyboards.
00:09:00 So I'm OK with that.
00:09:02 Now we are down to our
lead vocals,
and due to some people who I have
worked with it, who have an aversion
to red sharpie. It's bad luck to use
red sharpie on a console.
00:09:11 I strangely got into the point where
I can't use this bright red color anymore
It's bad luck.
00:09:18 Therefore, lead vocals are orange,
and background vocals are
some, one of this orange or
yellows.
00:09:28 This really depends on how many
sets of background vocals they are.
00:09:32 I want things that go together
to have the same color
but then I want differing groups
of the same thing
to have slightly different shades
of the same color.
00:09:41 So just like with the guitars.
If we had let's say,
two sets of background parts.
Each of them being made up by 4 to 7 tracks,
then each sort of group of tracks
that made up one vocal part
would have it's own shade of
the same color.
00:09:57 That's looking a little brown to me,
so there we go.
00:10:00 They're background colors.
At the bottom of the session is
just a print track. So right now,
it's just getting Bus 47 or 48
which is what every single track in the
session is routed to.
00:10:12 This is pretty much OK, normally
I would put the bass guitars
and keyboards up above
the horns.
00:10:25 Because that sort of keeps
my traditional rhythm section together.
00:10:28 Now that I've got everything color
coded in a familiar way
that's gonna work for me later on,
we're gonna move on to the next part
of the session prep and this next
part is very particular to mixing in the box.
00:10:42 I have something here called
Ziggy's template. Open this up.
00:10:46 You noticed as we scroll through,
it's all VCAs and Auxes.
00:10:51 What I'm gonna do is import
everything.
00:10:55 And import everything
about it. Here we go.
00:11:02 All this tracks are at the bottom
of my session, some of them
are actually gonna stay there but
we are gonna sprinkle this
within the session next to the
tracks that are either more
strongly associated with it, or
that are only used with it.
00:11:13 And as you'll see, there are
very few things that I do
only to one individual instrument.
00:11:19 That will become much more
apparent later
as we start to talk more about
the parallel compression chains
and FX chains that I use.
00:11:26 Starting from the top of what
I brought in
there's something called Toms,
then Tom verb, Kick Snare crush, Snare verb
Drums, because this is a VCA.
Drum Crush.
00:11:39 And that's all drum stuff. I'm gonna
drag this up
to the bottom of the drum kit
because for me also in my head
audio falls down. So all of
my audio goes to the bottom of the session
which is why I print my mix at
the bottom. I know its crazy
because audio doesn't flow
down hill. In my head it does.
00:11:59 We're spending the next several
minutes inside my head.
00:12:03 The tracks that I'm importing are
either Aux faders which are
going to process audio, collect
audio from sends from all over the session
or they're also VCAs which are a
special kind of fader in Pro Tools
which does not pass any audio of itself
what it does is it allows you
to collectively adjust the audio
for all of the faders in a group,
but slightly different then doing it
by just grabbing some of the faders
within the group themselves.
00:12:31 It's almost like having a
global trim
for anything within the group
that you assign the VCA to.
00:12:38 The other thing that it does and
the reason I use it
is it also has some very special
behavior when you are soloing
and you're gonna see why that's
really important.
00:12:46 The other thing is, I've just found
that I don't like cascading
all of this tracks through lots
and lots of extra Buses and Auxes,
I want the simplest signal path
through the mixer as possible.
00:12:59 Being it a digital mixer it's not like
you're adding lots of extra
analog amplifiers and transformers
and things that color the sound necessarily,
but you are adding to the complexity
of the delay compensation within the mixer,
because your are creating more
paths to the monitor path.
00:13:14 And also, and this have been fixed
since I started doing this
but also there used to be some
very odd bugs that would
only crop up every once in
a while
due to audio taking many
paths to the monitor output
and I just got out of the
habit of doing it
and it works for me now.
00:13:30 It actually keeps the mixer very
simple which later on
once the mix has most of
its processing in
and the delay builds up within the mix,
it actually keeps the delay down
so that you're not trying to do
a fader ride a second before
the audio actually happens.
00:13:46 I think we're kind of running
out of things I can do
without actually playing audio.
Just to quickly recap,
I've color coded everything,
because I'm crazy that way.
00:13:56 I have imported lots of things
from my template,
most of which are either Auxes with
things we're gonna use for
parallel compression later on,
there are a couple of effects,
there are few times when I'm
running instruments through
Auxes on their way to the mix bus,
but most of the tracks
are gonna be going straight
to the mix bus
even though I haven't assigned
that yet.
00:14:14 Then finally my mix bus goes
through something I call a router
because it routes audio from
one place to another
which has a master fader on it
so I can affect level
going to the plug-ins that are
on my stereo 2-bus.
00:14:29 One thing that you might be wondering
is why am I bothering with the master fader
which I can put inserts on
and then also running to an Aux fader
and then going through the
Aux and printing out of it.
00:14:42 The main reason is because...
There are actually quite a few reasons.
00:14:49 Two main reasons for doing it
this way is that my stereo Aux
with the plug-ins on it, evolved while I
was mixing in more of a hybrid fashion
so I had audio coming in from the
outside world to hit this plug-ins.
00:15:01 And then when I start moving
into the box
I love the way how master
faders allow you to almost
redo your gain structure
after the fact
and in a really simple way.
00:15:10 One main difference between
Master Faders and Aux Faders
is on every type of fader except the
Master in Pro Tools
all of the plug-ins are pre-fader.
00:15:19 Changing the level of the fader doesn't
change the level going into the plug-ins.
00:15:24 I, personally, from being someone who
grow up on analog recording,
the idea of post fader inserts is
crazy to me.
00:15:34 It doesn't make a
whole lot of sense.
00:15:36 So what I really wanted to do is
completely separate the gain structure idea
from the processing idea.
00:15:44 The other thing that it allows me to do,
and I didn't do it on this particular track,
but there are quite a few songs
where one of the easiest things
you can do is called the
slippery fader.
00:15:52 We'll actually turn the mix up half a dB
in the chorus, and then
you turn it back down whether you
come back down slowly
or right at the down, but in the
verse you come back down.
00:16:00 If I was doing that sort of automation
I can do that on my Aux fader
where zero is my loudest
part of the mix
and everything else comes down
from there in big chunks.
00:16:11 I can still go back and just grab
my Master fader anytime I want
and bring the mix up and down
to affect how it hits my stereo bus
and fix any problems that I may
have created as I'm working
on the song over the course of time.
00:16:24 It really separates those two functions
to use the Master and the Aux
even though I can probably
figure out a way to combine them
I just don't want to.
00:16:32 What we are going to do is
go back through the session
and make sure that the groups
are assigned properly
so that my VCAs are going to work.
00:16:40 I'm gonna quickly enable groups,
I've selected all of my drum tracks
and I noticed there is a group here
that is already assigned but
sometimes I have to
make new groups because they've added
overdubs or done some editing.
00:16:53 Sometimes they already have a group
that will work
so I'm always willing to
reuse a group.
00:16:58 It turns out that this group which
is called Steve
Steve Drums, that's my Drum group.
00:17:04 This VCA, because it was imported from
the mix template,
is already assigned to Steve Drums,
which is great,
so I can mute it and you can see,
the drums are soft muting
I can solo it, none of the drums mute,
everything else in the session
soft mutes so I know that VCA
is working.
00:17:21 The Lightning does not have a
VCA and probably
because it's just a sound effect
and it only happens once in the song,
I'm not gonna bother with
the VCA for this.
00:17:30 It's very seldom that I don't have
a VCA for every track in the session.
00:17:34 Since I said that we're gonna go
ahead and make one.
00:17:39 Let me make a group for
Lightning.
00:17:41 Let me make a new VCA.
00:17:45 And samples, why not?
I will assign that to my
new group... Lightning.
00:17:53 And most importantly, I'm going
to name it. Did I spell that right?
I don't even know.
00:18:00 Even more importantly I'm gonna
color code it.
00:18:02 VCAs are bright yellow otherwise
you can't find them. They hide.
00:18:07 Make sure this is working. Great.
00:18:10 Percussion, I have my two Auxes
and I haven't actually started
assigning any of the outputs yet.
But I do not have a percussion VCA.
00:18:18 Again, let me check out the percussion
and see if there is a group for all of it.
00:18:23 There isn't, otherwise I would see
a solid black circle over here.
00:18:26 Actually we've got more down here.
Hold on.
00:18:31 Maybe we're gonna get a solid
black circle.
00:18:34 Nope.
00:18:35 I'm gonna make a group.
Call it Perc.
00:18:39 Then we're gonna make a VCA.
Call it Perc.
00:18:45 Assign it to the proper group.
00:18:50 So exciting.
00:18:52 Make it yellow, because otherwise
it won't work properly.
00:18:57 Fantastic.
00:18:58 Bass. That already came up well.
There's already a group made for that.
00:19:03 Guitars I believe I should
have imported.
00:19:07 They did not.
00:19:08 Right now they are controlling
a group called Rhythm Guitar
which happens to be just one
of the two guitars
and as it turns out, the guitar
that we didn't use.
00:19:16 So I'm gonna make a new group
and call it Guitars.
00:19:19 Reassign this guy to Guitars.
00:19:24 We have keys, that's already
assigned properly.
00:19:28 Horns. We do have several sets
of horns, but...
00:19:33 that I'm only gonna split them up
for the audio routing
I'm not going to split them up
for any other purpose.
00:19:39 And I have one VCA for all
the horns which...
00:19:42 does not look like is assigned
properly.
00:19:44 Let me select all my horn tracks.
00:19:47 You may have noticed that I'm
selecting tracks by just
dragging around on the edit window.
00:19:51 That is this fantastic function which
ties the edit selection
to the track selection.
00:19:58 I love it, I use it all the time.
00:20:01 If you don't know about it,
it is this little button up here
which I'm turning on and off.
00:20:07 It just makes it really quick for me
because it's a lot quicker
to just drag a rectangle in
the edit window
than it is to click on one track,
scroll up,
find the shift key without looking
and click on another track.
00:20:18 Anyway, that's why I'm doing it.
00:20:20 I selected all the horns. Look at that.
I see a group.
00:20:24 Called Horns Aud.
00:20:27 Apparently that's Horns Audition.
00:20:29 I'm going to assign...
00:20:31 my Horn VCA...
00:20:33 And it's actually kind of
important...
00:20:35 Well, it doesn't matter. You could
probably just make new groups,
that would be exactly the same
as some old groups,
but I don't like having extraneous
irrelevant things in a session.
00:20:45 I'll only make groups that I need.
00:20:47 And also I'll know that they're
ones that I made
because they are at the bottom of the list
and are only being used for the VCAs.
00:20:54 They don't have anything to do with
the groups that whoever was tracking
were making along the way,
which are much more to do with either
something directly to do with mixing
or editing...
00:21:04 or it can sometimes be a great forensic
way to find out when things were recorded.
00:21:08 Generally there will be something
called edit group,
and that's all your basic tracks.
And you actually know
who is playing live, who is an
overdub...
00:21:15 And that kind of explains weird
anomalies
and let you figure out
if the bleeding you're hearing is
actually the same performance
as the thing that's in the session.
00:21:23 Really quickly, we've got lead vocal.
00:21:27 You might think you don't need
a VCA for the lead vocal.
00:21:30 And I would say that might turn
out to be true
but I'm gonna go ahead and make
one anyway.
00:21:36 Because I wanna a quick way
to turn things on and off...
00:21:39 and it turns out,
there already is one.
00:21:41 Good, I don't need to make a VCA.
00:21:46 It's called LV...
00:21:49 Yellow.
00:21:52 And then background vocals
exactly the same thing.
00:21:56 There should already be a group.
00:21:57 Yeah, BGVs.
00:22:06 BGVS, and again we will name this.
00:22:10 BGVs. I'll just use the
same terminology.
00:22:12 Background vocals are one of the
enigmas of working on songs.
00:22:16 They can be called 'BGVs', 'BVs'.
There are a couple of other terms I've heard.
00:22:21 The weird thing is there are people
who will not have any idea
of what you're talking about
if you say BGs.
00:22:27 They think you're just talking
about the group from the 70s and 80s.
00:22:29 When in fact you just
mean backgrounds.
00:22:31 But that doesn't make sense
to people who call them BVs.
00:22:34 I have no idea why.
00:22:37 I'm just gonna group U Roy and...
00:22:39 Ziggy's together as a Lead Vocal
because this VCA
is not really gonna be about
riding the vocal
or a real mix aspect,
it's really just for the
muting capabilities.
00:22:50 Alright, I think we finally have a
session where we can listen to something.
00:22:54 Now we finished stage one of
organizing a session,
which is the color coding
so I can find things quickly
and also importing from my template.
00:23:02 The next thing we're gonna do is
make sure that every single track
in the session
is part of some VCA group.
00:23:09 Generally this groups will be large
but I will have every single track under a VCA,
because that will allow me very quickly
later on to move with groups of instruments
and try out different arrangement ideas.
00:23:20 And work on small subsets of the tracks.
00:23:23 Now it's time to start
listening to things
so the first thing I'm gonna do
is just bypass all the plug-ins
on my Stereo Mix bus
so that I'm starting from
pretty much the same place
their rough balance was.
00:23:35 The reason I do that is,
one just to get a handle on
how the tracks are
sounding with my routing
but also to make sure that I've
actually routed everything properly
and I don't have some
weird delay now
because that can happen as you
reroute everything in the session.
00:23:49 Things can disappear, and I don't
want it to sound very different for right now.
00:23:53 I'm going to hit play and go through
and start muting VCAs
making sure the VCAs are controlling
the right things by soloing them up
and then get down to the point
where all we are listening to is Drums,
and then we are gonna start mixing.
00:24:14 We will get to that conga.
00:24:33 Alright.
00:24:35 I'd like to point out... there's a lot
of talk about monitoring
and what level you should work at.
00:24:41 First of all, monitoring is the
most important part of mixing,
if you can't hear, you can't mix.
00:24:46 Make sure that whatever it is that
you’re mixing on is something that
will tell you what's going on in
terms of having
some sort of frequency response
and you are in a room where you
are not listening to the room
you're listening to your speakers.
00:24:58 The other thing is pay attention
to how loud and for how long you listen.
00:25:03 Personally, I either listen really
loud or really quietly.
00:25:08 At the beginning of
working on a mix
I listen really loud because...
00:25:11 first of all...
00:25:12 It helps me be able to hear
things
specially when I'm listening
to individual tracks.
00:25:15 I'm not guessing at the impact of
the kick or the snare.
00:25:18 It's does it thump me in the chest
or hit me in the head.
00:25:22 The other thing is I really get a sense
for how it feels when it's loud.
00:25:27 Once I have the sound of the
instruments together
then I tend to work very quietly because
you can really only judge
balance quietly
because your ears will start to
shut down
trying to protect themselves
from yourself.
00:25:40 You can't really make any subtle
decisions while things are loud
so then I work very quietly.
00:25:45 Medium volume to me is
almost useless.
00:25:48 Which is sad because if I could
always work at sort of prescribed
eighty something dB I could
work all day,
never touch my monitor pot.
00:25:57 But that's not the way it works.
00:25:59 The only part of the Neve we're
using today is...
00:26:02 the monitor pot.
00:26:03 The Neve has a stepped monitor pot.
00:26:09 A nice click.
00:26:11 This is because they use discrete
resistors instead of a potentiometer.
00:26:16 But it also means that I've got
positions that are familiar to me.
00:26:19 If you don't have a stepped pot,
which 99% of you won't,
I would actually recommend marking
a couple of levels on your monitor pot.
00:26:26 That way, you actually set yourself up
a reference that you can use while mixing.
00:26:32 My two reference levels are one click
up from being off completely
and really loud.
00:26:39 I'm gonna start off really loud
and we're just gonna go through.
00:26:44 I'm gonna solo up the
drum tracks and normally
I'll sort of cycle through, and
solo, and listen, and unsolo.
00:26:51 I'm gonna do things but I've been
told I really shouldn't talk
while the music is playing.
00:26:56 I'm gonna go through and solo
so you can have a listen
then I'm gonna start doing things
and talk about them.
00:27:02 The very first thing I'm gonna do is,
there are a few plug-ins
left in this session.
00:27:06 This session is actually
very light on plug-ins
compared to a lot of sessions I get.
