Mixing For Music Producers

1. Introduction & Welcome!: Hey, I'm Dylan, I'm your instructor and thank you so much for your interest in this course, mixing for Music Producers. So let me tell you a little story. At a certain point in my music career, I realized a somewhat painful but very important fact. And that fact is this, your mixes don't sound good. Nobody's going to care about how cool your productions are. I felt like I was spending all this time learning sound design, synthesisers, sampling all these different cool music production techniques. And I thought that my productions were really creative and interesting. But the comments that I kept getting back from clients were things like, yeah, with a proper mix, sound really cool or I can't really hear everything, or it sounds a little messy, not fun things to hear really hurt a lot for me. I was thinking, Look, we're going to send this off to a mixer. It's going to get mixed, It's going to sound great. But what I realized was the admin, if we are sending the stems off to be professionally mix, if your song isn't translating to your client, they're not going to be excited, they're not going to push it to be released. And then that who'll production that you made is just going to sit on your hard drive and not go anywhere. Or if you're making demos to send to labels, they're not gonna give you the time of day if your mixes don't sound good, or if you're just releasing their own music, people are gonna think this just doesn't sound professional. So that's when I realized to devote a lot more time and energy to making my mixes sound better. Now I don't know about you, but I never signed up to be a mixer. I wanted to be a producer. I don't want to mix songs, but what I realized is that my productions needed to have that really professional radio ready mix in order to communicate the power of the productions that I was making. So even if you are sending off your songs to be mixed, or if they're just demos, or if you're just trying to make sure that the artists that you're working with understands your creative direction. You really do have to have your mixes sound better than they do. You're here right now watching this video. You probably already know that that's the case for your tracks as well. So if that's you, I'm glad you're here. Let's go all the way. Sign up for this course and let's get your mixes at the level that they need to be so that people can really hear creative, amazing, cool music production that you've been doing. Don't let a poor quality mics limit the impact that your productions can have. Make sure that your mixes are radio ready so that people can hear the creative vision that you've worked so hard to create. I really hope you sign up for this course and I'll see you in the first lecture. Thanks. 2. Starting a New Mix Session: Now it's time to start talking about setting up your mix. So in this course I'm going to assume that most of my students, if not all of my students, are producing their own music, and they want to mix it after they're done producing it. In other words, you're not a mixer getting, you know, folders of raw audio from from the producer, and they're asking you to mix it for them. You know, for an outside client. Obviously, a lot of the mixing topics that will cover in this course would apply to that situation as well, because we are talking about mixing, but there a few things that are sort of specific to those of us who are producing our own music. And then we want to go on to mix it. Okay, so I'm just gonna make that assumption. And if if these things don't apply to you, then that's that's totally fine. Um, so, uh, let's say that we have a project going a production project going, and now we've pretty much decided that it's done. Ah, we've added all the instruments we want and everything's looking really good. And now we want to move on to the mixed age. Well, it this because at this point we have a few different options. And, ah, really three different options for those of us who are producing the music as well. And I just want to go through them quickly. Option one, which I do not recommend. And I'll explain why option Number one is just to mix inside your main project. So you have a project like this going and you do all your EQ you and compression and you're mastering and everything in the same project. And then you go. Now, I do not recommend that option. And here a few reasons why Number one is that once you start mixing, it's almost impossible to resist the temptation to go in and change Midi instruments, change settings on different sense or change some different audio things. And once you go back and you start changing too many things, it's sort of undone. Does all the work that you've done on your mix already, and then you're basically starting over on so it will sort of keep you in this endless loop of tweaking and then remixing and tweaking and remixing, and you'll never finish a project. And believe me, I know that by experience, another reason why I don't recommend that is when ah, you are starting and completely new mixed down project. You know your actual mixed session in your d A W. It gives you a new fresh perspective on your work. Gives you a knopper to nitty to really listen to each of the individual tracks, figure out what's needed, what's not needed when you're in the same production window, the in sort of mindset that you've been working with, it's sort of easy to become like inoculated two different sounds. You don't even really hear them anymore