Inside The Mix: Green Day with Andrew Scheps
01h 35min
(61)
Dissect Green Day's Signature Stadium Punk Rock Sound
Learn how Grammy-winning mix engineer Andrew Scheps mixed the Green Day single “Bang Bang”.
In this exclusive mixing tutorial, Andrew opens up his final mixing session and shows you how he added the final sonic touches and details to the band’s self-produced record Revolution Radio.
Watch and learn as Andrew walks you through every track, every plugin and most importantly every decision he made to bring the song to life and ready to rock radio stations worldwide.
Throughout this 1.5 hour tutorial, hear before and after comparisons and learn the techniques a multi-platinum mix engineer uses to amplify the band’s legendary punk rock energy on their 12th studio album.
Learn how to:
- Create a larger-than-life soundstage and still maintain a punk rock attitude and energy
- Find a sonic vision for the mix that fits with the artist’s concept and direction
- Loud, punchy and huge sounding drums without using samples
- Apply a mixing template for a consistent sound and easy workflow
- EQ and balance doubled heavy guitar tones
- Fill out the mix with a bass tone that grounds the entire mix and also cuts through on small speakers
- Create a distinct and clear vocal tone that adds attitude and dimension to the mix
- Add stereo bus processing to nail the mix before sending it off to mastering
- Get a loud, fast and aggressive sounding mix without making it sound squashed, smashed or losing speed/energy
Whether you’re a fan of the band or curious to see how a real hit record gets mixed, this tutorial takes you deep inside the process and techniques Andrew used to nail Green Day’s signature stadium and radio rock sound while staying true to their punk rock roots.
Please note: This tutorial does not include the multitrack stems as per the artist’s request.
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 02:32 - The Final Mix
- 06:11 - First Impressions
- 10:53 - Processing The Intro
- 13:04 - Track Routing
- 15:31 - Drums
- 18:40 - Kick
- 22:07 - Snare
- 25:33 - Toms
- 29:58 - Overhead & Cymbals
- 36:08 - Room Mics
- 39:42 - The Full Kit
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:1 - Bass
- 08:00 - Guitar
- 20:24 - Rear Bus
- 23:12 - 2 Bus Processing
- 31:07 - Background Vocals
- 37:31 - Lead Vocals
- 45:48 - Huge Drum Fill
- 47:46 - The Exposed Vocal
| Part 1 | Part 2 |
00:00:08
Good morning, children.
00:00:09
We are back here at Monnow
Valley Studios in Wales,
home of all of my
really nice analog gear,
and once again we will not
be using it in this video.
00:00:19
Though we are monitoring through
the center section of the Neve,
so we are in fact listening
to the Neve console.
00:00:26
Just none of the good bits.
00:00:28
It's a good monitor section anyway.
00:00:30
So, much more importantly, today
we are here to look at the mix
that I did for Green Day on
their song, "Bang Bang,”
which is the first single
off of Revolution Radio.
00:00:40
Kind of an important song and an
important record for these guys.
00:00:43
Obviously, they've been
around for a long time.
00:00:45
I think they are celebrating
their 25th anniversary
as a band or something crazy like that.
00:00:50
They've been around
for a really long time,
but they've just taken four years off.
00:00:54
And then they decided
that they were going to
make a record themselves,
and it's their first self-produced
record in a very, very long time.
00:01:02
And I think that they just
decided they wanted to
hunker down in their
own studio in Oakland.
00:01:08
So I was sitting at home
in rural Worcestershire,
and I got a text from Chris Dugan,
Green Day's long time engineer, who
I've known for quite a while,
saying that the guys had
been working on some music
and they were getting ready to mix
and weren't really sure exactly
what they wanted to do,
but that my name had come up
and they wanted to hear
what I would do with it.
00:01:25
So, they sent over a
batch of three songs,
and one of those songs
was "Bang Bang.”
And it's actually the first
song that I really dug into.
00:01:33
I mean, I was working on
all three at the same time
the way I usually do,
but "Bang Bang" was definitely
the one I wanted to focus on
because it felt to me
as though these guys
were trying to just go back to
sort of the pre-epic Green Day.
00:01:49
They weren't in any way
trying to get away from it,
but I think they were sort
of thinking like "Yeah, man.
00:01:54
We were a Bay Area punk band,
and let's do some of that too,
because we are still that band.”
And, Bang Bang, as you're
about to hear, is a screamer.
00:02:03
It's just an up-tempo, fast,
short, let's check the timing here.
00:02:09
I think we're at three minute
and twenty-seven seconds,
and that's because there's
an intro and a guitar solo.
00:02:14
So, it's not classic one and a
half minute punk, but it's up there.
00:02:19
And it's a very aggressive
song, and as you'll hear,
because I'm going to
play you the song now.
00:02:22
It's got a couple of features that
made it very interesting to mix,
and by interesting I mean terrifying.
00:02:28
So, let me play you the song,
and then we'll start ripping it apart.
00:06:00
All right, a scorcher, kids.
00:06:03
The three things that
really jumped out to me
when I heard the rough mix were,
first of all, the intro.
00:06:10
You've got a small intro
that then goes to a large song.
00:06:14
So, that's a great
opportunity for dynamics
and to blow people away.
00:06:19
The ultimate example of this to me
is the beginning of The Wall,
the Pink Floyd album,
where there is a very,
very quiet baby crying.
00:06:27
And when I first bought that record
I was listening to the vinyl,
because that's all you
would buy at that point,
on my Radio Shack turntable,
and the speakers were mounted on the
wall with like a screw in the wall,
and then you'd hang the
little plastic speaker,
and baby cries,
I turn it up, turn it up,
and then all of a sudden the
first chord of the first song hit
and I jumped so much
that I hit the speaker,
knocked it off the wall
and it bounced onto the vinyl
and scratched it and
I had to take it back
and tell them it was defective.
00:06:55
But, that's the extreme version of it,
but what is great about having a small,
filtered intro is it
draws the listener in.
00:07:05
Even if you don't have a
massive level difference,
it makes the listener
have this sort of idea
of the sonic universe that
the song is going to live in,
and then you explode into full 3D.
00:07:17
It's just like going to
color in the Wizard of Oz.
00:07:19
You've spent so long in black and white
that you get used to that perspective
on the art that you're looking at.
00:07:27
And then all of the
sudden that thing goes color,
and it's as if the screen got bigger.
00:07:32
It's a really great opportunity.
00:07:33
Then there were two challenges,
and I knew they were
going to be challenges.
00:07:37
The small one is, at the
beginning at the first chorus
and at the end of the song,
the track breaks down and
you're left with acapella vocal.
00:07:46
So, all of a sudden the
vocal is incredibly exposed.
00:07:49
And so, what that means is,
you have to have a
vocal that sounds good,
not in amongst the drums
and the electric guitars,
but sounds really good on its own.
00:08:00
And it can't jump in level,
because what will
happen is you're hitting
all of your 2 bus processing
with the loud guitars,
as the cymbals go slamming
through the chorus,
the loudest part of the mix,
and then it all goes
away and your vocal is there.
00:08:12
So, you can run into all kinds
of problems with compression,
especially on the mix bus where your
vocal will sound different
and jump in level.
00:08:21
So, I knew that was
going to be a challenge,
and then the monster version
of that is the drum fill
in the middle of the song.
00:08:30
It's much easier to
make drums sound big
in amongst guitars and bass and vocals.
00:08:36
It's another thing to have
them sound really good
completely on their own.
00:08:41
And when we go back
and look at the drums
on their own you'll
see that I've actually
gone a little bit further
in terms of having
them be stadium drums.
00:08:50
There's actually more
processing on them
than I might otherwise use because
I felt like the way to get
through that part of the mix
was actually just to go over the top
and to have them almost
be stadium drums.
00:09:01
So you've got this up-tempo
fast strumming punk song,
but in this almost stadium context.
00:09:10
So it's, I'm over-thinking it now
because I'm backtracking,
so this wasn't something
I decided to do
in terms of the concept of it.
00:09:18
I just worked on it
sonically until it worked,
but I think what's cool about it
is it's almost a nod to
the fact that Green Day
are a stadium punk band.
00:09:28
So it give this huge
sized almost orchestral sound
to the toms and things
like that in the context of a
really fast rock song.
00:09:36
So those are the three elements
that sort of stood out to me,
and they actually became things
that we worked on quite a bit.
00:09:43
I would get mix notes
about the intro saying
"let's turn the intro up 4 dB."
And I knew it's because they
were just clip gaining at 4 dB
and they thought, well,
okay that contrast is good,
and that level went back
and forth a few times.
00:09:54
Then the vocal and the drums,
I think I got those really close
the very first mix that I sent.
00:10:00
We did many, many revisions of this.
00:10:02
First of all, we were
changing up the voices
in the intro so there was a lot of that,
but there were a lot
of little tiny details,
cleaning up guitars and holes,
things like that.
00:10:10
Re-singing little bits of the song
and sending it, just updating stuff.
00:10:13
So, there were a lot of revisions,
but the overall sound of
this track stayed pretty
much the same from the very beginning.
00:10:21
So, that said, I'm going to skip
over a lot of the technical stuff,
especially in terms of the
way I've got the session set up
and the way my template works
and things like that.
00:10:32
There are stand-alone videos
that go through my template
and how I bring it into a song,
so please,
if any of this seems to go
by a little bit quick,
or you're wondering like,
"hey, but what's on that track?"
and it's something from my template,
go check out the other video
and that should bore you to
tears about it and
you'll know everything that
there is to know about it.
00:10:51
So, what I want to do immediately
is break this back down
to the drums and we're going
to start building the song up.
