Ryan Hewitt Mixing Blink 182
02h 59min
(80)
Learn how Grammy winner Ryan Hewitt mixes the pop-punk superstars Blink 182
Building on the foundation and starting point from Ryan's Mixing Template Tutorial, in this tutorial Ryan walks you through his mixing process step by step revealing his techniques and workflow for creating a killer mix.
Ryan teaches his methods and thought process that goes into crafting punchy, clear and thick mixes that stays true to the band’s signature sonic attitude.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn dozens of tips and tricks on:
- Tracking songs with the end result in mind and working with the loudest drummer in the world
- Bringing the details forward and creating louder and more exciting mixes
- Combining analog and digital processing with hardware inserts and analog summing
- Using stereo and group bus processing to make processing each individual track easier
- Trying out creative ideas and making decisions that drive mixes towards the finish line
- Creating space and size around vocals that make them sound larger than life
- Automating a mix to create moments and energy that is essential for a final mix
- Printing mixes for clients and for mastering within the same session
Get inspired by seeing how a multi-platinum mixing engineer transforms raw tracks into a finished mix.
Learn from Ryan’s attention to detail and focus on the sonic vision for the song and apply his tricks and tips to your mixes.
Once logged in, you will be able to click on those chapter titles and jump around in the video.
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:33 - The Recording
- 01:53 - The Rough Mix
- 04:00 - Session Setup
- 05:37 - The Template
- 07:02 - Kick
- 12:22 - The Snare
- 23:03 - Overheads
- 27:05 - The Ride Mic
- 28:46 - The Room Mic
- 34:10 - Drum Squash
- 36:32 - Toms
- 43:55 - Hi-Hat
- 48:53 - Kick and Snare Samples
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Drum Crush
- 02:02 - Drum Bus Limiter
- 02:37 - Drum Distortion Bus
- 06:21 - Bass
- 11:38 - Guitars
- 17:20 - More From The Bass
- 24:41 - Hardware Inserts
- 31:53 - Stereo Bus
- 34:12 - The Verse Guitars
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Vocals
- 28:56 - Synths
- 30:51 - Percussion
- 36:14 - Sound FX
- 39:54 - The Organ
- 42:24 - Background Vocals
- 00:00 - Start
- 00:0 - Automation Setup
- 02:41 - Automation
- 17:57 - Automation Summary
- 22:33 - Print The Mix
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |
00:00:07
Hey, I'm Ryan Hewitt and we're here at
my studio in Nashville, Tennessee,
House of Blues,
and we're about to open a session
I haven't seen since 2003, it's
a song by Blink 182 that I've
recorded with them
called: 'Obvious',
originally mixed by
Tom Lord Alge.
00:00:22
I have the rough mix that I did
at the end of the..
00:00:25
..at the very end of making that record
just before it went off
to Tom Lord Alge, so
it will be kinda cool to hear that
and then see where we can go
with this track.
00:00:33
It was all recorded on tape,
we had a Studer 827 and an API console
in a house in San Diego
for a few months and we did all the
basic tracks there.
00:00:44
We dumped things into Pro Tools
to do vocals
and, you know.. so it's easy,
but everything else was played
on tape:
drums, bass, guitars were all on tape.
Everything was played
as you hear it, punching..
00:00:58
..and doing things the old-fashioned
way.
00:01:00
It's the way Jerry Finn,
the producer who did that record
wanted everything as the way he did
almost all of his record.
00:01:07
It's the anti-organic
thing, really..
00:01:11
..hyper-realistic, where we got perfect
drum takes, we wanted everything
to be great,
Travis would go out there and memorize
the arrangement of the song, play it to
a click track,
we'd cut the best pieces of his
performances together,
sometimes changing drums from
section to section
and other times changing microphone
levels,
turning things on and off so that when
we cut the tape together
the arrangement that we wanted
just happened spontaneously. So you'll
notice some things in this song that
sort of follow that rule.
00:01:43
And I'll point them out as we go along.
But,
really fun record to make!
The guys were wonderful,
completely responsible for my sense of
humor, these days,
I'm really looking forward to open this
thing up and play around with it a bit.
00:01:54
So to get started, why don't we listen
to that rough mix that I did
and
just get a feel for where the song
was at
when we finished tracking it
and sent it out to be mixed, and
we'll just sort of pick it up at that
point!
It's been a long time since this was
recorded
and it will be really fun to dig back
into this stuff
and see what we were doing at
that point.
00:02:51
Wow, that's certainly a trip down
memory lane..
00:02:53
..kinda cool!
You hear a bunch of things going on,
you can hear that..
00:02:56
..that room mic opening up
on the choruses, so you can see
how it's cut out,
it's not even recorded
in the verse sections and then it
pops on in the chorus, so that's
something we did
on the tape, I'll show you a couple
things with that, later.
00:03:09
We recorded this in a house,
not a real studio, so the room sounds
are really cool and
different from
a studio-sounding record
but we had all the accoutrement
of like
a real deal place: we had the API
console,
we had all of Jerry's gear,
we had my small, fledgling
pile of gear that I had bought,
you know,
all those years ago,
I think it was in a rack
this tall
as opposed to all the stuff
that I've got now.
00:03:34
But a lot of the things I do
have now are
influenced by..
00:03:37
..by Jerry Finn and
in fact those Pultecs I have
are the serial numbers right
after the one he had, and
that was much to his chagrin and
I bought those during the Blink record
and he only had one,
I offered to give him one of them
before I
paid for them.. he said: "no: I only buy
things in stereo pairs"; they show up:
it's the two serial numbers after his.
00:03:55
And he was freaking out, he got so
upset that he couldn't have them.
00:03:58
[laughs] so that was.. that was kinda
fun!
So all the drums are here,
lots of different preamps and
compressors to tape,
lots of things affected the tape:
the way we did the toms
was really cool.. he had this method
of sending the dry signal
off to a BBE
processor and we blended that
back in
all to tape. So the toms,
when I'll play them for you in a
little bit, will sound
already pretty huge,
the delays on the vocals,
were already committed,
I'm sure you heard those
in the chorus. I don't remember how
he did those
but..
00:04:30
..I definitely heard some filtering
going on
on those effects that were already
printed, so
at least we've got that going,
for us.
00:04:38
And then, some harmony vocals, some
keyboard parts,
so, fairly simple song,
so typically when I get
tracks to mix from somebody
I'll have a listen to the rough mix,
I insist
on them sending a rough mix
and that is because I can get a
pretty solid idea of what
they were thinking about
just before they sent a song, to me.
00:04:57
Hopefully they have some resemblance of
talent in the mix department so they can
put together a..
00:05:01
..a decent, listenable rough mix that
conveys their intention
with the tune.
00:05:06
If not, I have to sort of interpret
what they send me in an email, typically
or we talk about on the phone
and I need to take
what they've done with their rough
mix,
what they say they wanna have
in the mix
and what I like out of a mix
and
put all those three things together
into one sort of cohesive idea
and give them something
that's gonna be great.
00:05:27
I don't think about
what is gonna sound like on the
radio
or anything like that,
I just think:
'what does this song need to do?'
'where does this need to go?'
'where do I need to take it?'
If you've watched my template video
where I discuss
where everything is set up in my
sessions,
what all my aux sends do, what all
my colors represent
you'll have no problem understanding
where everything's going in the session
and what I am about to do.
00:05:51
So, I rely a lot on
augmenting my drums with
samples,
even though I recorded these and
I like these sounds,
they were really great at the time,
I feel like I'm probably going to need
some samples, so I have
sample triggers set up
and then tracks to print those samples
to,
'cause I don't like running them live.
00:06:08
And also if someone else ends up
with the session, I want my
samples printed
and my belief is that samples have
to be
absolutely phase-accurate, every hit
has to be perfect
and my assistant hates that, because
he's gotta go and chop it up
and make sure every single hit
is the same.
00:06:25
You know: is time-aligned, phase-aligned
with
the original sound.
00:06:30
So the edges all line up and
particularly with the kick drum
if those edges aren't lined up
then the bottom end will change
from hit to hit and I can't have that.
00:06:39
I want my bottom end consistent,
it's very important to me.
00:06:41
And..
00:06:43
..often times a lot of sessions will
come with samples that the band has
placed in there
and I go through and it's like:
did you not hear that these are out of
phase.. A).
00:06:50
Or B)
they're not time-aligned so
they're flamming
all over the place.
Or they're
sort of close but the bottom end
changes from one hit to the next.
00:06:59
And it's like: these are the details
that make
I think.. a great mix.
00:07:03
What I'll do now is just pull the faders
down and we'll go into detailed work
on all of our tracks and build a
good-sounding mix.
00:08:09
With this sort of music I generally
go for SSL EQs,
'cause that's sort of the sound of
punk-pop music
if it doesn't work then I find something
else
but this is sort of my go-to
channel strip for drums on these
kind of tracks.
00:08:22
A little bit of 75 or so on the kick
drum, to give it a little more thump,
Travis was using this extraordinarily
long,
plastic bass drum, his whole kit was that
sort of
translucent plexi glass
drum kit. So there's not a whole lot
of low end in there, so we have to
compensate for that.
00:08:38
There's only so much I think we can do
with EQ, on that,
so we'll probably bring our parallel
guy into that, which is
another compressor with a Transient
Designer and an Aphex 204
subharmonic synthesizer.
00:08:50
Let's scope that out and see what
we can find there.
00:08:54
So I can lift this kick crush
fader
and if I go on to this aux send, here,
I can turn that up. So let's solo this
and see what we get when we push
into this.
00:09:06
Just as a side note: I rarely touch
any of my parallel compressors:
they stay set at the same thing
and I can
vary what they're doing just by how
much signal I push into them, so
this will hit the dbx 160 compressor,
the Transient Designer,
which I will change,
and the Aphex 204 which, of course,
always changes depending on what
the fundamental frequency of the
bass drum is.
00:10:11
So that's just the parallel kick bus.
00:10:14
Again, dbx 160X,
the Transient Designer and
the Aphex 204, so..
00:10:19
..adding some sub to it, a little
bit of snap, some
length with the Transient Designer
and even a little more smack with that,
as well.
00:10:27
Here's the two of them put together.
Let's see what..
00:10:29
..what we need to balance with those.
00:10:56
Now I'll try putting a gate in
just to get a little more
isolation from that kick drum.
00:11:00
There's a bit of bleed,
when we tracked this I summed
the inside and outside kick mics.
00:11:06
So they've got a little bit of bleed
from the cymbals
on there. Let's just try to clean
that up a little bit.
00:11:10
It's not gonna be perfect by any
stretch, but..
00:11:12
..we can probably tighten that
up a little bit.
00:11:48
That's a pretty good place to start
with the kick drum,
just gated it a little bit to try to get
some more clarity.
00:11:52
So, here's with no gate.
00:11:55
Both the dry signal and the crush
signal
put together.
00:12:12
It sounds fine,
we'll see if that we'll help us later,
because we're loosing
some of the length of the bass drum
with that gate on it that I was kinda
liking.
00:12:19
Let's actually turn it off for right now
and just see if we need that, later.
00:12:23
So, let's move on to the snare drum and
see what we've got in that department.
00:12:42
So you can actually hear, there, there's
one of our edits
where we used a different snare drum.
00:12:45
So a really ring-y one in that sort of
rock breakdown thing
and when we go to the vamp
it gets like a tighter,
less ringy snare drum,
so we've sort of employed that
all over the place.
