Inside The Mix: twenty one pilots with Adam Hawkins
02h 03min
(68)
Adam Hawkins Deconstructs His Mix Of "Chlorine"
Learn how Grammy-winning mix engineer Adam Hawkins mixed the twenty one pilots single "Chlorine".
In this exclusive mixing tutorial, Adam opens up his final session and shows you how he mixed this incredible production from twenty one pilots.
This is an in-depth look at what it's like to mix a song from one of the world's largest bands, while dealing with tight deadlines and a distinct sonic signature, where the goal is to enhance and maintain the artist's vision.
In this 3 hour tutorial, Adam explains:
- His workflow in detail, including session setup, gear, routing, revisions and delivering mixes to clients.
- The story of the song's collaborative process between Tyler Joseph and producer Paul Meany.
- How he received the files in Logic Pro X from the band and mixed them in Pro Tools.
- His use of three different flavors of parallel compression on drums and how he automates them to change the tone throughout the track.
- His treatment of 808s, that made them sit in the track without taking too much space.
- How he enhanced the stereo bass tones on the record.
- His technique for sculpting multiple layers of synthesizers to help showcase the band's unique soundscapes.
- The use of Microshift and Little Alterboy on vocals and effects returns to add texture.
- How he uses multiple stages of compression on lead vocals and uses different preamp and tape saturation processes to add tone and slap delay.
- His use of dynamic EQ on the lead vocal to fight proximity effect.
- How to use delays to fill gaps between musical phrases and enhance the energy of the track.
This is an exclusive chance to learn Adam's personal mixing techniques, methods and all of the tricks he used to mix a hit song from one of the world's largest bands, and then apply them to your own mixes!
Learn more about Adam here
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:16 - Working with the band
- 01:01 - The Production
- 10:52 - Session Layout
- 12:30 - Workflow Summary
- 13:14 - Routing
- 17:51 - Drums and Percussion
- 19:58 - Drum Bus Processing
- 27:48 - Using Strip Silence
- 39:19 - Drum Automation
- 45:05 - 808
- 46:17 - Bass
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:33 - Synth
- 14:27 - Mellotron Strings
- 16:27 - Piano
- 20:36 - FX
- 23:34 - Lead Vocal
- 24:27 - Utilizing the Original Logic Session
- 35:23 - Recreating the Original Vocal Processing
- 40:03 - Background Vocals
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:1 - Mix Bus Processing
- 12:04 - The Master Limiter
- 14:58 - Mix Summarization
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |
00:00:00
Hi I'm Adam Hawkins.
We're here today at my studio,
Acacia Sound,
in Thousand Oaks, California.
00:00:05
And we're gonna deconstruct the mix
of Chlorine by Twenty One Pilots.
00:00:16
I initially met Twenty One Pilots working
on the tracking session with them,
with Mike Elizondo.
00:00:20
That was on the previous record,
and the guys enjoyed
working with me.
00:00:25
After that we did the song
Heathens which I also recorded parts of
and then ended up being
chosen to mix the song too,
after the initial rough mix was
kind of spot on what they wanted.
00:00:36
They were like:
"Hey just take that,
clean it up and let's see
where you take it from here".
00:00:41
And everybody ended up loving it.
00:00:44
So this time around when they
were doing a full album
they reached out to me and
asked if I would mix this album
based on what they liked about working
with me on Heathens and the tracking
and the time we spent
in the studio together.
00:00:56
And of course I said absolutely yes,
because,
I mean I love working with these guys.
They're great guys.
00:01:02
Tyler worked with Paul Meany producing
and co-producing the songs on this record.
00:01:06
I'm not sure whose hands did what
because I wasn't there for the process.
00:01:11
I definitely hear
Paul's influence.
00:01:13
Paul was the singer and
main creators I believe
in the band Mutemath.
00:01:19
You can hear his influence
in a lot of this stuff
the treatment,
some of some of the delay effects
on the vocals and stuff
are clearly Paul's style.
00:01:27
When we started thinking
about doing the record
I flew out to Columbus
to see Tyler's new studio
and help him dial in
the vocal sound a little
bit and set up the Mike for his
ukulele bass sounds
so that he could
confidently sit down and
record in his studio and know
that what he was
gonna send out for mix
was gonna be good.
00:01:50
At the time I didn't realize
that I was gonna be mixing it.
00:01:52
I was just there
to help him set up the sounds
and hope that I
was gonna mix it.
00:01:58
A few months later,
Tyler reaches out and says:
"Hey, we've got some stuff
ready to start sending to you".
00:02:04
"Here's the first song".
00:02:06
It was Tyler and Paul working on
the record together.
00:02:08
They did everything in Logic.
00:02:10
So what I asked them
to do so I didn't
have to learn
everything about Logic
was just to bounce stems
as everything is
processed already.
00:02:20
Like, give it to me how you've got
it and how you're loving it
and I will
then go through
and maybe ask for a few things
but they decided to just
give me the Logic session
so that I could
dig through if I found
I didn't love the
processing on one thing
or I needed to...
00:02:37
cut breaths out or find bad edits
that were a part of the stems.
00:02:40
I could do that and
then rebounce things or
remove certain elements
from the stems
and then re-export them and
put them in Pro Tools.
00:02:48
I ended up doing a lot
of that on some songs
and absolutely none of it
on other songs.
00:02:53
It just depended on
how it worked out.
00:02:55
Everything came to me
in pretty good shape.
00:02:58
Paul's a genius.
00:03:00
That guy, some of his creative
sounds are really incredible.
00:03:07
So it was a great starting point.
00:03:09
They tracked the drums
at United with Darrel Thorp.
00:03:12
So, I mean, everything
they got to me was
in pretty good shape.
00:03:17
There were some moments where
I wanted to change the bass tone because
it wasn't just quite full enough.
00:03:23
It was a little bit too
Guitar Rig sounding.
00:03:26
Re-triggered some of the
drum hits here and there.
00:03:29
I would usually use the same
sample that was there already
but just re-trigger it to
clean things up a bit
or make things more consistent.
00:03:36
There were some occasions that
I would go to Logic and
want to export just
the dry vocal first,
instance,
and then put it into Pro Tools
and try copying the same plugins
exactly as they were
in Logic to Pro Tools
and they never sounded exactly the same.
I don't know why,
I couldn't explain it,
like Tyler was really
in love with Microshift,
making this record,
from Soundtoys.
00:04:01
And he would put it
on the vocal and
it would create
this stereo doubling effect
where I feel, I mean,
that's what it does,
but it was different,
it was different on the left
side than the right side
more so than it was
in Pro Tools.
00:04:16
Almost like he processed it twice
and I'm guessing that in Logic
it acts more like
a multi-mono plug-in
than a full-on matched stereo.
00:04:25
So I've learned that I had to take
the vocal track,
split it into two mono tracks
and put two separate
Micropitch plugins
to recreate what he had done
inside of Pro Tools.
00:04:37
I was kind of
frustrating at first,
trying to figure out how
to take what he gave me
and not change it because he
loved what he had already done.
00:04:47
And improve on.
00:04:49
The song I'm gonna be
showing you today is Chlorine
and it's probably one
that I did somewhere
in the middle of the project.
00:04:57
It wasn't one of the first songs I got
and wasn't one of the last.
00:05:00
I had a good flow going by
the time I got to this one
and I knew what they
were looking for
by the time I got
the song and I also
was comfortable with how
the files were getting to me
and it was pretty smooth
process by that point.
00:05:12
So here's the song
Chlorine and I haven't
opened up the session in a while
so I'm gonna have to refresh
my memory of what everything is
and where everything
is going and
how it's labeled.
00:05:21
While it's playing
I'll start looking through
the session to see what I see
and hopefully find some
things to explain to you.
00:10:53
As I go through and look at everything
you can see where I've got drums,
the drum loop starts
in the beginning
and then these are
the bulk of the main drums
happening throughout the song.
00:11:02
Outro drums.
00:11:04
This is actually a
submix from Paul.
00:11:06
I tried to adjust it a little bit with
the original tracks
and whatever he was
doing it was awesome
and I kept going back to
what he did originally.
00:11:13
So this ended up not really
being a difficult song
because there is a lot
of submix stemming out.
00:11:19
I split some of the drum loop tracks
and the individual
tracks so I could
alter the kick and the
snare differently from
just the entire loop.
00:11:26
So as I go through the session
I like to organize
things with drums on top
usually kick, snare
then hats, toms,
overheads, room.
00:11:34
This is a unique situation
where it's not the
typical kind of drum setup
so it's not really that,
it's more like
whatever comes in first
ends up at the top.
00:11:42
After that they
arrange a session with
the 808 track that comes in
in one section that
normally it would
be below the bass
but somehow ended up above.
00:11:51
Bass, synth bass.
00:11:53
Any synthesizers here.
00:11:56
These are horns and then strings,
the pianos and then any kind of
special effects
or additional things
that have been added.
00:12:06
Sometimes it would be a
delay effects from Paul
sometimes it's just some
transitional builds.
00:12:12
And then follows vocal.
00:12:14
Lead vocals are all bright red.
00:12:15
The background vocals
are all like a burgundy,
kind of how I picture
them sitting in the mix
where the lead is the focus
and the background vocals would
be a little bit further back.
00:12:24
And that's pretty much
the layout of this whole session.
00:12:27
It doesn't sound
like a basic song
but it looks pretty basic
when you look at it in Pro Tools.
00:12:31
I do use the control surface,
sometimes.
00:12:35
I like having it when I need it
but there are other times when
I don't even touch it throughout the mix.
00:12:39
I spend a lot of time
low volume on NS10s,
Focal SM9s and a
Dangerous Monitor ST
for switching and
A/B between sources
which is usually the rough mix
or every once in a while
I'll check something on streaming
or just take a break from the
song and listen to something else.
00:12:57
I am running HDX with two cards.
00:13:01
Mostly...
00:13:03
I don't think I use that
many DSP plugins to be honest,
it gives me more voices
than I could get
with a native system.
00:13:09
There are times when
you get a ridiculous number
of tracks on a song.
00:13:15
So one of the first things I do
when I get files from someone
is to set them up so they're
all gonna make sense to me
so that I don't have
to search constantly
for what I'm looking for.
I know at least the general area
where to head or where to scroll
to find what I'm hearing
as I'm listening.
00:13:29
General routing when
I set up a session,
usually I have
all the drums go to
a main bus.
00:13:34
The song has multiple
drum sounds or packages
that I wanted to keep a little
bit separate control over.