00:10:56
And actually, in fact, let me
talk about the intro first
so we can get that out of the way.
00:11:02
The big thing about the intro
is there is a speaker phone plugin
that is generating noise as
well as doing all of the filtering
and distortion and
compression on the intro.
00:11:12
It's basically on the mix
bus and the bypass is automated
when we hit the actual intro of song,
this gets bypassed.
00:11:21
Done.
00:11:22
So we’ve got a pre-intro and then the
intro intro before we get to the first verse.
00:11:27
Basically all that happens is some
vocals here and then guitars,
bass and drums just like they
will be in the rest of the song
are playing through a speakerphone
that then goes away
and that goes a little
something like this.
00:12:04
That's it.
00:12:05
I could have done a lot of
automation on the tracks themselves,
but the band had actually
put the speakerphone in place
and I just tweaked a little bit
and then as the mix progressed
we worked on the sound of it
and it just seemed like absolutely
the best way to do it.
00:12:21
So I'm going to actually kill
the speakerphone now and
play you that same intro and
you'll hear that the band sounds
almost identical to the band
after the intro.
00:12:41
All of the contrast is coming
from the filtering
and the distortion and then the
added bonus of a
little radio tuning sampled
and stuff like that.
00:12:48
I'm actually just going to leave
the speakerphone sample out
and we're not going to talk
about the intro anymore because
there's actually no difference in
the way I mixed the drums and bass
in the intro than I did in the band
intro which is the next section.
00:13:03
It's a very simple session.
00:13:05
The only thing I'm going
to say about the set up
is you're going to see that
there are a bunch
of auxes in the session.
00:13:10
These pink tracks, and I think
I made them pink all the way through.
00:13:14
Basically they were monitoring out of
I believe 16, possibly 24
outputs of ProTools
onto a desk and into the
monitor section of the desk.
00:13:24
So basically faders at zero but
they move around every once in a while.
00:13:28
But everything was kind of grouped
into some output so the
guitars would be coming
out of a few different stereo outputs.
00:13:36
The bass was coming out
of one mono output.
00:13:38
And what I did in the I/O set up
was to uncheck the box that makes those
output buses to make
them internal buses.
00:13:45
So now then I can add an aux here
that picks up that bus,
and instead of going to physical output
I can route it directly to my mix bus.
00:13:54
So I rebuild the monitor
section of their console
inside of ProTools just with aux faders.
00:14:00
So there was a kick and a snare aux,
which I've actually got inactive here
because I just committed
the kick and snare.
00:14:08
I didn't need the individual
tracks with the
speakerphone automating it
was taking up a lot of DSP,
I was getting some playback errors
every once in a while,
so I just committed to it.
00:14:17
There is not much going on on the individual
kick and snare tracks themselves
that they didn't send to me.
00:14:23
We'll just deal with the
bounced kick and snare,
but those were going through auxes.
00:14:27
And then there was a kit aux,
I didn't make it pink,
which was overheads,
hat ride, there was a Tom's aux
and then there was a room's aux.
00:14:38
So eight outputs for the drum.
00:14:39
Kick, snare and then three
stereo of the toms,
the kit and the rooms.
00:14:44
Bass was a mono output.
00:14:46
Guitars were coming out
of 1, 2, 3 outputs on this.
00:14:51
So three stereo outputs,
two main rhythm guitars
and then a bunch of miscellaneous stuff
including the solo,
which in this case is almost
a rhythm solo
and then the vocal was going
to a stereo track here,
the lead vocal, and then
there was a vocal 2 and vocal 3
which were the two different
sets of background vocals.
00:15:10
The easiest way for me to
know how they were listening
was just to make all
of these internal buses,
route them through auxes to my mix bus,
and then I can hear exactly
what they had
and just by adjusting levels
on the auxes that I made
I could re-create their rough
mix if I felt like I needed to.
00:15:27
In this case I didn't really do it.
00:15:28
It was just a way for me to
route stuff conveniently.
00:15:31
Up to the drums.
00:15:33
Pretty straight ahead sounding drum kit.
00:15:35
They recorded the drums
in a smaller studio.
00:15:39
There was the usual
complement of close mics,
and again I've bounced the
kick and snare,
but was just kick in and out
and a snare top and bottom,
2 floor toms and a single rack,
single mic on each one.
00:15:50
Then they had overheads, hat and ride,
and that's really standard
close mic set up for rock drums.
00:15:56
Then there was stereo room,
then there was an AEA R88 stereo room,
then there was rooms iso, and
so this is two iso booths
and they would just open up
doors and put mics in,
and then they had a microphone in the
bathroom and microphone in the hallway
so they were taking advantage of
all of the different acoustic spaces
within the studio they were working in,
and every song got a
different balance of these rooms
and what was really cool about that is
while we still had the same close mics,
the kit would be tuned for
the song and so the sound
of the drum kit would
change a little bit
but for the most part the
drums were very consistent
for the whole album.
00:16:36
But I had a huge pallet of
cool sounding rooms that,
depending on the speed of the song and
how if they were being played
and how the cymbals were pumping
and things like that,
I could really change the
ambience that the kit was living in
so we'll hear all that,
but let me start this going down
to kick and snare very quickly
so I can just mute these three
auxes to take the rooms,
the kit and the toms out and
you'll hear pretty straight ahead
you can immediately hear that
there is reverb on the snare.
00:17:09
This is something that I do
to lengthen the snare
and make it just sound a little less
dry in the context of the full track.
00:17:17
It's not to make the snare sound
like it has reverb on it.
00:17:21
These guys had already set up
one that's using the AMS RMX16.
00:17:26
It's just length for the
snare drum and then a bit of EQ
that pops some mid-range out on that
very quickly play kick
and snare together
muting this reverb and you'll
hear how dry the snare goes,
which as we build up the rest of the kit
would really be a problem if we
left it completely dry.
00:17:51
It's like having a room
just for the snare,
and what that gives you is a lot
of control over how roomy
the snare is going to sound.
00:17:58
It also helps to keep the
snare more present
in the context of the drum kit.
00:18:01
If you're relying on room
mics for ambience
you're also relying on microphones
that are much further away.
00:18:07
And there are time differences between
the room mic and the snare mic,
and it will start to smear
the attack of the snare
or possibly even give you
a flam as you turn it up.
00:18:17
Now you could slide the room mics earlier
but then you're going to start
to get into phase problems
between kick and snare the
toms and things like that.
00:18:23
So leaving the room mics
to be ambience but
building a very tight ambience on the
close mic gives you all the flexibility
you will ever need to figure
out how much of the
attack of the kick and snare do I need,
and how much of the roominess in the
feel of the kick and snare do I need?
In terms of plug-ins on
the kick and snare,
we’re pretty straight ahead here.
00:18:42
They had done some work on the
drums which I left for the most part,
so with the kick drum they were
using an alloy for some dynamics,
I don't think anything crazy.
00:19:01
It's actually evening up
the kick quite a bit,
and I think with someone
like Chris who's such a
meticulous tracking engineer,
I mean I've very seldom seen
anybody spend as much time
just on the balance of the
microphones on a guitar amp.
00:19:18
It's astounding how much care
he takes and how meticulous he is,
and it's not in a way that
doesn't matter.
00:19:25
He's really, really listening
to the center of the midrange
of the tone of the guitar and
how it's working with the part,
and he's exactly the
same way on the drums.
00:19:33
So when I get a session
from someone like Chris,
I am very loath to take
away things unless
I really feel like "okay,
I see what he is going for.
00:19:41
I can do it in a different way that
will work out better for me in the long run."
I'm more than happy to keep
all the processing that's there
as long as I listen to it
and know what it's doing,
because the only thing I don't
want to do is try to undo
something that's being done
with more processing when
I could just back out of the
processing that's there.
00:20:02
In this case I believe
I kept almost everything.
00:20:05
I follow that with my very usual lo-fi,
which is a little bit of
a clipper into a Scheps 73,
which gives me some EQ,
very, very minimal EQ,
so there's some 60 Hz
and a tiny bit of 12K
just to open up the
kick drum a little bit.
00:20:20
So I'll play you with
and without this EQ.
00:20:33
So you can hear it just
focuses the attack of the kick
and gives that bloom a little
bit more of a low-end feel
instead of a lower mid feel.
00:20:41
There’s something I really
like about the un-EQed kick drum
but what I found,
and I'm pretty sure that's
why this EQ stayed this way
was that it was more
about how the kick drum
worked with the bass because
the bass is very busy,
and it needs to be very well defined
and you go to hear the entire bass part.
00:20:56
That's one thing about
working with a band,
and especially a three piece
band or even a four piece band,
when the players are very distinctive
it's very important to hear each player.
00:21:08
It's not enough to just sort
of have the bass in the song,
and I don't mean that you
mix the song inappropriately,
but you need to hear Mike's bass playing
with Tré's drumming and
Billie Joe's guitar playing.
00:21:21
Those are three elements that are there
as much as the drum part,
the bass part and guitar part.
00:21:27
It's really important to actually
hear the players in amongst the tracks.
00:21:33
So while this kick drum starts to sound
maybe a little less aggressive
because I've dropped the impact
down below where it normally
was in the tuning of the drum,
what it's doing is it's
actually dropping
it down below the bass
and allowing me to
carve out space for both
of them in the low-end.
00:21:50
This was not a decision I
made talking about it in this way.
00:21:54
This was an "in the moment
the whole track is playing,
what I do with the kick drum,
Let me EQ it a little bit in context,"
and it turns out that adding
that little bit of 60 dropped
it down below the bass.