00:27:10 90% of the plug-ins in this session
are the ones that I've imported.
00:27:13 But there are some plug-ins in here
and I wanna hear what they are.
00:27:18 I'm gonna solo up each of the
tracks individually
or in groups like with the kick drum,
I've got three different microphones,
I'm gonna solo them in groups,
and by themselves, to get and
idea of how they interact
and start making decisions
about what I'm gonna use
and what I'm not gonna use.
00:27:33 Looking at this snare top mic,
there is a gate on it.
00:27:38 Normally I would bypass a gate
that's on drums.
00:27:41 I like drums to be
natural and open.
00:27:43 But I've also read the comments
in this session
and Kick track says "note i liked gating".
00:27:49 I don't know who I is
in this context.
00:27:52 But Ziggy's does a lot of
the overdubs himself
and I could well have been
Ziggy's himself
and if not it's certainly someone
involved in the project.
00:27:59 So now I'm much more
opened to listening to it.
00:28:01 Here is the snare track
with the gate on.
00:28:09 And here is with it off.
00:28:17 While to me that snare sounds
unnatural being gated so tightly
what I'm noticing almost
immediately is that...
00:28:23 this is probably less about the
sound and much more about the pattern.
00:28:27 There are a lot of ghost notes
in the way Steve is playing the drum part,
I'm assuming this is Steve Ferrone
on this track.
00:28:33 They are trying to tighten up
the kick snare interaction
within the beat.
00:28:39 So now I'm gonna listen in context
and see if...
00:28:42 having the snared
gated is bugging me.
00:28:45 If it is then I'll back off on
the range of the expander
so that it will still be gating
but not quite as much.
00:28:51 And if it isn't bugging then
I'm just gonna leave it
because that's what they
are going for and...
00:28:55 I'm a fan of having stuff
done for me.
00:28:57 Let's see how it sounds with
and without the gate in the track.
00:29:01 This is with the gate.
00:29:06 Here's without.
00:29:13 It's kind of a subtle difference but
I'm gonna go ahead and leave it in.
00:29:16 Because why not?
They also had and EQ
on the snare top.
00:29:20 Looks like they are just
adding some body.
00:29:22 Whenever there are plug-ins in
the session
I listen to try and figure out
why they're there
and then I just decide whether
I like it or not.
00:29:29 And I really try and treat it
as if...
00:29:32 the track were recorded
that way already.
00:29:34 I don't treat it as:
"Oh, I see what they are going for...
00:29:37 now I'll do it slightly differently".
00:29:39 I either keep it or
I get rid of it.
00:29:41 And that's kind of it with
stuff that comes in on a session.
00:29:44 Here is the snare drum with
their EQ that they gave me.
00:29:51 Here's without.
00:29:58 It's kind of a subtle change...
00:29:59 it's really more about the body
of the snare
sort of the bottom that comes
along with the attack.
00:30:04 You get the crack on top and then
the body is that lower mid-range area
where they are boosting.
00:30:09 Again with.
00:30:15 Without.
00:30:20 Pretty subtle but I think really
what it helps to do
is to move the snare forward
in the balance of the drums.
00:30:26 It just sounds a little bit dryer.
00:30:27 It's a way to accomplish something
that you could also accomplish
just by turning the snare drum up
or something like that
but I'm gonna go ahead and leave
it in for now
and we will see what happens.
00:30:38 The snare bottom mic has a
gate on it,
in this case I would never even
bother listening to that
I just leave it.
00:30:44 Because, why not?
And I probably not gonna use
a whole lot of the snare bottom.
00:30:48 The next thing I'm gonna listen to
is the tom track
since that is actually a very important
part of prepping the mix for me.
00:30:55 Let's have a listen to this.
00:31:02 There are two things I'm listening for.
00:31:04 One is how much of the rest of
the kit is coming in to the tom mics.
00:31:09 And how good does that leakage sound
to decide whether I wanna use them.
00:31:13 The other thing is how much
of the toms are ringing.
00:31:16 In this case the toms are actually
ringing enough
that I probably don't wanna leave
those tracks opened.
00:31:23 They can be a very important
part of the drum sound...
00:31:26 But they can also be a very messy
part of the drum sound.
00:31:29 And I don't know the drum pattern
well enough yet to know whether
or not he goes to a crash
or a ride in a certain section,
but if you think physically about
where the toms are compared to the cymbals
they are always right below them,
and ride cymbals specially can
go absolutely nuts
in the rack tom mic and
the low tom mic.
00:31:48 I just don't wanna deal with it.
I will do...
00:31:50 the Pro Tools version of gating.
00:31:52 Which in this case have actually
left the cuts that I made.
00:31:57 I noticed he never plays the first
tom track so I'm gonna mute the audio
I could even hide this and
make it inactive.
00:32:04 Then, very few tom hits
on this track.
00:32:09 In fact there's only one little tom
fill in the middle.
00:32:12 But here I'll play you, this is
Tom two in the bridge.
00:32:23 All I'm gonna do is cut the audio
right to the beginning of this tom hit.
00:32:27 If we zoom in you'll see I'm pretty
much right on it
and there's a very short fade...
00:32:33 to bring that in.
00:32:37 I tend to fade out these toms
very slowly
because toms are usually something
you end up EQing a lot
to make them really big
or you might send them to
FX to add extra top end,
or they might have a reverb.
00:32:50 When they come in all of a sudden
they can really change
the character of the kit,
which is fine when you
hit the tom, but...
00:32:58 because an event actually
happens
so you have a new sound to
change the sound of the kit.
00:33:02 But if you take them away just
as abruptly
all of a sudden the rest of
the kit will change in sound
for no apparent reason.
00:33:09 I do a very short fade in
right at the attack of the tom
and a very long fade out.
00:33:14 That's what I've done here.
00:33:16 If we look through the rest
of the track,
and you can usually
do this visually,
if you are not really...
00:33:21 familiar with what waveforms
look like,
and this is something you learn
just from mixing a lot,
depending on the recording,
the Tom may not be as obvious.
00:33:29 It's great way to go through
and mute tom tracks like this.
00:33:34 You can actually do it in real time
while listening.
00:33:36 If you go ahead and hit play...
00:33:38 hear a little bit of drum...
00:33:41 I'm gonna zoom in on this track.
00:33:45 In real time I can see...
00:33:49 I have little blobs for every
snare drum hit
and none of this are toms.
00:33:54 I can let this play, go through...
00:33:56 eventually I'll run into a larger
waveform...
00:33:58 confirm that it is a tom,
and using keyboard shortcuts or
whatever you do for quick edits
or event just sort of
select the tom hit
and separate the region
and go back later and clean them up.
00:34:09 That's a great way to go through
the track in real time.
00:34:12 You can usually do two or three
tom tracks at a time.
00:34:14 In this case, I've already done it
and he barely ever hits the toms.
00:34:18 I'm just go ahead and mute the
rest of that track.
00:34:21 Then we've got a second
floor tom here.
00:34:22 Again exactly the same thing.
00:34:25 And then there's a track
called Timbale.
00:34:27 As it turns out, in this kit,
is being used very much like a tom.
00:34:32 And it was probably setup right up
next to the snare as a second tom.
00:34:36 If I listen to the bleed here...
00:34:38 It's just hi-hat and snare,
it's gonna make things messy.
00:34:43 I'm gonna treat this exactly
like a tom track.
00:34:46 Go ahead and mute where the
Timbale isn't.
00:34:50 Now I've got this four tracks
down to...
00:34:54 some very tiny little
chunks of audio
which I don't really have to
think a lot about.
00:34:59 Which is great.
00:34:59 Later on what I'm gonna do once
I have the drum kit more shaped
is decide if I need to treat
the toms in a special way
because specially when they're
only hit a couple of times in the song
sometimes you really wanna make
that an event
and there are a couple of tracks
in my template that can help that happen.
00:35:14 For now I'm just keep going through
the drum tracks.
00:35:17 The next thing we get to in
terms of normal multi mic setup
is the overhead track.
00:35:22 That's something I usually listen
to very carefully because...
00:35:25 there are two philosophies for
recording overheads.
00:35:28 One is you try and get a stereo
picture of the drum kit
through two microphones that
are above the kit
the other philosophy is to
have cymbal microphones.
00:35:37 Personally, when I record multi
miced drums
I will use the overheads as
cymbal mics.
00:35:43 They'll be spread out wide.
00:35:45 They'll be pointing
straight down.
00:35:47 They'll be pretty high.
00:35:48 Right over whatever cymbals
there are on the kit.
00:35:51 There are quite a few people though
that use a XY technique
or they you'll be right over
the drummer head
or they'll be outside but
pointing in towards the snare drum.
00:35:59 They are trying to get a picture
of the whole kit.
00:36:00 The very first thing I need
to do is understand
what sort of overheads
these are.
00:36:05 Let's have a listen.
00:36:11 Pretty good picture of the kit
but what I'm gonna do is go
down later in the song because I remember,
from listening to the toms,
that there are some cymbals later.
00:36:32 In this case the snare drum
is almost as loud as the cymbals.
00:36:36 Plus, the cymbals don't really
sound that great to me in this mics
so I'm gonna treat this more as
an extra drum kit pair of microphones
then I set the cymbals.
00:36:47 We'll figure out later where I'm gonna
actually get the cymbals from.
00:36:50 The good thing is, the cymbals
are barely used in this track.
00:36:53 So, if the hi-hat is a very important
part of the kit, crash is not so much.
00:36:57 As long as you hear them happen,
they can almost be white noise,
and it doesn't really matter.
00:37:01 Then we have some extra tracks.
00:37:03 There is a mono room track.
00:37:05 This actually has a plug-in on it.
00:37:11 Everybody’s favorite crushed up room.
00:37:14 They've used a Bomb Factory 1176.
00:37:16 This is actually something that is
really common.
00:37:18 You'll get sessions with really
simple old plug-ins
like the Bomb Factory plug-ins
that are free with Pro Tools
EQ3s...
00:37:26 And some people might wonder...
00:37:28 Why don't they used the better
sounding plug-ins?
The reason is, while you're making
a record a lot of times
you don't know who's gonna
work on it next.
00:37:35 You're gonna work on it in
three different studios,
you're gonna have to work on
that on your laptop.
00:37:39 It's very likely that every
single person in the world
has this plug-in.
00:37:45 And if you use it to help shape your sound,
they'll have your sound.
00:37:48 And when we listen with and without
this compressor
you'll understand it's actually
a big part of the sound.
00:37:56 That's with the compressor.
Here's without.
00:38:00 I'll turn that up.
00:38:03 And here's with.
00:38:09 And without.
00:38:12 This compressor is the
sound of these microphones.
00:38:15 It's really important for me
to at least for now just to leave
exactly as it is.
00:38:19 I'm gonna turn that back down so
it's more in the balance that they sent me.
00:38:23 Let's checkout the last few mics.
00:38:26 We've got two sets of room mics,
room and room far.
00:38:30 I'm gonna make the assumption
that room is close.
00:38:40 This is a nice sounding set of
room mics,
obviously they are in a very
good room,
but there's a very interesting thing
going on, I'm gonna turn this up
and play it again.
00:38:52 What I want you to listen for
is the stereo picture of the kit.
00:38:56 What's very interesting is that
it all seems very well balanced
but the kick drum is over
on the right.
00:39:06 That's just something to
make a note of.
00:39:09 It may not matter,
I might not care.
00:39:12 But if later on I'm having
trouble with the low end
because the kick doesn't feel
like it's in the middle
and starts to fight with
something else,
that's on my little mental checklist
for stuff to check out later on.
00:39:24 Let's check out the far room.
00:39:31 This is room is obviously much
further away, it's also...
00:39:35 interestingly, incredibly
left heavy.
00:39:40 The first thing I'm gonna do here
is use one of my favorite plug-ins.
00:39:45 The Trim plug-in.
00:39:47 But I'm using it in multi mono mode.
Instead of being a stereo trim plug-in
I have a left trim plug-in
and a right trim plug-in.
00:39:54 I'm gonna go up to this
little link symbol.
00:39:57 Turn off the link.
00:39:58 And I'm going to flip to
the right side controls.
00:40:01 And turn up the right side
until it feels centered
and then I'll start to listen to
what's going on in the drum kit.
00:40:15 I realize it's more than 6 dB off.
Switch this to 12 dB mode.
00:40:25 OK, now on the meters,
if you have a look...
00:40:31 It looks right heavy and it stills
sounds a tiny bit left heavy to me.
00:40:35 I'm not gonna worry about what it
looks like because I really don't care.
00:40:38 Because people don't look at mixes,
they listen to them.
00:40:40 And I don't know for sure that
I'm even gonna use any of this.
00:00:01 Now that we've balanced this up
I'm not even sure if I'm gonna use it
I'm not gonna worry
to much about this
it's right heavy, left heavy,
but I've got it sounding
somewhere where now I can
bring it in to the drum balance
and decide whether or not I'm
gonna use it later.
00:00:13 So now I'm gonna cycle back
around to the close mics
that I know I'm gonna use
and work on the sound of them.
00:00:19 I start with the kick.
00:00:21 It's what I do.
00:00:22 I've got three different microphones.
00:00:24 I've got the Kick in, a Kick sub
and a Kick reso.
00:00:27 I'm assuming there was some sort
of resonator placed in front of the kick
but I really have no idea.
00:00:32 I don't care, they are all
Kick mics to me.
00:00:34 Again this have gates on them
so I'm gonna very quickly
check out what the gate is doing.
00:00:42 And here's without.
00:00:47 It's not really affecting the
sound of the kick drum at all.
00:00:50 Here's with again.
00:00:53 And if you noticed,
watch the gain reduction...
00:00:56 the indicator, as I hit play.
00:01:00 And you'll noticed that it's been triggered
right both the kick and the snare.
00:01:06 Which is why it doesn't sound a hole
lot different when we take it off.
00:01:12 The big thing it's different,
I'm gonna play this for you again,
listen to the length
of the snare bleed in the kick.
00:01:19 I don't know if this is
gonna matter at all.
00:01:21 But what I'm trying to do
is understand, first of all
why they put the gate on there.
00:01:27 But also why they felt it necessary
to even right in the comments
that they liked it.
00:01:32 I really feel that it's important
for me to understand
what this is doing and then decide
whether or not I agree about liking it.
00:01:41 So that's a long snare.
00:01:47 It really does tighten up the snare
and it kind of changes the feel
of pattern again.
00:01:51 I'm gonna go ahead and leave
that on there. But...
00:01:53 with this particular mic
now I'm just gonna work on
the sound of it.
00:01:56 A plug-in that I like a lot, enough
that I saved it up here...
00:02:02 is the UAD Helios plug-in.
00:02:03 This is a model of a Helios EQ.
00:02:06 I'm gonna play this to you.
This is with the EQ set flat.
00:02:10 And then I'm going to change
the bass frequency.
00:02:15 I'm not actually going
to boost the bass
but I'm just gonna change the
frequency which will engage the circuit.
00:02:21 You'll hear a huge difference in
the low end. Here's without.
00:02:27 And here's with.
00:02:32 I don't know if this is accurate
to what the Helios hardware actually does.
00:02:36 But according to this model, just
switching in the circuit
is enough to give you
this great resonant bump.
00:02:41 And it's a very musical sound
down in that range.
00:02:43 So now I'm just gonna play with the
gain and decide if I wanna boost
more than the circuit does
on its own.
00:02:55 I'm gonna add a little bit of that.
The point on the kick seems fine to me now.
00:03:00 Later on, once everything is in
we might decide
if you want it to be
a little bit brighter.
00:03:04 That's all I'm gonna do with that.
00:03:06 And to be fair I'm not making all
this decisions completely from scratch
because I'm actually remembering
some of what I did during the mix.
00:03:14 Now I'm gonna use the UAD model
of the 31102 EQ
which is the same that is
inside the Neve 8068 consoles.
00:03:21 I know this EQ really well. I'm gonna
use the low shelf at two different frequencies
and see which one feels
more natural with the drum.
00:03:31 Here is 35 with 0 dB of gain and
I'll start cranking the gain as we listen.
00:03:42 That feels really good to me but
I'll check out 60 just to be fair.
00:03:47 That sounds terrible, I'm gonna
right back to 35.
00:03:50 To be fair to you guys let
me play a longer example.
00:03:53 For me the 35 feels like it's part
of the drum,
the 60 feels like I'm boosting
something that isn't there,
almost feels like boosting the
bleed of some other low thing.