00:13:40
It's very different in the beginning
versus when it comes into the verse
and the chorus sections.
00:13:45
So I've been routing
these initial drums in the intro
and they come in throughout to what
I labeled 'Drum 3' at the time.
00:13:52
Then the Auxes for 'Drum 3'
goes to all drums which
is down here after all the drums.
00:13:58
going to master track
that I can quickly adjust the
level of the entire drum kit.
00:14:04
Maybe I want to automate it,
up and down in spots
like I have here.
00:14:10
The rest of the drum kit
now goes to 'Drums 1'.
00:14:12
I don't know what happened to 2.
00:14:14
Let's see, do we have two?
Yeah, we do have two down here.
00:14:16
Drums 1, same thing it's going to
a master and 3 Auxes.
00:14:21
And Drums 2,
a master and 3 Auxes.
00:14:24
And I'll show you how I use
those three Auxes
to do a parallel compression.
00:14:29
And then this one
is just going to
directly to all drums.
00:14:41
And I'm guessing that's
just a reverb.
00:14:43
Yeah.
00:14:44
So I didn't want to
enhance the length of
the reverb too much
by going through the parallel
compression with those.
00:14:55
Something like that.
00:14:57
I don't really want to do
the parallel compression
either because it's going to
emphasize the high-end
too much and kind of make it hurt.
00:15:03
After I've set up the
drums and their Bus
I generally like to
stick to processing everything
on individual tracks.
I'm not a big fan of
going through and
assigning different Auxes
to different tracks.
00:15:14
I like to just know
that what I'm doing is
going to the output and not
being affected somewhere else
unless I have to do a special
treatment or effect in the section.
00:15:22
So all of the
remaining tracks, bass
through synths and horns.
00:15:28
Sure it's not a guitar song.
00:15:30
Pianos, effects, everything.
00:15:32
All the vocals just going
straight to output 1
which is my final output stage, the master.
00:15:37
With this final output,
once I've finished the mix
that's where I bounce from
so I actually,
unless Pro Tools is causing
some kind of issue,
I will typically double click right here,
to select from start to the end,
and bounce to disk and
I'll do it offline even to save me
two minutes out of my day.
00:15:55
When I do that
I select outputs 1,
I've named them to match
the Dangerous Monitor
so 1, 2, 3, 4,
just keeps things a little simple.
00:16:04
And when
I have my assistant come and
help out he knows what's what.
00:16:08
It makes more sense than 1 and 2,
and 3 and 4.
00:16:11
Generally I keep the optical input
that's coming from my computer
into the Pro Tools session
mainly so that I can output
it to the Dangerous Monitor
and switch to it easily.
00:16:20
And have the session playing,
with the mix at the same time as
another song playing in iTunes
or Spotify or Tidal or
whatever I'm using that week.
00:16:29
I can A/B.
00:16:30
It's not generally the healthiest
thing to do for yourself when you're mixing
because it will send
you down in a spiraling
whirlwind of pain and suffering.
00:16:40
And then this channel
is the last mix that I have going.
00:16:44
So this is the actual,
the limited version of the final
mix that went to mastering.
00:16:48
So if I was asked to
do changes to this now
I would keep that there
and I could A/B
to hear exactly how
the last version was
against what I'm
changing now and know
if I'm moving too far
away from the mark or
more towards what the
client was looking for.
00:17:04
When I bounce the disc
I make sure to
check
the option 'import after bounce'.
00:17:11
I bounce the whole mix into the session
where you can then instantly
assign an output to the track
and compare,
make sure that the bounce
matches the mix too
because there are times where
random things happen
and I have to
listen to the entire file
before I send it off to the client.
Otherwise they might hear something
that wasn't supposed to be there.
00:17:32
And every time I do a bounce,
it's always gonna end up at the
bottom of the session
so that I can check it, A-B it,
maybe edit it if necessary,
sometimes you'll get a
little bit of a click
or noise burst at the
beginning of the song
after the bounce so you
have to trim that off
rename the file and then export it.
00:17:50
So the top of the song starts out
with this kind of lo-fi,
drum loop thing.
00:18:03
With processing,
not the most drastic
processing right there
but then you look at this I guess it's...
00:18:09
like, why is that there?
Let's see what it
sounds like without this,
and without this.
00:18:22
So basically what
I'm doing here is,
there's a lot of rumble and
low-end boom happening
that I want to get rid of.
00:18:27
There's also a really
obnoxious resonance
that I had to get rid of
because it was driving me nuts
when I heard it by itself.
00:18:37
So here it is without that.
00:18:49
It's subtle but it's there.
00:18:51
And then I just wanted to
add some mid-range to it.
00:18:54
I also have a de-esser
on this track.
00:18:56
Let's see what it's doing.
00:19:07
And then later on in the song
this plug-in comes on and this
looks like it's an imager.
00:19:11
The sound is no longer
just panned to the left side.
00:19:14
It's now a stereo.
00:19:29
So it's just to kind
of widen it a little bit.
00:19:31
And it was just a mono track
but I wanted it to feel like you're
standing in front of a drum kit
not just having it so focused
straight down in the middle.
00:19:39
Moving on to the main drum kit.
00:19:42
So let me solo this
as it comes in the verse.
00:19:59
All of these drums are going to
a bus labeled 'Drums 1'
and I have some processing
on there and then
they all go to three
separate Auxes,
one that I labeled 'DA',
which is Drum Aux,
the...
00:20:12
I don't know why
there's an 'M' there.
00:20:14
It's normally 'DC' for compression,
which is a parallel compression,
and then 'DO' which is Omnipressor
where I'm really digging
in and compressing it.
00:20:23
Let me mute these.
00:20:25
So here it is with nothing.
00:20:27
And then I'm gonna turn
the Decapitator on and off.
00:20:43
Initially it's louder so
you think it sounds better
but if I match the volumes
you can hear the difference
in the punch of the
low-end that it's adding
and the little sizzle that it
adds to the top-end
that just helps the drums
sound more exciting.
00:20:55
Followed by an API 2500 plug-in
and it looks like when
I was doing this originally
I was trying to decide between
UAD and Waves.
00:21:03
I don't know.
Sometimes I go crazy and A/B
forever to figure out
which one sounds
2% better for the
particular moment.
00:21:10
And I it looks like
the Waves won this time.
00:21:12
So here it is with
and without that.
00:21:14
Here's without.
00:21:29
It feels just a
little bit messier
and this tightens things up a bit
so that it's more
compact and more focused.
00:21:50
So usually the 2500, I have a good
starting point for a drum sounds.
00:21:54
I often like to use,
actually start with my
preset that I submitted
to UA for this plug-in.
00:22:00
And it's medium to
pretty fast attack on 3
and 4:1, fast release.
00:22:06
I like to put this 'thrust detector'
on medium.
00:22:08
It kind of helps hold
things together a little bit
and it's not grabbing so
much on the low-end,
and usually in 'old mode'.
00:22:15
The one thing I've changed
since submitting this preset is
I don't generally do the
make-up gain thing here.
00:22:21
That's was an old habit,
when I used the hardware all the time,
to match level and this
matches level pretty closely
so that when you bypass it
in and out you're not being fooled
by the jump in volume which
clearly I did here
and I'm kind of sad
because I can't really
show you the difference
without it getting louder
and sounding more impressive.
00:22:40
Let's see what this sounded
like when I had it on there.
00:23:03
Pretty subtle difference
but I chose one over the
other for some reason,
probably within the mix,
not just listening to it soloed.
00:23:09
So then I have parallel
compression on the drums.
00:23:13
Let's listen to one of the
parallel by itself.
00:23:15
Here is just the McDSP 6050,
this guy is not doing anything
so I'll just hide that.
00:23:32
It's lengthening the reverb
and the decay of everything
and adding that little click,
that little pop on the top of the attack
that sounds kind
of ridiculous by itself.
00:23:44
When you're playing it with the
dry signal next to it,
it's adding that attack
from that little pop
and the length
to the decay of the
drums and the reverb.
00:24:12
So now Omnipressor is also in
but barely,
it's just to kind of bring up
the noise and all the
ambiance tucked in behind,
most of that information in there
is pretty wide stereo information.
00:24:22
So I like to bring it in and
it adds a little bit of
width and depth to the sound
by bringing all that
low level stuff up,
even though it's still
low it's still adding
the little bits of information
that make things feel a little
bit more interesting.
00:24:35
So if I turn it on by itself
with the dry,
without the McDSP one going,
we might notice a little bit more but
it's really a subtle thing.
00:25:07
So once I get that bus feeling
in a general area of what seems like
it's gonna be right for the song
I'll start going through individual tracks
that are going to be
going through that bus.
00:25:17
So now we know what's happening
to the end of the chain and
let's see what each one
individually got going on.
00:25:24
So here's the main kick track,
this first one.
00:25:27
So here's what it sounded
like when it came to me,
plus the processing
that I've added.
00:25:36
Seems like that processing is
kind of overreacting a little bit.
00:25:38
Decapitator is doing more
work and it's more distorted.
00:25:47
First thing I did was
high-pass there to get rid of all
that low information.
00:25:51
There's a little bit much,
and then I cut some of the highs
because there's a lot
of noise in there.
00:25:56
I'm using this compressor,
it's kind of a typical thing for me
to use an SSL style compressor
on a drum to enhance the attack
and almost shorten the decay
in the same time of doing that,
with the slower attack settings
it lets the initial
burst come through
and then clamps down on it.
00:26:21
I followed that with
a Waves Smack Attack
just cutting a little bit
further back on the sustain.
00:26:34
This was just chasing
down that low-end
to make it not so overbearing.
00:26:48
And then once again
I probably wanted to cut out
some of this low mid area.
00:26:52
I should point out,
on this EQ,
that I use a lot of times
because it's made
life a lot easier,
it has an auto gain feature.
00:26:58
So I will turn that on
so that when I pull this down
the level stays pretty static
so you can really hear
the change your making
not just getting
quieter or louder.
00:27:09
So when I pull this down
it makes this frequency
more obvious.
00:27:13
So now I wanted
to pull this down
because it was coming
through a bit much.
00:27:16
I probably could have
achieved the same thing
by doing a little bit of boost
at 1000 Hz and a
little bit of boost at 2 kHz
but this is how I landed there.
00:27:35
Moving on to the next track.
00:27:37
Let's see what we had.
00:27:42
Looks like just a little bit high-pass.
00:27:50
When I get stems
or just long front to back,
one long solid file,
I always like to strip silence
for a couple of reasons.