00:22:06
Moving on to the snare drum
so that we can move on
to the rest of the kit
so that we can move on to
the whole song.
00:22:11
Very simple again, "Bounce,"
they had a snare top, snare bottom, and
the only thing that's happening
is I made a copy of the
snare just in the intro.
00:22:19
But without the speakerphone plug-in on
there's no point in even
going through that.
00:22:23
It was just that I needed a little bit more of the snare in the intro,
and I added a bunch of reverb
to it so that in the intro
the snare
has a very unnatural sound to it
but through the radio what
that did is moved
the drums just much further away.
00:22:44
So, actually, let me turn
the speakerphone on
and I'll play you that too
with and without
that reverb because it was
much more about having
distance to the drums
than anything else.
00:23:09
So, that track is just in the
intro for ambience.
00:23:12
The main snare track, there's
very little going on once again.
00:23:15
They had done some EQ to get
rid of a little bit of ring,
which is always a good thing.
00:23:20
Then I put a lo-fi on it,
which is what I do,
and then there's a send
off to their reverb,
which is just that little room reverb
I showed you before, that nonlinear.
00:23:31
I've got sends off to my normal
stuff, which is the drums dirt,
which is my big distortion
thing to make drums bigger
and then also to the kick snare crush.
00:23:43
The thing about the kick
and snare on this song
is I kept them out of the
main drum compressors,
which is my drum crush and my fatso,
which is the Fairchild 670
and the Fatso.
00:23:56
But there are basically two
stereo compressors that are multi-mono.
00:24:01
Actually, they're unlinked,
and they are parallel compressors
for the entire drum kit.
00:24:06
In this particular mix though rather
than sending the entire drum kit
to them I decided to only send
the overheads and the kit to them.
00:24:15
And the reason for this is
because the drums are very loud,
play very, very fast and
there's a lot of cymbal work
going on in the choruses,
both in terms of crash rides in spots
but also just crashes to accent things.
00:24:28
And sometimes it's every bar
or something like that,
and what was happening was the
impact of the kick and snare
getting into that compressor was
making the cymbals pump.
00:24:38
So even though, by my standards,
this mix is not crazy loud,
it was making it sound like we
were smashing the mix a bit too hard.
00:24:45
So by keeping the kick and snare
out of the main drum compressor
it kept cymbals from pumping.
00:24:51
Once I get the whole kit in I can actually
add the kick and snare to
that compressor and
you'll hear the difference.
00:24:56
So it was a way of making the drums
get all of that extra
added compression to it,
but in a way that made it sound
cleaner which is very important.
00:25:05
Other than the lo-fi, there’s
very little going on here.
00:25:20
You can hear how much just that
little bit of clipping on the
snare drum really opens it up
and what it really does is it makes it
hit the reverb in a much better way.
00:25:29
It just sounds more alive,
makes the reverb just
sound more energetic in a way.
00:25:34
That's what that clipping
does on the snare,
something I do on almost every mix.
00:25:38
Next were the toms and again,
to avoid having playback
errors while I was working
on this song, because it's at
96K, there were a lot of tracks,
a lot of plug-ins going on at one point,
I've frozen these tracks.
00:25:49
All they had on were gates.
00:25:51
There is nothing super
exciting about that.
00:25:54
Toms are going to a stereo aux,
which I will now unmute,
and let's solo up the toms.
00:26:07
Really well recorded.
00:26:09
they get used a couple
of times for fills
in those spots they need
to be very, very loud
and what they had been doing
was they had a studio reverb
which I took off,
one of the few times I actually
got rid of some of their processing,
they used the CLA drums plug-in
which worked really well.
00:26:28
Well it adds quite a bit of the tone,
and I would normally do this
with something like pultec,
things like that and I
think I may have
actually rerouted back into my pultec,
so this is something that they had used.
00:26:48
It's almost scooping them out
Which is actually kind of cool.
00:26:50
This feeds into this
idea of stadium drums.
00:26:53
This is much more like toms through a PA
as opposed to a natural
sounding close mic.
00:26:58
I think it's what really
makes the drums work
on this song in a really interesting way.
00:27:03
After that little bit of
EQ to bring out some attack,
then they had actually
added a bit of hundred
just to get some more low-end.
00:27:17
So it's all about this
low resonance ringing
but what's great about
the way the toms are tuned
is it's actually very controlled.
00:27:25
There's a beautiful decay
to this low-end
as opposed to it just ringing
which can happen especially
in a drum pattern like this.
00:27:37
The length of the toms is really cool
and the EQ is what's really
helping make that length.
00:27:43
From there the toms are
being routed into the Tom track
from my template which is
adding yet more 100 hertz
just with a different
pultec model and some 5K.
00:28:01
It's really just taking the sound
of the toms that they had gotten
and going further with it.
00:28:05
What this L2 does is it allows
me to make the toms louder
in the balance of the kit without
there being these huge spikes
that are then going off
to the drum compressors.
00:28:15
Because I don't want the
toms to necessarily
obliterate the rest of the kit,
but they need to be loud and
they've got to cut through the cymbals,
so this L2 just sort of
keeps them in check
while also giving me a place
where I can just crank
this threshold slider around
and get more level out of them
without having to
just turn them up.
00:28:32
It's just a different way to do it.
00:28:34
And then I am sending
them off to my tom reverb,
and so I got rid of their
studio verb in place of my reverb,
sort of doing the same job
but this is again kind of a
stadium reverb so without the reverb.
00:28:54
It's a little bit of that
grainy almost nonlinear ambience
and I'm getting that out
of an ambience preset on revibe,
and I'm filtering on the
way in case there’s
some cymbal bleed and I'm
doing a bit of pitch shifting
on the way out and that's
what gives it that sort of
PA Stadium thing as opposed
to just a nonlinear reverb.
00:29:13
I use this on almost every rock
track that I do to varying degrees.
00:29:18
It'll be very quiet
on a quieter track
because I don't want you
to hear the pitch shifting.
00:29:23
I just want you get to the sense of size
and when we get to the
breakdown of the song
over here where the toms
are really busy.
00:29:43
That reverb makes a huge
difference in the feel of the kit.
00:29:46
Instead of you feeling
like you're sort of
sitting next to the
drummer you feel like
you're in an arena with the drummer,
which on this song is
absolutely the point.
00:29:54
Moving on to the rest of the kit
we can get through the
rest of this pretty quickly.
00:29:59
There were overheads.
00:30:04
Very straight ahead.
00:30:06
They've done what I would normally do.
00:30:08
I would high pass.
00:30:09
They've done a low shelf to
get rid of some low end, that's fine.
00:30:12
I don't like the overheads
to be too much of a
picture of the entire kit
because usually there are phase issues
and I get so much out of
the close mics
that I don't need to get my
snare sound out of the overheads.
00:30:22
So I'm looking for this
really to be some air
and mostly cymbals and getting
rid of low end does that.
00:30:28
There's nothing else going
on on that track.
00:30:30
I am indeed using the hi hat
track which a lot of times I wouldn't
but Tré is one of those
drummers who is very specific
with his hi hat, how much
it's open, how much it's closed.
00:30:41
Having the close mic gets
you some of that detail back
that might get lost as
you get out to the overheads.
00:30:53
So that's overheads with the hat,
and I'll take the hat out
and you'll hear that the
hat will just sort of disappear
into the background of the kit.
00:31:07
That brings it to the
forefront, which is important.
00:31:09
It also helps with the stereo
image of the kit better.
00:31:13
Personally I like to mix drums,
drummer perspective.
00:31:16
But they don't, and I have
no problem with that.
00:31:20
I want to make the drummer happy.
00:31:21
It doesn't matter what I like.
00:31:22
The other thing that's
kind of cool about that
is it's probably a subconscious queue,
and for a lot of people
might not do anything,
but having audience perspective
and then more of an
arena sound on the drums
just makes that all more realistic.
00:31:36
Drummer's perspective
but an arena sound is not
something most people have heard.
00:31:41
And it may not be something
they've really thought about,
but when you see a drummer
go around the toms
and you're sitting out in
front then you want that to go
from right to left because
that's what you're looking at.
00:31:54
If you want to have an intimate
picture of the drums,
you want it to go left to right
because that's what the drummer
is doing so it's something that
probably doesn't matter to most people,
but as a wannabe drummer who never
even learned how to play drums,
I always wanted it to be
drummer's perspective.
00:32:08
But this song actually makes a
lot of sense to be audience perspective.
00:32:12
Ride, not much going on here.
00:32:17
I’m not even sure,
we’re never even
on the ride so it’s dipped down,
its high pass, it's just adding
to the overall ambience of the kit.
00:32:29
So these four tracks together,
it's a really nice picture
of the cymbals,
and you can hear he's
smashing these cymbals
and they're going all the time,
so this was why I couldn't
send the kick and snare
into the main drum compressors.
00:32:47
The overhead, the ride and the
hat feed the kit aux,
and the only thing going on the kit
aux is my usual seek and destroy EQ.
00:32:56
And what this is doing is just getting
rid of the harsh parts of the cymbals.
00:33:00
Usually what happens is
when you get a rough mix,
the cymbals are not that loud,
the drums are not that compressed,
so any harshness that's
building up in the cymbals
isn't really that much of an issue.
00:33:10
Once you start doing
parallel compression
and all the bus compression,
that stuff really starts to
come up and that makes you
not be able to turn the drums up.
00:33:19
Also that harshness is
right where the tone
of the electric guitars are,
so by carving it out you're
getting two benefits:
one the cymbals don't hurt,
and two, just poked a hole in
the mix for the guitars
so it works out really well,
and I'll play you with and without.