00:04:02 Here's 35.
00:04:06 Nice and solid.
60.
00:04:10 Weird and flappy, and
it makes me uneasy.
00:04:13 I don't like being uneasy.
00:04:14 We are gonna go back to 35.
00:04:16 Now I'm gonna work a little
bit on the point because this EQ
usually has a frequency that sits right
in where the point of the kick drum is.
00:04:27 Normally you'd think it is in
the 2 to 4k range,
I find with this EQ, either
the 4.8 or the 7.2
works really well for bringing out
the point of the kick drum.
00:04:40 That sounds pretty good.
We can check out 7.2.
00:04:46 Now again I feel like I'm boosting
something that isn't there.
00:04:50 We'll leave it around 4.8.
00:04:54 I'm gonna bypass.
00:05:00 Who wouldn't like that?
One last thing I'm actually
going to check
with this EQ is the high pass filter.
00:05:06 It might seem counter-intuitive
to high pass the kick drum
because that's one of the main things
that it's meant to live at the bottom
but sometimes there can be
activity at 5 Hz, at 10 Hz.
00:05:18 And that is low frequency energy
that's gonna start triggering
compressors and things like that
but you don't actually even hear it.
I'm just gonna see
if the kick drum gets tighter and
cleaner or just gets thinner.
00:05:31 Here is the kick drum with no
high pass filter on it.
00:05:39 And I'm gonna move it up to 45.
00:05:42 When you're looking at the EQ it's very
easy to read the number on the knob
and assume that those are the
only frequencies that you're affecting.
00:05:49 But you really need to understand
EQ curves.
00:05:51 With a high pass filter the frequency
you select is the frequency
that is going to be 3 dB quieter than
the energy above it.
00:06:00 But that means you are in the
middle of the slope.
00:06:02 So you start turning down above that
frequency and then you turn down gradually
depending on the slope of the EQ
in terms of how many dB/octave.
00:06:10 I'm not gonna go in too deeply
into EQ theory at the moment.
00:06:12 But it is important to think that
it's not that I'm getting rid of
everything below 45 Hz when
I switch in a high pass at 45 Hz.
00:06:20 I'm gentling turning down the
low end starting a little above 45
and then going down to DC.
00:06:28 I've talked so much, I'm gonna start
over, here's the kick drum without the high pass.
00:06:36 And here's with.
00:06:41 That's the kick drum with and
without,
I really like it better without
the high pass filter.
00:06:47 The last thing is, while I've been
listening to this
I still feel that even with the Helios
60 Hz bump...
00:06:55 and the Neve 35 Hz bump, there's
something not quite right
about the impact of this kick drum.
00:07:04 I'm going to try and harmonically
induce some extra low ends.
00:07:09 I'm going to use...
00:07:11 my favorite plug-ins, that I use
quite a bit, the Renaissance Bass plug-in.
00:07:16 This creates the appearance of low end
by emphasizing the harmonic structure
above what would've happened
if you actually had the low end.
00:07:26 It's a create way to make something
sound really weighty
but not actually add a
ton of energy
down the frequency range that
you are trying to accentuate.
00:07:36 I'm just gonna listen and sweep
the frequency around a little bit
and then turn the intensity down but I
will end up adding a little bit of intensity
down in the bottom here.
00:07:56 Here's without that extra low end.
00:08:01 That makes me sad.
00:08:04 Here's with it.
00:08:07 That makes me happy.
00:08:09 It may turn out that that's too
much later on
but I'm pretty happy with
that mic. So really quickly.
00:08:14 I'm gonna leave the gate in, but here's
without the three processes we've put on.
00:08:24 Which when we first turned on
sounded pretty good.
00:08:27 And here's what we've ended up.
00:08:33 OK, that feels good to me.
00:08:37 I'm pretty happy with the sound of
that kick mic.
00:08:39 So now I'm gonna very quickly check out
the other kick mics with that one.
00:08:44 It's likely that I either will not use them
or one one of them will become a big
part of the kick drum sound.
00:08:52 Generally for me I feel like I can get
enough low end out of the inside mic.
00:08:57 But the more mics you have and the
less inside the drum they are,
the more drum bleed and the more problems
you can create later on.
00:09:04 Let's have a listen and see if any
of this are gonna help.
00:09:07 I'm gonna do it by adding them to
our inside kick mic.
00:09:17 I'm not so sure that's helping
I just wanna listen to the quick sub
on its own for a second.
00:09:24 To me that sounds like a kick drum
coming from the next room
which is exactly what the kick sub
mic usually does.
00:09:30 But I feel that we kind of solved the
sub problem without it.
00:09:34 At the moment I'm gonna go
ahead and mute that.
00:09:36 And let's check out the Reso track,
I forgot what this one sounds like.
00:09:45 This one sounds pretty good.
00:09:47 It does sound like an outside mic
with maybe a packing blanket over the top
to cut out some of the bleed.
00:09:52 So it doesn't have the presence of
the inside mic
but the separation is still pretty good.
00:09:56 Let's work on that for a second.
00:09:58 And see where we end up. I'm gonna
start up with that same Helios.
00:10:01 Because for low end why not do
the thing that works?
Here's with.
00:10:12 Here's without.
00:10:17 I liked it very much with.
00:10:20 Now I'm gonna immediately see how it
works with the inside mic.
00:10:25 Is it hurting or helping?
Here's the inside by itself.
00:10:41 It's actually hurting the low end which
makes me think maybe there's a phase problem
so I'm gonna call up my
favorite plug-in, the Trim plug-in.
00:10:50 And while it's playing, very quickly
switch the phase.
00:11:02 This is an interesting
one, this is where the
two drums are in sort of an
in between sort of spot.
00:11:08 What you should listen for now,
when I flip the phase all of a
sudden the drum gets aggressive.
00:11:14 But I feel like all of my sub
has gone away,
that I really carefully built up on
the inside mic.
00:11:20 I'm gonna flip this a couple of times
and then I'm going to unsolo this
mic along with the inside mic
and let's just see what the best
combination is.
00:11:45 OK, to my ears I like the size of the
drum with both of these tracks in
and the phase flipped...
00:11:53 on the resonator mic.
00:11:55 But I don't like what it does
to the very bottom end.
00:11:57 And we are mixing a reggae track,
I think I should be more worried
about the very bottom
then I should be about
how solid it is.
00:12:04 We are not looking for a super
aggressive kick drum,
we are looking for a great groove
and a great low end.
00:12:10 For the moment, I'm gonna go
ahead and mute that track.
00:12:12 We may come back to this later because
the drum needs to be bigger,
but I think we're OK.
00:12:16 The next most important microphone
to me is the snare top.
00:12:19 We've already looked at the
EQ and the gate.
00:12:23 You remember from earlier,
here's our gate that really makes
the snare nice and tight
and gets rid of the extra ghost notes.
00:12:29 This is our little bit of body.
00:12:31 We've already done quite a bit
to this but I'm gonna EQ just a little more.
00:12:37 And this kind of goes back to when
I've been mixing on a console,
I'm used to have Neve style EQ.
00:12:42 For all my drums.
00:12:43 I'm gonna go ahead and use one.
00:12:45 And here's one developed by some
fantastic engineer,
I don't remember his name,
but he really helped out with
this plug-in,
it's a model of a Neve 1073.
00:12:55 Very similar in style to the 31102
we were using on the kick drum
slightly different frequencies,
and also, because it's a different model,
done by a different company,
it's going to have different
characteristics no matter how close
it is to the actually EQ.
00:13:09 This being a snare drum I can assume
I don't need anything below 50 to 80 Hz.
00:13:15 The first thing I'm gonna do is play
with the high pass filter.
00:13:17 Let's go ahead and engage it.
00:13:19 And see how high we can go
before we start losing stuff
on the snare drum.
00:13:39 If think this works really well
at around 80 Hz.
00:13:42 I'm just gonna bypass and
put it back.
00:13:44 What's interesting is, I'm not just
cutting off everything down
in the range below 80 Hz. I have a slope
but I also have a corner
and I'm hearing a little bit of a
bump at the corner
which you do get, there's a little bit
phase shift and resonance
when the filter starts and I feel
like I actually picked up some body
by filtering at 80 Hz.
00:14:06 Here's with.
00:14:10 Here's without.
00:14:14 It's a subtle thing but I like it.
00:14:16 I'm gonna go ahead and start cranking
the top end EQ.
00:14:21 And I already know from EQing
thousands of snare drums
that generally I like 7.2 in the mid band
and this shelf is fixed at 12 K
so I'm gonna have a 12k shelf and
a 7.2 parametric mid band
and just start cranking until
they sound good to me.
00:14:51 In isolation that is starting
to sound pretty good
but what I'm noticing
is even with that extra body,
I feel like I wanna add more.
00:14:59 So we've got and EQ
that was in the session
centered around 200 Hz.
00:15:04 I know from EQing with my Neve EQs
that the 220 band
in the lower shelf works really
well on a snare drum,
especially in combination with
this high pass filter
so I'm gonna go ahead and
add some body here.
00:15:23 You might be saying, "OK, you've added
highs and lows, so...
00:15:27 Why didn't you just turned it up?"
And the reason is, because I've only
added highs and lows
and I'm actually putting a little of
a happy face EQ.
00:15:34 There's nothing wrong with
a happy face EQ.
00:15:36 If I'd just made this louder what
would start to happen is
the snare would still disappear.
00:15:41 I'm a fan of really bright snare drums
that have a lot of body to them.
00:15:45 What that means is that you're leaving
the mid range behind.
00:15:49 I could have gotten the same sort
of effect by using a more precision EQ,
taking out some mid range,
but that's not as musical to me.
00:15:58 I like adding the frequencies that
sound good
and taking away frequencies that
sound bad.
00:16:02 I don't ever think about taking away
frequencies that I don't like as much
to make the other frequencies
stand out.
00:16:09 Here's with and without this entire EQ.
00:16:17 Kind of night and day.
00:16:18 This is really starting to sound like
"Oh, that's a snare that can be on a record!"
The reason why I chose this plug-in
over the 31102 or other Neve models
is there's quite a bit of modeling
of how the input transformer
breaks down as you start
to hit it with more level.
00:16:38 That's why we have an input fader here.
00:16:40 I'm going to link the input and output
fader so as I turn one up, the other goes down
so that my level is actually matched.
00:16:48 So, I don't fool myself by just
making it louder.
00:16:51 I'm gonna start cranking up the input
and see if I get a little bit of
harmonic distortion
which is always a good thing
on snare.
00:17:06 It's subtle but I like it.
00:17:09 It's actually starting to build up in that
same area of body
that we were EQing in this
lower mid range band.
00:17:14 We can do that even more by
turning up this pre amp here.
00:17:17 We can turn this up a little bit
and see if we like it.
00:17:27 It's subtle but I don't
particularly like that.
00:17:32 I think we're just gonna go ahead.
00:17:34 Put this back.
00:17:35 At the default value but
leave this input cranked.
00:17:38 Here is the snare just with the input
gain cranked up a little bit.
00:17:49 Here's at the default setting.
00:17:55 And here's with the cranked again.
00:18:00 This is a subtle difference.
00:18:02 Where I think it's easiest to hear
is in the body of the snare,
down in that sort of 200 Hz range.
00:18:07 Body is a really good word, when you
listen to it loud
it's the thing that thumps
you in the chest.
00:18:13 Listen down there, it's a
very subtle difference.
00:18:16 And it's not that enough
of a difference for me,
after you check this out we're gonna
go even one step further. Again.
00:18:25 And without.
00:18:29 And back in.
00:18:32 I'm still feeling like this snare drum,
especially because of the gating,
which I don't wanna get rid of,
is feeling a little bit tamed.
00:18:41 It almost feels like a sample that
was laid in.
00:18:43 It doesn't feel like a drummer really
hitting the drum.
00:18:45 I'm listening on isolation so it's a little
unfair, but I can be unfair,
it's my show.
00:18:51 The next thing I'm gonna put it is
something that I love
on drums.
00:18:56 I don't think it would be appropriate
on the kick drum in this particular case
but the lo-fi plug-in that comes
with Pro Tools,
it's been around for a really long time
you can do all sorts of crazy bit reduction,
saturation tricks on it,
but it also has some built-in distortion.
00:19:11 And I'm gonna crank this distortion
probably no more than .5,
it goes from zero to eleven.
00:19:18 Of course it goes to 11.
00:19:19 But I'll probably get up to .2 or .5
and this is really gonna start to
push the snare drum
and make it sound more aggressive.
00:19:27 It's also gonna add a little bit
of level.
00:19:28 So it's a little bit of unfair of
a listening test.
00:19:31 But, you know, there you go!
I like this in sort of the .7 range
what I'm gonna do now is play
it for you and I'm gonna go past this,
and what you'll start to hear with more
distortion is the snare drum will
flatten out, get a little bit longer
and have more top end
but it doesn't sound as strong.
00:19:56 And when I go below this, it just
sounds little bit weaker
and tighter and more like
the original signal.
00:20:01 What I like with it in this area is it
really starts to feel like
the drummer is hitting the
drum harder.
00:20:07 Which is what I'm looking for.
00:20:23 Alright. So I'm gonna stay at .6,
and that's gonna be great. And I don't
touch any of the other controls in this plug-in.
00:20:30 Let's solo up all our kick and snare.
All both of them.
00:20:33 And see where we're at.
00:20:39 Good, and just for fun, here's kick
and snare without any of the stuff we've added.
00:20:48 Sad face.
00:20:56 Happy face.
It's much louder.
00:20:57 But the tones of the drums have
really changed
and they sound a lot more
natural to me.
00:21:04 Now I'm gonna very quickly
go though and see
if we wanna use the snare
bottom track.
00:21:09 Very much like we decided about
the other kick tracks, for the inside.
00:21:21 And here's without it.
00:21:28 With it.
00:21:30 I like it with it, it's giving a little
more length to the snare.
00:21:33 It's subtle.
00:21:35 Certainly it's not gonna
hurt having it.
00:21:36 The only thing I'm gonna do here
is listen to snare bottom mic
on its own and make sure it doesn't
have in crazy low end stuff from kick drums.
00:21:45 In which case I will high pass it.
00:21:48 Let me get rid of the gate
for a second.
00:21:55 Sounds like it's already been
high-passed, I'm just gonna leave it.
00:21:58 And later on, once the whole kit
is going, I'll probably play with the level.
00:22:03 Moving through the kit, hat mic.
00:22:05 In this particular track is probably
pretty important.
00:22:09 I just wanna make sure it sounds OK and
I'll set the level on the hat
once we are actually going
with the whole kit.
00:22:17 It's already been high-passed,
it sounds fine.
00:22:20 If I need to make it brighter
later I will.
00:22:23 That is exactly as long as you need
to listen to a hi-hat track usually.
00:22:27 The Toms. This is kind of special.
00:22:30 I know the context that they've
been used in so I know that they
should be pretty big.
00:22:35 Normally I'd wait until I've got the
mix a little further along
before making this decision.
00:22:39 But I already know that I wanna
make a big deal out of the toms.
00:22:42 I'm gonna scroll down here, get
my Tom's Aux...
00:22:45 and my Tom's Verb track.
00:22:47 Pull it up here next to the Tom tracks.
00:22:50 And let me show some sends.
00:22:52 Because we're gonna start using
some sends all of a sudden.
00:22:55 I'm gonna take my Tom tracks,
including the timbale,
because we decided earlier it
was a tom.
00:23:02 And instead of going straight to
the router...
00:23:05 Here...
00:23:06 I'm gonna go into the Toms Bus.
00:23:09 Which I have to find.
00:23:11 There we go.
00:23:13 So now the Toms are routing
into this Aux.
00:23:19 Which has a send to the
Tom reverb.
00:23:22 And then the Reverb I'll show you
exactly what's going on here.
00:23:25 The first thing is, what this allows
me to do is EQ the Toms overall.
00:23:30 I'm gonna mute the reverb and lets
just listen to the Toms in this one spot.
00:23:43 And I'll solo them up just so we're
not checking out the bleed into the other mics.
00:23:52 I'm gonna put in one of my favorite
plug-ins again,
the UAD Pultec EQP-1A.
00:23:58 Big, fat, wide...
00:24:01 floppy, moves around a lot EQ.