00:27:57
One,
it saves on processing power
because the computer
is not processing
when there's no audio there,
for the plug-in that's there.
00:28:05
Also,
when I'm looking at this
or looking at the mixer
I can quickly select a track
and hit tab, and hit play.
00:28:12
As soon as I hit play I'm hearing
the sound that's on that track
I'm not waiting for it or
searching for it or rewinding
or going back to the edit window
to click in the right spot
I can just keep moving
and immediately hear
what's on this track.
00:28:24
So like we just saw from this screen,
there is one little piece on this track
but if I'm working
in this section and then like:
'Oh wait what's on this track?'
from this window,
I can tab to it...
00:28:37
And there it is,
no guesswork, no searching for it
it's just right
there and saves me
a few mouse clicks.
00:28:44
That seems pretty similar
to the other kick.
00:28:46
Again, just a little bit of a high-pass
to get rid of some
of that sub info
that was probably
a bit too much.
00:28:53
Next track.
00:29:08
This is on the chamber track.
00:29:10
Looks like I'm just cutting
some rumble and cutting some top
to soften it a little bit.
Make it sit further back in the mix,
not be so close.
00:29:16
Even though it's reverb,
take some high-end
away from it,
it'll seem like it's
sitting further back.
00:29:21
All right.
Next track.
00:29:22
This is a drum sub mix
that was sent to me
from Tyler and Paul.
00:29:27
Looks like I'm just taking
a little top end off,
boosting a little low and
high passing a little bit.
00:29:31
And...
00:29:33
Adding in some attack and
removing some length.
00:29:37
So let's see what it
sounds like with nothing.
00:29:48
So it's funny it's kind of
backwards what I would normally do
and I'm making it
sound a little bit
more dull a little bit more
reserved
to blend in with the other
tracks that are there.
00:29:58
And I think this is doing
the bulk of the work.
00:30:12
Just so that the attack is the focus.
Not really
the length of the note
because there's reverb going on
there's already other things
giving us that length.
00:30:21
Next track.
00:30:26
This is a duplicate
of that same track.
00:30:28
No idea why.
00:30:29
I split it off for
this section of the song
but I don't see any
drastic differences.
00:30:36
Slightly less attack
slightly less lenght.
00:30:37
Normally I would automate
that kind of thing.
00:30:39
Maybe it came to me
in separate tracks.
00:30:41
I'll come back to that,
maybe it has something to do
with this automation down here.
00:30:59
Just cutting off
some of it, I mean,
you can see it more than you
can probably hear it.
00:31:06
You know, this 30 Hz going down on it,
minus 80 dB that nobody
would ever hear
but maybe it saved an ounce
of headroom somewhere along the way.
00:31:33
Let's see what this one
sounds like when nothing.
00:31:45
Looks like I am just
compressing it here
to add some attack
but then gating it to cut back on
some of the lengthened noise.
00:31:52
Cutting out some 7 kHz
to pull back the hi-hat
more than likely and also
rolling off the top
with the low pass filter.
00:32:00
This is EMI TG 12345,
it's from waves and it's one of
their Abbey Road Studios plugins
emulating the channel
from the EMI console
and then this
you'll see as we go
is one of my favorite plug-ins
on so many things.
00:32:15
And this knob right here is one
of the most important to me,
the spread knob.
00:32:19
It's just messing with the phase as
far as I understand it.
00:32:27
It's just an occasional reverbed snare
and what did I do again,
as you're going to see
a pattern here,
on drums I often will
high-pass them a bit
just as a safety measure almost.
00:32:36
But also there's a little bit of a bump
that comes from the
SSL emulation,
at least from Waves,
around the high-pass frequency
which is actually a lot lower
than this number says.
00:32:46
I think it's actually,
it says 70
but if you look at it somewhere,
it's probably closer to 30.
00:32:51
Don't understand
why they do that
but that's what they're
doing on this.
00:32:55
That's followed by this
and I'm just taking away...
00:33:03
a little bit of that noise,
that crackle that's happening there.
00:33:08
You can hear that.
00:33:12
It just jumped out to
me when I was listening
so I attacked it
and got rid of it.
00:33:26
So this one has some
of that same noise,
I wonder if I...
00:33:29
Yeah, I went for...
00:33:31
cutting that on this one too
and gated it
so you can hear that high whistle.
00:33:39
That's probably an artifact
that was intentional or not
from an old
digital sampler or
whatever the source was for this.
00:33:47
So after getting rid of that whistle.
00:33:57
I just basically looks like I'm
trying to beef it up a little bit,
adding a little bit of low-end
adding a little bit
of upper mid-range
and then taking away a little bit
at the very top end
so that's more impactful,
more of the meat
of the snare drums
that are happening
across the board here.
00:34:18
Not a lot going on there
it's a kick drum that
comes in occasionally
with some reverb on it.
Again hi-pass,
some SSL compression to
enhance the attack.
00:34:46
So it looks like I'm
automating this low-cut
to be on some of the hits
but then I want that low-end punched
to be back for some of the others.
00:34:55
Listening on its own
doesn't make a lot of sense
but definitely in the
group of all the drums
it's helping make room for one of
the other sounds that's happening
whenever this is being cut.
00:35:03
Otherwise just adding a
little bit of mid-range
not a lot happening again.
00:35:07
I kind of just default with
this SSL channel
on the channels now and I have
for years since
this thing came out.
00:35:14
I mean that comes from years of
working on SSL consoles.
00:35:22
Cutting some highs,
maybe a tiny bit of
expansion happening there
to kill something.
00:35:30
That's very subtle.
00:35:32
We'll see what it sounds like without it.
00:35:43
Just taking some top off mainly.
00:35:58
This is a fun one.
Without everything I've got on there.
00:36:08
Kind of sounds just
more standard drum kit.
00:36:11
It looks like I'm adding
some 1.6 ish
to this one, wide bandwidth,
so I was just going for more
of a color thing,
not really a corrective thing.
00:36:19
And it's very subtle.
I mean, 1.2 dB,
guessing I made this change while
I was playing with everything else
and not just soloed because
it's not really a huge change that is
gonna jump out on its own.
00:36:29
Again, a little bit of a high-pass
because there's that
sub info in the kick,
all of those kicks having it.
00:36:34
It's just good to choose
one solid low-end source
than having them all try to
fight for that same space.
00:36:41
Followed by this EQ.
00:36:44
And looks like I'm adding some
146 Hz
and cutting some 4 kHz
and some 9 kHz.
00:37:04
Definitely cutting some low end
too with this high pass filter.
00:37:07
Sometimes I'll pick this plug-in over ProQ
just because I feel inspired
by a different user interface, really.
00:37:15
Sometimes,
if I can't find it with one
I'll just go play with another just to
see if it inspires something different
by having a different user interface.
They probably sound pretty similar
if you were to set them exactly the same,
you could probably get them to match
but just looking at different images
on the screen can change the outcome.
00:37:33
I decided to put a
Microshift on this track
just to give it a little bit of
more of an interesting
thing and unique sound.
00:37:40
I spreaded it out in the
stereo field a little bit
and it's kind of a chorus
in fact, almost,
and it just made the section where
the song drops down feel cool.
00:38:04
And you can see on here that
the mix is pretty high, it's 75%.
00:38:07
If I understand how this works correctly
the effect isn't doing anything
below 670 Hz.
So it's really just affecting
the mids and the highs.
00:38:15
And the kick remains
mono and focused.
00:38:19
So if you've got a
mono sub-woofer
it's not canceling any
information out by being phased
or delayed and modulated
like this plug-in does.
00:38:30
So here's the whole
package soloed...
00:38:33
and I can quickly
bypass all these plugins
so you can hear the difference
of what all of this has done.
00:38:53
So listening to it raw versus processed
I feel like I achieved
thickening things a bit,
adding some punch and attack,
taking away some of the fizzier
high-end information
that will distract
you from the vocal
that's coming in.
00:39:08
It just makes it a nice
tight punchy package
instead of all of these different
elements that seemingly...
00:39:14
go together, but...
00:39:17
They're not helping each other
quite as much as they are
once all the processing is on.
00:39:21
Basically for this song I'm bumping up
the drums for the choruses
and bringing them back
down for the verses
just so that the energy comes
down a little bit for the song.
00:39:30
In this case I decided to do all of
these as one package
instead of doing one at a time.
00:39:35
Sometimes I will only like
turn up the Omnipressor Aux
for the chorus to make it
a little bit crazier in the
high-end and wider
or just the dry signal so that
the length of the notes
doesn't get longer
but the attack becomes sharp to
make the impact of the chorus bigger.
00:39:57
All of the reverb on these drums was
added there either during tracking
or during processing in Logic before
they sent these stems to me.
00:40:07
So I don't know the source of them
some of them are labeled chamber
then maybe they are from an actual chamber
at the studio they were tracking at.
00:40:14
Some of them are probably from plug-ins.
00:40:16
Some of the compression that
I've done on these individual tracks
was specifically to enhance that
so that you really feel
the space was there,
or the space that
they've already created.
00:40:26
Moving on down the track, on the Outro,
there's a drum sub mix
of this drum kit
and that is how I got this stem.
00:40:41
It's all coming
from Tyler and Paul.
00:40:43
The only thing I'm doing to it is,
again, same thing I did with this that
I did with the others: Decapitator,
API compressor followed
by the three auxes,
dry, compressed and really compressed.
00:40:56
On this subgroup, that they've given me,
I'm also adding a
parallel limiter
directly to that track.
00:41:03
So there's a lot of
parallel processing going on
with this one.
00:41:22
You hear how it adds the
decay and length to the room.
00:41:26
You can kind of hear the
cymbals ringing out a little bit
so I'm assuming that's why
I put this gate on there
to chop it off before
it was all room noise
and you're just hearing
the meat of the sound.
00:41:38
Here's with nothing on this track.
00:41:57
And then it's also got this reverse.
00:42:05
Reverse drum kit going on underneath it.
So together they make this.
00:42:19
And similar thing, I'm doing parallel
limiting on this reverse track as well.
00:42:23
Probably so that you're hearing a
little bit more of the earlier quieter
reverse sound
while it's still at its softest peak,
it's coming through and you're hearing the
effect more than you would otherwise.
00:42:34
And then I'm also
widening that so that
it sits on the outside of the
stereo field of the main kit.
00:42:39
And, yeah, nothing going on there.
00:42:44
Lastly...
00:42:52
I'm guessing again this
is a chamber reverb
maybe from the studio maybe from Logic.