00:33:49
You can hear that there is
this nasty wash going on.
00:33:53
When by taking it out
you also start to hear
the upper frequencies of the cymbals better.
So it’s a way of adding top end to the cymbals, some air that’s going
to be up above the vocal
and above guitars by just
taking out the midrange,
and these frequencies are
dependent on the song,
and not because the musical
key of the song but
because the way the cymbals are hit,
what cymbals they're using
it's always to do with the
cymbals themselves.
00:34:17
It's just the sound of the metal
building up as they get bashed.
00:34:22
So that's what that's doing, and
then that's being sent off to the
drum crush and fatso as you would expect
and it's also getting sent
to the drums dirt.
00:34:31
I'll talk about the drums dirt quickly
now that we've got more the kit in.
00:34:34
Quite a bit of distortion
using an Izotope Trash 2.
00:34:37
There is some trash, and there's a filter to
take out some of that harshness,
and a little bit of compression
and that's followed
by a very, very broad midrange EQ,
which is doing exactly the same thing.
00:34:51
It's taking the harshness
out of this distortion,
and what this drums dirt does is
it just adds some glue to the kit.
00:35:00
It's actually acting more like reverb
or compression than it is distortion.
00:35:04
So let me play you kick snare and
kit and toms with and without the dirt.
00:35:26
So you can hear, it's almost
acting like a room mic really,
and normally what I would be doing is
only bringing that in for the
choruses of a song,
let's say, and it just lets
the drums get a little beefier,
a little tougher to
cut through the guitars.
00:35:39
This song, everything after
the intro is basically chorus
in terms of intensity so this
just became part of the drum kit,
and you can see there are
some breakpoints here.
00:35:49
I was experimenting with
bringing it in and out,
and just decided it was part
of the drum sound so I needed it.
00:35:55
It's quiet, it's down at -18.4,
it's not doing a huge amount,
but it definitely helps the
drum kit feel glued together
and just feel a little more exciting,
and it adds to that kind of arena feel.
00:36:06
Let's check out the room mics.
00:36:10
The standard room sounds like this:
Not a lot going on, and I
left the microphone exactly as is.
00:36:24
I don't even know what microphones it is,
but it just sounds like a good room mic.
00:36:27
If there was a bunch
more low-end than that
I would have high pass
filtered out some of it,
but it's nothing that's
going to make the kick drum
go wide or weird or phasey,
so I decided to leave that in and
then never had to go back and adjust it.
00:36:40
Next is a ribbon room.
00:36:48
And you can hear quite a bit
more is being done to that,
so first of all there is
a trim plug and they had,
I'm assuming just to check phase.
00:36:54
It's actually not doing
anything in this case.
00:36:57
Then there is an MS matrix
because he was using the
ribbons recording MS so he's
decoding them here.
00:37:05
That's all that's doing, so they
encoded on the way in and decoded here.
00:37:09
We get the sound of this room mic,
which is the compression.
00:37:13
They had already started compressing.
00:37:14
I probably tweaked this a little bit.
00:37:16
I'm not even positive that I did.
00:37:18
And then there is some
EQ again to take out
some of the harsh midrange
and then actually
add back in some presence
in the room and this
would be because the ribbons
are actually pretty dark
which means even in a section where
there is a lot of cymbal work
it's not terribly harsh so
it's okay to actually
add some of that midrange back in and it
gives you presence in the cymbals
without all the stuff
that hurts and covers up the guitars.
00:37:46
So if I get rid of the
compression and the EQ,
you'll hear it's a much more
straight-ahead room mic.
00:37:56
Put the compression back in, and
I’ll show you the compressor.
00:38:04
Super pumpy, but really exciting,
and that added into the rest of the kit is
going to again give us back
a lot of motion to the kit,
which is what we're looking for.
00:38:13
Then, we've got rooms iso,
which is actually not used in this session,
so let me just make it inactive.
00:38:19
This was a case of mixing and matching
to make the drum kit sound different.
00:38:23
Then here's a microphone
in the bathroom,
and here's a microphone in the hallway,
and there’s just a little
bit of inPhase on it.
00:38:37
Again, this is something they did and
I'm assuming that this was
balancing against the bathroom mic.
00:38:43
On this particular song I
decided to hardpan the bathroom
and the hallway mic, so I
made a stereo pair out of them.
00:38:55
So, what's cool about this is it's
two totally different sounding rooms,
and it is not like oh, 1 is on
the left and 1 is on the right
in terms of the physical placement
of those microphones in the room.
00:39:05
But what it does is it
gives me a stereo thing,
and these microphones
are very different.
00:39:10
So there's motion.
00:39:12
This brings me back up to
the decision to use
the hi-hat mic because the
more things you do like this,
just using room mics which
don't really have a
good stereo picture of the kit,
the more you then need to
reposition the drums.
00:39:25
So the toms need to be loud and
panned wider than they normally would be,
and in this case I needed
the high hat mic
placed again to move the hi hat
back to a certain part of the kit.
00:39:36
You see there's just a little
anti-harshing EQ on rooms aux,
and that's it.
00:39:42
I'm going to play you
the whole drum kit,
and I’m going to mute the hi-hat mic,
and you'll hear in the verses
how the entire drum kit will
just lose a little bit of focus
when I get rid of the high hat mic.
00:40:06
Back-and-forth between the crash cymbals
and the hi hat is made
much more apparent,
plus the stereo imaging of the
kit starts to tighten up
by using the hi hat mic,
so you're not always just going
for the hi hat with a hi hat mic,
it could be that you're
really trying to just
sort of re-establish the
physical picture of the drum kit.
00:40:25
What I’m going to do is
actually add the kick and snare to
the stereo drum compressors
so you can hear how
that’s going to take away from
the clarity of the cymbals.
00:40:36
So I will put this into the drum
crush and also into the fatso.
00:40:41
Now the kick and snare are
going to get louder,
but that's just part of showing this.
00:40:46
Let me go to the end, which
should have a bunch of cymbals.
00:40:58
Here's that same stretch
without the kick and snare
going into the main drum compressors.
00:41:12
So we get two bars of dong,
dang ducka da, dong dang ducka
and then cymbals hits:
bang, bang, bang, bang,
I’m using “Bang, Bang”
it’s the title of the song,
how appropriate.
00:41:23
Those cymbal hits
sound totally different
with the kick and snare
in the drum compressor.
00:41:29
So here's with them in,
and listen for those cymbals.
00:41:51
The decay of those cymbals
is very, very different.
00:41:54
They’re long and sort of see-through.
00:41:56
You hear the kit below the cymbal.
00:41:59
When the kick and snare are in there,
you basically hear the cymbal until the
next kick drum and then the
cymbal gets pulled down
and that was something
we're really trying to avoid
on this record in general,
but certainly on the more up-tempo,
energetic songs with a lot of crashes.
00:42:14
We really didn't want those
cymbals sucking backwards,
and we spent a lot of time
getting the balance of that right.
00:42:19
So the only other thing
that's happening is the
room kick snare toms and kit auxes are
all being collected down
here into a drums aux.
00:42:29
Basically that was just in
case I need to do something overall,
which in the intro I did.
00:42:34
I needed to pull the drums down,
and then later on in
the mix process I actually
added a little bit of
the drums to the rear bus.
00:42:42
So the entire drum kit is
getting fed into the main compressor
for the rest of the instruments,
and that lets the kick in
the snare and the rest of the kit
interact with the guitars
in a way that helps a song
just sound a little bit
more live, and it's something
I do on really the more dense
rock mixes that I do.
00:42:59
Either just the kick and
snare or the entire drum kit
will work their way into the rear
bus, but notice this sends it -15.
00:43:06
All of the other sends to the
rear bus will be at zero.
00:43:09
All the guitars, the bass, the
vocals get into the rear bus
as a complete picture of what
they're doing inside the mix bus,
but the drums get into the rear
bus at a much reduced level,
and it's just to get a
little bit of rhythmic
pumping inside the rear
bus that goes along with the drums.
00:43:25
I said I wasn't really doing
too much to the drums
because they came to me
sounding really good,
so let's prove the point,
I guess, and what I'm going
to do is play you the
drums with all of their stuff,
and then I'll put all my stuff
back in and you'll hear that.
00:43:51
Better sound better, because
that sounds pretty good.
00:43:57
And here's with everything.
00:44:09
So it's just the bigger, louder, wider
version of what was already going on,
which is kind of what I do in general.
00:44:16
The only other thing with
the drums is there
is an overdub both in the
intro and in the breakdown,
and it's just because the
part has too many things
for normal humans with four limbs.
00:44:27
Just adding snare inside
of the tom rolls in the intro,
and then
snare and hat inside of
the tom roll in the breakdown.
00:44:54
And you can hear without it,
it's just an incomplete drum pattern.
00:45:04
But without Tré growing
another arm out of his forehead,
you can't actually play it.
00:45:08
Pretty standard stuff,
and it's the exact same microphones
but just the kit and the
room version of them.
00:45:15
And it's, they're not even
balanced exactly the same
because it just doesn't matter.
00:45:18
I basically tucked these in
so that we got the effect
of the extra hits and moved on.
00:45:25
That's all that's going on there.
00:00:00
Next on our list is bass.
00:00:02
Very straightahead.
00:00:03
There is a DI and then
two different amps,
an SVT and a Bassman.
00:00:08
And obviously Mike's a great bass player,
and Chris is a great recording engineer,
so there's not a lot going on here.
00:00:16
They were being collected into a mono
output on the session they sent me,
so I'm collecting into a mono aux.
00:00:24
There is a Decapitator
for a little bit of color.