00:24:03 But in this case that's fine, because
I've got individual hits
and I'm just gonna add a bunch
of low end and see how they react.
00:24:09 And we'll start up
at around 100 Hz.
00:24:11 See how that is.
00:24:19 Try 60 Hz.
00:24:24 That seems to be below
what's actually going on
so we'll stick around 100.
And here's without.
00:24:34 Without.
00:24:38 Not too subtle.
00:24:39 I also wanna pickup a
lit bit of presence.
00:24:41 I could use a different EQ and
really find the attack on each of the toms.
00:24:44 But I can get away with a broad thing.
Somewhere in the mid range. Let's start...
00:24:49 At around 5 kHz, make it nice and broad,
and start boosting that up.
00:24:59 Sounds good to me. Here's without.
00:25:07 That sounds really good to me,
I'm also noticing though
that the tom on the left
that hits first, which isn't even all
the way on the left,
is much quieter.
00:25:18 I'm gonna use one of my favorite
things in Pro Tools, which is Clip Gain.
00:25:22 You may notice there's a little
level written on every...
00:25:25 region that is big enough
to display it.
00:25:28 And you've got a little fader.
00:25:29 You can either grab this fader
and turn up...
00:25:32 the clip gain of this clip,
which is their new term for region
if you're old school Pro Tools.
00:25:38 And this pretends that you have
recorded the audio louder.
00:25:43 It happens pre-fader, pre-insert,
pre-send, pre-everything.
00:25:48 It's like going back to
the tracks themselves
and turning them up.
00:25:51 I'm just gonna let this cycle,
and using shortcuts,
shift+ctrl+up and down arrows,
I'm gonna turn up that first tom hit
until it feels balanced with the second one.
00:26:08 And that's good.
00:26:09 The next thing I'm gonna do
is check out this tom reverb.
00:26:13 I know the context, this is a breakdown
in the middle of the song
there are some sound effects.
I want this toms to be a big deal.
00:26:19 And this is why I love templates, this is
a reverb that took me two hours to find
while doing one song and it's nothing
like anything I'd normally do.
00:26:28 But it's really cool and now I always have
it available on every single song I mix
and I just decide whether or not
it's a good idea.
00:26:35 I'm going to turn it on, we will have
a listen and then I'll show you what it is.
00:26:44 And here's without.
00:26:48 So basically, it is a filter,
I love having a filter on the
way in to a reverb,
so I'm cutting off the very top because
I don't wanna hear any high resonance in a reverb.
00:27:00 Then going into a little microshift.
00:27:04 Which is basically just widening
and pitch shifting.
00:27:08 So now you might be realizing this
is kind of a 90s thing.
00:27:11 And then a Revibe set on
an ambiance.
00:27:14 It's supposed to sound like a room
but it's a pitch shifted room.
00:27:18 Pitch up, pitch down, doesn't matter,
I don't even have control, just one knob.
00:27:23 But...
00:27:25 Just so you can hear with and
without the pitch shift. Here's without.
00:27:32 And with.
00:27:37 It almost acts like a doubler going
into the reverb so the reverb is thicker.
00:27:41 Which is what I'm looking for.
00:27:43 This is like the really really subtle
version of "In the air tonight".
00:27:46 If you don't know what I'm talking about,
I'll wait while you Google it.
00:27:52 OK, so you checked that out,
you know what I'm talking about.
00:27:55 The next thing is, within the toms,
you heard this timbale track and
I just wanna check it out on its own.
00:28:02 Very quickly.
00:28:04 Because...
00:28:07 That's a very distinctive sound and it's
obviously been used as a part of a drum fill.
00:28:13 So I wanna really bring out the sound of
the timbale, which in most cases is mid range.
00:28:19 I'm gonna pull out my trusty EQ3.
I love this EQ for several reasons.
00:28:24 I'm gonna cycle this and
I'm gonna start EQing.
00:28:27 I'm gonna use a trick that you can
use on this EQ,
the Massenburg EQ, I believe
the Oxford's can.
00:28:33 You can solo a band of the EQ
to help you find a frequency.
00:28:37 I did not complete the Tonemeister Course
so I can tell you what frequency something is.
00:28:41 But when I sweep an EQ
I can find it and I know.
00:28:44 So I'm gonna tighten up the band
on my high mid band,
cause I know that this is
the band I wanna use,
I'll then, while the audio
is playing,
hold down shift and ctrl,
and touch the frequency
control of the EQ,
it turns it into a band pass filter,
so I can sweep around and find
the frequency I wanna EQ.
00:29:12 That's the really nasal part of
the timbale sound,
and nasal is something that you
usually don't want
but in the timbale it's exactly
what you're looking for.
00:29:19 I'm gonna start boosting this.
00:29:25 And here's without.
00:29:33 It just makes it sound like he's
playing a little bit harder.
00:29:37 Listening without soloing the band
it feels a little bit high to me.
00:29:42 So I'm just gonna pull it down
a little bit.
00:29:46 Perfect. Alright.
00:29:50 Now, I'm going to mute...
00:29:53 all the room mics...
00:29:55 all the overhead mics...
00:29:59 and the mono room mic.
00:30:01 And I'm gonna see how my kick,
snare, toms and hat mics are sitting.
00:30:04 Does it feels like a drum kit
minus some overheads,
or does it feel totally wrong?
I'm gonna very quickly balance this.
00:30:15 It feels great.
00:30:17 Apparently, I'm awesome.
00:30:19 The next thing I'm gonna do is
start adding in
each of this overall kit mics
whether it's a Mono Room,
overheads or anything like that.
00:30:27 And we're gonna see what
happens to the kit
and I'm gonna sort of build up
my full drum kit sound
by bringing each of this tracks
and individually blending them in
and mixing and matching, there's
gonna be a lot of turning up and down
muting, unmuting.
00:30:42 All I'm doing is just listening to see
how it affects the kick and snare
and how it feels. Does it feel
like it's in a room?
And try and come up with a
complete picture of the drum kit.
00:30:59 This mono room mic which sounded
very cool when listened on its own
is actually sounding just like
reverb now.
00:31:05 I'm gonna leave a little
bit of it in
and we'll come back to to it
later on if I want that sound.
00:31:12 But without maybe as quite
so much compression.
00:31:15 I have a feeling we're gonna get
away with it, fine, as it is.
00:31:18 But that's what I'm hearing with
that track. Here's overheads.
00:31:29 It sounds pretty good to me.
Again it's...
00:31:32 It's a little bit too much of
the kick and snare.
00:31:34 But without the cymbals through most
of the song that's gonna be OK.
00:31:37 Because it was recorded so quietly,
I'm gonna start cranking up the clip gain
while it's playing, instead
of moving the fader.
00:31:46 And I'm gonna go to the end where
it's playing the loudest.
00:32:02 Now I'm gonna leave the overheads alone
and start bringing some room mics.
00:32:06 Let's see what we've got.
00:32:42 The last thing we're gonna do is check
out this extra drum tracks
down here at the bottom, so
let's see what they are.
00:32:50 It says cymbal overdubs, I'm assuming
it's some sort of cymbal overdub.
00:32:55 I could be wrong though.
00:32:57 It is, it's cymbal overdubs.
00:33:00 What's great about this is we have
full control over our cymbals separately
but now let's see what they're
doing with the rest of the kit.
00:33:12 Great, sounds great.
I'm not gonna touch it.
00:33:14 The last thing is.
00:33:16 You may have been wondering:
“Scheps is in front of me for a long time
and hasn't done any parallel compression.
00:33:23 This is not Andrew”. Because all I do
is parallel compression.
00:33:26 So let's do some parallel compression.
00:33:29 Because we are sort of working
backwards and forwards from the actual mix
I'm just go ahead and make the
sends active
because I was already using them.
00:33:37 Here are sends to the 'Kick Snare Crush'
on every kick and snare track
and if I look at the levels,
I would bet
that they're all pretty even.
00:33:50 They're all at zero except for
the kick in track.
00:33:54 The way I'm using it right now
we're not even using in the kick track.
00:33:58 This was to balance the kick
and snare within that compressor.
00:34:01 That compressor, down here is...
00:34:04 a DBX 160 VU.
00:34:06 These settings are pretty standard
for me when I use it.
00:34:10 What you'll see is...
00:34:11 that the kick and the snare transients
will always trigger the compressor.
00:34:16 And the bleed of any of the other
instruments
will never trigger the compressor.
That's sort of where I set the threshold.
00:34:21 The amount of compression and
the output gain, I don't know.
00:34:24 That's just where they've ended up.
It's what sounds good to me.
00:34:27 I'd love to have a better explanation
than that. But that's the way it is.
00:34:31 So. Here is with the
kick and snare compressor.
00:34:39 And here's without.
00:34:43 Need I say more, I'm gonna leave
that in for now on.
00:34:46 Now I'm gonna very quickly sort
of bring up some of my room tracks
because the kick and snare have
come forward so much.
00:34:52 To re-balance the kit
a little bit.
00:35:05 And let's try that Far Room mic,
again, just to see if it's any good.
00:35:11 Nope.
00:35:12 OK. Here's my drum sound. You may
also be saying...
00:35:15 "Why are you working on the drums
in isolation for so long?"
One reason is because I'm doing
a lot of talking so it's taking longer.
00:35:22 The second reason is because I kind
of have an idea of how the drums should sound
by themselves
based on how they are going
to work in mix.
00:35:30 That's just something I've got from
doing so many mixes
that I've heard mixed drums
so many times.
00:35:36 I don't need to keep checking
everything in context
but let me put everything
back in context.
00:35:41 I'm gonna leave out percussion but
let's grab a bunch of other the instruments.
00:35:45 And hear how the drums are
doing in general.
00:36:06 The drums are sounding a little bit
dry right now but I'm gonna
come back to them once we've got
some of the other instruments sorted out.
00:36:13 You may have heard something
go on in the horns
which we're gonna address
later on.
00:36:17 Which was actually a really
tricky part of this mix.
00:36:20 But I'm gonna keep building
the rhythm section
one instrument at a time because
that's the way I do things.
00:36:26 The next obvious place to go
is the bass.
00:36:28 Here's where you'll start to see
how flexible the VCA's make my session.
00:36:32 I've muted everything, except
the drums and bass
but now I wanna just work on the
bass, so I can solo up the bass
and that will mute the drum track.
00:36:43 Within that, I now wanna hear what
each bass tracks is doing individually
so I can solo within the VCA solo
and listen to individual tracks
as soon as I drop out of solo here,
the VCA solo takes back over.
00:37:04 OK. This amp track is
kind of interesting.
00:37:08 Let me solo that and
turn it up a little bit.
00:37:15 It's kind of flabby and
a little bit weird.
00:37:18 So, what I'm gonna do...
00:37:20 is make the decision to not really use
a whole lot of that amp track,
I'm gonna use it for some of the
low end later but I'm gonna turn it down
and I'm gonna do something I do
on quite a few sessions.
00:37:30 I'm gonna very quickly just duplicate
the Bass DI.
00:37:35 I don't need alternate playlist,
automation or whatever.
00:37:39 But I'm gonna make sure that
it keeps the group assignments,
so that will keep it within the VCA
and insert after the last selected track.
00:37:46 Here's a copy of my DI.
00:37:48 And now, I'm going to distort it
a little bit
and make it sound more like
an amp track.
00:37:53 I'm going to go for the old
standard by Sansamp.
00:37:58 Because it's fun.
00:00:01 And this isn't gonna get too dirty
but I should be able to get
quite a few body out of this.
00:00:05 Let me solo it up.
00:00:25 Here's without.
00:00:30 So let me backtrack a little bit and
go over what I just did with the Sansamp.
00:00:33 It's basically a model, one of
the very early Bomb Factory plug-ins,
it's a model of the one space Sansamp
hardware.
00:00:43 And it's basically a box with
many different types of distortion.
00:00:47 Left to right, there's a pre amp knob,
which is basically and input gain knob.
00:00:53 Very much like the pre amp knob on
any amplifier.
00:00:56 Then there's a level knob on the
far right
which is your master level.
00:01:00 The pre amp will affect how much of
the signal hits the distortion circuits,
and the output level is purely
a fader on the output.
00:01:10 So if you have toms of pre amp gain
you can make-up with the Output knob.
00:01:15 Then there's a low and high EQ.
00:01:17 That's literally just low and high EQ.
It's two tone controls.
00:01:22 But then you have Buzz, Punch,
Crunch and Drive.
00:01:26 These are just four
distortion circuits,
the reason I didn't reach
for the Buzz or the Drive
is because those are very
bright settings.
00:01:36 I'll crank them up and you can
hear what they do.
00:01:45 Actually the Drive is sounding pretty good,
maybe I'll use a little more.
00:01:49 Here's the Crunch.
00:01:54 That's sort of a pinched EQ which
I don't like at all on this.
00:01:58 Let's turn that down I little bit more.
And this Buzz is a very top end one as well.
00:02:06 Which, interestingly on this bass
because there isn't a whole lot of top end,
it's just making it super messy
down in the bottom.
00:02:14 I'm gonna turn my Buzz back down
and let's try a little more Drive
and see how that works.
00:02:27 I think this sounds really good
but the one defining
characteristic of it,
especially as I bypass the
plug-in, I'll do it again,
is that the DI track without this plug-in
sounds very much like a DI
and with the plug-in sounds very
much like an amp
it doesn't have that ultra present
finger thing
and it really does sound like
it's been processed
which is important.
00:02:48 It's very difficult, when you have a
full band going,
to get away with just the DI track,
but I really don't like the sound of
the amp track that much,
so I feel like this is gonna
give me a great way
to make it sound more amplified
but have the presence and definition
of the DI without having all the
weird characteristics of the DI.
00:03:13 Let's see how they all blend together.
00:03:27 So in this context the bass mic amp
is actually really helping me,
it's adding a little bit of length
and evening out the bass a little bit.
00:03:41 OK, so here comes parallel
compressor number 2.
00:03:45 This is the Bass Crush.
00:03:48 So named because you
crush the bass.
00:03:51 I've got and EQ, with a high pass
that's first in the parallel chain
just to get rid of really crazy
low end stuff.
00:03:59 And then I'm using McDsp 6030
Ultimate Compressor
because it let's me go through lots
of different types of compressors quickly.
00:04:07 The reason is, with parallel compression
it doesn't really matter
what the compressor itself sounds like
it only matters what it sounds like
being blended back in.
00:04:17 And you can't tell what's gonna sound
like without blending it.
00:04:20 You can't solo up the compressor
and get and idea of what's going on.
00:04:24 So to very quickly go through lots
of different types of compression,
while listening to it blend,
is a great way to just find
the compressor that works.
00:04:31 So let's flip through some
and see what happens.
00:04:59 A lot of choices.
00:05:00 I'm not gonna go back through
all of this different options
and pinpoint why I like or dislike one.
00:05:07 In general I'm looking for something
that's really natural,
that just helps even out
the low end within this bass line.
00:05:13 It's Abraham Laboriel Senior playing,
he's amazing.
00:05:16 And I wanna make
sure I keep his feel.
00:05:18 I noticed as I listen to the bass
that he's not playing that low.
00:05:23 He's playing up high a lot
of the times.
00:05:25 I've just realized that one of the
major decisions has been made for me.
00:05:32 The major decision is: who's going
to rule the low end?
Is it the kick drum or the bass?
Because only one of them can do it.
00:05:38 On a reggae track I'd have normally thought
the bass was gonna dominate the low end
but it turns out that the bass is much
more of a melodic instrument jumping around
and that constant four on the floor
kick drum is what's gonna drive
the low end of this track.
00:05:52 This Mod Tube setting sounds
natural to me.
00:05:54 I'm blending in just a little
bit of it, down at -9.4.
00:05:59 I'll play you with and without
and really all that should happen
is that the level comes up a little bit
and is a little bit more even
especially as he jumps and octave.
00:06:15 Alright, so let's see how this
sounds with the drums.
00:06:19 I could do one of two things.
I can unsolo my bass tracks,
which is what I will do.
00:06:23 And now my bass and my drum
VCA's are left unmuted.
00:06:27 So I'm building up the track and
I don't have to remember
what I've already worked on
and what I haven't.
00:06:31 Any VCA that's unmuted I
have already worked on.
00:06:34 Here's bass and drums.
00:06:50 As I'm doing this
I'm immediately deciding my snare
is a little too dry and too loud.