00:43:07
Limiting, widening
again to make it sit outside
the stereo field of the main drum
so that it's more of
the side information,
more interesting stereo field.
00:43:17
So let me see what
I'm doing with this EQ here.
00:43:20
It looks like I'm cutting
a lot of the 400 Hz area
but I'm also, I affected
the slope of the bell curve.
00:43:27
Pro-Q is really awesome
because it lets you do that,
I mean, I like to think of it
as sharp versus dull.
00:43:33
And take more down
with your cut, affecting more of the
bands next to where you're cutting.
00:43:40
Let me show you what this is doing
without that particular cut in there.
00:43:55
It's just kind of this ringing
that was happening from the chamber
that was kind of cutting,
coming through the mix
and not sounding
too pleasant to me.
00:44:03
Looks like I'm doing
that again here.
00:44:21
So those two areas I just wanted
to kind of get rid of them
because they were distracting me
from the part that was most
interesting to me in the sound.
00:44:28
And then again taking
some high-end away from it
to make it sit further back.
00:44:33
The brighter it is the closer it feels.
00:44:49
Again...
00:44:50
My favorite go-to, this TG plug-in
spreading the width a little bit
and parallel limiting happening.
00:44:59
Not really much else.
00:45:00
It looks like I put this on there
and then didn't really touch it.
00:45:04
70 Hz.
00:45:05
Hi-pass again.
00:45:14
OK. So on this track it looks
like I have an RBass,
an SSL channel,
mainly using it
for the compression
and maybe to cut back
a little bit on the top end
or the click of the
attack of the initial hit.
00:45:25
So RBass is kind of making it
sound fuller on the upper base area
so that it's not all sub.
00:45:32
SSL channel is controlling the
dynamics so that each note
feels about similar level
and it looks like I even
had to adjust the length
of some of the notes with fades so
that they matched each other.
00:45:43
And then Smack Attack again,
I'm using it to add some sustain
so that this last
little bit of the tail
is still being heard a little bit.
00:45:55
So that's with everything on.
00:46:11
And I remember this was in
more sections of the song
and ended up just cutting it out
everywhere else except for right here
because it was taking up a
little bit too much space.
00:46:20
As we work our way down
to the session
we get to the bass,
which has been a big
part of this whole album.
00:46:27
I think most of the songs were
written on bass as
the main instrument
and the main focus
and starting point.
00:46:47
So this came to me with a fair
amount of processing already on it.
00:46:51
So before I did anything.
00:47:05
You hear that there's some
side-chain stuff going on
to make it duck for the kick
but it was a little bit too extreme
and some of the notes
were kind of getting buried.
00:47:13
So let's see what I was doing
to compensate for that.
00:47:17
Focusing here mostly on the gate
and probably cutting
some of the sub rumble
in-between notes
but this high-pass.
00:47:25
Here it is with just the SSL
gating a bit and cutting off
some of the super low sub stuff.
00:47:41
And I should correct myself,
I've actually got this in
expander mode, not gate.
00:47:46
So it's not chopping it off
and going straight to nothing.
00:47:49
I'm just reducing a 20 dB
to pull back some of the
noise but leave some of it
so that it sounds like
a real instrument.
00:47:56
And then I added the Decapitator
that is on full blast.
00:48:00
It's on 'Punish', it's on 10
but then it's just mixed in 10,5%.
00:48:05
Let's see what this is adding.
00:48:25
See, you can hear that it's
adding just some upper harmonics
and kind of evening the tone out
so you're hearing
the note of each note that's
being played a little bit clearer.
00:48:36
And then some compression following
that to even things out even more.
00:48:40
And I didn’t want to
totally do away with the
side-chain thing they've
got going on already
but I did want to
even things out a bit
so that the bass was
kind of at the forefront.
00:49:14
Again it's hard to show you
because I made it get louder
so you can't really
hear just the difference
but it's just leveling
things out a bit.
00:49:21
And then,
parallel limiting to really smash it down.
00:49:26
But it's only blended in,
let's see where it's at.
00:49:29
11% of it.
00:49:46
Seems more subtle.
00:49:47
And I'm also cutting a
little bit of low-end here
which I'm not sure
what frequency that is,
it's just labeled bass.
00:49:53
But I ended up doing that
a lot with this plug-in.
00:49:56
I don't know want to know
what it is all the time.
00:49:59
And then I'm just,
another Renaissance de-esser.
00:50:03
Very heavily used plug-in for me.
00:50:05
Because it's great for,
in this case, getting rid of the click
of the attack of the bass
or the slides in-between.
00:50:28
You can especially hear it right
there on that last little bit.
00:50:46
A little bit of that
clank that was
kind of obnoxiously
sticking out of the mix.
00:50:51
So here's the drum
soloed with just the bass.
00:51:23
Drums and bass.
00:00:00
When I start a session
I set everything up in a order that I like
and I actually work my way down
visually and...
00:00:08
as the song progresses,
as things come in later,
they are further
down the session.
00:00:12
So yeah,
get the drums feeling good,
add the bass in,
start adding some of the other things
and...
00:00:19
generally I put vocals in last
on a song like this
but sometimes
you have to start with
the vocal in from the top
because it's like the focus,
the number one thing
that keeps the song rolling
but that's not that song.
00:00:33
Here's the first synth
that comes in at the
opening of the song.
00:00:49
It looks like I maybe played around
trying a different a few
different things on it.
00:00:54
Didn’t use that.
00:00:55
Didn’t use that.
00:00:57
Interesting.
00:01:08
I'm guessing that plug-in
and a lot of these others
are an afterthought.
00:01:12
I tried to do something to it
and realized it was fine as it is.
00:01:15
As you can see visually isn't
actually doing anything.
00:01:18
Sure there's a phase
shift somewhere from this but...
00:01:24
It's not really affecting anything
in the audio that's recorded there.
00:01:27
And this is probably just
making it louder.
00:01:31
I don't know what I
was thinking here.
00:02:07
So, on this synth bass
I did my usual,
anytime I insert this plug-in
the default has the
70 Hz high-pass on.
00:02:14
It's probably a bad habit
but it's just how I've done it
for years and stick with it.
00:02:20
And then I took off
some very top-end.
00:02:23
A low-pass at 16 something.
00:02:26
A little bit of compression
and gated the noise in-between
so that I could then
do the parallel limiting
so we wouldn’t bring the
noise in-between the notes.
00:02:36
As an effect I added
a 1/4 note Oneknob Pumper
just to barely
make this track kind of pulse.
00:02:45
And then, an 1/8 note delay.
00:02:47
Just kind of swirling around
behind the actual notes.
00:02:58
There you can hear that delay.
00:02:59
I also have a Send going on here
to a Microshift plug-in.
00:03:03
And then, if I bypass everything.
00:03:24
This is pretty subtle but it just adds
a little bit of a pulse,
a little bit of a
rhythmic feel to
that long drum note.
00:03:50
Not a whole lot going on up here,
just to get a tiny little bit
of parallel limiting
to smooth things out
but not really take the life
out of it by over-compressing it.
00:03:58
And then this awesome free plug-in,
it's the chorus from,
I think it's a Juno 60,
a Roland Synth
and I love this free plug-in,
it just adds a little bit of
character, a little bit of pitch mod,
Stereo width.
00:04:14
Here's without.
00:04:29
It kind of brings that track to life
and makes it nice and broad,
stereo and interesting.
00:04:44
Nothing done to that one.
00:04:46
Just a touch of reverb.
00:04:49
That is...
00:04:52
The UAD EMT 250.
00:04:55
Chances are this is the stock setting.
00:04:58
It looks like I'm taking
some highs off of it.
00:05:22
It looks like I loaded the
brainworx SSL channel
just for a change.
00:05:26
This plug-in has
an analog emulation of multiple channels
and
you hit this button and
it just randomly changes
what channel he
was on the console.
00:05:35
And it will change
stereo imaging a little bit
so I sometimes
just click through
to find one that makes it
sit a little bit better
in the left to right area,
not quite as mono
because the left side is a little bit
different from the right side.
00:05:46
It's random and you
have no control over it.
00:05:48
But sometimes it's perfect.
00:05:50
Where this sound is in the
song, it's kind of the focus.
00:05:53
There's some effects going on,
there's a piano but this was like the main.
00:05:56
It's called the pad, it's main bed
where everything is resting on.
00:06:00
So I wanted to make it a
little bit more interesting
and adding a chorus just did that,
it adds a little bit of
swirling effect,
a little bit more
motion without
jumping out at you like,
"Oh, there's a bunch of chorus!"
So here's without.
00:06:26
You can hear that there's already
something on there.
00:06:28
But this just takes it to another level.
00:06:42
And then in the song,
you can hear it without.
00:06:45
There's a lot of stuff
covering it still but...
00:07:10
It's a pretty subtle change but...
00:07:12
It feels good.
00:07:27
This one is pretty much good to go.
00:07:29
I just took some of this low-end out,
that is just rumbling underneath.
00:07:47
And it's probably one of
those things that you see
on the EQ more than you hear.
00:07:50
And sadly,
I'm affected by that.
00:07:55
Absolutely a sucker for seeing it
so now I hear it.
00:08:17
So, on this one I'm just mainly
adding a little bit of upper mid-range
to make it stick through the mix.
00:08:23
One of the things I adjusted
while it was playing with everything else.
00:08:26
And...
00:08:26
Low-pass to get some of this noise out.
00:08:29
From whatever synth that was,
let's see if it's labeled.
00:08:33
No.
00:08:34
And then I'm adding a delay with
a lot of repeat
but I'm using a hi-cut and a low-cut
to really narrow the bandwidth and
it makes it not repeat forever.
00:08:45
So, without the delay.
00:09:13
I wanted to add the delay to this
to make it come through the mix
a little bit more interesting.
00:09:19
Again, it's more about about pulling the
emotion out of the sound that it's there,
it's already a great sound and a great part
but adding this length and decay to it
adds to this
swelling in the pulse
that's coming in and out
with the sound.
00:09:34
I don't know how else to put it
other than this delay
is panning left to right
constantly.
00:09:40
It just adds another layer
of feeling to me.
00:09:42
Without it just felt like that was cool
but it wasn't all the way there yet.
00:09:52
And you can see that the mix is pretty low.
00:09:55
It's not a drastic change but
it just felt better to me.
00:10:16
I probably dragged this plug-in
over from one of the other ones
that the low-pass was there but
I saw visually that it wasn't really
affecting anything where it was left
but I wanted to get rid of this...
00:10:29
Just to get rid of some
of the mud a little bit.