00:12:55
So, our snare sound,
is not going to be consistent
throughout the song. So we just sort of
have to ball park that
and get it great as an overall
kind of thing.
00:13:03
I remember being happy at the time
we tracked it
with that snare sound, so
let's see if we can help that out.
00:13:09
So let's try a gate on the snare
and see
if we can clean that up, at all.
00:13:12
Get a little bit more definition
happening.
00:13:22
There's a lot of bleed happening on
this, which
frankly I don't remember!
What we can do to get a clean gate
trigger,
and this is a bit labor intensive,
but
you know, all good things are,
I suppose,
is: we can manually go through
the snare track
and gate it by editing out all the crap
that we don't want.
00:13:40
And use that to trigger the gate
on the snare drum track that we're
gonna use.
00:13:44
Does that make sense? I've already
done that and I'll show you the track
so you can see what I'm talking about.
00:13:51
And it's consolidated, so you won't
necessarily see
the exact edits, but you can see..
00:13:56
..and I'll play it for you, you can hear
what it sounds like.
00:13:59
Then we'll never hear this again!
Basically it's just acting as a trigger
for my gate on the snare drum track,
so
we're gonna make that go away..
00:14:12
the snare drum trigger track
is being sent to the snare-gate bus
at zero, pre fader,
and then we can come over to the snare
top track
and open up our gate,
set up a little side-chain
that will be triggered by that
trigger track
and we will set that up to look at
the snare-gate bus.
00:14:33
So now, if we turn that key on
we'll solo the snare top
and if we go here, we can listen to
the side-chain of the gate
which is now that trigger track,
check it out:
So, this track here is triggering
the gate
on this track, here.
00:14:51
If we put this into action, here,
check it out.
00:15:19
Travis is one of the hardest-hitting
loudest drummer I've ever
recorded.
00:15:24
He is not ashamed
of bashing the crap out of these
cymbals. So,
you know, it's just
plain impossible to get
any kind of isolated sounds
on these close mics with him, so..
00:15:35
..it's a delicate balance of
you know, gating this a little bit,
you can change how much you're
rejecting those
other sounds with the range knob,
here,
and you can't really get too
aggressive
you're really gonna hear it through
the mix, opening and closing, so
we just want a little bit of definition
well: I want a lot of definition
but there's only so much I can get
so let me show you what I'm gonna do:
we're probably gonna set it
with about 9dB
of gating.
00:16:01
I think that should probably be
sufficient
but let me show you what it sounds like
if we do too much.
00:16:15
So you hear the cymbals all over the
place when it opens, and that's
not gonna be really nice, later. So,
let's just set that at a moderate
depth of about 9dB,
that should be fine,
we'll keep an ear out for that, later.
00:16:25
The reason I'm going through all
this trouble is, because
I want that gate to be perfect, I don't
want any mis-triggers,
I don't want the hi-hat, or the crash
cymbal or the toms
triggering that gate to open
and he's doing a lot of little delicate
work
and by chopping out all the
crap that I don't want, I can get
all of his
little ghost notes to open the gate
and otherwise I might loose those
things. So,
since we've got this gate set up
already, with this
side-chain, why not use it on the bottom
snare?
So I'm gonna copy it down there,
let's have a listen to the bottom snare,
real quick.
00:16:55
This is without the gate.
00:17:19
So, here I can get away with a longer
release
and a longer hold
'cause there's not not as much cymbal
bleed happening, down there
and the tone of Travis' snare drum
really
comes from the bottom snare,
'cause that
top head is wound up so tight
that there's no tone in it.
It just
like a concrete block, so
I'm gonna try to pull a lot of the
tone and the low end
of the snare drum from the bottom
mic.
00:17:40
Which I think was a 57 on the top
and on the bottom, so
fairly standard setup.
00:17:45
And then I'm also gonna hide this
trigger track so I don't have to
look at it anymore and mistakenly
turn it up and
put it into the mix, 'cause that would
be a bummer.
00:17:52
Let's put the top and bottom together.
00:18:10
And let's try the SSL channel strip on
those, as well,
let's see what we can get out of this
thing.
00:19:12
So the snare top needed a little bit
of midrange to..
00:19:15
..to make it pop a little bit,
in my opinion,
I almost always cut out something
around 500Hz on snares,
it's sort of where the box-sound
lies,
it's a typical sort of thing I like
and then on the snare bottom,
I felt it needed a little more crack,
you know, 4.5k maybe..
00:19:29
what's this, like 9 or 10k on the
top end shelf,
again, rolling out a little bit of 500
or so..
00:19:35
when we tracked this record Jerry
was always reaching
for a little bit of 220 on the bottom
snare mic
and he said: 'always add 220 on
the bottom snare!' so in his honor
I pretty much always
add a little bit of 220 on the bottom
snare, just to think of him, he's
passed away a few years ago, now.
00:19:48
Let's hear that one more time.
00:20:02
That's a pretty great pop snare
sound for me.
00:20:05
The other thing I like to try,
we'll give this a shot and see
what it does:
a Distressor on the bottom
snare
can be pretty great.
00:20:13
I'll call up my
hardware inserts and pop a
Distressor on that and
see what that does.
00:20:18
What's cool about the Distressor
is that the attack and release are
so infinitely variable:
you can really change the envelope
of that snare and make it really
just slamming, I absolutely love it.
So,
let's dig into that and see
what we can get, here.
00:21:09
So you can feel that snare
drum just thickens up
like, you get that snare-iness
of the snare
the pop from the top head
and just like the
[sound] kinda sound
from the bottom, so that's sort of
what I've been going for.
00:21:19
I like to put the gate
before the compressor,
in this case, and then I like
to put the EQ after the compressor,
generally,
because then I can EQ whatever
I want and it doesn't affect
the compression.
00:21:29
There are a lot of times where
I'll do the opposite, so that
specifically it does affect the
compression
but in this case I like the compressor
before the EQ
and we'll get into some instances later
where we'll do some carving
before the compression, to show you
what I am talking about, there.
00:21:46
Let's put the kick and snare together,
see how we did on that.
00:22:04
That feels pretty good.
00:22:05
When I get my kick and snare sound
together
I'm thinking about samples, already.
00:22:10
And not only because I want
a little bit more consistency
but to me
the other important thing about adding
a sample is it helps that sort of
bleed-to-direct-signal ratio.
Right?
So if I put a little bit of a sample
in
I'm automatically getting
more point
on that sound, on the kick and
snare
in this specific instance.
00:22:30
So, there's a bunch of bleed
happening, so
there's gates opening and closing and
we're gonna put the overheads in
so that it will make it less obvious
that that's happening
but
having a sample in there will just
give it a little more definition.
00:22:42
Let's carry on, put up the rest
of the mics
in the drum kit and see how they're
affecting
the direct sound of that kick
and snare, at the moment.
00:23:07
So, the thing I like to start with, on
overheads
is a surgical EQ.
00:23:10
So I usually go to this FabFilter
Pro Q.
00:23:13
Just to cut out the really irritating
frequencies. There's almost
always something around 3k,
that really harsh cymbal range,
particularly again with Travis because
he hits so hard, and
I wound up with a couple of KM-84s
as a spaced pair
right over the cymbals, that's why
you don't hear so much of
the drum kit. It's all just cymbals!
But that's sort of what we were going
for in this style of recording.
00:23:34
So let's just solo up the overheads
and pull out these
problem areas to see if we can
find them.
00:24:25
So there's a few little nodes, in there.
There's..
00:24:27
there's a little boxy sound around 350,
some weird harmonics around 3300
and another thing around 6.6k so
those are octaves on each other,
so that makes sense that
that's happening.
00:24:39
So check it out without the EQ and then
we'll pop it in.
00:25:07
That's definitely an improvement let's
see how it sounds
with the kick and snare.
00:25:41
So now let's get into a sort
of a macro thing, with the overheads.
00:25:45
One of the tricks I like to use for this
to sort of make the cymbals
fit in and push back a little bit
is to use this SSL channel
compressor
with a fast attack, fast release
and probably around 8:1 ratio
to sort of
you know, bounce those cymbals a little
bit with the kick and snare.
00:26:00
So let's see what we can do, there.
00:26:59
All right, so we're getting better.
00:27:01
And these sounds will all change
as the mix
progresses and we add other microphones
in and
see how they affect
what we've got going, so far.
00:27:07
At this outro part
he's playing on the ride cymbal, we've
put a spot mic on that.
00:27:11
Again, just to sort of be able to
manually balance
these settings.
00:27:15
So, let's have a listen to that mic
and see if it's gonna
fit in well with the overheads.
00:28:16
There's a severe ringing around
5k, so
let's see how it sounds like with that
EQ in.
00:28:41
So that blends in, it's not offensive,
you can hear what he's playing on
that cymbal, so
let's let that "ride" for the moment.
Forgive the pun!
We'll put the room in, 'cause that's a
big sound of the record as well and
it's gonna add a lot more splash-iness
and
things to deal with, so.. let's check
out the room mic.
00:29:07
The room mic I used was a THE
binaural sphere
probably about 10 feet in front of
the drum kit.
00:29:13
And you can tell I hammered that
pretty hard, I don't remember what I
used on it, but
at least that sound is like, it's very
intentional and it's
got the elements that we need
right off the bat.
00:29:24
And actually sounds better
than I remember it sounded.
00:29:26
I think.. so,
same thing, this sort of needs a little
bit of corrective EQ.
00:29:31
So let's grab this
Pro-Q one more time.
00:29:34
Let's throw it in actually
with the track
and see what we need to pull out a bit,
before we do anything.
00:29:46
Sounds to me like it might be out
of phase..
00:29:48
and if not, slightly out, so
let's get that,
the IBP plug-in..
00:29:55
and see if that helps us, at all.
00:30:15
Yeah, and you can tell right there,
'cause the bottom end
comes back. So let me take this off.
00:30:19
Listen to it as I recorded it, which
apparently is incorrect! So,
check it out.
00:30:27
You heard the low end from the kick
drum went away, there?
Let me take the room out and
you can hear what the kick drum
sounds like, by itself.
00:30:38
And now I'll put the room mic, which is
out of phase: listen to the low end..
00:30:47
you hear how that bass drum just lost
of all of its bottom?
So, let's put this plug-in back in
where I've inverted the phase, here
and then I've sort of tweaked this
phase adjust,
just a little bit off of
'normal', whatever 'normal' is..
00:31:00
I think I've helped that low end
punch through, again, so check it out.
00:31:15
So that's definitely helped our cause,
quite a bit.
00:31:18
So now, let's see what's thrashing up
our sound a little bit, here.
00:32:00
There's a frequency that's making
my teeth hurt.
00:32:28
So let's try popping in one of those SSL
channel strips
and see what we can make happen
with that.
00:32:33
The midrange of the room is where it's
really gonna be effective for the drums
and then maybe we can pull a little
bit of bottom end into the picture
from the mic, as well.
So check this out.
00:33:57
Cool, so we're getting there, with
that stuff.
00:33:59
Pulled up a little bit of low end
out of the room
which kind of gives that kick
drum a little bit of bloom,
same thing in this little sort of
upper-mid range area
to get a little bit of that crack
out of the snare, into the room.
00:34:10
Let's move on and see what else
we got, here.
00:34:12
When I record drums with a lot of
mics, like this,
I typically print a drum squash
track
which is an aux send,
from the console
that takes the kick and snare mics
and sends them off to some
kind of compressor and just
pounds the crap out of them.