00:06:54 So, I’m gonna re-balance
a little bit just
with bass and drums and
the we'll move on.
00:07:24 One last thing that I'm going
to do, going back to the drums
now that I've heard the bass is,
the drums are still
feeling a little bit dry,
I love the way the kick
and snare are hitting,
which is gonna be really
important as we move forward,
but they are feeling dry. So, rather than
just start turning up the room tracks,
because I haven't liked
that yet, what I'm gonna do
is add yet another parallel
compressor to all of the room tracks
and all of the overheads.
00:07:47 So I'm gonna select them here,
and shift+option,
and you'll see they were
already assigned in the mix,
I'm just gonna be activating these
sends to the stereo drum crush.
00:07:59 And again, all of my sends,
because of the way that the
preferences are set,
come up at zero and the panning
follows the main pan,
so this is a perfect copy
of what's going to the
router, which is my stereo mix
now making it's way off
to a parallel compressor.
00:08:13 And you may have noticed one
difference between the way
I use parallel compressors
and some other people do.
00:08:19 I don't setup specific parallel
compressors for a track
I set them up for
groups of tracks
or to do functions that
require lots of inputs,
like I have one for the kick
and snare, I don't have one
for the kick and a different
one for the snare.
00:08:32 Later on you will see
that I have some for
everything in the mix except the drums.
Things like that.
00:08:37 I just love the way that things
interact in this compressors.
00:08:40 And the way adding those in really
changes the character of the mix.
00:08:42 Let's see what the Stereo
Drum Crush does to the drums.
00:09:00 I like that a lot.
00:09:01 It's really brought out some
more movement in the kit
without messing with that strict kick
snare that's happening from the gates.
00:09:08 It's giving some
length to the snare,
it makes it sound a
little more natural
but it's not sounding
roomy and reverby.
00:09:14 So one more time so you can get your
head around what's going on here.
00:09:18 Here's without the
extra drum crush.
00:09:31 A little more natural,
a little more fun.
00:09:33 Which if there's should be a key
element to this track is the fun.
00:09:37 Now that the drums and the
bass are pretty together,
I wanna get the
percussion in quickly
because there's
quite a bit of it.
00:09:43 Let me just go ahead and unmute that VCA.
One button, no waiting.
00:09:48 And let's see what's going on.
00:10:03 So, the congas are going
all the way through.
00:10:06 Well, not all the way through.
Let me zoom in a little bit.
00:10:09 The congas are playing quite a bit
of the song so I wanna make sure
that they work really well
with the bass and the drums.
00:10:16 I'm hearing a little bit
of a weird mid range frequency.
00:10:20 I'm gonna seek and destroy
using my technique
that I used on the timbale but in reverse,
I'm gonna find my annoying frequency
and then I'm gonna take it out.
00:10:48 Here's without the EQ.
00:10:53 Here's with.
00:10:57 So, it's just to help even out the
slap with the tap.
00:11:00 Let's see how that works in the groove.
00:11:11 Alright, let's skip to where
the cowbell comes in here.
00:11:23 I have all of this percussion running
through and Aux and I feel like
it's all a little bit low so I'm gonna crank
that up a little bit and see how we go.
00:11:37 When I turn this up it feels too dry and
not part of the groove.
00:11:42 Now I'm gonna introduce a parallel compressor
that's a huge part of all of this mixes.
00:11:47 Which is what I call the 'Rear Bus'. If
you watched the other video where
I'm mixing on a console you will understand
exactly why it's the 'Rear Bus'.
00:11:56 It's named after the Rear Bus of my Quad
Console. It's basically a stereo compressor
for lots and lots of instruments.
In this case,
the first thing
that's gonna hit it...
00:12:05 is the percussion.
I'm gonna activate that send
and let's go down to the bottom of the session
and I'll show you what the Rear Bus is.
00:12:14 In this session it's called the
'Instrument Crush' and it's based on
a chain that I have set up in hardware.
It's two black face 1176s.
00:12:23 They are not linked.
00:12:25 The whole point is that they
are unlinked compressors
so if a transient hits the left
side it turns down the left side
but leaves the right side
alone and vice versa.
00:12:34 I'm using it with multi mono plug-ins
as opposed to stereo plug-in.
00:12:38 And this 1176 plug-in
happen to sort of sound the
closest to the hardware that I was using.
00:12:46 It's not necessarily that this
sound the most like a black face
because they don't.
00:12:50 I think some of the other models
actually sound
closer to the black face hardware
but this one reacts properly.
00:12:56 Strangely, this is
at 2:1 compression ratio,
which is peculiar to this model of 1176.
00:13:03 The Black Face 1176
lowest ratio is 4:1.
00:13:08 So, this is a really good
example of a compressor
not necessarily being what you're
looking for in the first place
which is a Black
Face 1176 at 4:1,
but having the right character when you
blend it in with the other instruments.
00:13:22 So here's the percussion
with that send turned on.
00:13:35 And here's without.
00:13:44 Obviously there's a big
level difference there
but there's also a
feel difference.
00:13:50 Let me turn it back up
without the Rear Bus.
00:14:02 Let me turn it back down,
pop the Rear Bus on.
00:14:12 Maybe I'm crazy but that
sounds a lot groovier to me.
00:14:15 So, let's go up and see what
happened with our conga
then we can check out the rest of
the percussion tracks and move on.
00:14:49 This shaker is a great
example of percussion
used not necessarily to
be heard distinctly
but completely moving
the groove along.
00:14:58 Let me solo this up so you
can hear what's doing.
00:15:03 Now I'm gonna play you the track
with and without it.
00:15:06 Here's without.
00:15:13 And here's with.
00:15:19 It makes even me move my head.
This really propels the track
and you see that is corresponds to
that cymbal overdub that comes in.
00:15:27 This is obviously a huge
lift in the chorus.
00:15:29 Now, you haven't heard
the song in a while,
it's hard to keep
track of this things,
I know why the arrangement
is the way it is
but once we get the rest
of the instruments in,
we'll go back really quickly and show you
how this things are affecting the track.
00:15:41 So this shaker is awesome, it
shouldn't necessarily be louder.
00:15:44 We've got a second shaker later in the
song that really picks it up again.
00:16:02 That's more of an ear-candy
off to one side percussion.
00:16:06 All the other percussion
tracks are just for the intro
for this first hit. We're
just gonna really quick listen.
00:16:12 Turn on the Rear Bus there.
00:16:20 Sounds good to me,
we're gonna move on.
00:16:23 Instead of pulling up another
instrument, I'm gonna do something
that sometimes I do even earlier
in the mix. I'm gonna come down
to my router Aux and go to
through the 2-bus processing
because it's at this point that I really wanna
find out what I wanna use and what I don't
because any compression or overall
EQ that's gonna happen on this bus
is really gonna affect the
groove and how things interact.
00:16:45 So, to me it's pretty stupid to wait
till the end of the mix and then
decide what you're gonna put on it.
Because you've already mixed the track.
00:16:52 If you managed to mix without
anything on the 2-bus, great.
00:16:54 Just leave it that
way, leave it flat.
00:16:56 Maybe a tiny bit of EQ,
something like that.
00:17:00 But if you're gonna be compressing
or doing major EQ, do it early
because then you mix into it, and it
really affects what you're doing.
00:17:07 Going through this plug-in chain
again, I've got an UAD 670 Fairchild.
00:17:12 The threshold is almost
all the way down
so as I put this in you'll see there's
almost no compression going on,
it's really more for the character
of the sound as it goes through.
00:17:38 So if you saw, there's no
compression going on,
and now I'm gonna just try
unlinking the controls.
00:17:43 The side-chain,
not the controls.
00:17:45 The controls link only makes the
left and right knobs move together.
00:17:49 The side-chain link actually makes
the compressor act separately.
00:17:53 Even tough I'm not compressing,
according to the meters,
I just wanna see if
there's any difference.
00:18:08 Not really hearing any difference so
I'm just gonna leave it and move on.
00:18:12 The next plug-in
in the 2-bus chain
is the model of the Neve 33609
which is basically
two Neve 2264As
in one chassis with controls to link
or unlink the detector circuits.
00:18:24 To my ears I've never heard a 33609
that sounds the same as the 2264.
00:18:30 Apparently the circuits
are identical,
I'm assuming it's something to do with power
supply, things of that nature.
00:18:37 But for working in the box,
this is an awesome emulation
of the character of that
particular compressor,
especially because I use a very fast
recovery time. So, here's with and without.
00:18:49 I think you'll hear exactly what
I'm talking immediately. Here's without.
00:19:17 Obviously we pick up a little bit
of gain going through there.
00:19:20 But it really is
starting to mix itself,
I feel like the cowbell mixes
the drums down, things like that.
00:19:26 So, stuff is starting
to interact in a fun way.
00:19:29 Next in the chain is this Brainworx
EQ model which I stumbled across
because on the 1073 I did with
Waves, one of the most fun things
about it is the M/S processing,
the ability to EQ the middle
information separately
from the side information.
00:19:43 One of the great things
about working in mid/side
is to really affect the mid information
and side information separately.
00:19:49 To demonstrate what that is this EQ has
some great buttons to actually solo up
the middle information
and solo up the sides.
00:19:56 So, here's the
middle information.
00:20:05 And here's the side information.
00:20:11 Where did our bass go?
Our bass is only in the middle.
00:20:14 Kick and snare, only
in the middle, gone.
00:20:17 So, I would normally not do this
soloed but let's do this soloed.
00:20:21 I'm gonna wanna brighten up the sides
a little bit, just because I do.
00:20:25 Let's add some
high-shelf to the sides.
00:20:35 And then let me see what
happens down in the low mids
because we’ve got our congas,
and toms are gonna be out there and later
on we're gonna have some keyboards.
00:20:42 And I'll come back to this again
once the whole mix is up.
00:20:45 I'll do some quick EQ based
on the drums and the bass.
00:20:53 I like what's that
doing to the congas.
00:20:55 Let's go to the middle information and
see what we wanna do with our bass, kick,
and later on the vocal which
which we'll be affected by this.
00:21:15 You may have noticed that
this EQ does automatically
what you have to hold down shift
and control to do on a EQ3.
00:21:21 It solos up the band makes
it a band pass filter
so you can really find the
frequencies you are affecting.
00:21:46 Let's hear with and without.
00:22:00 Sounds great to me. It's really
helping propel everything.
00:22:04 The next in my chain
is another EQ.
00:22:07 But this is the super
broad Pultec EQ.
00:22:10 It's a little flabby but it's
really nice and musical.
00:22:14 This is and EQ setting that some variant
of this is used on every single mix I do.
00:22:19 I'm doing yet another
happy face EQ.
00:22:22 Some 100 Hz and some 10k.
00:22:23 Sometimes I'll bump
that up 12 or 16 KHz
depending on how harsh cymbals
are and things like that,
turning it into a straight air
EQ as opposed to a treble EQ.
00:22:32 One of the reasons why I do this on
a mix bus is to keep myself from
having to EQ lots of things
individually because you're introducing
lots of extra phase
shifts, things like that.
00:22:42 If I can make my console
have a bunch of low end,
I don't need to add it to other stuff. Really
just the kick and the bass, nothing else.
00:22:49 Let's just check this out.
00:23:01 Who doesn't like that?
The last step in the chain, you may
have noticed some red lights coming on
because of course, each of
these stages adds level,
is a limiter.
00:23:09 I use a couple of different things,
I normally use the Massey L2007,
it's an awesome really
transparent limiter.
00:23:18 I was just at a demonstration
that Mick Guzauski gave.
00:23:21 He was using the Fab
Filter Pro Limiter
and so I checked that out the other night and
I really liked that so we're gonna use that.
00:23:30 Because that's fun too.
00:23:31 Generally I'm doing .2 dB of limiting
here, which with the floating point mixer
and the way plug-in chains work
will actually give me more than .2 dB
of limiting but my ceiling is at .2,
my threshold is at .2.
00:23:46 So this is just to get rid of the transients
that are overshooting and that's it.
00:23:50 Just to shave off
the red lights.
00:23:52 Because red lights make me look
like I don't know what I'm doing.
00:23:57 All I have to do is find the control again
because I've forgotten where it is. Here we go.
00:24:02 Down at the bottom we've got an output
control. We've gonna crank this down to .2...
00:24:08 .02.
00:24:17 And you can see the limiter is actually
doing between 4 and 6 dB of limiting
but my red lights have gone away
so now I look like a
professional engineer.
00:24:25 So that 2-bus stuff is gonna stay
on all the way through the mix.
00:24:29 I may come back and revisit
the EQ on our mid/side guy
just because those frequencies don't necessarily
mean anything without all the instruments in
but otherwise I'm
pretty happy with that
and we're gonna listen with that
all the way through the mix.
00:24:42 Alright. So now we've got
everything in on the stereo bus.
00:24:46 We very well may come back and
revisit that EQ later on,
once we have the rest
of the instruments in.
00:24:51 But speaking of the rest of the
instruments, let's get them in.
00:24:54 We only have one guitar to deal with
here because there was a decision
made very early on the mix process not
to use this extra rhythm guitars.
00:25:02 I'm actually gonna ditch it.
00:25:04 There's no reason to
have it hanging around.
00:25:06 Let's check out this guitar.
00:25:14 Because we only have one guitar I'm gonna
cycle with the keyboards at the same time.
00:25:18 And I think that what we're about to
find out is except for the break,
all of the keyboards and the guitar
are doing this back-beat bubble.
00:25:27 A huge part of any reggae
track is this back-beat.
00:25:31 Let's go through...
00:25:34 some of the keyboards.
00:25:41 Upright piano. Here's some B3.
00:25:43 There's a stereo top track and
a low track to go with it.
00:25:48 This is a pretty standard
way to record a B3,
one mic on the low rotor and
stereo mics on the top.
00:25:53 I'm just gonna leave it
exactly as they sent it
with their balance and let's
see what this sounds like.
00:26:04 Sounds fine.
00:26:05 Then there's a Rhodes track and
there's Rhodes Room and Rhodes DI.
00:26:09 Again, this is a pair of tracks that
go together to make up one thing.
00:26:13 My general theory
is that whoever was recording the
song has spent time balancing this,
even if it was really quick, and this
is the balance the way everybody
has been listening to
while they overdub,
it's what everybody's been
hearing, it's why they think
it's ready to be mixed.
I'm not gonna mess with this balance
between the elements
of the Rhodes
or the elements of the B3
unless I hear something wrong.
00:26:37 I just take it.
00:26:37 Panning and balance exactly as they sent
it until I hear something I don't like.
00:26:42 There's no reason for me
to remake it if it's good.
00:26:48 OK. I've got four elements
doing this back-beat,
I've got two that go all
the way through the song,
the rhythm guitar,
the upright piano.
00:26:59 And then I've got
two that trade off.
00:27:01 I've got the B3 in choruses
and the Rhodes in the verses.
00:27:06 I'm just gonna solo this guys up and
let's see what they all sounds like.
00:27:20 The way this is put together you have a
left back-beat and a right back-beat.
00:27:25 The guitar and the upright piano
go together to make the right
and then the B3 and the Rhodes
take turns being the left.
00:27:32 So far that sounds fine to me.
00:27:34 There's something that
I did during the mix
and I don't remember the entire
process for why we did it,
other than we felt like the back-beat
needed to step up in a couple of spots.
00:27:46 I'm just gonna show you what
I ended up doing in the mix
and then you'll hear what
it does and we'll be happy,
but I don't remember the
entire thought process
behind creating it
in the first place.
00:27:55 What we've done
with the guitar is,
there is spring
reverb here on a send
and I'm gonna turn on
the send here and then
I'm going to flip over and
show you the mute automation.
00:28:08 If we look at the mute
automation for this send,
we're on in the choruses and
then we're off in the verses.
00:28:14 The reason for doing this, I've just
remembered looking at the automation,
was to do exactly that to
lengthen the back-beat
in the choruses, make
it a little bit bigger,
have a little more space to it,
but then in the verses
to really tighten down.
00:28:27 That's also kind of a difference
between the sound of the B3
and the sound of the Rhodes.
00:28:33 I'm gonna play you the guitar going
from the chorus to the verse
with the reverb dropping out.
00:28:43 It makes a really big difference.
It's a really simple change.
00:28:48 I'm using the Softube's
Spring Reverb plug-in
and an EQ to get rid
of some low end.