00:10:32
Get rid of whatever this
is going on the 20 Hz
that just tends to come
from analog synths.
00:11:00
These horns,
that's how I had them treated.
00:11:03
I mean, the energy of it reminded me
of an old Beatles record or something
and I kind of wanted it to sound like
they were taken from
a Beatles record
but everybody knows you
can't do that anymore.
00:11:13
So...
00:11:14
I added some FX that made
it feel that way to me.
00:11:17
Here it is without...
00:11:38
And...
00:11:39
Just took
some of the low-end off.
00:11:42
This is, a limiting in parallel.
00:11:47
Adding some low EQ, some high EQ,
and then making it
a little bit wider
with the spread thing.
00:11:53
Like I said earlier,
I really like using this plug-in
for quickly making a
sound more interesting.
00:12:12
Then I added a little bit of slap,
a dotted 16th note,
to add some decay,
add a little bit of space
and sit it back in the mix.
00:12:20
I am cutting the highs
at 2.6 kHz
on the delay repeats.
00:12:33
You can kind of hear them ringing
after the fact
but they're not bright since
I took a lot of high-end off.
00:12:39
And then just some
record noise...
00:12:42
To actually make it sound like
it was playing from the record
and not a sample.
00:12:51
And this plug-in also does
something with the stereo imaging
and just alters the tone a hair.
00:12:56
I think I was using it
mostly for the noise though.
00:12:59
And because of the noise
I don't want that noise
throughout the song.
00:13:03
So I automated it to mute
anywhere that's not
supposed to be heard.
00:13:28
And after that I'm sending to
an UAD emulation of the
old Roland Dimension D.
00:13:34
It's an old favorite chorusing effect
from the good old days.
00:13:38
Usually it would sit in the rack.
00:13:41
And it just had these
buttons on it
that nobody really knows
exactly what they're doing
but it's just fun to
stick it on.
00:13:48
I usually use it on a Send
and play around
with how it's affecting the sound
that you're sending to it.
00:13:54
It sounds great on drums,
bass and in this case, horns.
00:13:57
Just to make things
sound a little bit wider.
00:14:13
I usually use this as a Send
because it doesn't
have a mix control
on the plug-in itself and if
I don't want it to be at 100%,
messing with the stereo image
and if I wanna keep the some of
the center intact I will usually
use it as a Send.
00:14:48
On this Mellotron's string sound
the focus is mainly in the mid-range
so I want to get rid of
everything on the top and the bottom
and push the mids
so that it's really cutting through
underneath everything else that's going on.
00:15:18
Which makes more sense
once it's in the track.
00:15:33
So this sound is just tucked.
00:15:35
It's panned hard right.
00:15:37
It's barely in there
but when you put all
the top end back into it
and make it less
of a mid focused
you really draws your
attention to that,
that it's panned far right.
00:15:46
With the high-end cut
it's less of a...
00:15:50
"Hey, here I am!"
And more of a...
00:15:53
just sitting in there and adding.
00:15:55
Where you can pick it out
that it's an interesting
thing happening on the right
but it's not really trying
to grab your attention.
00:16:26
That's pretty subtle.
00:16:29
Oh, main piano.
00:16:34
I remember that,
this is a unique sounding piano,
there's really no high-end info
and I tried to push a bunch
from 1 kHz and up
with this brainworx EQ.
00:16:45
Let's see.
00:17:05
And then I added a delay to it,
for the section.
00:17:58
It's another really subtle change
but with the repeats
you can feel the pulsing,
the timing of the attack
on each repeat.
00:18:06
And it kind of just gives you,
it's almost a metronome effect
where you can just keep
feeling the timing of everything else
since everything else
is dropped out.
00:18:39
This is a piano sample that
I know Tyler and Paul
both were in love with
because...
00:18:45
I think they kept asking
for me to turn it up...
00:18:47
On this mix pass.
00:18:59
I'm just trying to
thicken it a little bit
to get some of the sub
but visually it's
not even there so...
00:19:13
There's a tiny bit of
noise I caught up by doing that.
00:19:15
And then, for once,
on this sound I'm actually
using the spread to
make it less stereo.
00:19:21
I wanted to give it a little
bit of more body and sustain,
and make it come through.
00:19:26
Let me show you this piano
without the limiter on it.
00:19:40
It's such a cool sound,
I just want it to come
through the mix more
without just turning it up.
00:19:44
So, by adding this limiter
I get to bring in a little
bit of the subtleties
and then, pushing the mid-range,
which is the bulk of
where the piano is,
it's turning it up
but without turning up
the sparkle of the high-end.
00:19:57
So, I think you might be
able to tell in the mix
what I'm doing here.
00:20:19
And then also,
it was a little wide for me
and I like
really wide stereo image
but it was a little bit much
and it was disappearing in mono
so I pulled the spread down
to bring this back in the focus.
00:20:31
You can hear it on
iPhone speakers.
00:20:33
It's a cool part and I wanna make sure
everybody is gonna hear that.
00:20:37
Let's see, these are all
the special effects added.
00:20:51
So, I think all the panning
information was already there.
00:20:55
I high-passed it
so that I can then bring in this limiter
without bringing up too
much of the low-end again.
00:21:00
I made it wider
so that as it's panning,
it just felt more extreme.
00:21:07
Let's see what are
all these guys.
00:21:23
I have no idea what
that is but I love it.
00:21:25
Man!
I'm just repeating myself
but here is the TG12345 again.
00:21:31
Parallel limiting and spreading.
00:21:32
Just to make it wider
and bring up the low level
stuff that's in there
that's hiding everything else
that is going on in the song.
00:21:39
It looks like I added a de-esser.
00:21:55
Just to kind of keep the level
on some of the harshness
that's jumping through.
00:21:59
A little 'Heys' and I'm not
doing anything to those.
00:22:02
This guy.
00:22:09
It looks like I tried a few things
with this and it ended up just...
00:22:15
I'm cutting all that low-end info
that you see going on down here.
00:22:29
Very tiny bit of high-end cut.
00:22:31
Way up there at 12 kHz.
00:22:58
Nothing major going on here either.
00:23:00
Really, I'm just using
this high-pass and low-pass
to kind of confine,
make sure that
nothing sticks out
beyond this area.
00:23:06
There's barely anything
there in the sound
but anytime
something in the
high-end poked out beyond
this limit that I set
it just jumped
out too much to me
and it felt uncomfortable
so I want to make sure that
things stayed in that range
throughout the entire
performance of that sound.
00:23:21
I thinned it out a
little bit after that.
00:23:23
Pushed some of the mid-range
to make it cut through better
and here's another Send
to Studio D now?
Yeah.
00:23:31
No longer the Roland Dimension D,
it's now Studio D.
00:23:34
And I think this brings
us to the lead vocal.
00:23:38
So, here's the vocal,
just starting with
the EQ that I've added in here,
to start with.
00:23:56
So, you can see,
there's nothing major going on.
00:23:58
It's tiny little changes,
1.79 dB
of 9 kHz
and 2 dB of 228 Hz.
00:24:05
It's just enough to take
care of the tiny little bit
and it's already
a pretty good vocal sound
and it's already processed.
00:24:11
Because you can hear
that there's
some kind of
stereo something
happening in there.
00:24:25
I'm not quite sure what it is,
it's probably a Micropitch.
00:24:28
The reason I asked to have
the Logic session
in case I need to go
back to anything dry,
sometimes I'll get something
from a client,
there's a ton of reverb on a
vocal, say,
but in between the vocal lines
there's a ton of crazy noise
and it's only lip smacks and breaths
or room noise
and once that reverb is there
I can't do anything about that.
00:24:53
And,
I can't control the
dynamics quite as well
because if I bump up a word
with all that reverb on there
it's more noticeable
than just bumping up the word
and having the reverb
come from that send.
00:25:03
So that's the main reason
I ask to get the dry
and effected,
I don't wanna take away
what vibe
a client already has going
from the rough mix
or from,
even though it was part
of the creative process
which I think it
was on this record,
I just wanna be able to make it
more technically
correct and
make sure that those little
snaps and pops
coming from saliva
or a loud breath
doesn't distract you from the song.
00:25:32
And that's basically it.
00:25:34
It's a lot of work for me
that's probably never gonna
be noticed by anybody.
00:25:39
If all the mouth
noises were in there
it probably wouldn't
bother anybody but me
but I care, I wanna make it good.
00:25:49
Or the best I can.
00:25:50
I then also, I like to add a
ridiculous amount of compression
which you'll see in a second,
and if all that
stuff is in there,
it gets amplified even more
along with the reverb.
00:25:58
So, it's just nice to have the control,
mainly for delays and reverbs.
00:26:01
But, distortion and modulation stuff
leave it on, great.
00:26:05
I can chop that off
or automate that at any point.
00:26:10
That's followed by this,
Scheps EQ,
I'm not changing anything
with the EQ there.
00:26:15
Whatever this preamp section
does it does something cool.
00:26:17
And let's see if we can
hear the difference.
00:26:21
I did it for a reason,
I promise.
00:26:41
It's super subtle
but you can hear a difference
in the feel of
the overall sound,
it makes it feel a little
bit more real to me.
00:26:48
That's followed by this,
one of my old favorites
in the hardware world
and I continue to use it
in plug-in form
just because it's familiar, number 1,
it adds quite a bit of character,
it adds a lot of top end,
specially this plug-in version.
00:27:01
Nice distortion
and it really locks
the vocal in place.
00:27:05
If you hit it just right
it will make sure that vocal stays
right on top of everything.
00:27:10
Still room for automation
but it really does a good job.
00:27:31
Sadly, once again I did not match
the output to the input
like I try to do, always.
00:27:37
Specially now,
but I'm guessing I
probably imported
this settings from another song.
00:27:42
Just as a starting point
and adjusted from there
without going back.
00:27:46
But, I love 12:1
on the 1176,
specially this particular model,
the blue stripe from UA.
00:27:55
It just really helps
lock the vocal in place.
00:27:57
And it won't really touch
the softer parts
but it will really knock back
the louder sections
of the performance.
00:28:05
And all without really destroying
the sound and the feel of it.
00:28:09
It's just great
for over-compressing.
00:28:11
I like to pull this attack back because
the 1176 is gonna be
fast no matter what.
00:28:15
But, I'm actually surprised
this is as fast as it is,
but I like to pull it back so that
it puts a little bit of punch
on the attack of every note
and, depending on the song,
sometimes I like a really fast release
to really keep the energy
and excitement going.