00:34:25
I don't remember what I use, here
but let's see what this sounds like,
on its own.
00:34:29
And basically I call it a
'cheater track'.
00:34:31
So, when you're tracking
you can get as much of a mixed
sound, as you can,
while you're cutting the track,
makes everyone, you know..
00:34:38
..play a little better and feel like:
'ah, this is a record!', you know..
00:34:40
Get some little parallel processing
going on,
right from the beginning, so..
check this out.
00:34:56
Oh, now I remember what this is.
00:34:58
This is a custom opto compressor
that Dave Collins,
one of my favorite mastering engineer,
built for me,
and I don't even remember what's in it,
I don't know what's in it,
I've never opened it up. It's a box
with a few knobs on it and
it had like an LED to tell me how
much compression was happening
and it was always lit up,
all the time.
00:35:15
And in fact, I took like a Blink 182
sticker
and cut a hole in the middle and
put it over
the LED..
I don't know where it is!
Right now it must be in the closet
full of junk, so
I'm gonna have to break that up
'cause this is really cool sounding!
Let's add that into our mix and see
what we get.
00:35:50
That punched things up quite a bit,
didn't it?
I'm really happy with that sound.
Jeez!
Let's see if we can pull more out
of this room, let's
try one of these Transient Designer
things,
let's see if that helps us, at all.
00:36:31
I actually prefer without,
so let's dump that.
00:36:34
Let's move, what else do we have here,
we got toms..
00:36:37
..let's see what the toms sound like,
here
and if we're gonna need to do any
processing, to those.
00:36:55
So now, I started talking earlier
about how we tracked, the toms..
00:36:58
..so the tom trick I was talking about
that Jerry Finn developed, was:
taking the microphone
off, let's draw..
here's a drum.
00:37:06
I'm a terrible artist.. so here's a
microphone. It's not a mallet,
here's the drum..
00:37:11
we take the signal from this
microphone,
we go into the console,
we're gonna have 2 channels, here.
Right?
So, this is the mic channel
and this is the BBE channel, here.
Right?
So, we come out of..
00:37:27
..this is the console, we'll call this
the mixer.
00:37:32
We come out of the mic
channel
and we go actually into the BBE..
00:37:41
..and then we come back into
that channel, on the desk.
00:37:43
So this will be channel 1,
this will be channel 2.
00:37:46
We flip the phase on the BBE
and then this sum goes to tape.
00:37:54
Right? Now, the other thing that
happens, here..
00:37:58
..before it goes to the BBE,
in fact,
here we go.. this is me being
completely out of order..
00:38:05
..we go to a gate..
00:38:10
..and the trigger input..
00:38:13
So this is our drum, remember? We have
a little trigger
that sits on the drum, like a DDrum
trigger or something. Any sort of
piezo sort of pickup will work.
00:38:22
We bring that
into the side-chain
of the gate.
00:38:30
So,
this is opened only when you
hit the drum, so there's no
bleed from anything else, this
is a physical
pickup on the shell of the drum.
00:38:39
Right? I can make this a little
prettier.
00:38:41
Put some lugs on it.
00:38:44
So, trigger goes into the gate
side-chain,
and then when that gate opens, it feeds
the BBE, which goes boom!
You know? It's a subharmonic
synthesizer,
it does an excitement on the top end,
you can see it there, in the rack.
00:38:58
There's like a low contour
control
and a definition control.
00:39:01
Wind that shit up! Just turn them
both all the way up.
00:39:04
That's the setting! It's all you need.
00:39:06
And you take, go into the BBE,
go back into the console,
you sum these two signals together
and voila'! You have an awesome
tom sound.
00:39:13
Huge! So,
it will work with any sort of exciter
like this,
the Aphex 204 works fine,
there's some older Aphex that work.
The BBE 822, the newer one, works.
00:39:23
But if you're doing something
other than a 422
make sure it's out of phase.
00:39:27
Or I should say: check to see
that out of phase sounds best.
00:39:31
For the BBE, I don't know why
but electrically it's out of phase
with the
dry signal so you have to flip the
phase there to make it sound awesome.
00:39:39
Otherwise it's gonna sound rather
pathetic, so..
00:39:41
..double check that when you try
to do this little setting.
00:39:44
So, let's listen just to this big
fill that goes across
all the toms, I'll show you
what these sound like, fresh off
the tape.
00:39:54
Here's a low tom.
00:40:03
When we cut this, of course we did it
to tape
and we did this sort of
Roy Thomas Baker thing, where we just
smash the toms on the tape.
00:40:10
So, they're a little thick-sounding
so let's see if there's anything
we can do
to clean those up a little bit.
00:41:49
Yes, so just cleaning that mud a little
bit, rolling off
the extreme low end, so it doesn't
shake
the woofers
excessively,
and just cleaning up that mud
where each drum has its own little
resonance, that's not gonna happen
and then adding a little bit of
attack to the top
to get a little bit of that point
on the drum.
00:42:05
In fact, just for fun, let's try
putting
Transient Designers on these,
'cause that's something
I would normally do. See if that helps
us, at all.
00:43:00
Yes, so this Transient Designer helped
us poke that attack through,
you know, that wall of room sound that's
happening in the chorus, here.
00:43:07
You'll also notice that I manually went
and gated
all the tom hits.
00:43:12
You know, sometimes I'll go back
and touch these up
as I just did,
just sort of depends on what the
bleed situation is
with the drums, but I generally like
to have things pretty tidy and clean.
00:43:22
And, I'll reach in and tighten all
these up, manually. Rather than trying
to do it with a gate, 'cause
all sorts of other things can trigger
the gate
like we were talking about with the
snare, so
I'd rather it just be very consistent,
do the same thing every time.
00:43:34
This is another thing my assistant
does
in preparation, for when I mix
these songs.
00:43:39
Let's step back for a second again
and hear
what we've got at the beginning
of the song.
00:43:58
Let's try throwing the hi hat mic in,
I think that's the last
of the close mics
and then we can see what we
can do with parallel processing, so
here's the hi hat. Again, Travis is just
wailing on that thing, so
let's see if we even need it, first
of all.
00:44:10
Here's without the hi hat mic.
00:44:17
Pretty darn loud, so let's see if
we add it,
if we're helping us or hurting us.
00:44:32
I think that's actually helping us,
it's giving us a little bit of
detail, it's not harsh..
00:44:36
I used a Beyer 160 ribbon,
on this record,
so it doesn't have that harsh crap
on the top end, and I'm
kinda liking that, so..
00:44:44
let's listen one more time, see if
we got in a good place
'cause he does some more detailed
hi hat work, later in the song.
00:45:23
That's working out well, we'll see how
it plays with the instruments, later
'cause all this is for not..
00:45:27
..if it doesn't work with the guitars
and bass and such. So,
It's vibing pretty good on its own,
let's throw in this room mic that
happens in the chorus.
00:45:36
As I was talking about before,
when we cut this
we intentionally arranged things to
happen at different places, so..
00:45:42
..you heard that snare drum change,
earlier,
now we have a room mic that comes
on suddenly, in that first chorus.
00:45:48
And we did that by editing the tape,
erasing pieces that we didn't need,
so on and so forth. So,
check it out when it comes in.
00:46:11
Ah, it's starting to sound
familiar!
That's what I remember from the
record, so
this, if I remember correctly,
was a Royer 122
about 25 feet from the drum kit
around the corner of the house.
00:46:22
Like in the, you know,
he was set up in the living room,
I think this was like
the mic was in the dining room
or something, so
the chimney,
I believe, stood in the way of the
direct sound from the drum kit.
00:46:32
And then of course I probably
hammered it with something
like a Distressor or whatever.
Check it out on its own.
00:46:44
It's a bit thick in the bottom there so let's see what happens if
we pull a little bit out.
00:46:48
Again, going to my favorite little
surgical EQ.
00:46:51
But let's do it with everybody
happening so we know
how it's affecting the bass drum sound..
00:46:55
..with the whole picture.
00:47:38
Yeah, so we're gonna need to pull out
a little bit of that cymbal business.
00:47:53
What I'm looking for out of that mic
is kick and snare
so I want those to be the predominant
sounds in that room,
get like a lot of explosive energy
out of those two things, so..
00:48:01
..let's listen again and see
if we got that.
00:48:16
That's feeling pretty good!
It's effective,
we want it to be obvious as the
song is titled,
that.. a new thing has
started there, so..
00:48:23
I think we're in pretty good shape.
00:48:25
Now, let's listen to the whole
thing, here, let's listen to a verse
and a chorus
and see how we've done.
00:48:55
So, pretty good shape. There's a little
bit of beef
lacking from the the kick drum, for
lack of a better term,
so let's get a sample going.
00:49:06
I got my trigger track, here,
as I had in my template
and we can come over here to
the kick drum,
kick trigger is already on,
it's at unity gain, it's panned to
the left
which, for the Slate Trigger plug-in
will trigger the sound
and the right side of the Trigger
plug-in is what
suppresses, going into the side-chain
of the trigger.
00:49:25
So if you want something to trigger
the sound, you put it to the left,
if you want it to not trigger the sound,
you put it to the right.
00:49:30
So, that's what we've done here.
We can open this up and see
what I've got available.
00:49:36
I put all my favorite kick drums,
in here.
00:49:39
Let's set this to go out of
the drum, so we can hear it, real quick.
00:50:15
That's my go-to sound for
a punk-pop kinda thing,
it's got that little typewriter-y kinda
top end that I need
and then it's also got some sort
of beefy low end.
00:50:23
The combination of two different
kick drum samples.
00:50:26
What I like to do is, bus this
to a track,
so I'll use my 'Kick Trigger Print' bus
which is already assigned here,
got a track ready to go..
00:50:37
..put that fader up and put it in
input, I'm gonna print it..
00:50:40
..we're gonna go away and come
back and you'll have it. Check it out.
00:50:44
Boom. There it is.
00:50:46
Ok,
so, suffice to say
I've printed my kick drum trigger,
let's see what that does for us.
00:51:20
So let me play you the kick drum
by itself.
00:51:40
So we're adding a little bit of
beefy low end,
little snappy top,
let's add the kick drum crush check
and I think I put..
00:51:49
..I did not put the kick sample
in there. So,
but let's add the kick crush where
we had it
and then we can add the kick sample
into the crush track.
00:52:11
And then we can hear everybody
together.
00:52:24
Kick drum is poking through real
nice, now.
00:52:27
And we have the same thing available
to us on the snare drum.
00:52:30
So, you've gonna have to trust me,
I've printed my snare
samples, we'll pop that in,
I've also printed a snare room sample.
00:52:40
So, check it out. Here's my snare
sample, by itself.
00:52:47
Because Travis' snare on its own
is really poppy
and, you know, sort of cutting,
I wanted something that's a little
beefier and
longer-sounding. So, we're gonna
try this one in there
and then, because we like the sound of
room on his kit,
but maybe want a little bit of a cleaner
sound on the snare,
let's see if this
room sample will help us.
00:53:10
That should be kinda interesting.
So let's hear everything
in the drums, without any samples.
00:53:22
His snare drum sounds really good.
Let's see if
our sample helps us or hurts us.
00:53:39
Yeah, it adds a little bit of.. again:
that sort of
beefy sound, it's like superhuman
drums. That's how I think
of samples. So let's try the room sound
and
see if that helps or takes away from
the vibe of the real room that we have.
00:54:00
Yeah, I don't like it for this song.
I thought it was gonna be cool
but I'm gonna ditch it. So let's put
that away.