00:28:55 Basically just trying to make
it sound like an amp reverb,
something you'd find on a Fender
Twin, something like that.
00:29:01 And make it a really natural thing.
We have two very natural sounding
guitar tones and the only thing
that is changing is the reverb.
00:29:10 Let me solo up the Rhodes and the
B3 through that same transition.
00:29:14 And let's see if they do
kind of the same thing.
00:29:25 Pretty similar, I mean, to me the Rhodes
doesn't even sound that different from the B3.
00:29:30 We go down an octave, the
voicing changes a little bit.
00:29:32 This is all about keeping
that back-beat going
but having it feel different
in terms of the size.
00:29:38 Once again,
let's just solo this guys up and I'm gonna play
through the transition from section to section.
00:29:54 It's a really drastic difference
in feel just by changing up
the sonics on one side and the
instrument on the other.
00:30:02 I think this is gonna make a big
difference once we drop it in the track.
00:30:05 The other thing I'm going to
do right now is I'm going to turn on
the sends to the Rear Bus.
00:30:10 Because this will sort of change
the balance of the instruments
and it's what I was doing in the mix.
So rather than drop them in
and have they be too quiet I'm
gonna pop them in to Rear Bus now.
00:30:31 Let me play that for you again.
It's pretty drastic.
00:30:33 It really changes. The other thing that
happens, now listen to the bass line change
as we go between
the two sections.
00:30:41 You'll also hear the
percussion change as we go.
00:30:43 All of those changes together
give you two very different feeling
sections but the groove is just relentless.
00:30:50 And that, again,
is by basing the low end of the track
on that four on the floor kick,
because that never stops,
it doesn't matter what else is going on.
00:31:09 Now let me play the end of the verse
going into the chorus,
so you feel it going the other way.
00:31:24 So it's subtle changes but I think it
really helps lift the track without having
drastic changes. The only instrument that
changes is we switch from B3 to Rhodes
and we have a percussion
change, cowbells come in,
in the verses, which actually
tighten up a little bit
than the conga in the choruses.
But what happens is you have
a drastically different space and once the
horns and vocals are in you'll understand
why we do that as opposed
to just have a bunch
instruments come in the
chorus to make it bigger.
00:31:53 It's not the way this
track is put together.
00:31:54 So speaking of vocals, let's move
down to the background vocals.
00:31:58 The BGVs, as I'm calling them.
Solo those guys up.
00:32:09 That's the sound of the Marleys.
It's one of the great things
that Ziggy decided to do on this
record was to have his sisters sing
and they sing on, I think, every
single track on the album.
00:32:19 It's such an instant gratification in
terms of the character of their voices
and it sounds so familiar too because their
direct descendents of melody makers.
00:32:30 It's awesome. I love
the sound of this.
00:32:33 They sent it with a hard pan, they
sent it with a certain balance.
00:32:37 I think I'm gonna leave it.
00:32:39 I don't see any point in changing it.
What I might do in a second
once we get them into the track is
I might put them through and Aux
so I can do some overall little bit of EQ.
Maybe add some FX or reverb
or something like that but we'll have
to see how they seat in the track.
00:32:53 I believe that other than the horns and
lead vocals we have everything going on.
00:32:57 So, I'll just drop this into the
track because they’re so awesome.
00:33:01 Play a little bit of the first chorus,
and then we're gonna attack the horns.
00:33:12 I lied. We're gonna work on the
background vocals for just a second.
00:33:15 Let me just select this,
they just feel a little dry.
00:33:18 I know they're gonna
need something.
00:33:20 What I'm gonna do very quickly is
add an Aux fader to collect those,
and I'm gonna... say,
give me a new track.
00:33:29 This will very quickly
create the Aux, name the Aux
and route everything exactly
where it's supposed to go.
00:33:34 I'm gonna have an stereo Aux
and I'm gonna call it BGVs.
00:33:38 Done. All I have to do is solo safe
it and make it a nice bright color.
00:33:45 And we're done.
00:33:46 My default output is my router
so any new track
automatically goes there
and now all four
this tracks go here.
00:33:52 Now I can start to do some
overall stuff to them.
00:33:56 The first thing I'm gonna do
is add a little bit of Aphex.
00:34:01 Which is in here somewhere.
00:34:03 And I'll solo up while we do this so you
hear what's going on with the Aphex.
00:34:15 It's a little much. But you can
hear its very grainy top end.
00:34:19 It's not like EQ. It's a
very specific process
with the Aphex Aural Exciter.
00:34:23 The plug-in I'm using is
the Waves emulation of
the very first version
of the Aural Exciter.
00:34:29 Personally, in hardware, I use the Studio
2 which is I think, the third version
I ever brought out, but the character
of what's going on the top end
is very similar. The only real
setting on this is that I'm
mixing 100% wet so that I can use it
on a send as opposed to an insert.
00:34:47 The next thing I'm gonna do
is use some of my vocal verb.
00:34:51 Somewhere here in my sends,
I've got Vocal Verb.
00:34:57 That's coming down to this
Aux right here which, again,
has a filter on the way into the reverb
because I don't want any low end bouncing
around in the reverb and I don't
want any sibilance in the reverb.
00:35:09 And then we're using a pretty
simple Plate emulation from UAD.
00:35:14 I'm using Plate A, with a
pretty short reverb tone.
00:35:17 I don't know for sure if that's
right for this song but let's see.
00:35:25 That feels good. It's way too much.
00:35:32 Let me drop this back in the
track and we'll see where we are at.
00:35:42 OK, without the
Aphex and the reverb.
00:35:52 Sad face.
00:36:01 Alright, that feels good to me for
now and again, once everything is in
than we'll go through and really
fine tune those. They may end up
going into the Rear Bus. This
track is so simple tough
that I have a feeling they're not going to.
Only because they sound good as they are.
00:36:16 You may be wondering why am I doing
all of this work without listening
to the lead vocal at all. And really,
the only reason is because I've
mixed so many songs, I don't
think it would be possible
for me to not leave room for
the lead vocal anymore.
00:36:30 I know what things sound like when they
work in a mix with the lead vocal.
00:36:35 Earlier on my career I'd have gotten
the lead vocal in much earlier.
00:36:39 But at this point it's just less
fatiguing and less worrying about,
"Oh my god, is the vocal level right?
How does that work with things?"
I can really work on that track and
once I've got the lead vocal in there,
if something has to change, it has to change.
I don't really care. Because I've got VCAs
so I can quickly re-balance
the entire band,
going through once we've
got the vocal going.
00:36:58 So I'm still gonna leave
the vocals for last.
00:37:03 Now we get to the horns.
Which if you remember
from early on when I
played you the rough mix,
there is and odd
problem with them.
00:37:10 Let me play you a little of
what's going on with the horns.
00:37:25 You hear, there's reverb and
then there's no reverb.
00:37:28 These tracks have
been consolidated.
00:37:30 So they've done some edits
that I'm not seeing.
00:37:32 What's happening is, if
we go through the tracks,
we've got close mics for the
bone, trumpet, high sax, low sax.
00:37:39 Then we've got some room mics.
There are quite a few room mics.
00:37:43 At least two stereo rooms
for every pass of horns.
00:37:47 These tracks up here is one pass of horns.
These tracks here is a second pass.
00:37:52 If I solo up the rooms.
00:37:57 And go to the problem spot.
00:38:01 Ah, there's the problem.
What's happening is,
in the original horn arrangement, they
had another lick that they played after that.
00:38:08 At this point I've got two options
for how to save the horns.
00:38:12 I can either get rid of
the original room tracks
and just pop a
reverb on these guys
and go about my business.
00:38:19 Or I can try and
salvage the edit.
00:38:22 I think that it really
would be much better
to keep these room mics
because they sound great.
00:38:27 I'm gonna take a two step approach
to fix this reverb problem.
00:38:30 The first thing I'm gonna do
is find one overall reverb
that works with the existing
rooms so that I have a reverb
that doesn't cut off,
that will extend.
00:38:38 Then I'm gonna find a reverb to sort
of replace the end of the reverb
that I've already got.
00:38:44 Let's find our overall reverb first. We're not
gonna use a huge amount of but it's going
to kind of help glue our two
reverbs together later on.
00:38:54 I'm gonna use an Altiverb here because it's
got lots of different rooms available.
00:39:00 Let's go for some sort of Hall.
We'll start off the concert hall,
it doesn't really sound like
what we were already doing.
00:39:09 I wanna use this one because I
don't know how to pronounce it.
00:39:12 Let's see what we've got.
00:39:34 I think we hit a winner.
Immediately.
00:39:36 This actually is sounding a little bit like
those other rooms. The first thing I'm gonna do
is bring this rooms back in, see if this
blend and what I might do is actually
use this for the fixing reverb and we'll
find a different one for an overall.
00:39:56 This is actually pretty good already.
I'm gonna change my mind again.
00:40:01 Maybe I don't need an overall
reverb because this blend
is pretty good but it does
sound a little bit wet.
00:40:06 I'm gonna try to automate
the send to give me much less
until that very last hit.
00:40:12 Let's switch the automation to
the volume control for that send.
00:40:19 Close up some windows
that are in the way.
00:40:25 And here is the automation lane for
that send. I'm gonna bring it up
right next to the waveform so
I can see what's going on.
00:40:32 I'm gonna turn down so my default level
is much quieter. And let's have a listen
just to make sure it's a good
level until the reverb goes away.
00:40:48 That sounds OK. Now what I'm gonna do
is zoom in, take this very last hit...
00:40:54 And just turn up the send.
And let's see what happens.
00:41:07 Here's without it.
00:41:11 Here's with it.
00:41:16 I think we have a winner.
So, because I'm really lazy,
I'm gonna copy this.
00:00:03 And every time that happens,
I'm just gonna paste it in.
00:00:07 I think we're good, and I think
it's vocal time. You're ready?
Here we go.
00:00:12 I'm gonna deal with Ziggy's
vocal first because
it's much more of the traditional lead vocal,
plus, it is the song melody lead vocal.
00:00:20 So it's gonna have most of the interaction
with the horns melodically and harmonically
as well as the
background vocals.
00:00:25 The U Roy vocal is gonna
be a very special case.
00:00:28 I'm just gonna have to make sure he's
loud and proud and doing his job.
00:00:32 But, sonically I feel
like Ziggy's vocal
is gonna take a little more
work so I'm gonna start there.
00:00:36 First thing I'm gonna do is solo
it up just to have a listen
so I know what it is
that he is doing.
00:00:49 Go to a verse.
00:00:57 So overall it sounds pretty good. I'm hearing
something that's a little bit thick.
00:01:01 And I'm also wanting it
to be a bit brighter.
00:01:03 The brighter thing I think I'm gonna
do with the Aphex as opposed to EQ.
00:01:07 But let me bring up and EQ3 7
and sort of sweep around in the low
mids and see if I can find anything
that sounds really muffled and if so
I'm gonna dip a little bit of it out
and probably use a low shelf below
it to keep the present low end
but get rid of some of the thickness.
If I don't find anything that's consistent,
I'm gonna leave it alone and try to just brighten
up above it and we'll see how that works.
00:01:49 Vocal is something that I really feel
you need to feel the impact of it.
00:01:53 The same way you do with the
kick and snare.
00:01:56 So this is something where
I'm gonna be monitoring loud.
00:01:59 To get my vocal sound.
00:02:01 I've got to make sure that when
he sings a closed vowel sound
that it actually really
hits me in the chest.
00:02:07 I'm gonna crank it up a little bit.
We will listen through
with and without this EQ
and see if it's working.
00:02:25 I actually like that a lot.
It's really helping.
00:02:28 A couple of things that I do
on a lot of vocal tracks so
I tend to just try them to see if
they work is, I always try a Phoenix.
00:02:36 Just to see. Because vocal
is always one of the things
when I was recording on tape,
that always benefited it.
00:02:42 It never sounded worse coming
off tape than it did in input
unless there was wrong
with the tape machine.
00:02:47 Just the way that compression worked.
For a subtle version of that
one of my favorite plug-ins
is the Phoenix. I'm gonna go ahead
and pull that up.
00:02:57 Basically, there are five
different algorithms
on this plug-in, four of them
mainly deal with lots of top end
and they all sound different,
you just have to learn them.
00:03:08 And then there's one
called Dark Essence,
which the more you crank it the more
it starts to really push the low end.
00:03:13 I think we're OK in the low
end but I'm gonna go ahead
and listen to what happens
on the Dark Essence.
00:03:30 It's a little much, so let's try Radiant,
for some reason.
00:03:42 OK, that's sounding
really good to me.
00:03:44 Another thing that I'll often
use directly on the vocal
is kind of the only
other thing I ever use
is just the Renaissance
Vocal Compressor.
00:03:52 It's a very simple
compressor, I don't wanna
be thinking about my
compression at this point.
00:03:58 I'll just use a tiny touch of it because
it has this auto make-up gain on it
which basically is gonna help
me make the vocal louder
without having to really
think about it too much.
00:04:24 I think I actually like
it better without.
00:04:27 I'm just gonna make it inactive.
00:04:29 I'll keep it around
because you never know.
00:04:33 I think we are ready to drop
it into the track just to see
where it's at and then I'm
gonna go back, solo it up
and I'll add some parallel
compression to it and some FX
but I wanna kind of feel how
it sits with everything.
00:05:08 I know we need the Aphex, I know
we need the parallel compression
so I'm just gonna go
ahead and do that.
00:05:13 Most of the sends have
come in from my template
so I'm just gonna go ahead
and turn some things on
and then I'll show
you what they are.
00:05:20 The first thing is a Vocal Crush. As you can
probably guess, it's a parallel compressor
used almost
exclusively on vocal.
00:05:27 It doesn't always mean that I
will only use it on the vocal
but if call it Vocal Crush
I know exactly what it is.
00:05:33 And what it is in this case is...
00:05:37 An 1176.
00:05:39 This one happens to
be the Waves CLA 76,
which to me is kind of the
grainiest of all the models,
which I really like for this kind
of application. It's all buttons in,
attack and release all the
way down, all the way up,
so I have an
incredibly slow attack
and incredibly fast release.
This is gonna be really speedy.
00:05:59 And then I'll drive into it and this
level tends to work pretty well.
00:06:03 I'll start with this level,
I'm not really gonna mess
with the settings on this
compressor too much.
00:06:08 What I'm gonna do is mess with either
the send into it or the return,
and get a balance between the
aggressiveness of this compressor
and the speediness and my dry vocal which
doesn't have any compression on it whatsoever.
00:06:35 OK, so now I'm gonna mute that.
00:06:37 Playback the vocal, I'll bring it
in about half way through the verse.
00:06:40 The levels are gonna jump up quite a bit
but you can also really hear a difference
in the character of the vocal.
00:06:52 Same two lines with it.
00:07:01 You can see from the meter
we're compressing a lot.
00:07:03 Let me play you one more time and
watch the compression meter.
00:07:13 But because we're
adding it in parallel
it doesn't have a
crushed feel to it.
00:07:17 It just feels like he's a
little bit more on fire.
00:07:20 And that's what we've been doing
to all of the instruments.
00:07:22 Just trying to make them
a little more exciting.
00:07:24 The next thing I know we're
gonna need is some Aphex.
00:07:27 I'm gonna go ahead and
turn on that send.
00:07:29 I'll just put him
back in the track,
and I'm gonna bring that send
up until it sounds good to me.
00:08:13 So really quickly let me play
with and without this Aphex.
00:08:21 Same line without the Aphex.
00:08:27 Now, I use Aphex on
the vocals because
it's a very different
process to EQ.
00:08:33 EQ basically just
boosts a frequency
whereas the Aphex, it's patented, I
don't know what the special sauce is,
but it's a very dynamic process.
00:08:42 It's also a very grainy process.
00:08:44 And there's something about it
that sounds like a record to me.
00:08:47 So, it's a totally different
character than EQ.
00:08:50 The other thing is,
instead of individually EQing
everything that wants to have
this sort of sheen on top,
by using one thing on a Send,
I actually end up
with this great kind of sheen
shared by all the stuff that should have it,
and it's all on exactly the same frequency
and it feels the same.
It's almost like using a reverb
but it acts like EQ.
00:09:13 The same way using parallel compression
can act like EQ and can act like an
excitement fader,
which you can't really get
away with direct compression
because you're gonna crush the crap out of
something and add a little bit of it in,
which is a totally different feel
to directly compressing something.