00:28:30
Sometimes I will slow it down a
little bit like I did on this one
so that it's more of a
constant level and
less of a pumping effect.
00:28:37
I like to follow that up
by a tiny little bit,
at least it should be,
let's see what happens when I hit play,
of compression on here,
just kind of
kissing the meter.
00:28:47
Kind of old saying.
00:28:49
And this just adds a
cool tone to it as well.
00:29:08
It's just like an
added layer of polish,
maybe knocking back some of the consonants
that come through the 1176
and smoothing things a little bit more.
00:29:18
In this song,
I followed it by a J37,
adding a little
bit of slap delay.
00:29:22
I'm not really saturating it,
even though there's still a little bit of
saturation happening,
it's more for the slap delay.
00:29:29
So, you can hear it while I'm doing.
00:29:44
And you can see here that
I'm cutting the high-end
and a little bit of low-end,
actually,
quite a bit of low-end,
on the filter for the delay only.
00:29:54
So, the delay kind
of sits further back
behind the lead vocal
and it's just adding space.
00:30:00
With everything else going on
it almost feels like it's just a room sound
but it's this kind of funky sounding
slap delay that just
adds another dimension.
00:30:11
De-esser, very necessary.
00:30:13
This one can get
kind of ugly sometimes.
00:30:16
But it's my go-to
because it's very familiar
and it seems to be one of the faster.
00:30:21
Actually, it gets the 's' to me
and you can watch it.
00:30:32
Just make sure that those 'S'
don't come through super harsh
and blasting you after this
pretty large amount
of compression.
00:30:40
Last in the chain is a Waves F6
and I'm gonna guess before I play it
that I'm really only affecting the low end.
00:30:48
Adding a little bit
of body to the vocal
but it's almost like
fighting proximity effect,
if he moves closer to the microphone
and it gets bigger
it will automatically help poke down
some of that low end so that
it doesn't get too woofy.
00:31:11
And it looks like I'm doing a little
in the 2.6 kHz.
00:31:16
Probably to combat 'S' a little bit
or just a little bit of harshness,
and this is probably helping
push the sibilance back
just a hair in spots.
00:31:25
This plug-in is pretty new to me
and I think I maybe started
to use it during this project.
00:31:30
And I just found that it
kind of helps simplify life
where you can get a vocal
tone that sounds great
and even it as they move
closer or further to the microphone
or off-axis to the side.
00:31:43
You can set it
very gently to kind of
keep the tone in line
without having to automate an
EQ throughout the whole thing.
00:31:50
And it does a very good job.
00:31:52
You can see here
this is 350 Hz and below,
I'm just keeping an eye on it,
letting it kind of ride itself in a way.
00:32:00
That doesn't mean it
always takes care of it
but it's a good place to start
for keeping a thick
nice vocal sound
but not getting too
boomy on certain words
without having to really
dig in and ride the EQ like crazy.
00:32:13
And we come down here to
see where I'm sending,
I'm sending it to what
I always label 'Doubler'
but it's really a Microshift plug-in
so this is the default setting that
comes up when you open the plug-in
and it's really just
varying delay on each side
that modulates a little bit,
kind of a chorus.
00:32:33
I think it comes from a H3000
kind of micropitch preset.
00:32:38
And here you can hear it with and without.
00:32:55
It just adds a little bit of width,
a little bit of space.
00:32:58
A little bit of a smoothing over.
00:33:01
I think it may already be on
this track before I got it
but it just felt cool to
add another layer of it
and spread things out even more.
00:33:10
That's followed by the EMT 250 reverb.
00:33:27
I've got this reverb set
right now pretty long
and cutting highs as much as this allows.
00:33:33
I always turn off this noise feature,
I don't know if anybody
out there enjoys noise
turning on default on
a plug-in but I don't.
00:33:41
This is a great simple
to set and adjust reverb
that I end up using quite a bit.
00:33:51
You can hear the long
nice decay that it's got.
00:33:58
It masks the slap a little bit
and let's the slap
be less noticeable.
00:34:05
I'm also adding a quarter note delay.
00:34:14
And that's just kind of swimming
around all the words in there
I'm not doing anything
fancy with this one.
00:34:18
Sometimes I'll just side-chain it
to make it duck underneath
but it's a simple Echoboy
in Echoplex mode.
00:34:27
Often times,
on the chorus of a song,
there are spaces in-between the lines.
00:34:35
I kind of wanna fill those holes
without being too obvious.
00:34:38
It's something I just like to do,
I don't know how to
explain it other than
it fills in the gaps and completes
the performance to me.
00:34:45
I can go back and put it
on the whole song.
00:34:49
You can hear this is
going on all the vocals.
00:34:51
And I'll show you without
and it just feels like
there's an empty hole.
00:35:22
So, this is something that
feels really cool to me.
00:35:25
So, on this vocal tracks,
when I originally started the mix,
there was...
I don't remember what exactly,
something I wanted to clean up
and have them unprocessed
so I could do my
own things to them.
00:35:36
And I went to Logic and I noticed
that they had this reverb
after some other
processing on the vocal
and then following the reverb
was a Microshift and
a Little Alter Boy.
00:35:48
I wanted to keep that going
without having to use their work-flow,
I like to have this
kind of effect on a Send.
00:35:54
Mainly because I can run
several tracks to the same thing
and not have to have multiple
instances of the plug-in.
00:36:00
Let me open the Logic session
and show you
what I'm talking about
and where it originally started.
00:36:05
So, like I said,
in the beginning of the mixes
of these songs
I would get the stems
which was a lot of all the parts
that Paul exported from this session
but he also gave the session
in case I wanted to dig
through to get anything
unaffected
or completely dry,
or partially effected.
00:36:22
So, on this song I really
wanted to go for the vocals
to clean things up a bit.
00:36:26
But not loose the effects
that they originally had.
00:36:30
You can take a look here at the session,
this is how it came to me,
and for me I don't use
Logic frequently at all.
00:36:38
So it's all very foreign to me
but you can see everything
going on in here.
00:36:43
And it seems pretty
well laid out and almost
in the order that I would
normally do in Pro Tools
but there's a lot going on here.
00:36:50
You can see all the
individual drum tracks
where he exported sub-mixes
that I ended up using
instead of going back to check
for each individual track
because the vibe they already
had going was already great.
00:37:02
There was no real
reason to do that.
00:37:04
But one of the things that
specifically stood out
was the vocal track where I wanted to
clean things up a bit
and keep that same effects going.
00:37:11
OK, so I showed you that Aux in Pro Tools
where I had the Little Alter Boy
formant shift and Microshift
after the reverb as kind of an effect.
00:37:22
So, I'll show you where
that idea came from,
it came from Paul's original Logic session
and I can show you why I
ended up doing that,
why I felt like it was worth
keeping that in the mix.
00:37:33
Here's one of the vocal tracks initially,
inside of Logic,
and you can see that he's
got another compressor,
there's a little bit of delay,
it comes in and out maybe in some spots.
00:37:42
But, here's the reverb,
so I ended up saving the setting
and then opening in Logic and
then copying the settings
from this Microshift
and this Little Alter Boy
to put after the reverb so I can do
everything I wanna to the Lead Vocal
and all other the background vocals
that had this treatment
and keep this effect intact.
00:38:01
That's just an example
of one of the elements that I went
back to the Logic for.
00:38:05
Now let's go back and
look at it in Pro Tools.
00:38:08
Let me turn off all the other time
effects so that you can hear it.
00:38:14
This is a ValhallaVintageVerb
in 80s mode
and after it I have another Microshift
just barely blended it
and then after that,
there's a Little Alter Boy
just pushing the formant
down a little bit,
a little bit of distortion,
a little bit of blend.
00:38:35
If I bypass this...
00:38:42
Actually let me do one more.
00:38:47
So you can only
hear the wet signal.
00:39:02
It seems so much
more subtle now.
00:39:15
You can slightly
hear there's a lower,
a slightly deeper voiced Tyler.
00:39:20
Blended in, off in the distance.
00:39:51
So I wanted to make
sure that I retained that
from their original idea
and thought process.
00:40:05
So the background
vocals I kind of just
make them a little a little bit darker,
a little bit bigger,
not quite as compressed so
that there's more room to move.
00:40:12
If they were all coming
at you super intense
it would be a bit much.
00:40:16
That feels a little bit more relaxed
when the backgrounds can be
in the background.
00:40:21
So I'm taking some top
end off with it here.
00:40:24
Probably I just
copied and pasted.
00:40:26
Yeah, it looks like I've copied
that over from the lead vocal.
00:40:31
Just the dbx compressor
to just barely ride the
things a little bit.
00:40:36
I still have to de-ess
and...
00:40:39
Wow, I took more top end
off with this guy.
00:40:56
But this sounds like it's
a group of vocals, maybe,
or just a doubler...
Yeah, chorused doubles.
00:41:02
And it looks like I chose the stem
that they send with no reverb.
00:41:05
I probably copied and pasted,
or drag over,
I wish I could copy and paste.
00:41:11
Then we get to the next lead vocal section.
00:41:37
The lead vocal on
this section I wanted
to kind of compress it even harder
so I'm using the
'all-button' mode.
00:41:43
Which funny enough,
this setting right here matches
my real blue stripe at 12:1.
00:41:50
I don't understand it
but this is how
I came really close to matching
my hardware unit,
by using the 'all-button' mode.
00:41:57
Copied the EQ, copied that.
00:41:59
J37 again for a
little bit of the slap
and then again this guy
probably copied over
to just help smooth the low end.
00:42:08
De-esser. This delay...
00:42:11
It sounds like, maybe I'm not,
but it sounds like maybe I'm automating
it a little bit to come in and out.
00:42:43
Yeah, I just wanted to add
another dimension of space
behind the vocal.
00:42:48
I mean,
I can't add an instrument,
that's not my hole here,
I'm mixing, so I'm adding an effect
to kind of
fill in the gaps again,
like I did in the chorus.
00:42:57
It's just a cool sound effect
like a headphone
ear-candy kind of thing.
00:43:01
I'm automating the repeats
and then I'm also
automating the pan
so that's panning side to side
and I think that I just randomly
probably assigned it to a fader
on my controller and ride it
as the song was going down
and then maybe go back and
added a few spots here and there
but just do a kind of a
performance of that delay.
00:43:23
So after that delay on the vocal
I have Decapitator distorting it even more.
00:43:40
And it's just kind of a
lo-fi effect blended in.
00:43:43
Within the Decapitator I'm
cutting highs and lows,
pushing it quite a bit
but then blending it in...