00:00:28
Then there is a Fatso,
and this is because I got a session
to mix once and someone had
put a Fatso on the bass
and it sounded really cool.
00:00:35
And I just saved their settings.
00:00:37
I don’t even remember who it was.
00:00:39
It sounded cool so every once in a while
when I'm not sure what I want to do
with the bass I'll just pull that up.
00:00:44
And then there's an EQ,
which is something I use quite
often on bass and guitars.
00:00:48
It's a Helios model and UAD has one,
Waves has one.
00:00:52
I've been using the Waves one lately
and adding either 700 or 1K
on the bass is just the presence
as well as using the 60 Hz circuit
of the Helios.
00:01:03
In this particular mix
I’m actually adding 1 dB of it.
00:01:06
Normally that can just sit at zero.
00:01:08
As soon as you switch it in
there's resonance and it's just
because of the way the
filter circuit is built.
00:01:13
You have some sort of feedback
in the crossover.
00:01:16
I don't know exactly what
the topology is
but it will resonate at around
the frequency that it's set to
so this can add a lot of really cool
low end to the bass.
00:01:24
So I'm going to play
you the bass tracks
individually with everything still on,
and then we'll go through
what I'm doing overall.
00:01:30
Here's the DI.
00:01:38
Just adding a bunch of presence to that.
00:01:45
And that's not because I think that it
sounds better with that.
00:01:48
What it is is I'm using that DI track
to get the sort of intimate part
of the bass sound,
which is the sound of the strings
themselves as opposed to the
thundering bass tone
that is the rest of it.
00:02:00
Then here's the first of the amps.
00:02:12
And here's the Bassman.
00:02:20
A little bit dirtier and obviously
added together
those 2 amps are just going to fill
out the low end because the low-end
is going to be completely in phase,
but the midrange will
be a little bit different
so we're going to get more low-end,
a little more solid.
00:02:33
It will also even out.
00:02:34
This particular bass track
is pretty even
note to note,
but just having two recordings of it
will even it out because
the notes that are quiet,
unless it's the bass itself,
aren't going to be the same amount quiet
in every amplifier or every microphone.
00:02:56
Adding the DI back into that
you start to get more definition.
00:03:05
And that definition sort of
acts like aggression.
00:03:08
The more you can hear the attack
of the note,
the more aggressive the bass will sound.
00:03:11
Sometimes, especially while recording
there are people I've seen
who feel as though
the more distorted something gets
the bigger and more
aggressive it will sound.
00:03:20
And the reality is the more distorted
something gets the
less attack it will have,
and it can quite often
get less aggressive
and especially in the track
you start to lose all
of the rhythmic element
which is where the energy and aggression
will come from from something like that.
00:03:35
So it's actually sort of a cleaner bass
than you might expect on this track,
but it will pick up distortion from the
guitars in a way.
00:03:44
So it's much more important
that you can hear
exactly what it's doing and
it's the driving pick
on the strings that's making it happen.
00:03:51
Now that we've got all three tracks in
I will show you what's going on
with these overall plugins.
00:03:58
So the Decapitator.
00:04:10
Pretty subtle.
00:04:11
Just a little bit of drive on there.
00:04:13
That is then followed by the Fatso.
00:04:27
It actually has the feel of
parallel compression to me.
00:04:31
So it's bringing the low mids
to the forefront and it's
really evening everything out.
00:04:35
And then, last not least, the EQ.
00:04:50
What's interesting to me about this,
and it's why I love this particular EQ,
but just EQ in general,
to me this makes the biggest
difference to the bass sound.
00:04:59
It obviously sounds very very different
with the Fatso,
but the Fatso is just
making it a bit more
of what it already is.
00:05:05
This little bit of EQ at 700 Hz
and then the resonance at 60
is turning into a really
exciting bass sound
as opposed to just a
really good bass sound
of an exciting performance.
00:05:16
So check that out again.
00:05:29
There you go.
00:05:30
EQ is much more than
just frequency shaping.
00:05:34
It can really change
the character of stuff.
00:05:37
And that happens on the toms.
00:05:38
It can happen on anything really,
but I think it's really apparent there.
00:05:42
And then this is getting
sent off to the rear bus.
00:05:45
While we're here I'm going to
back and show you what
I was talking about before
between the kick drum and the bass drum.
00:05:52
I'm going to play you a
bit of the verse,
which is when the drums are the tightest
so you're not going to be
distracted as much by cymbals.
00:05:59
And what I’m going to do is bypass the EQ
that is on the kick drum,
which if you remember from before
was sort of dropping the low end of the
kick drum down lower.
00:06:09
So it's a little less aggressive
when you listen to it.
00:06:12
It's a little rounder,
it's more of a bloom.
00:06:14
What it's also going to do is allow the
kick drum to live underneath the bass
almost completely.
00:06:19
And like I said before
this was not something
where I decided like:
"okay, who's going to live
where and whatever?"
This was probably after all of the
instruments were in and I felt like
I was losing the kick and the bass
was a little muddy.
00:06:32
So I went up to EQ the kick drum
and that fixed both problems.
00:06:35
So let's see if I'm right.
00:06:50
But I think you can hear
exactly what's going on.
00:06:53
The kick drum disappears into the bass.
00:06:55
Where as if I get rid of the bass
and we listen to the
kick drum without it,
it's probably not so bad.
00:07:08
You hear less of a difference
when we only listen to the drums.
00:07:13
But when the bass is
in and I toggle this EQ.
00:07:28
1.9 dB at 60 Hz is making
a massive difference
in the drive of the drums.
00:07:35
This is another vote
for EQing in context
because it would be very easy to
work on the kick drum a lot,
soloed up, or just in
the context of the drum kit
and then because you've
spent so much time on it
you assume that is the
best the kick drum
is ever going to sound when it
doesn't matter what the
kick drum sounds like,
it matters what it feels like in the
rest of the song.
00:07:56
And this is a really good
case for the EQing in context.
00:08:00
This brings us to the guitars
which you can see there are quite a
few guitar tracks but in
reality it's pretty simple.
00:08:07
So I'll take you through
these one at a time,
and you'll see that we build up
the main guitars out of just two sets
of rhythm guitars.
00:08:13
They carry most of the song.
00:08:16
On this entire record there
were three main guitar tones
and it was just three rigs that Billie
and Chris set up and tweaked
and had there available.
00:08:27
And they're very different
sounds but they go together
to act as one rhythm guitar.
00:08:32
What that shows you is how ridiculously
good a guitar player Billie Joe is
because these were not
tracked at the same time.
00:08:40
They were tracked separately
because sometimes the pick slides
will just be on one set of guitars
and not on the other.
00:08:46
But their performances are
so tight that it works
like it's a single guitar performance.
00:08:50
So first of all what they
called the park guitar,
and I'm not even going to guess as to
why things are called certain things.
00:08:56
This is the Park New.
00:09:06
It's two performances hard panned,
exactly the same set up.
00:09:09
I believe the same guitars
on both of these.
00:09:12
But you can hear how great all of the
attention to detail is there.
00:09:16
All of the strumming and the muting
and all that is happening
very, very precisely.
00:09:21
Now let me play you the second part
of the main guitar tone,
which on this particular song
is called the Park Saul.
00:09:35
Very, very different sound.
00:09:38
Again, here's Park New.
00:09:44
And here's Park Saul.
00:09:50
And together.
00:09:58
All the presence from the
Park New and all the body
from the Park Saul,
and what also will happen is as you get
into things like a
little later on where you have the
chugga, chugga, chugga,
the muted strums.
00:10:17
On the individual guitars
those strums sound like:
So that's a lot of the ring.
00:10:30
That's about the attack and
the ring together.
00:10:32
On their own they both have a
lot of that midrange ring,
and it's going to be too much.
00:10:37
Together they even each other out,
and it just becomes a really cool sound.
00:10:45
This really is meant to
be one guitar tone.
00:10:48
It's four performances,
one of each hard panned to each side,
and that's it.
00:10:53
Now what's going on on the auxes.
00:10:55
So guitar one is the Park New.
00:10:57
There's not a lot going on.
00:10:59
They were using an iZotope Nectar,
which I believe has
some saturation going on.
00:11:14
A little bit of saturation
and then a Radiator.
00:11:17
So I think basically this might've been
one of the first songs cut.
00:11:20
They're still dialing in the tone.
00:11:22
Came back to it later and thought,
"well, we can actually go a
little bit further with it."
So the Radiator is only
in the choruses.
00:11:28
It's out in the verses.
00:11:37
So I'll play the transition
going from verse to chorus.
00:11:47
So we pick up some level
which is never a bad thing.
00:11:49
It saves me having to ride it up,
but we're also picking up a little
bit of harmonic distortion,
which is what the
Radiator is giving you.
00:11:56
And then our old friend Helios.
00:11:59
And on these I'm adding 1K,
which is actually a bit below where
I would normally add.
00:12:03
I mean on guitars I would usually
be anywhere from 1.4 to 2.8.
00:12:08
Every once in a while 3.5,
and then this 60 Hz thump here is acting
like cabinet thump to me.
00:12:15
So I’ll show you this
bypassed, and then in.
00:12:33
It just sounds like so much
more than EQ to me.
00:12:36
It makes me very happy.
00:12:37
I love this.
00:12:39
Looking at exactly the same
stuff on the second guitar,
this is the Parks Saul,
the kind of darker one.
00:12:44
Just a tiny bit of EQ to
get rid of some harsh stuff
that they had done,
and then again I'm using
the Helios this time at 1.4,
which is a very standard
frequency for me for rhythm guitars.