00:54:05
Let us also now try
the snare crush
track, that we've got. I'm gonna
solo that up
we'll pop some stuff into it and
see what we get.
00:55:29
The snare parallel is going through
my 1176
and then the second channel of the
Transient Designer
and the second channel of my Aphex 204.
00:55:36
So, the
compressor's obviously compressing,
that setting rarely ever changes,
the Transient Designer is giving you
a little bit of attack,
a little bit of length
and then the Aphex 204 gives
a little bit more bottom end
and a little more edge on top.
00:55:51
Let's try blending that in and see
what we get.
00:56:35
That's pretty rocking, that sounds like
a Blink 182 track! So,
I'm pretty excited about that and we
haven't even gotten to the other
stuff that I can put on the drums!
00:00:00
Man, I don't even know if we
need to go to this stereo drum crush!
But I'll show it to you anyway!
I always have this stereo drum crush
parallel bus set up,
typically it's got my hardware
Chandler TG1 Limiter
on it
set to the limit switch
and usually the fastest release
but it would depend on the tempo
of the song. In this case
it's a pretty quick tempo, so
it's set to the fastest release.
00:00:22
Let's see what it sounds like when I
start throwing things into that limiter.
00:00:25
I'm gonna hit the 'Flip' button on
my console
so I can just have faders to send
into that aux send, so check
this out.
00:01:18
So let's listen to the drum mix
and we'll pop this in and see
what it sounds like.
00:01:52
Lots more fun, it brings the details
forward a little bit more,
makes the drums a little more
aggressive-sounding, so
I'm gonna roll with that,
let's see what happens, then.
00:02:01
Another trick I like to use
is a little limiter on my
drum bus,
looks like I'm getting hot, here.
So,
let's actually look at that
real quick, make sure I'm not
blowing things up too bad.
00:02:36
So that's in pretty good shape.
00:02:38
Another trick I like to use is
this distortion bus
so let me show what I typically do
with this and see again
if this is gonna help us or
hinder us.
00:02:46
I flip the faders into 'aux
send' mode
so I can send into that distortion box.
00:02:51
Which is..
Culture Vulture.
00:04:00
Let's see what happens if we pop
the toms into that mix.
00:04:17
So this could be interesting..
00:04:18
let's see what this does if we
add it to
the drum mix, so I am gonna flip back
to fader mode..
00:04:24
So now we've got a little sound
happening with our distortion box.
00:04:27
I've done like a litte pre..
00:04:29
..EQ going into it, 'cause we
don't want it distort
the bottom end too much
and there's always something
happening around 500
and also don't want to distort
too much of the top end.
00:04:37
This is the EQ going into the
distortion box,
then we have the Culture Vulture
which I showed you a second ago
and then another little EQ at the end
so, actually real quick,
'cause I really didn't deal with that
too much, let's just solo that
distortion box, again.
00:05:26
All right. So now, what happens if we
add that into the drum kit?
So it sort of helps me out
with that, like,
sort of mid-rangy aggression
that I like a lot.
00:06:02
So, again: let's let that ride.
00:06:04
I think that's pretty much all I wanna
do at the moment
for the drums, I know that's a lot,
it's a lot to take in,
lots of parallel things going on,
some EQ, some compression,
some distortion, that sort of thing.
I think we can move on now, let's hear
a few other things in the track.
00:06:19
And make everybody work together..
00:06:56
We've got this DI and we've also
got an amp,
one of the things I like to do is make
sure that the
timing and phase response between
the two is optimal. So,
I put these IBP
in-between phase box -tools,
on here and see what happens.
00:07:27
And as it turns out we don't really
need those.
00:07:29
I think I tracked
the bass with an IBP
and made sure that that was
pretty tight when we cut it.
00:07:35
We're in good shape, there.
00:07:37
And then, what I like to do with
the bass
is, you'll see, is I take the two
tracks, put them on a bass bus
and bring that through two different
aux returns,
which I may or may not use,
both of them,
but they're there, ready
to go.
00:07:48
I usually try to start with
just one bus
and I'll do my EQ and compression
routine to it and see if that works
and if I have any issue with low end
then maybe I'll pop that other
bus on and
I'll play with that a bit. So,
this song sounds like it might
benefit from
my little bass chain
which is a dbx 161,
it's an unbalanced version of a
160, same thing,
and actually mine has a balanced
option on it,
a balanced modification,
and then into my Moog
EQ that's been my sort of
go-to
chain for this sort of punk-rock
stuff, so
let's fast-forward to the end of the
song, where we have more
aggression and see what happens.
00:08:29
This is just a random setting
left from some other record.
00:08:31
So let's see what it does.
00:09:26
What I look for out of the Moog
is
really aggressive mid-range, it's got
this really great
sound around, like,
700-800Hz, something like that.
I can't even see the numbers
from where I sit, so I don't really care
I'm just sort of listening, and,
that's all I use the Moog on,
it's the bass, so it's..
00:09:41
..it's in the right frequency range,
most of the time.
00:09:44
I think there's something around
3k, something like that
to add a little presence to the bass.
00:09:48
Then the low end is probably set around
120 or so
to get it above that kick drum, let
the kick drum have the low end
of this record, 'cause it's moving
pretty quick.
00:09:57
There's a few dB added on each one
just to sort of..
00:10:00
..to taste, whatever sounds good.
00:10:02
The 161 is usually set to like 4:1,
no output gain,
you know, the threshold is set
to wherever and
right now it's hitting about
4dB of compression or so.
00:10:14
We'll see if that even works, let's see
if that happens
with the drums and if it's the right
choice, and if it's not
we can go somewhere else, but typically
this is..
00:10:21
..this is the sort of sound I like
on this kinda song.
00:11:14
Arguably the whole low end is
the kick and bass
in this kinda song, so
the other thing I like to consider
when I am
dealing with bass drum and bass
guitar
on a song like this, is
processing them together through
a hardware EQ and compressor, so
I haven't yet kicked on my Manley
or the API 2500 that I have
on my drum bus,
let's get guitars in there and then
deal with that, make that decision.
00:11:40
Let's have a listen to the guitars:
there's three main guitars: left,
center, right,
as Jerry always almost does
and I've got those bussed through my
Manley Pultecs over there
and we'll see if we need those.
We
recorded these guitars..
00:11:55
..the typical process for this record
was
trying two different amps
at the same time, through two
cabinets
and each of those cabinets had
two microphones on them. So,
a total of four mics
that we would sum on a Neve BCM10
through a Manley Pultec already
and then going to tape.
00:12:10
So, we may or may not need those
guys, we'll see..
00:12:13
we'll see what these sound like.
Let's just solo up, real quick,
the two main
guitars.
00:12:20
Left and right.
00:12:37
Pretty big and disgusting-sounding.
00:12:40
[laughs] in a good way! Mostly.
But..
00:12:43
..some woofiness going on, in
the bottom,
we need a little more definition
a little more note out of it
so, again, what I would start with
is a corrective EQ
with my friend, over here,
first thing I'm gonna do is chop off
all the bottom end
like that.. 'cause that doesn't matter.
00:13:11
Now I gotta find where this mud is
happening, there needs
to be a real narrow band cut
on this low end stuff. So let's see
if we can hone in
on something down here that's really
troubling me.
00:13:40
Yeah, so there's that frequency.
It's just like this [sound]
all that subharmonic crap that
we don't need
in the guitars. We want them to be like
biting and cutting, not
[sound]
that's not what we want, here.
00:13:52
Let's just copy that over to the other
side, 'cause it's really the same sound,
pop this into the track with the bass
and the drums and see
what else we need to do with them.
00:14:23
Actually not too bad!
I think we can get a little more
definition out of the mid range
to get some bite and some note
and there maybe a little more mud we
can cut out, but
the main thing is that the bass
and the guitars are playing pretty much
the same thing throughout the song.
So we want to make sure that,
that they're playing well, together.
00:14:41
And, of course, with the drums
but that's not as much of a concern.
00:14:45
So let's hear the bass
and the guitars, right now.
00:14:59
So we gotta remove some mud from the
guitars, that's stepping all over
the bass.
00:15:04
Same sort of thing, I'm gonna be
really boring
and go again with an SSL.
00:15:09
Let's listen to one side and see where
that mud is.
00:15:59
Yeah, so we cleaned up a bunch
of stuff around, I don't know, it's
probably 6-700Hz,
boosted a tiny little bit in the bottom
end to keep us,
you know, from lapping off too
much of it
but at the same time I'm filtering out
some low-low stuff at 70Hz
with this filter, which sounds different
from the filter on the EQ 2.
00:16:17
So, different vibe,
we just needed a sharper cut on
that bottom end
to get rid of that subharmonic
garbage
that happens with massive amps
like these.
00:16:24
Let's copy that setting over
to the other side
and hear both of these tracks
real quick, by themselves.
00:16:42
That sounds pretty loud
and exciting, so let's put that in with
the bass and drums and
see how things are working out.
00:17:15
So you can see they're playing a little
bit better with each other, so like
the guitars aren't stepping on the bass,
you can distinctly hear what the bass
is doing.
00:17:22
Although I think we can actually get
a little more definition out of that
and maybe cut a little bit of mud
out of the bass
which is just sort of this wooly sound
happening again that I am not happy with
let's see if we can hone in on that,
real quick. Let's just solo it up
and the great thing about this EQ is
it's got this spectrum analyser
so it helps us find these
problem areas.
00:17:56
So what I like to do with the bass
is I cut out
a little bit where the kick drum
is sitting
and in this song the kick drum is
like
between 60 and 80Hz.
00:18:04
It's thumping down there so we don't
want the bass guitar
stepping on that, too much.
00:18:08
So we'll do a little cut there,
also I roll off the extreme low end,
I mean, isn't that the
..isn't that the saying of..
00:18:16
..of pureMix?
'High pass everything'! So,
lots of high pass filters to really
keep things clean.
00:18:44
So that's a little more happening.
00:18:45
And you'll remember that on the guitars
I cut out something around 700Hz
which is where the meat of the
bass lies.
00:18:52
And I'm gonna go over here on the
bass and I'm gonna
boost a little more with a narrow
curve.
00:18:56
Right in that vicinity
to try to help us get a little more
attack on it.
00:19:01
Now, we're gonna try using my
Aphex buddy, over here,
which I reserve exclusively for bass
to try to get a little more attack
out of it.
00:19:08
So, let's solo that up.
00:19:10
And add
a little bit of this guy in. Usually
he winds up around -10,
it depends entirely on how much
you send to it
and then what the return is doing,
because it's a dynamic processor, so
let's see what we can get.
00:19:42
So you can hear it, when I was sending
too much it was distorting,
we wanna make we don't distort it
in a bad way
but we get a little bit of fuzz,
a little bit of edge
on it, as well, so..
00:19:51
we can sort of manipulate the balance
of the send and return.
00:19:54
Incidentally, if you haven't noticed,
this is a parallel send,
I'm sending off of the bass bus
we've combined the two bass channels
into a bass return
and then we're sending again
off to the Aphex over here
which is gonna go out of the bass
output, to my summing bus.
00:20:10
Before we add it to the mix, let's
listen to it with and without the Aphex.
00:20:13
So here's without, first.
00:20:26
You can hear when it goes up the neck,
it gets a little grindier,
a little nastier,
'cause that's getting up into the guitar
region and we wanna
make sure he's a bit more distinct
and there's a few fills he does through
the song,
I wanna make sure those are present.
Let's hear with everybody, again.