00:43:48
Wow, right at 50%.
00:43:51
And it's just adding
a layer of fuzz around the vocal
but it's not consuming it
because it's blended in.
00:44:04
You can hear it really
break up right there.
00:44:05
Part of that is the delay
and part of that is the Decapitator.
00:44:12
And then, after that, spring reverb.
00:44:28
The spring reverb on here
is mono, right in the middle,
stock Avid awesome
Air spring reverb that
I use quite a bit.
00:44:37
I've got all the stuff floating
around the vocal now
and I want it some more in the
center, some more space
and information
happening in the center
that just sits behind the vocal,
it's pretty subtle, it's mixed in at 18%
but it just adds another bit of space
and make this pretty emotional
moment sit better to me.
00:45:11
This is also going to all of those same,
actually even more.
00:45:15
Wow, I put a lot of stuff on this one.
00:45:18
This is being sent to that same
Microshift, then 250
and another ValhallaVintageVerb.
00:45:25
Let's see...
00:45:25
It's probably pretty
much the default setting.
00:45:28
I just shortened the decay a little bit
and that's just a great reverb
for a darker bigger space.
00:45:35
The quarter note delay is still there.
00:45:37
A spring reverb
another stereo spring.
00:45:40
Wow!
This is a...
00:45:49
Orban Spring reverb unit.
00:45:51
And I use it all the time,
it's one of my favorite reverbs.
00:45:55
And after this track
there's an effects track
that I'm guessing
Paul and Tyler did.
00:46:04
It already has all that decay.
00:46:11
And all I'm doing
to that is the usual
widening a little bit
and blending in a
little bit of limiting
so that I don't really
have to crush the track.
00:46:35
That's pretty much already processed,
just copied over some of the EQ and
the dynamics stuff, de-esser.
00:46:58
That's already processed.
00:47:16
Again, that's all
tasty stuff from Tyler and Paul.
00:47:26
So then we get to this
section and the vocal sound
is totally different,
this is like the breakdown rap section.
00:47:32
I wanted the vocal to be super
upfront, super clear
and commanding over top
what's going on there.
00:47:43
It's a little brighter, a little bit
clearer than the rest of the song,
I'm cutting as much high-end in this EQ
and cutting a little bit of the mid
so that it sparkles a little bit more.
00:47:51
And then I'm actually
even adding a little bit of high-end,
for that section.
00:47:55
Back to 'all-buttons' mode
so that it really gets pushed.
00:47:59
You can hear...
00:48:09
You can see it started out pretty dynamic
where the first line is pretty loud,
the second one, pretty soft,
and then it gets loud again.
00:48:16
This just slams it all down,
keeps the level,
adds a cool tone,
adds a little bit of a sheen,
a little bit of distortion.
00:48:22
Followed again by this
just to polish it over a little bit.
00:48:34
This meter is so hard to read
but it should be like
no more than 3 or 4 dB
of gain reduction coming from that.
00:48:56
This part was a little bit thinner so
I pushed up the low
frequency a bit more here
but I'm aggressive with
it knocking it down
so that it would stay more
consistent but be thicker.
00:49:06
I'm on 300 Hz,
I've got the gain boosting 1.5 dB
but it knocks back at
7.5 dB if necessary.
00:49:14
Then I even automated it.
00:49:16
Instead of automating an EQ overall this
I automated the threshold
of this so that it does less work
at this section of the song.
00:49:31
So you can hear the effect of that,
it's mainly to keep the tone consistent.
00:49:57
Again, it's subtle stuff
but I feel like hear a major
improvement in the tone for that.
00:50:03
And really,
I'm just doing it for myself.
00:50:06
What else am I doing here?
There's one word, I think,
where I added some delay.
00:50:24
It just felt like a
cool place to add that,
make that word hop
a little bit more,
see what this is...
00:50:41
It's really just a shorter decay,
cleaner and clearer sounding reverb.
00:50:46
Like a room sound kind of thing.
00:50:48
For the Rap section I didn't want
some long lingering reverb
stepping on the next word
but this just adds a little
bit of space around it
and kind of makes you feel
like you're in the room with them.
00:51:22
It's funny how subtle
some of this stuff sounds
once you hear in the mix with
everything else that's going on.
00:51:28
More background vocals.
00:51:36
These backgrounds are really
heavily effected,
I'm guessing with Little Alter Boy
just bringing the formant down.
00:51:43
And then this one is
bringing the pitch and the formant down
I'm guessing.
00:51:58
A little bit more going on that one,
I'm not really exactly
sure what they're doing,
maybe it's just blended in,
a formant shift, but not a 100% mix.
00:52:12
That's just some
accent 'ad lib' tracks.
00:52:29
Here's the lead
section for this outro,
again I probably copied
this settings over
from the very first
lead vocal track.
00:52:36
This is sending to that Orban
spring reverb sample that I made
and Valhalla Shimmer,
with a really long...
00:52:47
Decay.
00:52:49
And it's modulated.
00:52:54
You can hear the pitch
going up and down
through the reverb if
I quickly start and stop it.
00:53:04
This plug-in is so great.
00:53:06
I always love to put it
in big stereo and dark,
and it's just a big wide
long smooth reverb.
00:53:30
And that's the reverb
that they originally sent.
00:53:32
This is like a separate wet only track
but I embellished it a little bit,
added some to the dry tracks too.
00:53:58
I'm not quite sure what's
going on this track,
it seems like they've got
a couple different vocal tracks happening.
00:54:04
And some pitch effects happening
all...
00:54:08
hidden behind there.
So I just put a touch of compression
probably in the mix, pushed
a little bit of mid-range
to make it come through
a little bit better,
A little bit of de-essing,
a little bit of reverb
and a half note delay,
let's see what's that doing.
00:54:23
I think that's probably just
to add some space.
00:54:42
You can hear that delay sneak through
every once in a while
in-between the words and it's just
a cool little repeat that's happening.
00:54:48
Also, it looks like I
had to go and de-click
this in certain spots.
00:54:53
Whatever was happening with
the group vocal thing.
00:54:56
Probably just some mouth noises,
I would generally highlight the
section that's got a problem
and open up
RX De-click.
00:55:06
I normally start around here
in the sensitivity
but sometimes I'll push it up
and often times I have to play
with the algorithm
to figure out how to get rid of the
exact click you want to get rid of.
00:55:18
But this is really good for
getting rid of mouth noises
or all kinds of different things
that can happen within a vocal.
00:55:25
And that's pretty much all the tracks.
00:00:00
OK, so at the end of all of this I have
some processing on the mixbus.
00:00:03
The Waves NLS Buss plug-in is my first
plug-in on the master chain generally.
00:00:09
Sometimes I'll go without it.
I always compare, A-B,
whether it's helping or hurting.
00:00:14
But I also like it because
it helps me monitor the
headroom of my master.
00:00:18
You've got all these tracks coming
and some of them are random levels,
some of them, like clearly on this
song, I'm pushing things
beyond zero I tend to try not
to do that but it happens.
00:00:29
Doesn't matter, it's Pro Tools.
00:00:30
I can just bring down this master fader
and it will affect the level that's getting
into this chain of plug-ins
and it's basically the same as going back
and turning down all
these other faders.
00:00:42
So that's why my master
ends up at -6.5.
00:00:45
Some people say that's not cool.
I don't care.
00:00:49
It works for me.
00:00:50
I've never had an issue
with it and
I've tested where you know, you push
all the faders up, pull them all down,
print something,
then pull them all down first,
master up, it will phase cancel 100%.
00:01:00
Nothing's changing.
00:01:02
I use this to keep the headroom into
this plug-in so that I'm kind of peaking,
sometimes it'll push to -2,
usually shooting for -3,
And I like to put the drive up just a hair.
00:01:14
It can get in trouble if you
put a lot of
low frequency like 808 subs going on
and vocals at the same time.
00:01:21
This plug-in can make the vocal sound
like they're crackling and not cool
but on a song like this it adds a cool
punch and a cool dimension to the sound,
I guess it's emulating what
hardware does
it doesn't sound the same to me
but it does something cool.
00:01:36
I follow this with
a very simple plug-in
just doing some high-pass
and some low-pass.
00:01:44
Really high and really low
and it's kind of like a safety net
to prevent anything crazy getting
through that you can't hear per se
and nothing that we use will reproduce
but it's just a habit that I've got.
00:01:56
And something about this plug-in,
and I take it in and out,
it adds a little bit of
sheen and polish that,
even with just these
tiny little settings,
seem to help the whole mix.
00:02:06
On this project,
mostly, I used this
emulating an EQ that I always
used to love and use.
00:02:12
Pretty subtle changes to the mixbus,
it's like 1 dB or less
and I'm boosting everywhere across
the board and turning the gain down.
00:02:20
So probably not doing anything.
00:02:22
But I made these choices as I was going
because it felt better to me.
00:02:28
Then the classic SSL mixbus compressor.
00:02:31
I barely have it doing anything.
00:02:33
Maybe 1 dB or 2 at most and slow
attack, auto release generally,
in a song like this with the big moments
and quiet moments it's just knocking down
a few dB here and there in the
bigger sections of the song
and then when it cuts
to the quieter section of the song
it doesn't release
really quickly
so that you hear
a jump in level.
00:02:53
It's really just
kind of a habit.
00:02:56
It has a cool tone though
and I keep it on there.
00:03:00
Another bad habit.
00:03:04
I wish I could stop using this
on the mixbus but I can't.
00:03:07
It's an old old old plug-in.
00:03:09
It makes things insanely bright
and boosts the low-end
so that's probably why as you
as I'm going through the mix
you see where I'm cutting
a bunch of top end on things
and sub.
00:03:22
Where if you look a lot of other mixers
they're boosting
that information.
00:03:27
This kind of takes care
of it for me from the start.
00:03:30
So I'm not doing
it on every track.
00:03:32
I'm kind of counteracting
this when necessary.
00:03:35
It makes me work backwards and I wish
I could stop but it adds this nice
glue to everything
and just makes things sit together
really nicely in nice top end.
00:03:44
I'm using the dual mono mode
so that it's enhancing the
stereo image a little bit.
00:03:49
It's just become one of
my secret sauce plugins.
00:03:53
I also watch the meter
on this and pull back the drive
so that I make sure
not to go over zero
because it can get
nasty and ruin the mix.
00:04:01
It's all about a subtle change.
00:04:04
This one also on the
mixbus I really like it.
00:04:07
Generally I use the default setting as
it comes up and then I turn the noise off.