00:12:57
It brings out the tone of the notes
and a little bit of the attack,
but it's below where
all of the noise would be.
00:13:04
I'll show you this guitar
with and without.
00:13:21
Just night and day.
00:13:22
And here are these two guitars,
and I will show you them
with and without both of the
Helios because it's kind of huge.
00:13:28
So this is with.
00:13:47
It's a little punkier, but
it's also much, much smaller
and having this extra
depth to the guitars
just has them keep up
with the bass and drums
that we've already made that much bigger.
00:13:57
From there
these two guitars just
go off to the rear bus.
00:14:00
It's no mystery.
00:14:02
They're joining up with
the rest of the gang
in the rear bus to interact
and make everything happen.
00:14:09
So then after those two main guitars,
they had a third stereo
aux called guitar 3
which was collecting all the
rest of the guitar tracks.
00:14:16
So we've got a few different
things going on,
and I just kept them all
going through guitar 3,
because why not?
The first thing is you've
got a sustaining guitar
that's used in the intro and then again
in the chorus and the breakdown.
00:14:35
And then later on in the chorus
this becomes a third rhythm guitar.
00:14:44
So, here I'll play you the
three guitars together
just in that chorus.
00:15:01
Here's without the third guitar.
00:15:08
So what this is it's just a lift
to the second half
of the second chorus,
and without hearing in context
it doesn't mean a whole lot.
00:15:15
But what it means is you
continue a section
but you actually do get a bit of a lift.
00:15:20
So going from the first half of the
chorus to the second half.
00:15:31
Just come back that much stronger,
gives us a lift halfway through,
and harmonically it's
also changing as well.
00:15:37
The other guitars are really
just used in a couple of spots.
00:15:41
So I'll go through them quickly.
00:15:44
We've got guitar 9 down here,
which in the intro.
00:15:53
Along with that drone in the intro
it's joined by two sitar tracks,
which I'm assuming is the
Electro-Harmonix sitar pedal
but it could've been a
Coral sitar guitar
or perhaps it's sitar itself.
00:16:04
I really don't know.
00:16:05
And that gives us the base drone,
and by base I don't mean bass frequency,
I mean base in terms of the arrangement.
00:16:13
This gives us the drone that
goes through the breakdown.
00:16:27
Really good chaos.
00:16:29
It's kind of swirling around underneath
the guitar melody.
00:16:33
The guitar melody is on
these vaporizer tracks.
00:16:51
They are actually working alongside of
one of the two main rhythm guitars,
which is still playing in that section
plus this guitar 8 track right here.
00:17:12
Then these vaporizer
guitars down here along
with what's left on the
Park Saul track
in the breakdown go together
to give you a melody
and then also some of the rhythmic stuff
that comes in halfway through.
00:17:41
And then along with that
we've got one low octave drone:
As well as:
Basically what we've got
is a lot of droning material,
which I will now play
all of them together.
00:18:06
And they're moving and they're different
and they're a little bit sloppy,
which is very cool so it gives you this
bed of harmonic chaos in a way,
which really sets up nicely
underneath the very precise rhythm
and melody of the guitar melody
as well as the vocal which is
then doubling the guitar melody
and with this really busy
tom pattern underneath.
00:18:43
And then finally on our guitars
all we've got is the solo section,
which is basically just taken
from these two guitar tracks here
and it was bounced through a plugin.
00:18:55
They were automating a flanger
and I guess just in case
I didn't have the same plugin
they went ahead and bounced them.
00:19:01
so the solo sounds like this.
00:19:16
Nice really midrange-y
feedback-y Flanger,
but the point of that, is
that those guitars
are riding on top of
standard rhythm guitars,
so we're back to having the
Park Saul and the Park New.
00:19:30
So together, along with a couple
of little drone guys,
this is what you've got in the solo section with the guitars.
00:19:51
So you still have the foundation of your
standard rhythm guitars.
00:19:54
So as opposed to just putting a
Flanger on those guitars,
adding that extra guitar
gives you complete control
over how much of the Flange effect,
how it's going to effect the
midrange of the guitars.
00:20:04
Otherwise if you tweak the Flanger
on the rhythm guitars themselves,
everything else changes.
00:20:09
This way all you're worried about
is the balance between the Flanger
and the rhythm guitars.
00:20:14
That completes the band.
00:20:16
I know it looks like
there are a ton of tracks,
but it's drums, bass, guitars,
and in most of the song
we're looking at two guitars
which are playing the exact same part.
00:20:24
So now is a good time just to hear
what the rear bus is doing.
00:20:28
I'm going to put the drums
and bass back in,
and the bass is being
sent to the rear bus
and all of the guitars are
being sent to the rear bus
just on their auxes,
so it's a really simple routing.
00:20:38
And let me play you a
chorus with the rear bus.
00:20:59
Right, and without the rear bus.
00:21:16
Obviously when I mute the rear bus
the drums come up
because they aren't as reliant
on the rear bus for their
level in the balance,
but you can also hear that the guitars
just change character completely.
00:21:26
They go from pumping to sitting there,
so this is just that shared parallel compression.
00:21:32
Now what I'm going to do is go back up
to the drums to my main drums aux,
which you might remember from earlier,
I'm actually sending to the rear bus.
00:21:43
So now what I'm going to do is
I'm going to play you that
same chorus section
and I’m going to mute and
unmute this send.
00:21:49
And what you'll hear is the interaction
between the drums and
the guitars will change.
00:21:53
The drums will get a little bit quieter,
but it's much more about
how the strumming
patterns and the kick
and snare go together.
00:22:15
In some ways it's subtle,
and in some ways is one of
the most important things
going on in the mix.
00:22:20
I just feel as though it
goes from being a
pretty cool sounding
jam to being on fire,
and it's that little bit of
getting the rhythmic drum kit
inside the bass and the rhythm guitars,
which have a lot of
rhythm to them already,
but they have a much
more steady rhythm to them.
00:22:39
Where as the kick and
snare have that more loping rhythm,
and by having that loping
rhythm inside the rhythm
of the strumming that you
get on the bass and the guitar,
it just completely opens up the groove.
00:22:50
So let me play that for you again.
00:22:52
Hopefully you'll hear it
and like it as much as I do.
00:23:10
I think maybe what we'll do now
before we go to vocals
is I'll just talk about
the 2 bus processing.
00:23:16
This is almost exactly the same
as every other mix
that you may have seen me do.
00:23:22
If you haven't seen any
of the other videos
of me doing mixes you
can also go look at the
standalone video about
my template again.
00:23:29
I believe this is exactly
the same as what is in the template.
00:23:33
So this is from the same era.
00:23:36
We start off of the 33609.
00:23:38
I'll just hit play so you can see
just how hard we're hitting it.
00:23:48
So you can see this is actually
on the quiet side for me.
00:23:51
Normally on a really loud track
at the loudest point
I would be hitting at
4 dB of gain reduction,
and we're barely at 3.
00:24:04
The first thing is that I think
we've managed with
all of the parallel stuff
going on inside the
drum kit and in the rear bus
to get all of the sort of
excitement that I need,
and I don't need to
get as much of the glue
out of this compressor
as I normally would.
00:24:20
But it's also there was
a very conscious decision
to not have this record sound smashed.
00:24:25
So it can sound dirty,
and it can sound compressed,
but it can't sound smashed.
00:24:30
So we backed off on the stereo bus
of quite a few the mixes more than
I might have normally if that wasn't
brought up as a specific issue.
00:24:39
But we just wanted to make sure
that the cymbals stayed clear,
and that's what this does.
00:24:44
By not hitting this as hard
the cymbals don’t pump as much.
00:24:48
So that's the compressor.
00:25:04
Better with, I would hope you would say.
00:25:06
What follows is a 670 model,
and this is just for color.
00:25:11
I'm not going to go through
all of the settings again
because I've done that in
the standalone video,
but we're not compressing here.
00:25:17
If these needles move at all it’s
just some stuff leaking
into the detector circuit.
00:25:21
But I don't think this mix is
loud enough for that to happen.
00:25:24
So this is a little bit a
harmonic distortion.
00:25:40
And along with the
harmonic distortion comes
a little bit of level,
which isn't a bad thing but
it's something that
when you're learning how to mix
is something you have
to be very aware of.
00:25:49
All of the modeled hardware that's
giving you harmonic distortion
is going to give you a little bit of
level and some manufacturers
give you more level than others.
00:25:58
So you've got to be aware of how much
is level and how much is the
actual sonic goodness
when you're using something like this.
00:26:04
I'm not afraid of the level at all,
but I need to know that
I'm actually getting the
benefit of the harmonic distortion.
00:26:10
Because if I'm not, get rid of the
plug in and just turn it up.
00:26:14
Next is our usual stereo
EQ in mid side mode.
00:26:18
A little bit of shelf here,
and the only thing that's
different here is first of all
I’m not using the stereo
width on this mix,
and I think what was
happening was it was
starting to sound a little unnatural.
00:26:30
This one doesn't have
any of the stereo widening.
00:26:33
It's got my 1.3 dB shelf at around 8K,
and then I'm also using this bass shift,
and this I'm actually going to show you.
00:26:41
What that's doing is a little
more of what the EQ
on the kick drum was doing
is it's shifting that low end focus down
to the thump of the kick drum
as opposed to the constant
low end of the bass.
00:27:06
It really just helps pull the
kick drum out of the mix
and let it rhythmically drive
the song which
I think helps the song move
much, much faster.
00:27:16
One of the things to be aware
of when you're mixing a fast song is,
does it feel fast?
Because it's very easy to
slow the song down
especially with parallel compression.