00:21:16
So I think we're getting close.
00:21:18
I've got one more guitar
to put in here
and that, we usually put in the
center.
00:21:21
In a Jerry Finn production.
00:21:23
And let's see what this guy
sounds like, by himself.
00:21:43
So, you know, he's playing the
same thing as the other guys
in that little breakdown
and then he goes to an octave part
that just plows right through the outro.
00:21:51
Let's see if we actually need this. Hang
on. What's he playing in the chorus?
He actually needs a little bit of beef.
00:22:21
He's thinner than the other guys.
00:22:22
That's sort of typical with what we
used to do on this record
is the guy in the middle needs to be
a little thinner
to give up some space to the bass
and to the vocal
kick and snare, all the other stuff
that's happening in the middle.
00:22:33
So typically I pan this guy off
to one side or the other, just a little
bit, to keep him sorta
from stepping on all this other
stuff, that's centered
in the mix.
00:22:41
I think Lord Alge would have my head
for that, 'cause they go:
left, center and right!
A little love from the API,
might be just the thing we need.
00:23:32
That's pretty sweet.
00:23:33
Let's hear what he's doing here
in the breakdown
and make sure we're still cool.
00:23:56
See: I liked what he was doing here
in the breakdown when they're all
playing in unison
but he sort of disappears
when he goes to that octave,
so I'm gonna just
clip gain that up a little bit.
00:24:06
Let's see if that helps us
a little bit.
00:24:08
So that I don't have to do much
automation later, it's just ready to go.
00:24:37
Yeah, that feels a little better, to me.
00:24:38
We need him to speak a little
bit more.
00:24:40
I think that would be pretty cool.
00:24:42
So now we've got this whole rhythm
section pictured together,
the next thing I like to do at
this point is to
get my hardware stuff in..
00:24:50
into the mix. So,
On the drum bus,
I have my API 2500
and that goes into the Manley
Massive Passive
on the bass bus I don't have
anything, 'cause I like to do that
with the hardware insert that we used,
which was that dbx 161 and
the Moog,
that's like, going out of Pro Tools
to the hardware and then back in
so if you have Logic you can do
the same thing
you know, it's a sort of universal
concept of using
hardware as an insert.
00:25:16
Now, on the guitar bus I have the
Manley Pultecs
and we'll see if we even need
those on this mix,
like I said, when we recorded them the
guitars already went through that
Pultec, so I don't know that we need
a boost
in the same available frequencies
that we have on that box.
But we shall see!
So let's just let it rock, from the top.
00:25:35
I'm gonna go and try some stuff with
the drums, on the 2500
and the Massive Passive and we'll see if
that helps us or hinders us.
00:28:17
The 2500 today is not doing what I want.
00:28:21
I'm not really loving it, because it's
just, like..
00:28:23
it's pushing the drums further back
than what I want today.
00:28:28
Had I mixed into that
from the get-go, maybe the sounds and
the balances would have been
a little bit different..
00:28:33
but given what I just did today,
I'm not gonna use it and that's
actually pretty rare, I almost
always have that on my drum bus,
so..
00:28:40
maybe you know what? Lemme try
one other thing on that
'cause there's maybe another
way to use it.
00:28:43
So, let's try this.
00:28:45
If we come over here to the
API 2500,
it's got this setting that's called
'new' and 'old'
and 'new' is a feed-forward
compressor, where
the side-chain looks at the input
of the compressor
and..
00:28:57
..grabs that as the signal
that it's going to compress, so
'new' is a very aggressive sound,
that's what the SSL compressor does
and several other boxes.
00:29:07
When you set it to 'old'
it's looking at the output of the
compressor, so the sound
that the side-chain is getting has
already been compressed
so it's really lazy
and slow and it's not as bite-y
like a
feed-forward compressor
will grab the front of the note,
the front of the transient,
the [sound].
00:29:27
The 'old' mode, sort of lets that
transient go through
and then
has a softer knee to that compression,
so..
00:29:33
..let's see if it sounds like something
in the 'old' mode.
00:29:36
So here's the 'new' mode.
00:29:37
Let's solo up the drums so we can
concentrate on this part.
00:29:41
And I think what would be cool is to
listen to the chorus..
00:29:44
..and see what happens,
'cause the chorus was
the part that I didn't like
what the compressor was doing.
00:29:50
We'll listen without it
and then I'll pop it in.
00:29:59
Just pushes the drums back
and that's not what I want. I mean
I want a roomy-sounding drum kit
but I want that kick and snare to
smash through the room
so you get a feeling of
close-mics with space around it,
if that makes any sense at all.
00:30:12
So here's without
and when I pop it in, it's gonna
be in the 'old' mode.
00:30:28
This actually makes the room kind
of more explosive, I think!
Let's hear that in the mix.
00:30:46
I think I prefer it in!
That's pretty dope.
00:30:48
Usually on my drum bus I go with
the 'new' mode
but today the 'old' mode is working!
And, you know, I use that on
occasion but
it's not always the thing, but today..
00:30:57
..that's a really cool sound!
I like that a lot!
What I didn't explain was what I was
doing over here with
the Manley Massive Passive.
00:31:05
So that's on the drum bus.
I've added
a bit of 47Hz here on the bottom
with a bell
that's fairly broad so it's picking up
realistically from..
00:31:16
..from like 30Hz to maybe,
you know,
80 or 200Hz, something
like that.
00:31:20
Just adding some beef to that
drum sound.
00:31:23
The bottom of this feels really
good on drums,
my favorite EQ for that
then I've added a bit of upper
mids, 2.2k
again on a broad bell,
this is sort of 'overall tonality'
for the drums, that's how I look
at this
and then we've got
a bit added on the top, 8.2k shelf
that's sort of a Pultec feel,
you know, 8.2 on a Pultec is
amazing on snare drums
so why not put it on the whole drum kit?
That's what I say!
When I get into drums that have way too
much sub action going on
I'm not afraid to put that low cut
filter in, again,
just on the whole drum kit, to
help me out.
00:31:56
I think the next thing I like to do,
once I've got the whole rhythm section
together
is dial in my stereo bus.
00:32:02
Let's see if the Smart
is going to help us again,
today.
00:32:06
Or not!
Let's go to the loudest part
of the song,
go to that breakdown bit
into the
end of the song.
00:32:12
We're gonna start without the
compressor
and then I'll pop it in my sort of
typical setting
and see what happens.
00:32:49
So, there's the sound of rock,
man!
The SSL bus compressor takes
everything and goes: [sound]
makes it nasty and angry!
It pulls the snare drum down,
a little bit
but I typically set up my mix
before the bus compressor with
my snare drum too loud, anyway.
So this sorta helps me
put that mix back into perspective.
00:33:08
And then the next thing I like
to try is
to see if this NTI
helps us out
on the top end. It feels like the mix
is a tiny bit dark, right now
so let's see if this air band helps
us out.
00:33:20
So we'll start without it and then
we'll add it in.
00:34:05
So you can sort of feel how the
top end just
opened up, like there's this magic
air now, happening
around the drums and the
guitars
but without getting too nasty
and shrill.
00:34:15
I think the next thing would be,
let's just throw this verse
guitars in, so we have something
to balance the lead vocal against.
00:34:20
These are pretty simple
and very cool, I actually
remember
doing these:
we recorded these sounds,
this little part, into Pro Tools,
we used a flanger, actually we used
like the
Dynamic Delay that comes with
Pro Tools
and I..
00:34:38
..I put some modulation on it
when we recorded it
and we sort of made a flanger
out of it.
00:34:43
We did these chords first, then
I put this on in post
and then we printed it back
to tape and made a stereo
kinda flanger sound.
So check this out!
Let's see what this sounds like
with the band.
00:35:25
This is gonna need a little bit
of help to
poke through this stuff, so..
00:35:29
..I think the answer to this one
is gonna be,
let's try this API, I think this might
help us out.
00:35:56
Yeah, that's gonna help out.
We need to trim a little more
bottom end off, I think.
00:36:00
And I kinda wanna nasty this up,
a bit. So let's
put a little nastiness on it.
00:36:32
That's more like it. And I think we can
squeeze it a little bit, to..
00:36:36
..to make it..
00:36:38
..a little more sustain-y.
00:36:39
If that's a word.
00:36:41
Something simple.. probably an LA3
will do, for that.
00:37:11
That's feeling fine. And the other thing
I think we should try is..
00:37:13
..it's a stereo sound,
so let's try widening that thing
out, a little bit.
00:37:35
The other thing that could be
interesting is,
I've got this chorus, set up
on an aux, down here, as part of
my template,
that's got some width on it, too.
So it's got this Dim D
and the stereo width plug-in, here.
00:37:48
So this is like
a model of an old chorus.
00:37:51
So let's see if that helps us or
just makes it
ridiculous-sounding.
00:38:36
Yeah, that's feeling pretty right.
00:38:38
And then next on the hit parade is
this acoustic guitar,
this just sort of strumming..
00:38:55
I'm inclined to sort of
smash that up, a little bit.
00:39:14
And then also probably..
00:39:16
..mash it.
00:39:18
This Decapitator is one of my favorite
things. You can add a lot of
grit to it, without being obnoxious.
00:39:46
It's only to add a bit more
bite out of it
let's try something else.
Let's try
a 1073.
00:40:12
So now we've got this, thrown
into a plate,
it might be a little bit much,
but you never know
'till you hear it in the track.
00:40:25
Another thing that might be cool is,
to give this a little bit of an echo
and try something interesting
on this.
00:40:33
So let's set this up to be a
Roland Space Echo -sort of sound
make it a little nasty
and something like an eight note,
maybe get a little
crazy, spacey vibe, here.
00:41:08
So now we've got sort of a spacey
vibe on the guitar to take up
more room and to bloom into something
with that other
phase guitar. So we if put those
two things together,
let's hear it with the track.
00:42:07
Yeah, so that's doing what we
wanted. I mean,
you don't really wanna hear that,
as like:
'hey there's an acoustic guitar
strumming, back here!'
it's more of a sparkly kind of thing.
00:42:14
And we can maybe get a little
more aggressive
with that echo, let's try that.
00:42:33
Take a little of that modulation off,
maybe. That little wobble..
00:42:36
it's going a little bit fast.
00:43:10
That's pretty cool.
00:00:00
I think the next thing we gotta do
is get into some vocal sounds, here.
00:00:03
So I've split these vocals up,
he's got just a singular vocal
down the middle, in the verse,
got Travis barking off to the side
and then we've got four of
Tom's vocals
in the chorus, make up a big
gang kinda thing.
00:00:14
So I've got two of those panned
in towards the middle,
two of them panned out towards
the edges
to make that a nice, thick picture
of chorus vocals.
00:00:22
Let's check this out.
00:00:24
Let's pop them up and see what
we get.
00:00:45
He's struggling to be heard so obviously
we gotta hammer him down a bit [laughs].
00:00:49
First thing I gotta try, 'cause I just
got it, we gotta try it!
A hardware insert with the Chandler
RS124.
00:00:55
That's a pretty meaty compressor
and Tom's pretty thin..
00:00:58
..sounding, so if can get something
thick on him
maybe that'll sort of help..
00:01:03
..help him compete with those
guitars.
00:01:05
I just gonna set this up in a little
bit of a loop
and see if we can make this not
too annoying.
00:01:34
So just for the sake of comparison
let's try an
in-the-box 1176.
00:01:38
There's a couple of them that UAD
makes
that I really like, there's Revision A,
which is the old,
you know, blue-stripe, class A thing
and there's the revision E, which
is a later..