00:09:29 It's a different way of doing it
and it's something that my
ear really seems to like.
00:09:33 The next thing is, the
vocal is super dry.
00:09:37 This track is not dry at all. The
drums are dry, the bass is dry,
that's kind of it. Everything
else has some reverb
so obviously he's gotta
live in a space too.
00:09:47 There's a vocal reverb in the
session from my template,
which I think...
00:09:53 we already had a look at.
That's our Plate.
00:09:56 I'm just gonna go ahead, turn on that
send and I'll bring some of that up.
00:10:00 That should help glue it
in with the backgrounds
because they're gonna
live in the same space.
00:10:23 I like that but it actually
feels a little bit dark to me.
00:10:26 I'm just gonna open up
the filter before it
and take out a little more of
the low end on the way in.
00:10:42 One last thing I'm gonna do to see if I
can make it sound a little less dry,
sync back in the
mix a little more,
is something from my
template called Spread.
00:10:51 And that is based on the Micro
Pitch Slap program from H3000,
which I've used for years
and years in hardware.
00:10:59 I've made lots of different
versions of this with the 910.
00:11:03 At the moment I've got
the Little Microshift on
setting 3 and 100% wet.
Let's see how that sounds.
00:11:43 I like a little bit of that. It
helps sync them in a little bit.
00:11:46 The next thing I'm gonna
do, before U Roy,
it's only because I'm scared of U
Roy because if you get that wrong
you've blown the whole track, it doesn't
matter what the rest of it sounds like.
00:11:54 If you remember from way back
when I've got this Master
Fader for my router.
00:12:01 So this is controlling how much
of my stereo mix gets into all
the plug-ins in my stereo bus.
00:12:07 Now I'm just gonna
have a look at 33609,
which is my main
stereo compressor.
00:12:12 I'm gonna see how many dB of
compression we're getting.
00:12:14 And I just know from experience
that it should be
somewhere around 4.
00:12:19 If it's more than that, I'm
gonna drop this fader down.
00:12:21 If it seems like I can push it
I'm gonna try pushing it just to
see what it does to the groove.
00:12:26 Because it's really gonna
change the groove.
00:12:28 We're watching this meter here
to see if it gets up to around 4
and I'm gonna be changing...
00:12:33 this level.
00:12:34 See what happens.
00:13:03 I like that. One last thought
I had while doing it,
to glue the vocal back in,
is I'm gonna get rid of this
horn reverb bus and I'm gonna pop
the lead vocal into the Rear Bus.
00:13:14 I should turn them
down when I do that
because it's gonna pick
up a lot of level.
00:13:21 But now the background vocals,
the horns, the keyboards will
all be pumping that compressor
that has the vocal in it.
00:13:26 This may help glue it back
in a little bit more.
00:14:04 I like it in the Rear Bus and
the last thing I adjusted before hit
stop was to bring the backgrounds up.
00:14:11 What does is it gives the
lead vocal an excuse
for being how loud
and present it is
because the other vocals
are as loud and present.
00:14:19 Let me do that for you while
the track is playing.
00:14:24 I'm gonna go back down two
dB on the background vocals
and play a little bit of
the verse into the chorus.
00:14:42 All I'm gonna do is turn
backgrounds up 2 dB.
00:14:57 I'm gonna have to do vocal rides but
now, it makes a lot more sense to me.
00:15:01 Everybody is sort of
living in the same spot.
00:15:04 I can't put it off any longer.
It's time to check out U Roy.
00:15:08 This is the thing that made me the
most nervous, was getting this right.
00:15:13 Let's just...
00:15:14 Check him out at the
end of the song,
have a listen, and sort of
see what we're gonna do.
00:15:27 Alright, so let's get to work.
00:15:28 I think the first thing we're gonna do is some
sort of similar work on the low end.
00:15:33 I feel like there's something
holding the voice back.
00:15:36 I'm gonna search around
for some low end stuff.
00:15:55 I'm adding a little bit of body.
00:15:57 Sort of in the same range we
took out of Ziggy's voice,
it's a little bit higher,
but I think it needs it.
00:16:02 There's something
kind of annoying.
00:16:39 So what I'm doing here is actually I have
two overlapping bands in the same spot.
00:16:43 There is a nasal thing
that's bugging me
but I also feel like I
want some presence.
00:16:47 I'm gonna do kind of a tight band,
taking out at the frequency I found
that was really hitting me.
00:16:53 And then I'm gonna add in that same
area with a wider band and that will
make it feel as it still
have that mid range presence
but hopefully cut back on the stuff
that's really, barking at my eardrum.
00:17:11 Alright. We're
getting somewhere.
00:17:13 Just because we can, let's pop
a 1073 style thing on there.
00:17:21 I have very standard
settings for vocals,
the same way kick and snare, I've
got some very good starting places.
00:17:26 That would be, to use
some of the high shelf,
to use some of that 7.2 mid band
and in combination with the shelf
that will really set the top end going.
And then for body,
possibly some 220.
00:17:37 Will just run this and
see what happens.
00:17:56 Getting good. As always
we'll try some compression,
I'll try the usual first,
this little Renaissance Vocals.
00:18:07 See what happens.
00:18:28 I'm not sure about that, let me
move that guy over and let's try...
00:18:32 The only other hardware compressor I
ever really put on a vocal is an LA-2A.
00:18:38 Let's try one of those,
and just see what happens.
00:18:41 By the way, on a lot
of the Waves models
you see this 50Hz, 60Hz and
Off function for the analog.
00:18:48 That's on a lot of
their plug-ins,
what they've done is they've
modeled all the parts
of the circuit that actually make noise
or are reacting to the power supply
and the reason there's a 50
Hz and a 60 Hz version is
for US power 60 Hz,
European power 50 Hz.
00:19:02 I find, 90% of the time,
there's no sonic benefit
to having that part of the circuit
in and the noise can sometimes
be crazy. So I always turn
that stuff off right away.
00:19:14 So let's see what
this guy does to it.
00:19:32 Alright, that's starting
to sound good to me.
00:19:35 I'm gonna drop them in the
track and I'm gonna turn on
our Vocal Crush send,
our FX send and the
Spread send because
I'm almost positive that all
three of those are gonna be good
but I'll go ahead and mute them.
00:19:49 While I play the track with him in it,
I'm gonna start bringing those in.
00:20:30 Now let's see if we need any reverb on him.
00:20:48 OK, the only thing I think we still
need is, he needs to live in a space
because this is sort of a dance
hall thing that happens.
00:20:56 It would normally be through a PA.
I always have a slap in my template.
00:21:02 Let's just go ahead and
see how that works.
00:21:05 If the slap that comes with
the template doesn't work
then we're gonna go ahead and
get something else going.
00:21:10 All I'm using, again, is
some filters on the way to
the Roland Space Echo.
00:21:15 We've got other
choices, this is just
what I happened to be using around
the time I made the template.
00:21:30 OK, the real test is how this
sound is bringing the track in.
00:21:44 He's sounding really
good to me actually,
but there are a few elements
of the mix that are feeling a little dull.
00:21:50 Especially after getting U Roy sounding
so good. I think we're gonna revisit
Ziggy's vocal sound
and the snare
and see if that's enough and if not than
we'll dive into a few other instruments.
00:21:59 But I think we're getting pretty
close to automation time.
00:22:03 I'm just gonna be jumping around a
little bit while the track plays.
00:22:06 And you'll see what I'm doing.
00:22:51 One thing I actually wanna try is adding
a tiny bit of reverb to the snare.
00:22:55 I'm not a huge proponent of reverb
on drums, but like with the toms...
00:23:00 The toms it's more of
an FX and the snare
it's more of just trying to
lengthen the snare naturally
but without doing something
that really sticks out.
00:23:11 So you almost feel as tough the
snare was just tuned differently
and what I'm really starting to feel is
that the gate that we've got on the snare,
that's making it tight and
getting rid of the ghosts,
is good for the groove
but bad for the sound,
so I'm gonna try and lengthen
it with some reverb.
00:23:24 I've got a kind of an ambient
reverb in the template.
00:23:27 Which is basically an
ambiance program in Revibe.
00:23:33 Let's see how that works.
00:24:28 Automation time.
00:24:31 When I'm automating, when I'm mixing on a
console there are toms of faders, I can grab
lots of things things at once.
00:24:39 I've tried lots of different
controllers for mixing in the box
and I really don't
like any of them.
00:24:44 I've ended up using my
Frontier Alpha Track
which I have for years.
00:24:48 It's a single fader controller
and in a lot of ways I've found
that it has made me much more focused
and I really kind of enjoy it.
00:24:56 A shortcut that is awesome when you have a
controller, is if you hold down Shift+Ctrl and click
on any tracks name, it immediately
does the scroll into view command
which also puts it on the first
fader of your controller.
00:25:09 What I'm gonna do is pop
this guys into touch.
00:25:13 I'm gonna do the drums first because
they're pretty steady state
but they make the transitions
well with the fills
and I'm just gonna be pushing
the fills as they go by
and also kind of faking
some dynamics into them
to make some of the sections build more like
the end of the brakes, stuff like that.
00:25:28 One thing that is really cool
about having one fader is,
when you have lots of faders
you can get distracted
and you think you're riding the drums.
But then you touch the bass fader
and then the lead vocal, and really all that's
happened you stopped riding the drums.
00:25:42 This way I'm gonna ride the drums all the
way start to finish. It's gonna be awesome.
00:25:47 Here we go.
00:29:45 I'm gonna bring down the snare reverb
because it's bugging me a little bit.
00:29:49 I'm just gonna concentrate
on the breakdown for a second
because I feel like I know how
to fix it and I wanna just do it.
00:29:55 I'm gonna ride the congas first because
they're kind of a big deal going on here.
00:30:01 Let me make sure that the
group for the congas is on.
00:30:04 That the group of all of
the percussion is not on.
00:30:09 Pop those guys into touch.
00:30:13 Scroll them into view.
And let's do it.
00:30:53 Another big part of that build is gonna
be the B3 which starts playing chords
half way through.
Come down here. Pop them in touch.
00:31:01 Scroll them into view.
00:31:26 And some love for the bass.
00:31:27 I don't think I'm gonna have to really
ride the bass through the whole track
because he's just so on
it and part of the groove
but I am gonna ride him
going through this break.
00:32:14 I think we're basically done except for
riding the horns and the vocals.
00:32:18 So I'm just gonna go ahead
and do that.
00:32:19 And I'll meet you on the other side
with the finished mix.
00:32:23 I've just finished riding all the
vocals, went back, EQ a tiny bit
on the horns to brighten them up
a little bit. No major changes.
00:32:32 I think we're ready to print this. It's been
really fascinating to mix this song again
after...
00:32:37 Probably about 8 months since
the first time I mixed it.
00:32:40 It's ended up in a slightly
different place but
the biggest thing is
once again being true
to the roots of the
song, which is the reggae,
which is supporting U Roy's
vocal along with Ziggy's.
00:32:52 Really making a big deal
out of the horns and the backgrounds
and just making sure it
grooves. Alright, here's the mix.
00:36:43 Et voilà!
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Andrew Scheps is a music producer, mixing engineer and record label owner based in the United Kingdom. He has received Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album for his work on Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium, Album Of The Year for Adele's 21, and also Best Reggae Album for Ziggy Marley's Fly Rasta.
Andrew started as a musician, but found that what he enjoyed most was working behind the scenes. This led him to study recording at the University of Miami. After graduating, he spent some time working for Synclavier, and then on the road with Stevie Wonder (as a keyboard tech) and Michael Jackson (mixing live sound). But he found his home in the studio, and he honed his craft working for producers such as Rob Cavallo, Don Was and Rick Rubin.
Andrew collaborated with Waves in order to create his own line of plug-ins which include the Scheps 73 EQ and the Scheps Parallel Particles.
Andrew is one of the best known mixing engineers in the world, well-known for his Rear Bus mixing techniques that he developed working on his 64 input Neve 8068 console and his love for distortion of any kind. If you are watching pureMix videos you will see that he managed to carry his analog sound signature over to a fully portable digital rig. These days, Andrew mixes completely In The Box as it allows him much greater flexibility and the ability to work on several project simultaneously.
Parts of this site and some files are only accessible to pureMix Pro Members or available to purchase. Please see below our membership plans or add this video to your shopping cart.
Hello Andrew and everyone reading this.
The part I was really waiting to see was how to deal with the transients and he just shaved everything off with Pro L. You can feel the bass drum was gone and part of the snare body, to my ears.
Of course when we talk about somebody like Andrew, the expectations are really high. Again, to my ears it sounded a little rough, not "radio ready" quality, specially the vocals. I'm not saying he is hiding the secrets or anything, I'm just being honest, I may be totally wrong. Although very good explanations and the microshift trick worth it watching it.
daniel.boa
2022 Jun 30
the best video so far... pure mix in real taste
crone.a
2022 May 29
Andrew is definitely a sound crafter! Amazing vid!
Analombardi
2021 Jan 07
hmmm, shouldn't choosing which mikes to use on the snare and kick be done pre EQ?
ShuntaiMusic
2020 Apr 13
I am taking the time to watch this over and over again, this is my 3rd time. Learning to mix Reggae away from Jamaica is a challenge but He's done a fantastic job. Now if I can remember 50% of his techniques I'll be alright, I took a lot of notes over a span of 3 days. Fly Rasta. The guy is a genius but I understand it took a lot of hard work to get there.
gcarmona99
2019 Oct 03
Epic Session! Great tutorial as well.
joethecomposer007
2019 Jan 08
Thank you soooooooooooo much for this amazing lesson. Its mind blowing how many details i keep missing that you remind me of . One day I guess I'll remember )
RobertVe3
2018 Mar 29
Shoutout Andrew Scheps on this educational plus practical behind the scene of an Top-tier Mix Engineer at work crafting a Grammy winning Production mix; Straight ART! The ultimate goal of mine and everyone on this message feed. My only question; was the Lead and Background vocals treated for Ss before your final mix? Never see no use of a DeEsser here. I hear no obvious reason for it in your mix here, but i was wondering if it was done prior? Awesome mix my virtual mentor ((:0))
invisarts
2018 Mar 12
The off-beat keyboard and guitar is called the "skank" and the reggae legend of toasting is "you" Roy not "ooh" Roy! But great video and mix! Thx!
Rymsha
2018 Mar 03
Hi Andrew, great video again. Just a question - when reading various mixing articles I have picked up the general info that you should not:
1. Put a limiter on the 2 bus, that should be left to mastering engineers
2. Always leave at least 3-6 db of headroom on the mix bus.
Seeing your video, you seem to break both general ”rules”. What´s your thinking on this?
andreievkalupniek@westat.com
2017 Nov 04
So cool!!! The automation rides where the icing on a perfect cake...everything is grooving and moving in such a pleasant way! Thanks!
maladik
2017 Jul 18
Il y a un problème avec la vidéo, au chapitre 3 à partir du rear buss il n'y a plus de sous titre et le peu qui apparaissent sont complètement décalés.
StephenHare
2017 Apr 22
These tutorials by Andrew Scheps on mixing "Fly Rasta" are of the absolute highest calibre. What Mr. Scheps does here is focus on using a few tools consistently and masterfully in order to get the song to groove best - and he explains why. What I learned most was his philosophical approach to mixing without pretense. This is what we can apply ourselves as our own styles grow, and not get bogged down on whether someone uses one parameter over another. Thank you for making this happen - I felt very much like I was part of the session itself. Respect!
AchillesWoods
2017 Apr 07
Andrew is just as interesting to listen to as he is to watch. He instills confidence!
Jonathanbminor
2017 Mar 10
Thank you for the incredible video , an absolute learning experience.
ilyaorlov
2017 Mar 03
Thanks a lot! This is really cool!
smstudio56
2017 Feb 27
Great Video explaining each phase on how the who mix came together. Question regarding the rear buss, are the send pre or post fader, and from the group busses or individual tracks? I'm assuming the busses,..
mauroiul
2017 Jan 26
Great video! Having said that I would like to stress 2 things:
1-I found U ray voice a bit disconnected from Ziggy's one, there is more excitement to it (more spread and aphex) and in my very humble opinion that took some attention away from Ziggy's voice. I thought he would fix it by the end, but he didn't. Does anybody else feels the same?