00:27:25
You can completely change the groove
because your homogenizing in a way,
and by taking the very fast
strummed guitars and basses
and homogenizing the mix in that way,
you've got to bring the kick back out
because it's the less constant
pattern of the kick and snare
which makes the song move.
00:27:43
Next is this little collection
of Slate stuff.
00:27:46
I was using this because it
came to me on a mix
and it, I don't even think it
was on a Green Day mix,
it was on something else
and it helps the kick drum come
through and on this mix I'm also using a
tiny bit of their high lift.
00:27:59
This is some top end
EQ as well as a little
of whatever the virtual
channel is doing.
00:28:04
It's harmonic distortion,
but it does it in a way
that makes the kick thump
sound better to me.
00:28:08
So here's with and without that.
00:28:24
Just a little more aggressive overall
and a little bit brighter.
00:28:28
Then we've got my usual happy face EQ,
which in this case is the UAD Pultec
adding almost 3 at 100 and adding
a little over 3 pretty wide at 10K.
00:28:54
We can see,
again this is a case where
EQ sound like a lot more than EQ.
00:28:59
It just, everything sounds
more energetic with it.
00:29:02
And it is just EQ.
00:29:03
There's no hidden dynamics going on
but it's bringing out the
frequencies where stuff
is happening as opposed
to the midrange slab
that's built up.
00:29:12
And then last but not least,
the Oxford Limiter.
00:29:16
It's probably doing quite
a bit of gain reduction
because were not compressing that hard
so a lot of transients
are making it through.
00:29:22
This mix isn't as loud as some mixes,
so it's not going to be quite as much,
but I’ve seen this go you
know a good 6 dB,
that kind of thing.
00:29:30
This has the inflator circuit
built in so 47% of curve.
00:29:37
It's some inflator.
00:29:38
Slow attack, fast release,
turning the gain down the way in.
00:29:42
I don't know why.
00:29:42
That's the way it
is in the template.
00:29:44
It just stuck that way, and my output
level is set to the highest value
where the red light doesn't turn on.
00:30:00
The inflator is doing
what the inflator does,
plus that little bit of
limiting is really helping
to tuck the snare back into the song.
00:30:06
It's kind of starting
separate otherwise.
00:30:08
And I'll play that for you again.
00:30:21
Helping put everything
back in a package,
so I guess very quickly
I could just bypass everybody,
and you can hear what
all of these things,
which as I take them in
and out one at a time,
you can hear what they're doing
but it's all a little bit.
00:30:35
But the combination of all of
these together is a huge amount.
00:31:01
And there you have it.
00:31:02
My two bus chain,
it's just what my console sounds
like for this particular song.
00:31:07
So last but very much
not least are vocals.
00:31:11
The vocal arrangement is very simple.
00:31:13
I'll actually go through
background vocals first.
00:31:16
These tracks here are
just the samples of recordings
of fake newsreaders saying some stuff.
00:31:22
Not very important.
00:31:23
We don’t have the
speakerphone going now,
so there's no real point
in checking those out,
but you heard them
in the intro.
00:31:28
For the actual background
vocals themselves,
they would bounce
them together into stereo pairs
of backgrounds which is awesome.
00:31:35
So for me, I'm not
dealing with 12 tracks
of backgrounds that have
been balanced since they were sung,
but I still have a ton of
tracks in the session.
00:31:44
They've gone ahead and bounced them.
00:31:46
So, we've got a couple of
different sets of background vocals.
00:31:49
I’ll make them both bigger so we
can see what’s going on.
00:31:51
This is set one.
00:31:56
And second group here.
00:32:01
Basically a double.
00:32:02
Put them together,
you've got a nice little group.
00:32:07
Obviously favoring one group a
little bit more than the other,
because we don't want
it to sound like too
many voices but these
tracks just go through
and are doing all of the answer vocals.
00:32:24
They sound great.
00:32:26
They've got some EQ,
and this again came from the band.
00:32:29
They’ve got CLA -76,
all buttons in,
but with kind of a faster attack.
00:32:35
All the distortion you're hearing is
coming from this compressor really.
00:32:39
So let me play you just this
one with and without the compressor.
00:32:52
Huge amount of the character
of these vocals
is coming from the compressor,
and that's the same on
the lead vocals as well.
00:32:59
And then they’re using the Redd Desk
to just give some presence.
00:33:11
So all that crispy top end
that we got from the compressors
being brought out by this EQ,
and also taking away a lot of the low.
00:33:21
Exactly the same chain
on the second group.
00:33:24
Then those two background vocal tracks
are collected down to this aux,
which has a CLA vocal plugin on it
and is doing quite a bit.
00:33:39
So you can hear all of the effects
that are on the
background vocals
that are coming from this plugin,
and again this was sent to me like this
and they sounded great.
00:33:47
I think I probably tweaked
some settings on the CLA vocals
and I may have tweaked
the 1176 a little bit
but not much because they
just sounded really good.
00:33:55
All right, and there's one more
track of background vocals,
and what this is is the harmony
that goes with the leads.
00:34:00
So rather than the answer vocal,
it's the tag of the chorus.
00:34:07
And it's exactly the same type of thing.
00:34:10
There’s the CLA Vocals on it,
which without:
It's just doing a lot of
great processing,
compression plus a little bit of slap,
and that's pretty much
it for the background vocals.
00:34:26
When you look at what
I'm doing with them,
it's all the exact same
stuff I always do with them,
and if you watch the template video
you'll see everything
that's going on here.
00:34:35
I'm not using the Pultec,
LA2A, Pultec chain at all
on either the lead or the
background vocal.
00:34:41
So the background
vocals are coming in here,
they're going straight
through the Phoenix
for a little bit of stuff,
going through the R Vox for a
little bit of other compression stuff,
and then they're hitting the L2
which has just been in
my template forever.
00:34:57
So that's it.
00:34:59
And then they make their
way down to the combiner,
which obviously if I was
trying to save real estate
or make my session less complicated,
I can get rid of my Pultec Chain,
move all the sends up to this track,
and everything would be fine
but why bother if it sounds good?
And on this session
I'm using the stereo vocal crush
which is 1176 with all the buttons in.
00:35:20
I am using the send to the rear bus,
I’m using a little bit of the Aphex,
which gives us some top-end.
00:35:26
I'm using a little bit
of my vocal reverb
which on this session is probably still
the plate which was the default, yep.
00:35:32
Still plate A on the UAD Plate.
00:35:35
Just a little bit, not much
because there are
quite a bit of the effects
coming from the CLA plugins.
00:35:40
A little bit of the spread which is
my dual 910 micro pitch slap,
and the slap which
is the Bucket Brigade Delay.
00:35:47
So what I can do is
bypass all of this stuff
and you hear a massive
difference in the vocals themselves.
00:35:54
So while I'm using a ton
of processing that they sent me
with the CLA Vocal plugins
and things like that,
there's still quite a bit within
my template to help
shape those vocals and get them ready
to be part of the much louder mix
that they're now going to be a part of.
00:36:16
All right, and here's with
all my stuff back in.
00:36:25
They're much wider, they're brighter.
00:36:27
Most of that is going to be the
stereo vocal crush and the rear bus.
00:36:31
So here's just the vocals
with the effects that I added.
00:36:39
And here's with the rear bus
And the stereo vocal crush.
00:36:47
The stereo vocal crush is
bringing out a lot of the gritty stuff
because it's that all buttons in 1176,
which if you forget
what that looks like,
it looks like this.
00:36:57
All buttons in slowest
attack, fastest release,
just some sort of unity
gain-ish gain structure,
though in all buttons in mode.
00:37:04
All bets are off in terms of gain.
00:37:07
And then the rear bus is what's
going to make it interact
with the rest of the song
and because of how processed
they were through the CLA 76 plugins
I'm assuming that's why I never needed
to reach for the Pultec
because the Pultec LA2A Pultec chain
is what will kind of smash
them into a little package
that makes them poke
through distorted guitars.
00:37:29
That was already happening
with something else
so I didn't need to do it.
00:37:33
Lead vocal.
00:37:34
Very, very straight ahead.
00:37:35
There is a single lead
vocal and a double.
00:37:38
The lead vocal itself
has a little bit of EQ
just to suck out some sort of
buildup in that 500-1K range.
00:37:47
Then it's got an all buttons in,
faster attack, very fast release 1176.
00:37:54
This is a lot of the vocals
sound is this compressor
so looking after it,
there is some slap that's being
used later on in the song,
and then there's some EQ I'm
using to get rid of something harsh.
00:38:05
But just listen to the vocal forgetting
about what's coming after this track,
and I'm going to bypass this compressor.
00:38:20
All right, now we're going
to bypass that compressor
on both the main and the double.
00:38:33
All of that super aggressive
distortion is coming from the 1176,
and it's one of the
reasons I love the 1176.
00:38:41
It is one of the most
versatile compressors ever made.
00:38:45
There are lots of compressors
which have more controls,
let you get to more things,
but you can shape sort of
within the realm
of what that compressor sounds like.
00:38:55
Whereas all buttons in,
or even just a combination
of a couple buttons
sounds totally different
than a lower ratio
when the compressor is
working its normal mode.
00:39:05
The attack and release
times can completely
change the character of this compressor.
00:39:10
It goes so fast and so
slow that it really starts
to introduce distortion
and things like that
instead of just being more
or less compressed.
00:39:19
Great compressor.
00:39:30
Pretty awesome and then
this slap is something
that they had built,
and I really liked and
actually I think I probably
saved these setting somewhere to use somewhere else.
00:39:38
But here's with and without their slap.
00:39:50
So it's not only slap,
it's also some of the dirt
you're hearing
which is quite cool.