00:01:48
..I think it's still class A but it
doesn't have the transformer output,
I don't even remember what the
deal is.
00:01:53
The A is softer-sounding and the E
is brighter and more aggressive
and that's the last thing we need
on Tom's vocals
so let's try the A.
00:02:00
'cause maybe that will warm him up,
a little bit.
00:02:19
Yeah, I mean that sounds good
but I think that
the RS124 sounds better.
00:02:23
So let's pop that guy back on.
00:02:25
And then the other thing I've got
on that analog insert
is a Rupert Neve Design's
5052, which I think is a really good
sounding EQ.
00:02:33
So, let's pop that in and see
if we can, again,
sort of help him in the
low mid department.
00:03:17
Yeah. So, that's feeling pretty good.
So, I am adding
a little bit of 100Hz
on a low shelf
I got a little 1.5k on him to sort of
make him pop out a bit,
that's it for over here. Oh, and it's
got that little 'Silk' button,
the red is, I think, a low end
transformer saturation kinda thing.
00:03:36
And that's like helped pop him up.
00:03:39
The other thing that's sort of like,
you know..
00:03:41
..that's become the de facto thing
for vocals, is to saturate them
a little bit.
00:03:45
So it helps them smush them a little
bit more.
00:03:48
So let's try that out.
00:03:49
We didn't record these vocals
to tape
so they don't get the benefit
of that saturation
so, the other thing I like to use is
this Phoenix plug-in.
00:03:59
That can help kind of impart another
nice tonality thing to him.
00:04:02
I'm trying to tame that.. there's a
little nasal shrill thing that he's got.
00:04:06
Let's see if we can help that out,
a little bit.
00:04:08
These get more aggressive
as you turn the dial, over here. The
DarkEssence is pretty gnarly
and we can turn up the balance
of the process, here.
00:04:17
With him I'll probably start
with this one.
00:04:52
I'm not really feeling it, on this one.
I don't know that we need it anymore.
00:04:56
That one 124 is smashing it pretty hard
and just keeping him in line, just
making him really intense, 'cause
the thing you can do with
compression is:
you can really flatten an emotion
with it
or you can really emphasize and make
it angrier
by using really aggressive compression
and that 124 is certainly no subtle box.
00:05:14
I think that we can carve
a little bit out
I think there's something happening
in the
the low, low end, that we gotta
get rid of.
00:05:20
We'll need to de-ess him a little bit.
So let's..
00:05:23
..actually we'll pop this after
the compressor.
00:06:00
So just taking out a little bit of
mud from down here
250-ish
the region between 2k and 3k is
where you get
the presence in the vocal
and it's just a question of
how much and exactly where.
00:06:11
This seems to sort of work for him
and it's also mitigated that little
edgy thing that he's got, up there.
00:06:16
The next thing I like to do is pop
a little de-esser on him.
00:06:19
My favorite is the Fabfilter,
I've been using it a lot lately.
You can get pretty aggressive with it
and is very transparent.
00:06:27
I just use very simple settings,
almost always the default sort of
works for me.
00:06:32
Let's check that out.
00:06:49
You can hear immediately and
see on this graphic, how
this thing is just selecting the
'S' and knocking them out
and when I first put it on the
threshold was way too low and
it gave him a bit of a lisp.
00:06:59
We definitely don't wanna do that.
00:07:01
We just wanna put those 'S' back in line
with the rest of the vocal.
00:07:04
The interesting thing is to try it
at the end of the chain
after you've done the brightening
EQ, if you have any,
or at the beginning of the chain,
and sometimes I've gotta
knock out so much 'S',
I got one at the beginning
and one at the end.
00:07:16
Compression can sometimes
exacerbate
'S' problems, sibilance problems
and of course you wanna get that vocal
nice and bright
but doing that, of course, brings the
'Ss' back up
so sometimes you need to put a
de-esser at the end of the chain, too.
00:07:28
Let's move it to the beginning and
put it before the compressor
and see if that's better.
00:07:49
Yeah, see: that sounds more natural
to me so I think
we should probably leave it there.
00:07:53
Yeah, it's funny.. when..
00:07:54
..when a vocal is recorded poorly
there's a lot of stuff you gotta do
there's a lot of carving you need
to do to
pull out any kind of room
anomalies,
chesty things,
artifacts of poor mic placement
or poor mic choice
and in this case we had a really nice
mic,
we spent a lot of time getting
the vocal sound formed
and we had him in a very neutral
room,
so there aren't
many of those issues to deal with.
We can hammer him
and he's not bringing up a
plethora of bad
ambience, behind him.
It's a pretty
dead-sounding
vocal.
00:08:29
And that's usually what I go for
when I am recording
you know, a pop kinda thing.
00:08:33
I use those
SE Electronics shield thingies
to keep more room out of the vocal mic
because my philosophy is:
the..
00:08:41
..deader you can make that vocal
the blacker
the background to that vocal
the more in front of the mix you can
get that guy or gal.
00:08:49
Obviously there's a lot of situations
where you don't wanna do that
when you want it to sound organic
and natural and live
like the person singing with the band
rather than in front of
but in this case you wanna get
that vocal
right up on top of everything
on top of the mix, on top of the world,
really.
00:09:06
So I have this post behind my monitor
here, in the studio,
and I imagine the singer's head
sitting on top of that post and
if he's not up there, or she,
then I haven't done my job, yet.
00:09:15
I need to hear every single
word that guy is saying.
00:09:19
Diction is very important,
it's a big part of producing a record
but
you know, if I am just mixing the song
I don't really have any control over
any of that and I gotta take
what I've been to make it the
best that I can.
00:09:31
The next thing, once we have sort of
a vocal sound, is
to figure out what the effect is
gonna be,
what does he need to be surrounded by.
00:09:38
Sometimes it's nothing at all,
bone dry.
00:09:41
Like some Avett Brothers records
I've made, or
Chili Peppers have barely
any effects on the lead vocal,
at all.
00:09:46
But this thing, because the band
is so big,
he needs a little bit of space
around them.
00:09:51
I'm thinking a short bright room
might be the way to go, so
I have my room
send set up
and I usually go with this
Valhalla Room to start. So let's see
what my sort of, you know,
beginning setting is. I have to have
a short bright room,
I made a little preset for myself
at some point.
00:10:10
Let's see if that's the thing or if
we need to go elsewhere.
00:10:38
Rather than that, let's try a little
slap echo
instead.. maybe that'll be
cooler.
00:10:44
So we'll turn this off,
go back to our vocal channel
and bring up our slap send.
00:11:08
You know, it's funny.. that's blending
too much with
the band, so I got another idea.
00:11:13
Let's go back to our room sound
and get a different plug-in going.
00:11:19
A sort of combination of an echo
and a room
this thing called the Cooper Time Cube.
00:11:25
The '70s sort of echo box
that's actually a physical echo box.
It's a bunch of
garden hose coiled up in a box
and you send it
through a speaker, there's a speaker
on one end and a..
00:11:34
..and a microphone on the other. That's
essentially what it is.
00:11:37
And there's another preset on here,
usually I'm against presets,
this is kind of a cool thing.
I think
the 'bright room' on here,
when you set it up to 'Wet Solo',
can work really well.
00:12:23
All right. That is what I want.
00:12:25
Now, the other thing that's
happening here is:
we printed an echo
so let's get that into the game.
I should actually put him
up here.
00:12:34
Get him going out of the lead vocal
outputs
and see what he brings to the party.
00:12:52
So that's gonna be cool,
what we need to do with that is
cut off a bunch of top end.
This is too bright.
00:13:12
Ooh!
That is pretty weird, isn't it?!
You know, the disterning sounds
in a rock song like this,
in a pop song,
is the snare drum and the lead
vocal, so..
00:13:58
we got sort of a..
like a really cool
Travis Barker snare drum that's
super identifiable,
Tom's voice of course is very
distinctive and then we got like
this cool room sound around him
that sort of melds him a little bit with
the drums, 'cause the drums are pretty
roomy in the verse,
subtly, and now Tom's got this
sort of
space around him. So he can
conceivably
be in that living room..
00:14:21
..with Travis. And then, when we get
to the chorus
we'll find something else
to put, in there.
00:14:26
But, speaking of Travis, he's got a
little vocal part
in the verse and let's see what he's
got going on.
00:14:43
Well, whoever recorded that is a jerk!
'cause that is really dark!
We're gonna go with this SSL EQ but
the first thing I should put on here
is, I'm gonna mess him up
a little bit
with some distortion. And this one vocal
I don't mind soloing.
00:15:03
So obviously he wanted to sound
sampled, he was into major
hip-hop stuff, at the time,
so this is sort of a little subtle
part but
kinda mess this up,
a little bit.
00:15:17
Let's see, so that's pretty close.
00:15:36
That panning is kinda wonky,
we did that in the rough mix but
it's kind of annoying, right now.
00:15:41
So we're gonna let him sit on
the right side.
00:15:52
Maybe he can use that little slap
business.
00:16:32
And I think I can smash him up,
a little bit.
00:16:58
Cool!
I mean: more or less, I think our
verses are
pretty happening.
Vocal sounds good to me,
Travis is good,
got a little slap on him
just to sort of push him out of
that speaker, a little bit.
00:17:11
I think we're in good shape.
The only other thing I wanted to try
is see if we can stereo-ize
these delays, a little bit
to make them just bloom a little bit
more.
00:17:20
So, let's just solo those and see
let's see what we can use,
I think there's a setting
in Echoboy
that's like a widener kind of thing.
00:17:35
Stereoizer.
00:18:19
Yeah.
00:18:20
That's what I was looking for,
just to get it out a little bit
from behind the vocal
to spread him out a little bit.
00:18:27
Let's see what we can bring
to the chorus party, here.
00:18:31
We got four vocals
we panned them out, just a little bit
and then a lot on the third and fourth
stack
and then I've put them into a bus,
so actually what we need to do,
we need to get all these effects onto
the bus,
so I don't have to mess around
with sending them off of
each guy.
00:18:48
I can just send them from the whole
combination
of vocals.
00:18:54
And in fact we can turn all of these
off, here.
00:18:58
Deactivate these.
00:18:59
Let's see what happens, here.
00:19:52
So I wanna pan in the first two guys
down the middle, so it's like a lead
and a double
and then third and fourth stack
I split hard left and right.
00:19:59
So we continue to have that
emphasis of the
center with the lead vocal
and then two guys join him
from the sides. So,
we just sort of go from the verse
with the vocal here, to this chorus
with a whole bunch of dudes singing,
so it sort of opens things up,
widens it up,
there's a million ways to handle that,
but..
00:20:16
..this felt right, like when I had him
panned out like this and then like this
I lost my center image and that
kind of
you know.. makes me a little
unnerved
listening to that in a studio.
00:20:26
As a group, I think that we can
squeeze these guys
a little bit.
00:20:31
Let's try the 1176 and see if that
does what we want. We might need
a few things before that.
00:21:06
Obviously we're gonna need some
some de-essing, here.
00:21:08
So I'm gonna do that on each individual
channel
rather than the group.
00:21:13
So that each one can have its own
you know.. personal de-esser,
if you will!
And in fact, I'm just gonna grab
this setting
from the verse vocal
and see
if that works, here.
00:21:26
I wound up taking the side-chain of this
de-esser and opening it up
all the way to the top,
'cause there's occasional little
mouthy bits that the de-esser
will kick,
I want those to be pulled down.