00:04:11
It does something,
again a little bit of brightness boost,
a little bit of sub boost.
00:04:17
This crosstalk feature of it
does something cool to the stereo image.
00:04:22
So nine times out of ten I like what
it does to the mix.
00:04:26
Lastly this has been my go-to
make it crazy loud limiter
to send a reference
to the clients
so that it sounds as loud as
the rough mix, number one.
00:04:38
Because every time I get a rough
mix these days it is smashed
and if I send it back and it's not
as loud as the rough mix
then my mix doesn't sound better
to most people.
00:04:51
I'm trying to combat that
and change things a little bit
but for the most part
this is what's going to be on the
reference mix that goes out to clients.
00:05:00
When I send this to mastering
I back off of this a lot and
I actually leave this off a lot during
the mix process too
because if I kept it on
and then take it off when
it goes to mastering
it's going to sound
like a different mix.
00:05:11
So I make sure to work on my mix with
the limiter off quite a bit and then
just put it on towards the end.
00:05:16
The mistake I make a lot is after
I've sent out my first mix pass
and I'm just making
adjustments for the client
I tend to leave this on and make
adjustments into it.
00:05:27
And if one of their concerns
is to turn something up
sometimes this is fighting it and
I don't change it because it's easier
to just turn up that
one thing and then
let the mastering
guy deal with it.
00:05:38
But usually it's not
an issue and
I back this off like 3 dB and back off the
output and that's what goes to mastering
and that puts my level
RMS usually around -12
-10, still on the hot side
but not super smashed.
00:05:57
This is a brand new thing to me.
Actually I did not have this
when I did this mix
but it's an outboard meter so
I can just see it at all times
and keep an eye on that level.
00:06:07
So I normally start with
a lot of this stuff on
as I start the mix.
00:06:11
That doesn't mean that
they're doing so much though.
00:06:13
Like this I will have set to not
be doing anything,
I have it ready to go so that I can
start compressing a hair when I'm ready.
00:06:21
I make sure to be very conservative
about the level going into it.
00:06:24
The limiter is absolutely off.
00:06:26
The EQ is generally off
in the beginning because
if I'm already getting a
high-end boost from this one
and then I'm adding
more from this
or whatever EQ I have on
the master at the time
I'm going to start
cutting 16 kHz everywhere
if I'm giving it too much
here and too much here.
00:06:44
So this is usually off and this is added
like I make these changes to taste.
00:06:48
I'll have it on but I'll have
the gain at zero to start out.
00:06:51
It's not the last thing I do
but it's definitely not
the first thing I do.
00:06:55
I will put this on though
from the beginning,
unless it just sounds ridiculous,
if I get a track that's already
everything is kind of pushing
in the high end.
00:07:04
There's no point
in having this on because
this is going to fight me the whole time.
00:07:09
So yeah let me go through and I'll show
you what each of these is doing to the mix.
00:07:13
Sometimes it can be pretty drastic.
00:07:16
Let me go to one of
the bigger sections of the song.
00:07:19
I'll go to the first chorus.
00:07:21
I'll turn all these off,
start with just nothing.
00:07:48
This one...
00:07:50
you barely going to
hear a difference.
00:07:51
I mean both of these
are so subtle that
you've got to listen, A-B
to really hear the difference
but it's enough of a difference
that I keep using it.
00:08:00
Here's this one off.
00:08:25
I don't know why I hear a
difference when I'm just cutting
70 kHz.
00:08:30
Next in the chain is this EQ
and it's an UAD plug-in. So if I bypass up
here you'll hear the glitch as it's playing.
00:08:38
So I'm gonna bypass it here.
00:08:40
Here it is without.
00:09:08
Here's the UAD SSL
bus compressor.
00:09:11
My current go to.
00:09:12
This version finally replaced
my hardware version
that I used for years
that none of the other
plug-ins quite got right.
00:09:19
This one seems to get it right.
It's nice on the low end.
00:09:22
I'm very gentle with it as
you'll see but here it is without.
00:10:00
On this one it should be more noticeable,
the top end you'll feel it
really open up.
00:10:03
You'll hear the sub open up a bit more
It's all my secrets.
00:10:47
Here's the last stage of tape saturation
that I always put on
and sometimes I'm kind of bad about
checking this meter but usually I try to be
pretty cautious
with this one too.
00:11:33
So all these super
subtle changes
add up to the sum of
the final product.
I mean it's all these tiny little things
that I've learned over the years
that this gives me 2 percent of this
and this gives me 2 percent of that
and then this is
5 percent of that
and that's a big part of
figuring out how to
do this all in-the-box.
00:11:56
And it's a lot more work to get
things to sound right like this
but it's awesome that I
can open this up six months later
and show you exactly how I did it.
00:12:05
Now that you've heard
the mix with and without
anything on the master,
the last stage is the limiter.
00:12:10
And like I said this has
been my favorite lately.
00:12:12
I'll show it to you how
I deliver it to the client
and then how I deliver
to mastering
which is basically just
backing off of this
blindly but generally works,
this limiter definitely has a sound but
it doesn't change the balance really
so it works well doing this
with this particular limiter.
00:12:30
Here it is with the
limiter how I'd set
to go out for approval.
00:13:03
And then here it is with the limiter
set for how it goes to mastering.
00:13:06
It just pulled back a few dB
so that it's not hitting
quite as hard,
giving the mastering
engineer more room to work
and
any tonal changes that come
from this limiter
are usually remained
pretty much intact.
00:13:47
It's only about a 3, sometimes 4 dB
difference depending on
how hard I had to make
the reference mix.
00:13:53
If I get a reference mix
or a rough mix come in
and it's like cruising
at minus 3 RMS
the mix I'm gonna deliver
is gonna be pretty close
to that and I'd never want
anything that hot
to go to mastering.
00:14:09
Unless it's a truly creative decision
to really crush it that much
then we can just back down
the entire level
but I really want to try to not
like really destroy the music.
00:14:21
As you can see even the
limited version on this song
is not crazy slammed.
00:14:25
I think mastering ended up
bumping it up quite a bit.
00:14:27
I think this was around -8
with the original,
like the main reference limiter on it
and now it's sitting around -12 for
what level it is that goes to mastering.
00:14:39
I'm even making an
effort now to go even lower
and try shooting for -14.
00:14:44
Even on the reference
that is sent out
because everything
is being normalized on Spotify
or on iTunes
and the loudest mix is
actually sounding smaller
so I want mine to sound bigger.
00:14:59
So after all this is said and done we
ended up with nine versions of the song.
00:15:03
You can see it at the top of the
screen it's mix 9, a number each pass
so that I know how to get back
to whatever version the
client is listening to.
00:15:11
Otherwise I would be lost if they ever
need to go backwards.
00:15:14
So this was version 9. Some of it's level
some of it is tone some of it is edits
some of it is putting different parts in
or taking different parts out.
00:15:23
It's a major process these days
because it's possible to
recall so much
just why not make
another change?
And it's fine for me,
it's it's very quick and easy
and this is a piece of history
going down
like it's not going to,
well I can't say that.
00:15:41
Maybe this album version 2
will be released one day.
00:15:44
The way the way the
future is headed
we'll be able to update
our mixes forever.
00:15:49
But you know, I want the artists and
the record company and everybody involved
to be as happy as possible
so if someone has one
tiny little change
that they want me to make I'm gonna make
it because it's the last chance to make it.
00:16:02
So it looks like this song is going to be
released as a single on the radio,
hopefully it's already happened,
now that you're watching this.
00:16:10
I had a great time going through
and revisiting what I did.
00:16:13
I wonder if I'd make the same
decisions today if I were to remix it.
00:16:17
There are some parts that I'm like:
"Oh, wow, that's weird that I did that."
I wonder why did that.
There are other parts like:
"Huh. That's cool that I thought of that."
Thank you so much for watching. I really
hope you got something out of this
and it's time for a beer.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
- Air Spring Reverb
- Altiverb 7
- bx_console SSL 4000 E
- DMG Audio
- EQuilibrium
- Eventide Omnipressor
- FabFilter Pro Q2
- FabFilter Pro-R
- Izotope RX 6 De-click
- McDsp 6050 Ultimate CS
- NUGEN Stereoizer 3
- Oxford Inflator
- Reel Tape Saturation
- Soundtoys Decapitator
- Soundtoys EchoBoy
- Soundtoys Little AlterBoy
- Soundtoys MicroShift
- Soundtoys PrimalTap
- TAL-Chorus-LX
- TC Electronic Clarity M
- UAD Ampex ATR-102
- UAD API 2500
- UAD Chandler Curve Bender
- UAD Dangerous BAX EQ
- UAD EMT 250
- UAD EP-34 Tape Echo
- UAD SSL G Bus Compressor
- UAD Studio D Chorus
- UAD UA 1176 Rev A
- Valhalla Shimmer
- Valhalla Vintage Verb
- Waves Abbey Road Vinyl
- Waves API 2500
- Waves CLA-76
- Waves dbx-160
- Waves F6-RTA
- Waves J37
- Waves NLS Buss
- Waves OneKnob Pumper
- Waves RBass
- Waves Renaissance DeEsser
- Waves Scheps 73
- Waves Smack Attack
- Waves SSL Channel
- Waves TG12345
- Weiss DS1-MK3
Adam Hawkins is a Grammy Award Winning Engineer based in Los Angeles, California.
Originally from New Jersey, he began playing guitar in bands and creating records at the age of 14. Adam got his start in the NYC recording scene, working out of Unique Recording Studios with artists like Big Pun, Rakim, KRS One, Kurtis Blow and more.
After moving to Los Angeles in 2001, he met Mike Elizondo and has worked closely with him as a tracking and mixing engineer ever since.
Adam has worked with artists such as Twenty One Pilots, Muse, Switchfoot, The Regrettes, K Flay, Robert Delong, Walk the Moon, Avenged Sevenfold, Gary Clark Jr., Regina Spektor, Tegan & Sara, Kimbra, L.P., JoJo, Mastodon, Michelle Branch,Keith Urban, Rilo Kiley, Alanis Morissette, Moby, Eminem, Maroon 5, Fionna Apple, 50 Cent, Rod Stewart, P!nk, Nelly Furtado, DMX, Eve, Jason Mraz and up and coming artists such as Half Alive, Call Me Karizma, The Score, and Winnetka Bowling League.
Adam spends most of his time mixing these days from his studio Acacia Sound in Thousand Oaks, California.
twenty one pilots
Muse
Switchfoot
The Regrettes
K Flay
Robert Delong
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