00:39:55
And then I just have a tiny bit of
de-harshing going on here.
00:40:08
And just like some of the other EQ
we talked about like
on the overheads,
by taking out this tiny,
tiny slice of 2.4 K,
it's opening up the
bottom end of the vocal
and part of that is because of how
it's hitting compressors further down.
00:40:22
But it's also subtractive
EQ as additive EQ.
00:40:25
I could have just put in a bunch of low-end,
but that's not really
what I wanted to do.
00:40:29
I wanted to take care of something
it was a little bit nasal,
but in doing that you then can you hear the rest
of the frequency spectrum of the vocal.
00:40:36
So once again here's with and without.
00:40:48
Night and day and for
a pretty tight queue
coming down 5 dB at 2.4K
you wouldn't think would
have that kind of impact
on the rest of the frequency
spectrum of the vocal.
00:40:58
But huge to me.
00:41:00
We go from there down
into their vocal chain,
which had, I think I
probably put this de-esser on.
00:41:07
This is just the best place
in the chain to do it.
00:41:09
And then it’s followed by
just another CLA Vocal.
00:41:11
So there's quite a bit here.
00:41:13
We'll hear with and without.
00:41:25
This is just the next
stage in getting the
ultra-compressed distorted sound
which is what they wanted,
and this is kind of the
world that Billie's vocals
live in for this whole record.
00:41:36
But there are just different
sort of extremes of it.
00:41:40
This is definitely one of the most
aggressive distorted
versions of the vocal,
and there are much more open versions
and obviously there's an acoustic song
where the vocal is very
natural sounding.
00:41:50
But this compression,
sort of verging on distortion,
even if you don't go all the
way to distortion
is kind of what his vocal sounds like.
00:41:59
And there are sort of characteristics
sonic signatures
that vocalists who have been
in bands for a long time have.
00:42:05
Not all of them do,
but Billy definitely does
with his vocal sound,
and that comes from the compression
but it's exactly the same thing as
Anthony from the Chili Peppers
always singing on an SM7.
00:42:16
He sounds great on a
251 or a C12 or a U47
because why wouldn’t he?
But it doesn't sound like a
Chili Peppers record.
00:42:23
Put an SM7 in front of him,
it sounds like that.
00:42:26
Put this kind of compression
on Billie's voice,
and it sounds like a Green Day record.
00:42:31
It's just part of it,
and it's a huge part of it.
00:42:35
So again, since we have
that sort of level of compression
and processing,
before we even get into
my normal tracks,
I never needed the Pultec.
00:42:43
Again this could be inactive and
I could cut out the middleman
and move these sends up,
but instead I have a second de-esser.
00:42:52
So there's one before the CLA
and then there's one after,
if you follow the way the
signal path is going.
00:42:58
This is purely because I was de-esing
and then I need to de-es some more.
00:43:03
This isn't like some cool trick,
it's just I needed to control
probably more the CHs in the
THs were popping out more than Esses,
and this was just the place
where I could grab them best.
00:43:16
If you grab them too early in the chain,
then you're not taking care of the
artifacts of the heavy compression.
00:43:22
If you grab them too late in the chain,
all of the heavy compression
has made them
the same level in terms of what the
detector circuit can look at
as the rest of the vocal.
00:43:31
So there's nothing for it to grab onto.
00:43:33
So I ended up having to grab it in the
middle and then later on.
00:43:36
I'll play that first line with and
without both de-essers.
00:43:51
This is sort of like that EQ thing.
00:43:53
By taking those Esses out a little bit
it lets the compression
distortion come up a little bit,
and the vocal just sounds
a lot more even.
00:44:05
They're probably both
grabbing all of the Esses.
00:44:13
It's very different for me just cranking
the range on one of
them because I'm catching
one before this processing
and one after.
00:44:22
After that, once again it is
all the exact same stuff
that I do on the background vocals
and on every other mix.
00:44:29
There's the stereo vocal
crush, the rear bus,
the Aphex, the reverb.
00:44:34
There's not that much spread,
and then the slap is actually
out on lead vocal
only because we've got some delay here
with some tight reverb and
some slap delay.
00:44:44
We also have delay coming
from the Kramer Master Tape.
00:44:49
The last thing we needed was more
delay coming for me.
00:44:52
What they had set up,
whether I tweaked it or not,
was more than enough for this song.
00:44:56
But just again, really quickly,
even getting rid of these
effects is a huge difference.
00:45:13
It's not just level.
00:45:15
You can hear the difference
in the breath
before his first words,
so check that out.
00:45:19
Here's with.
00:45:24
And here's without.
00:45:33
It's really helping bring
everything that's good
about this vocal to the forefront
and tame all the rest of
the stuff so the breaths
can be really, really loud
but not jumping out.
00:45:44
So now that we've everything in,
I actually want to go
back to one of the first things
I mentioned was this
huge drum fill going
into the outro of the song.
00:45:52
Terrifying!
Terrifying because you
are now going to expose
everything you've done with the
drums for everybody to hear,
and it has to work.
00:46:01
And remember I was
talking about the sort of
arena size of the drums,
and I think that over-the-top
crazy arena sound
is actually really cool in context.
00:46:11
So now, check out as we
go from the full band
screaming along to just drums
and then back into the band.
00:46:19
All of those reverbs will
be noticeable to you
but they all go together
to just be big bombastic drums,
which is like:
"holy crap what am I hearing?"
and then we're back into
the song to finish out.
00:46:39
Though hardly the most
natural sound in the world,
but I think it's awesome.
00:46:42
I love the way those toms
sound just natural enough
that you know it's not a sample.
00:46:48
It doesn't sound weird,
but there's so much stuff on them that they're like cannons,
and that's a really cool
feature of the song.
00:46:55
So it made me build the
drum sound in a slightly
maybe more effected
way than I might have
if we didn't have this exposed drum fill.
00:47:05
But then in the context of the song
I think it made it really, really cool
because you do have
the spot in the middle
where there is a lot of
toms in the breakdown.
00:47:27
And any drier than that
and I feel like the toms
and the snare might've
started to sound small,
and I probably would've been going after
getting that kind of sound anyway.
00:47:35
Purpose building it for
the drum fill informed
the rest of the song,
which worked out really well.
00:47:41
So now that we've
got the vocals going
we can go back to one of the things I mentioned
at the very beginning
which is the exposed vocal.
00:47:47
It happens going into the breakdown,
it happens at the end
of the first chorus,
and it happens at the
very end of the song.
00:47:52
So let me play you the
very end of this song.
00:47:59
What you can see is
were automating this slap
inside of the song,
and that comes on for the end
because one of the biggest problems
you have is things going from wet to dry
or dry to wet and the
effect balance changing.
00:48:13
It has to sound appropriate.
00:48:15
If it sounds different than
what you thought it sounded
like inside the track it can be
very, very distracting.
00:48:21
But the other thing is it can also
jump up in level,
and it's just a difficult
thing to come
through and basically
just with clip gain
and with effects I was
able to make that work.
00:48:37
But if I turn off the
slap that's coming in
and I bring that vocal
up to the regular level
and just let the vocal play.
00:48:50
It’s distracting. It no
longer feels like the roomy arena
of the song,
but having that slap
in the whole time was
making the chorus too messy.
00:48:59
So having the slap come and go and
having the clip gain
come down just makes the vocal
sound like it continues.
00:49:12
And that's it.
00:49:13
It's sort of seamless in a way,
but you're doing it by
actually having stuff change
and that's the key to me for all my
parallel compression on the drums,
using the drums dirt
sometimes only in sections,
using the Pultec sometimes,
and again I'm not using
all of these tricks,
if you want to call them
tricks on every song,
but it's the ability to
change the sound of something
so that for the listener it
sounds like it doesn't change.
00:49:37
And pretty much that's it.
00:49:38
It's just a great arrangement
and a great performance
of a scorcher of a song
so there are the
arrangement tricks in a
way of having the small intro,
of having the breakdown
with the totally different harmonic
sort of feel to it by having the
sitar drones.
00:49:53
You've got your drum fill,
but in general it's just a really
good rock song played well,
and hopefully I just made it loud enough
so everybody could hear it.
00:50:02
And that's it.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
- Avid Lo-Fi
- Avid EQ III
- iZotope Alloy 2
- iZotope Nectar
- Waves CLA drums
- Waves CLA-76
- Waves L2
- Waves REDD.17
- Waves Scheps 73
- Waves PulgTec EQP
- Sound Toys Decapitator
- Sound Toys Radiator 1567A
- UAD Fairchild 679
- UAD Fatso
- UAD Neve
- Sonnox Oxford Limiter
- Slate Digital
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.
Beyonce
Lana Del Rey
Red Hot Chili Peppers
U2
Michael Jackson
Green Day
Green Day is an American punk rock band formed in 1986 by lead vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong and bassist Mike Dirnt. For much of the group's career, the band has been a trio with drummer Tré Cool, who replaced former drummer John Kiffmeyer in 1990 prior to the recording of the band's second studio album, Kerplunk (1991). Guitarist Jason White, who has worked with the band as a touring member since 1999, was an official member from 2012 to 2016.
Bang Bang
CLICK_HEREMusic CreditsBang Bang
By Green Day
"Bang Bang" is a song by American punk rock band Green Day, released as the lead single from their twelfth studio album, Revolution Radio (2016), on August 11, 2016. Regarded as combining elements of the band's early punk rock days with themes from their politically motivated later albums, the song was inspired by the events of mass shootings in the United States and is written from the viewpoint of a mass shooter.- Artist
- Green Day
- Producer
- Green Day
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