00:21:36
I open up the top of that,
as much as I can.
00:21:38
Let's see if that helps us.
00:22:11
Yes, that helps a lot.
00:22:12
Now, one actual production trick
for
this sort of thing, which I didn't
know at the time
is, when you're stacking vocals
with lots of 'Ss'
is: try to have them sing it
without the 'Ss'.
00:22:22
You know, sometimes you can go
in there and chop off the 'Ss'
if it stays as annoying as it was
earlier,
we might go and do that and see
how it sounds.
00:22:30
So, let's just go back to what we had
right now
and hear that again.
00:22:51
So, we're in good shape, there.
00:22:53
I think we'll go back to my
trusty SSL EQ.
00:22:56
We gotta thicken him up a little bit,
you can hear how that EQ just
put him right up on top,
little bit of mid range, probably
around 2k on this one,
little bit of upper, tippy top
10k shelf,
little bit of low end of 150-ish
and a little cut around 300, that's
usually where the problem area is
on vocals.
00:24:01
What he needs now in the chorus,
some space again, some love
from the atmosphere.
00:24:06
We've got this printed echo,
which I don't know if you noticed, but
I've been clip gaining up so it's
in a competitive volume
for that part,
it may need to get a little bit louder,
still..
00:24:16
..and then, because it's sort of
mono-ish, we spread it out
but it's still not, like,
this massive, like:
'Hey, I'm a chorus!'
so, let's find another echo
to throw into that mix.
00:24:27
Now,
my sort of go-to
sound for choruses,
in a pop song,
is this digital delay
Echoboy has.
00:24:36
And in this sort of song,
I'm probably gonna go with a
quarter note, 'cause we are at
half time,
let's just give it a go and see
what happens.
00:24:57
And so we can concentrate on that,
let's chop out,
let's cut this guy for a moment.
00:27:31
So, I've actually switched
acts
in this echo and rather than doing
that really clean,
crystal,
digital delay emulation, I've gone
with the MemoryMan
emulation, so it's more of a darker,
dirtier kinda thing.
'cause that digital thing
was poking out too much. And this needs
to be, again, like this sort of..
00:27:49
..like dry ice on the floor. Like you
are in an arena and there's this sort of
mist around the vocal, rather than
this
obvious, like: 'Hey, here's an echo!'
So, this sort of disappears into the
guitar mess, a little bit
and I like what that's doing.
00:28:04
And then I went into this
little style-edit thing, here,
and added some diffusion to it
so it makes it sort of reverb-y
and change the wobble to be
from a Square Wave, which came with this
emulation, to this random sort of
movement.
00:28:17
So I think we'll let that roll,
for the moment,
let's slap this other delay, back in,
the one that we printed
and see how they combine.
00:28:39
Perhaps a little bit less of the
'new' echo.
00:28:58
All right.
00:28:59
Two or three more things to
put in:
we got this little low synthesizer
that happens in the chorus
and that sort of just
makes a
big earth-shattering low end
kinda thing.
00:29:10
Let's go listen to what
that guy is doing
and what he brings to the party.
00:29:28
That guy
needs a little squeeze
and a little love.
00:29:32
Let's distort him a little bit so we can
get some harmonics happening.
00:29:37
Usually, for distortion,
like..
00:29:39
..that kinda thing I usually
go to the
Decapitator in the 'pentode' mode
'cause that seems
to give me a lot of harmonic love.
00:29:49
So here's without it.
00:30:05
That's gonna give us a little bit
of excitement.
00:30:07
And then..
00:30:09
give it one of these..
00:30:20
Take away that tippy-top
edge thing that's just noise.
00:30:23
Let's see what he does, now.
00:30:41
Yeah, so you know: we'll just
stick him in there,
he needs to make a little bit
of an impact
but not
ruin Mark's bass part, over there.
Which,
at that moment is just a whole
note anyway, so
it's all sort of adding up together
in a nice way.
00:30:53
The other fun, impactful thing
we got in the chorus is this bell
and its reverb and then a little
tambourine,
that sort of thing, it's a little
flavor
for the chorus, so again,
back to the ProAcs
and let's have a listen to these
guys, over here.
00:31:25
You gotta give it some of that
grainy, grainy top end.
00:32:05
A couple of strange harmonics,
in this one.
00:32:07
Actually let's loose the Decapitator.
00:32:09
Just take off some top end.
00:32:13
There's this weird harmonic
happening down here,
I think these are samples
so, you never know what's gonna
happen with these.
00:32:23
Oh, and that's the echo chamber
we made
and you can hear the buzz
[laughs] from the room!
We made that echo chamber
in the bathroom
and the Pro Tools rig
was in there too, so there's a [laughs]
a little bit of fan noise, bleeding
into that!
So, let's do the same sort of curve.
00:33:42
So, the last I think I guess
we gotta put in the chorus for this
first half of the song to be complete
is this tambourine.
00:33:48
We got a stereo bit of tambourine,
we got a stereo reverb, so let's check
those out and see
what we've got, here.
00:34:10
Something weird that we made.
00:34:12
Let's just see what that sounds like
in the track.
00:34:15
I know that I wanna make this
tambourine
longer, so let's get our
Transient Designer on here, 'cause
that's a bit too spiky,
I can tell already, it's gonna be
something like that.
00:34:45
And I think we can ruin that thing
a little more with our friend
the Decapitator.
00:35:08
The thing I want that reverb
to do is
go really wide.
00:35:12
So let's get our friend
stereo WidthMan going!
Moving right along in the song,
a handful of things left to do.
00:36:20
Let's get the flying saucer guy in here,
this was a cool effect that I made
with my Yamaha analog delay
that I had just bought before that session
and I was dying to use it on stuff,
so there's a handful of places
on this album
where that guy sort of makes
some weird effects,
and this is one of them.
00:36:37
I don't remember what we fed into it,
but there was something happening
that was pretty fun.
00:36:41
Check this out.
00:36:57
[laughs]
That was pretty fun, at the time!
That panning I really do like, so..
00:37:02
..we're gonna leave that
and we're gonna get our little
corrective EQ guy here,
chop off a bit of the top end, I think.
00:37:10
We may need to put him in some
kind of space...
00:37:47
you know, that bright room
is not good for that.
00:37:50
We just need a little
sort of generic space.
00:37:53
I want just like some ambience.
00:38:31
We got that little guy
and then there was an 808
here, that
kind of explodes at the bottom
with that little
alien landing.
00:38:39
Let's check that guy out.
00:42:07
So now we got that B3 added
to the outro.
00:42:09
Just as a pad, you know, kind of
a thickening agent, if you will,
'cause as we saw earlier,
we got these two left and right
guitars
and then that center guy drops out of
you know, chugging along with
the heavy guys
and goes up to an octave part.
00:42:22
We've added a B3 there to sort of
help anchor that
sort of aggressive mid range in that
part.
00:42:28
We got another set of vocals from Tom,
this is sort his little refrain that
happens in the end
and I've put those all onto a bus, here,
so we can actually turn off
all these effects sends.
00:42:40
And those will just happen from here.
00:42:42
'cause I'm lazy!
I like to re-use things,
I like to keep things simple,
I'm gonna copy what we did for the
chorus vocals..
00:42:49
..see what happens when we use that
same sound
on this vamp vocals.
00:42:54
We'll definitely change something
'cause it can't be
identical, obviously if we
EQ in the same way and they're..
00:42:59
..happening at the same time
we're gonna have some interference
from those two parts. So,
we have to make something
on this
set of vocals that's gonna distinguish
it from the other set, when they start
piling up on top of each other
in the last
sort of chorus go around. So,
let's have a listen to those
and see what we got.
00:44:26
So I think these guys can benefit
from
a little bit of distortion/saturation
kinda business.
00:44:32
For vocals I like to do this
Ampex model on the
Decapitator so let's see if we bump
that up a little bit.
00:45:12
So that's definitely helping out!
And we're gonna copy these
de-essers down here, also.
00:45:17
I hope I don't need a de-esser on
this microphone.
00:45:48
Vocal's feeling pretty good, it's
sitting on top of that wall of guitars,
I've put it into the lead vocal crush
to sort of center it, a little bit,
anchor it in the middle,
we've added a little bit of
doubler effect,
so in this session I'm using this
Soundtoys Microshift thing
just a really simple chorus kinda thing.
00:46:05
And then I widened it out, a little bit.
00:46:07
It just thickens that up.
00:46:09
A little bit.
00:46:10
I gotta find something like
some space to put it in
but we don't wanna use that lead
vocal room
that we're using in the verse.
I think we need something
a little more special.
00:46:20
And I'm thinking something splashy
for this.. and..
00:46:23
I don't think it's that Lexicon 224,
I think what could be cool is that
EMT 250.
00:46:29
So many permutations that we can use
it's kinda ridiculous!
I think want something bright,
so let's try that..
00:46:37
..I can hear what this does.
00:47:18
All right, so that's feeling
pretty cool.
00:47:20
Let's see if we can
do an echo on this, also, without
getting too messy.
00:48:48
So I think we got a good party
going here.
00:48:50
The last guy we gotta bring
to the party
but the most important, my good friend,
Mark Hoppus.
00:48:56
So, he's got a little harmony part
on the chorus,
starts out just being the second
and fourth lines and then the end,
it's everywhere!
Let's hear what he's contributing
and get him up into the mix.
00:49:37
He's a little thick-sounding.
No offense, man!
Let's squeeze him a little bit,
to get him
havening and situated with
our friends that are in there, already.
00:49:48
Let's hear everybody, together.
00:51:10
You probably saw there, I was throwing
a bunch of effects at Mark,
similar stuff to what's on the lead
vocal
just to sort of keep him as part of that
sound, to glue him to Tom, there.
00:51:20
Put a little bit of double track
on both
Tom and Mark
in their primary chorus parts.
00:51:26
Also shoved him a little bit into that
lead vocal crush parallel
again, to keep him a little 'floating
on the top', there.
00:51:32
Vocals are sitting loud and proud,
makes me happy,
I think that's pretty much everybody in
the mix, at this point.
00:00:00
So when I get ready to start
automating stuff, I wind up
putting a lot of things away,
hiding a lot of tracks
so that I have less faders to contend
with and scroll through on
the desk, here.
00:00:11
What I do is, I make a couple
of markers.
00:00:15
I call this one my 'All Tracks
View'..
00:00:19
..so no time properties and we wanna
make 'Track Show/Hide'
so we've got everything visible
that we're using
and we can OK that and actually
I make this one
98, all the time.
00:00:31
And then we can get rid of a bunch
of tracks, so now my drums
are basically just one fader,
that VCA is gonna
control the whole drum kit.
00:00:38
So I'm gonna put all this
away,
just hide them, you don't wanna make
them deactivated, of course
'cause we still need them to play
and then because this stuff is not that
important
I'm gonna stick this at the bottom
of the session, below
the vocals.
00:00:55
'cause we don't really care
about those.
00:00:57
The bass is going to this sub-group
so I can hide the bass tracks,
I can hide the Aphex, 'cause that's
a post fader send.
00:01:04
We have all these guitars,
keyboards, lead vocals,
Travis' BV,
we don't need Tom's
vocals anymore.
00:01:14
And we don't need
the other Tom vocals.
00:01:18
And again this is just hiding them
so things are a little more
streamlined
and I can move about the session
much more easily.
00:01:25
We're now down to,
I think, 16 faders.
00:01:28
Yeah, more or less.