2 -Sometimes I would like to see some of those great mixers dealing with a bit less then a perfect recorded track. Although I'm sure this is the kind of level that they normally get, this is probably not always the case for some of us.
vivalazik
2017 Jan 09
thx for this video ! It gives a lot of tricks to try (aphex instead of eq, all the parallel stuffs via sends...). Plus freedom, instinct... It also brings out the question of what is a "prefect" mix. Is it something where everything is under control, following rules ? Here, clearly not but that's what makes it alive ! It's even more important that we're talking about reggae.
Thank you master !
Dazz13
2016 Dec 07
Ok only a few seconds in and already I can only give 4/5. Lead vocals are not orange they are BLUE for boy and PINK for girl. Also Bass is GREEN, Drums are NAVY/BLACK that's ok. Keyboards PURPLE ok... Guitars are RED and brass is ORANGE. (And acoustic guitars are yellow cause they're light) Apart from that great video! :D haha
Yongmun Lee
2016 Nov 17
IT IS JUST OUTSTANDING. I THINK THIS VIDEO SHOULD BE WATCHED BY PEOPLE WHO LOVE TO MAKE THEIR MUSIC GREAT.
CarlStone
2016 Oct 23
Outstanding Masterclass!!
Thank you so much.
Peace
Carlos
angie
2016 Jul 29
great, so useful to see this wizard working start to finish
SonicAlchemy
2016 Jul 13
Andrew Scheps is the kind of guy I would simply just love to work with and\or learn from anytime. What a great mentor. Cheers!
baloo7777
2016 Jul 03
Thank you! Really liked your easy down to earth reasoning and the way you showed how you organize the rough mix so you can see and work with no pain.
uppayardvybz05@gmail.com
2016 May 28
WELL DONE!
dasmusique
2016 May 14
Vraiment très cool! Merci pour ce vidéo!! Petite question: Est-ce qu'il print vraiment avec un limiteur à -0.2 db ??? Le mastering engineer ne doit pas aimer du tout! :)
Vive A.S. et Puremix!
composermikeglaser
2016 Apr 20
Great inside look into Schep's approach, I'd love to see how he would tackle a rock track or something with more grit. It's ironic to observe the man known for being the "loudest" mixer rock a reggae track. All in all, simply awesome inspiring ideas on how to be a better more competitive mix engineer.
Rusty Falcon
2016 Apr 05
INAKI... the answer about the compressor on stereo Drum Crush is in the "Fly Rasta All Analog" videos. There is a great segment in there where he talks about the outboard gear. PS it's a Chandler TG1 setup in dual mono, compress mode, limiter mode off, hitting it fairly hard. My takeaway is to use a clean dual mono comp 'in the box' unless of course you have the Chandler TG1 plugin.
mackiemezzer
2016 Mar 20
Altough the Pro-L is very powerful, I can't believe, that he would print a final mix for real with this kind of heavy 9 dB limiting. Anyway, watching A.S. was real fun, I'm still laughing about that "In The Air Tonight" joke :-)
And yes I'd love to see more of this!
Nathankaye
2016 Mar 14
Firstly, thanks to Andrew Scheps,Puremix & Ziggy Marley for this.
Not only did we get a very clear explanation from a genius in mixing, but we also got a Marley tune.
I got most from the kick & snare vids, but garnered lots from everything else, as well as reaffirmed some things I knew.
Only criticisms (I feel awkward saying that):
1) I really wanted to see Andrew ride the vocals. It's one of the things I was actually looking forward to getting a birds eye view on, but it was omitted. Why?
2) Only 1 minute of Ziggy's tune to mix?? So no toms, timbale, etc to practice with
Still gr8 tho!
soundcitybg
2016 Mar 09
Thank you!
TCawoski
2016 Mar 08
Awesome!!! Loved watching Andrew go through the process. He explained everything so well. Really good videos.
benreel
2016 Mar 02
Great video very useful tips , only issue is I would have liked to see the panning of tracks up close .
benreel
2016 Mar 02
He forgets to mention what compressor he uses on the drum crush buss that sends to his overheads on the kit .
I know he uses dbx on kick and snare . Anybody know the answer
bdhender
2016 Feb 26
These videos are absolute Gold. Worth every cent. Andrew Scheps is not only a brilliant Mix Engineer, he is also an excellent educator and refreshingly honest and funny at the same time. This is the stuff that you used to get by being a junior in an established studio, but rarely at this level. I received lots of learning and confirmations at the same time.
Thanks Fab for providing this and Andrew for you amazing presentation.
Fratel
2016 Feb 24
Thanks a lot...there are few tutorials were other languages is disponible! Remain as a rule!
owenlt
2016 Feb 20
The section on EQ-ing the snare drum may be the single most useful 5 minutes I have ever watched. (Now more like the single most useful 45 minutes, as I've watched it 6 times - with multiple pauses to open up some of my own sessions.) The mindset is super-informative: the tightening up (and slight fattening) of the low-end with a HPF; the low-shelf boosts; the 'there's nothing wrong with a happy face EQ' remark. Best of all, though I don't have the UAD Neve, I do have the Slate VMR, and both the general approach and the specific frequency settings work an absolute treat. Splendid stuff!
youngtim1
2016 Feb 10
A-MAZE-ING
I would pay for videos like this, all day long. Great score getting Andrew.
Does anyone have an idea why some of his tracks are routed to his router bus, and some are direct to the main print bus?
HANSON MICHAEL
2016 Feb 05
Just finishing up my own PT MIX template which is made out of Scheps and W. Huart. Thanks Scheps for this one!!! Now on to set up my Rec Vox Template and my Rec Instr. Template;)
youngtim1
2016 Jan 31
I would pay a monthly fee to watch more videos like this! Great content. Andrew is the man!
KG
2016 Jan 29
Wow that's really awesome! One thing only, is he always sending the mix with that much limiting to mastering? Seems a lot =D But who cares? Its Andrew Scheps! Great video!
johnfueston
2016 Jan 27
Both the in-the-box and the analog videos were wonderful! Andrew is not only a top engineer, but he is also able to clearly express his thought process and decisions. I would love to see more videos from him and other guest mix engineers. Well done!
reddirt
2016 Jan 25
Wonderful enlightening job Andrew. What has struck me is that i feel Fab would have approached it quite differently thus highlighting there's no absolute and right way - we can take something from each and every teacher to develop what works for us.
Take the learnings and trust our ears.
Thanks again Andrew and Puremix
mmezrich
2016 Jan 22
His sarcasm is my favorite thing in the whole world!
dexter_quito
2016 Jan 21
Most people are very smart but doesn't have a heart of a teacher. Andrew Scheps has both!
youngtim1
2016 Jan 19
I love this video. I mix in the box exclusively and this helped me so much. I would love to get a copy of what his routing/template is. I tried to pause and see what his sends, etc. were but still am not sure.
PageBoy
2016 Jan 05
A true savant makes everything seem so easy.
adamminer
2015 Dec 26
Andrew Scheps is such a great educator. I would watch him mix any ol' time. I learned a great deal. I'm very glad I had the opportunity to see him work.
My only suggestion is I would have liked to hear Andrew say a word or two about what kind of tracking processing would have been done. He didn't get into de-esser's or a lot of other clean-up work. I assume the tracks were recorded very well.
Saul Santilli
2015 Dec 25
Thank you! Effing amazing brilliant video Mr Scheps you are a gentleman and scholar . Thanks Puremix!
William Forrest
2015 Nov 28
Wouah, une des meilleures vidéos sur le mix, j'ai énormément appris (surtout sur la philosophie du mix). Un énorme merci à Mr Andrew Schepps et Puremix, excellent travail.
Gary Leahy
2015 Nov 08
WOW!!! I'll even say it backwards. "WOW"
You know as an amateur engineer no matter how many times I can sit and watch this video and others done by the pro's. It will never sound as good as them. I think that's why they don't mind spilling the beans on their mixes. Because what is on display is years and years of mistakes and experience as well as "EAR TRAINING". You cannot learn or arrive in one sitting. Having that it's good to see why they make the decision they do to make a great record. Fab another tutoring by Andrew please. Well done.
dlapanja4
2015 Oct 23
Really great video! I visited the Andrew Scheps seminar Mix with the masters and it was really great. When I was there, the parallel compressor he used on drums crush was UAD Fairchild 670. Someone of you asked about it. Hope it helps!
GavinS
2015 Sep 07
I want to rate this video a 5 so bad. I can't. Not because of Andrew... I love what he shows us here and he's one of my virtual mentors.
The reason I'm rating the video lower than I really want to is because not only are the exercise files just a small portion of the song (which I partially understand), but there isn't a Pro Tools session included.
We have to guess the template and plugin settings - and the rough mix. I actually don't mind doing this but I feel there should be at least a "setup" read me so that we can start exactly where Andrew is starting from. We should know the rough mix.
onlinemusic
2015 Sep 04
Great video. Clear, systematic explanations. Interesting to see the similarities and differences between Andrew's and Fab's approaches. Would love to see more complete guest mixes like this.
konop_tnt
2015 Aug 31
Whole "Fly rasta" album sounds very good. Very inspiring tutorial. At least one more with Andrew Scheps please!
craigaudio1079
2015 Aug 19
Fantastic tutorial!
M.Y.
2015 Aug 11
Amazing song.
Superb mixing.
These help me to learn the workflow of modern music creation!
Thank you!
jordanbarnett
2015 Aug 03
This video really helped me with routing and order of EQ and Compression. A great starting point for a session set up. Love his humor and his simplicity. Glad he is humble.
nelsongomezmera
2015 Aug 02
excelente video. un maestro
martthie_08
2015 Aug 02
I would have checked the drum room mics with a MS decoder, somethings seems a little fishy there.
too bad that after all these years ProTools does not come with a stock Mid-Side matrix, S1 to the rescue...
really great and inspiring video, I can only imagine how hard it must be to be mixing and teaching simultaneously, heavy work for the left and right brain sides
dannywmusic
2015 Jul 27
great!
would like to see more of there with other mixers
rmoreno
2015 Jul 12
Great Man. I Like It. Everything Sound Very Natural. Yes Thanks Puremix!!
Ming
2015 Jul 11
Awesome!!Nice video let me learn more,thanks.
I have some question about that.
First,the drum overhead Kick is on the right side,why it would be recorded like that??And Why Andrew didn't fix it in the mix??
Second,Andrew set a limit on master bus and it seems push that so hard,is there enough headroom for mastering?
that confuse me,hope to get the answer,Thanke!^^
rolyboy
2015 Jul 03
I feel very fortunate - Andrew is an excellent teacher and this is an outstanding mix tutorial. He is technically astute and lazy!! (what a great combo). His take on the use of specific in the box plugins was quite an eye opener for me - I own some and have subsequently delved into others. Thank you Fab and co - the blend of your specific insight and training, combined with the workflow and insights of industry professionals, is a godsend to those of us who strive to do better. Please keep these mix videos going (Tchad Blake pleeaase- he is UK based though I guess).
Joelhume
2015 Jul 01
More of this type of video please!
DaveNJ
2015 Jun 21
This was really great - thanks PureMix & Andrew!
I have one question - I notice that on Andrew's plate reverb sends he doesn't have the signal set to 100% wet - is this just a workflow thing as he'll end up getting more volume for each track he sends to it, or is there another reason?
bgrichting
2015 Jun 20
Wow, amazing video, very interesting to see how this pro is thinking about mixing a song. And FINALLY a very useful tip on why using VCAs in ProTools ;-)
jmag02
2015 Jun 18
Fabrice, it is truly incredible that you're bringing a video from such a mixing heavyweight to us. Thank you, and anything more like this (and the Ryan West videos) is so tremendously appreciated!
Phil Boneyard
2015 Jun 16
Love seeing someone's else thought process and also bought an Alphatrack after watching the vid and loving it, was looking at big DAW controllers prior but totally agree about his point on focus when automating. Thanks Andrew, Fabrice and the team :D
KentEastwood
2015 Jun 13
This is a fantastic and informative Lesson, thanks guys.
The 5 minute scene of Andrew riding the drum fader is pure audio engineering porn.
A great insight into Andrew's process, brain and sense of humor.
This has really helped me get more definition in my mixes.
Great stuff!
Cheers
playground
2015 Jun 12
Great video, thanks Andrew, Fabrice and Guillaume, can´t wait till next.
Andrew, you forgot to show us your Drums Crush Parallel compressor.
All the best!!
guillaume paillotin
2015 Jun 11
And thanks for the tracks !! I can make my own mix of Ziggy and U-roy !! that's awesome !!
guillaume paillotin
2015 Jun 11
Hello Andrew,
it seems so simple when you do it !!
But I 've been so frustated because I think you don't tell us in the video what is the compressor used for parallel cymbals crush !!
Thanks for sharing Andrew !!
xuanvuz
2015 Jun 09
Great vid! Please have more like this.
redhook
2015 Jun 09
This video went perfect with my morning coffees and chocolate muffin..
Now off to the studio.
Thanks !
Prezstone
2015 Jun 07
Brutal!!! Wonderfull.... Thank you! good job!
jasonxoc
2015 Jun 06
:/ I'm disappointed Andrew... Bass is always an earthy dark brown. This video sucks.
kenners_456
2015 Jun 06
thx for sharing this awesome stuff.
as you can see, there is no need to use much equalization,
if the tracks are well recorded and you know what youre doing.
the specific use of the aural exciter, is a good tip for beginners
to brighten up their mixes.
also that he uses very small amounts of compression on the lead vocals
was very inspiring for me.
greetings -kenny-
trechuck@gmail.com
2015 Jun 04
Wow, Andrew is a class act. He knows so much, and yet, he is so humble as he explains things. I feel more empowered to trust my instincts after watching this. This video is a must see.
Tas
2015 Jun 04
Andrew Scheps is GREAT!!! I love his work and he is GREAT teacher!!!!
The whole video is fantastic, i wish i could download it though...
Getting the chance to see how a master like Mr Scheps is thinking and how he's making decisions is fantastic!!!
Thank you Mr Scheps, thank you Pure mix!!!
Greetings from Greece
panchoguitars
2015 Jun 03
Automation time, the best face in the world jajajajaja
g
2015 Jun 03
@gatsie yes. :-)
gatsie
2015 Jun 03
He says "in the other video when I'm mixing on the board" at one point. Is there, or will there be another great video soon?
PSW
2015 Jun 02
Awesome vid. Thank you.
leesparey
2015 Jun 02
Happy Face :-)
FabianS
2015 Jun 02
...it was not worth it!
surfz247
2015 Jun 02
Great video. Andrew is awesome and funny. Great teacher. Hope to see more like this! Neal Avron!!
jmariogo
2015 Jun 02
Really amazing video, Andrew has amazing teaching skills. Thanks to everyone who made this happen!!
BillCammack
2015 Jun 01
Nice work! :) Thank you! :D
Stephansan
2015 Jun 01
Awesome!! We need more like this. Many thanks to Puremix.
tzeyean80@yahoo.com
2015 Jun 01
llollzz, there always a rushing in the end of the show....
bdunn315
2015 Jun 01
It's impossible to put into words with that video is worth. Having insight into Andrews decision-making process is priceless. What blew me away was the spent time Bringing out and utilizing the natural characteristics of the tracks instead of just slapping a bunch of reverb on everything. Fab, thank you! Fantastic!!!!!!!!!
alcoestudio
2015 May 31
wow!!! best mixing video!!! thx pure mix...
69bluesman
2015 May 31
Priceless visual and audio knowledge!!!
ESP
2015 May 31
Mind .... Blown !!!! Thank you pure mix ! let's have more of this !!! Incredible
MZ1387
2015 May 31
Great job Andrew! You're a great teacher! I really liked how you covered the technical, pro tools elements, groove and feel and automation. I picked up on so many subtleties and ideas that I can't wait to start a new mix. Thanks for your video. I can't wait to see another.
Philip
2015 May 31
More!!! Longer!!!
vlakanas
2015 May 31
WOW. WOW.WOW
Cryptx
2015 May 31
Awesome engineer & amazing stuff, thank you ! Keep it up, We need more ! ^^
immerdiesenamen
2015 May 31
Great Video! I like the way Andrew explains. Thanks to Pure Mix.
jasonxoc
2015 May 30
You got Andrew Scheps!!! I love that guy. He's my favorite engineer. Well... this made my weekend!! Thanks Fab and Andrew!!