00:01:29
Plus a few for those percussion
elements.
00:01:31
They're not gonna really do too
much movement.
00:01:33
Really the automation for me is..
00:01:35
..is about creating that emotional
roller coaster, so
the song goes on this journey.
The arrangement is great
so the balance front-to-back,
in a static manner,
conveys the whole song, it's fine
like, you know..
00:01:47
..it's a good rough mix
but now,
is when we're gonna sort of
amp things up and make it really slam.
00:01:55
So I'll put my Drum VCA up here,
at the top.
00:01:57
So my first fader is always my drum
group.
00:01:59
I can always bank back and forth
and I know that when I grab that first
fader it's gonna be for the drums.
00:02:05
We must make our group,
a little marker, and we can call this
'Mix Tracks View'
and hit OK. So now, if we need
to look at other tracks
I can just hit '.98'
and he's good to go.
00:02:18
One should be '99'.
00:02:21
I always make the start of the song
marker number 1
and the end of the song
marker number 2 so I can
always go to the top
and when I want to print it
I can hit '.1.', '.2.',
and I have highlighted the whole
track.
00:02:32
Ready to go. Easy.
Very small trick but
Makes my life nice when..
every song I work on
I can go back to the top
with just a couple keystrokes.
00:02:41
The first I like automating in a song
like this
is the drums, I sort of make
the arc of
the volume of the drums
through the whole song and then
everything else just sorta follows that
and surfs along, so..
00:02:51
..we got all the drums assigned
to the VCA
and we can just crank to that.
00:02:55
Usually I do it in one pass
unless I mess something up, but I've
memorized this song, pretty well.
And I know
pretty much where everything
needs to go. So,
without further ado!
Pop everything into 'Touch'.
00:05:51
So, drums feel good when I make them
explode into those choruses,
gonna make sure all the fills are
just popping out like they should be
so that big fill, I think in the second
chorus, the..
00:06:00
[sound] like that's gotta be
fucking loud! So,
I think we achieved that,
but - you know..
00:06:05
it's an iterative process so I'm gonna
do the drums, I'm gonna
do the bass and the guitars
and the vocals
and then of course we just nip'n'tuck
things as we go along.
00:06:13
We'll get to as much of that as we can
and
get as final a mix as we can.
00:06:18
It's never really done, you know?
[laughs]
We can come back to this, next week
and it's like: 'Oh!
Maybe we should do a little more
of that!'
And that's what recalls are for, but..
00:06:25
..you know, you follow your instincts
you do the best you can and
what you think is right
and you step away,
come back, fix it some more.
Actually what we're gonna do is
we're gonna group all the
guitars together
so I can sorta
ride those together.
00:06:44
And I am gonna cheat even more
so we can have this intro
really
explode, we're gonna turn this
guitar down a little bit at the front.
00:07:53
So the drums I do top to bottom
and the rest of the stuff
it's kinda like a sausage, you wanna
squeeze it from
one end to the other, to make
sure that it's all
working together, I suppose.
So,
I take a lot of breaks from this
part and make sure that the parts,
you know, you spend a lot of time
on the intro and then the
verse and then the chorus, make sure
that those transitions are working.
00:08:12
And we'll come back here for just
a second,
make sure this is happening right at
the front of the song.
00:09:29
Yeah.
00:09:53
When we made that phaser sound
we wanted it to be like a
dive-bomber going into the chorus.
00:09:57
Sort of ride that guy up.
00:09:59
Make sure he just: bam!
..it just drops that chorus!
So here's a part
I thought I was gonna make this louder
but it shouldn't be
but I think what we need to do
in that little, tiny interlude,
as annoying as it is,
we gotta automate a little EQ
to make that pop
and do something interesting
just for a split second.
00:13:02
I'm gonna rock a FilterFreak, here.
00:13:04
Make that guitar small.
00:13:09
Go with a high pass filter..
00:13:26
I'll automate that.
00:17:54
Basically what I'm doing is
sort of manipulating
that static balance
and making things just sort
of bounce, like
I wanna be bouncing in my chair
when the..
00:18:02
..when the handoff happens to the
chorus, I wanna be like:
yes! You know? And like..
00:18:07
..jumping up and down like
people in the stadium, so..
00:18:10
that's what gets me off during
mixing and makes me really excited, just
making everything sort of
swell and move and have excitement
to it.
00:18:18
You know, generally I start with the
drums
and you can see there's some..
00:18:21
there's some fairly big rides,
a couple or three dB
going into choruses to make sure
that shit just drops!
And same things with the bass,
the guitars..
00:18:29
..you know, the way this particular song
drops into the chorus is like
everyone just hits a diamond, hits a
whole note, there.
00:18:35
And we want that to just be
loud and proud
but let the vocals poke through it
so sometimes I'll push the front of that
chord and pull it back
and then the vocals go away and that
chugging part
comes in so I'm gonna push him
up, again.
00:18:47
They're not huge, massive moves,
as you can see
but you can feel they make
a big difference
to what's happening, what's important,
what's audible, what's not
and what you're concentrating on,
'cause
there's a famous person who said: 'we
don't walk away humming the drum fill.'
So, I want vocals up front
and then when there's no singing
you want something else to happen,
'cause if it's just sits there,
static, it's like: 'ok, well..
00:19:11
that loud guy singing to me up front
has gone away.. so..
00:19:15
for a split second, I might be bored!'
[laughs]
..and God forbid that happens!
So,
bring the guitar part up,
bring
a bass fill up, bring a drum fill,
something that's happening
can be
pushed just a little bit
to keep that low from happening.
You want, like,
once the song comes on, you want
energy happening from
somewhere, all the time.
00:19:33
During these rides I'm making a lot
of little, tiny
sort of micro moves.
00:19:38
If we zoom in on the drums, for example,
we can see
you know.. there's a lot of little,
like peaks and valleys, little bumps
and these are just sort of helping to
exaggerate
all the exciting things that are
happening
to help the groove push,
to help the dynamics, the explosiveness,
'cause remember, on our bus we got
a bus compressor sort of keeping a lid
on things
that keeps it even
and I wanna push into that,
push against it a little bit.
So that's something exciting
pushes through that lid,
so to speak,
and you know, leaps out and
kicks you in the face. So,
in this case, when that chorus
drops
everything just goes like..
swarms up
and because, again, how that..
00:20:18
for that chorus hits,
with that whole note
it hits and then it sits
and then it comes back
at you with this rhythmic part
and that's what all these rides
are sort of helping to emphasize.
00:20:30
So, to show you what this
automation is doing
I'm gonna play you
the beginning of the song through
the end of the first chorus
with all my automation moves
and then I'll roll back,
I'll turn off all the automation,
there's a button here
that says: 'Auto Suspend'.
00:20:43
Turns everything off
and we can hear what happens
when you just have a static mix, so
check it out: here's with all the
automation, up through the first chorus.
00:22:19
You can hear, when we get to that
chorus, it's just kinda like..
00:22:21
..you know..
00:22:22
..it's a chorus, clearly, 'cause
things change
but it's not like
jumping up in level. And when it gets to
the chorus in this kinda song, it needs
to just come out and kick you
in the face.
00:22:31
So, that's what we are achieving
with the automation,
feels good to me, I'm at a point
where
I would send this off to the band, now.
So,
I'm gonna print it,
you can see here, on my print track,
I've got this little Pro-L thing,
and this is to make the mix loud
when I send it off to the band, so they
hear it as you would, you know, after
a little bit of mastering,
I shoot for around, between
-10 and -8
on this meter, here, at the peak
of the song, at the ending.
00:22:58
Let's print the mix, we'll listen down
and
we'll do this little loudness thing.
00:25:48
So when I'm printing a mix like this
at the end of the day
I'm printing it without
any of this loud stuff that you see
here, on the screen.
00:25:55
This is straight off my Burl A/D
converter.
00:25:57
I make sure that I got at least
a couple dB of headroom
so the mastering guy has something
to work with.
00:26:01
And then I listen through the Pro-L.
00:26:04
Once I've printed it, I'll take that mix
and I'll copy it down to the track
below
while the track above
still has the Pro-L on it.
So I dial that in,
get the settings I like, make it as loud
as I feel is necessary
and then I take that setting
and I copy it down
to an Audiosuite version of that
plug-in.
00:26:21
I go to the channel plug-in,
copy the settings,
and then I go to the
Audiosuite and I paste it, in there
and then I process
the copy of the mix that's on the track
below.
00:26:35
That goes through its thing..
and..
00:26:38
I name that with an exclamation
point at the end.
00:26:41
So it denotes 'this is the loud track!',
right?
Exclamation point for 'Loud!'
And then I'll export that as a
16bit 44.1 file
as an mp3 at 192k
and send those off to the client.
00:26:55
Some people like getting an email
with mp3
so they can hear it on the phone.
00:26:59
Other guys like to download a CD-quality
version of it, so they can hear it
in all its glory.
00:27:06
It was really fun to go back to the
song, it's been
a long, long, long time since I heard
this track.
00:27:12
I make it a point not to really listen
to my own mixes and
my own recordings and things like that,
it's..
00:27:16
..it's an interesting thing when you
go through
a career making lots of music,
you know, tastes change, skills change,
processes change.
00:27:24
I certainly wouldn't have mixed it
like this, had I had
the opportunity to do it,
at the time,
it would have been a different
experience and, you know,
different methods and things like that.
00:27:31
It's great to bring these tracks
into my own studio
and have a crack at it.
00:27:35
It's pretty cool! I'm gonna send this
off to Mark and see what he thinks.
00:27:38
That'll be pretty fun!
Thanks to him for allowing us to use
this track
and I hope you guys enjoyed it
and got some
useful ticks and tricks and
tips and
ticks and stuff like that if you go
out and play in a field, so..
00:27:51
take it to your studio, try it out
and let us know how you do!
Au revoir!
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Ryan Hewitt is a Grammy winning engineer, mixer and producer with a credit list spanning all popular genres of music.
Ryan found his love for music and recording working along side his father, famed remote recording engineer David Hewitt.
After earning a degree at Tufts University in Boston, Ryan moved to New York City to work at Sony Music Studios. Opportunities then took Ryan to Los Angeles where he began working with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rick Rubin. This led to Ryan engineering and mixing the Peppers’ multiple-Grammy-winning double album, Stadium Arcadium.
Rick and Ryan have continued to work together on a number of projects with artists such as Angus and Julia Stone, Brandi Carlile, Lady Gaga and Johnny Cash, as well as three albums and three live DVDs for The Avett Brothers.
Blink 182
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Lumineers
The Avett Brothers
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Blink 182 formed in the suburbs of San Diego, California around guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge, bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus, and drummer Scott Raynor. Originally known as simply Blink, the band debuted in 1993 with a self-released EP, Fly Swatter. After releasing the album Buddha in 1994, the trio signed to Grilled Cheese/Cargo and released Cheshire Cat the following year. The threat of a lawsuit from a similarly named Irish band forced them to change their name to blink-182.
Obvious
CLICK_HEREMusic CreditsObvious
By Blink 182
Blink 182 formed in the suburbs of San Diego, California around guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge, bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus, and drummer Scott Raynor. Originally known as simply Blink, the band debuted in 1993 with a self-released EP, Fly Swatter. After releasing the album Buddha in 1994, the trio signed to Grilled Cheese/Cargo and released Cheshire Cat the following year. The threat of a lawsuit from a similarly named Irish band forced them to change their name to blink-182.- Artist
- Blink 182
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