because you've been listening. Uh, you've been listening, you know, for hours and hours and hours to this project. And it's really easy to Teoh. Sort of overlook certain parts or different flaws that you that you need to address. So starting a new project will really help deal with that. Okay, so that's why I don't I don't go with option one. I don't recommend option one. I haven't done that in a long time for those exact reasons that I just described. And then option two would be to save your project as a new project and just call it mixed down. And this is what I'll do sometimes, Um, but not what we're going to do for this course. But I'll just sort of explain what it is. So I have my production track here when rather than mixing inside my production track, I'll actually save my project as a new file name and just call it mixed down number one at the end, you know, so you can just hit ah, file, Save as and just call this at the end, mixed down one in case I have more than one mixed down, and I could just save it like that, and it's a new project. It's exactly the same as my production project, but I'm sort of taking a step back from the production side and moving on to mixing that way. If I I will sometimes do that on Lee if I've done a lot of, you know, quote unquote pre mixing during the production stage. If I have a lot of effects on the different instruments, a lot of sort of extreme plug in work going on, then I will sometimes do that. But again, that doesn't solve the problem of giving you a fresh perspective. And also, you know doesn't doesn't force you, Teoh. It's it allows you to go back in tweak things which sometimes can really, really lengthen your mix time. Ah, and so you know, it's sort of up to you. I do that sometimes if I'm really happy with my like, quote unquote Premix. Ah, during the production, I will do that every now and then. But in this course, we're going to choose option number three, which is to export everything as audio files and just start from a fresh, raw audio file mix perspective. So the way that we do that is the first of all you'd want to make sure that you're beginning and ending of your songs air lined up. So make sure that this there's nothing that comes before the beginning of the song here and that the end of the song. You know, this little marker this flag at the end ends after everything else has you know, all the audio has stopped things like just a simple you know, brackets on the beginning and end like that. Then we can go to file export and export all tracks is audiophiles. Now we have a dialogue here, and you can create a new desktop folder or, you know, wherever you want, create a new folder for all these audio files to go into, and we'll grab those in the next lecture, then down here with the details. You want to save them as waves. Um, I always do 24 bit. I think 32 bit float is unnecessary. Um, and so I do 24 bit, and then you have to decide if you want to buy fat bypass your effect plug ins again. This sort of depends for me when I'm doing this. Depends on how extreme my plug and work is. If I have a lot of like serious auto tune going on or really extreme distortions and things that I really like and I want to keep, then I'll keep all my plug ins, Um, or you can choose to bypass all your effect, plugs it plug ins and just start from a really fresh just the raw audio with none of your plug ins working because, as as you're producing, you meet. You may know that as you're producing you know if you may add a really heavy distortion on a synth part, and it's like part of the sound. And so you make you know, you might want to keep that as you move onto the mixed age and just print it as that sound with the plug. In other things, though, if you're just using, like maybe simple delays or whatever and it's not really essential to the spirit of the song that you're working with, then you might want to bypass it. Another thing that you can do to takes a little more time obviously would be to go through all of your instruments here and just decide if you want to keep these plug ins or not. You can just bypass them here on the channel strip itself, and then you can. That way you can include the essential plug ins that you have, but not the ones that maybe aren't necessary. Okay, let's go back to our window here. The include volume pan automation button isn't probably isn't too necessary. Do you even discuss because I'm guessing that at this point you don't have a lot of volume or pan automation. You may have other automation parameters going with, you know, with your sense or with your channel accused or what not. Um, so you know that Just decide if you want to keep that or night or if you want to do it in the mix stage and then for the normalize, um, options here you have off overload. Protection on Lee are on. And I will usually do overload protection on Lee or off just so that if I'm if I am getting some clipping can reduce the gain of that audio file once it's bounced. Okay, then you hit save, and that will export all of your audio files to a that folder that you created in in little next lecture, we will open up a new mix down project and start setting up our mixed session. See, there 3. Importing your Audio Files: and hello, students. Welcome back in this lecture, we are going to import our exported audio stems. So in the previous lecture, I explained that when you're starting a mix, you gonna want to start a new mixed session in your Daw. And there are many reasons for that. Namely, uh, sort of gives you a fresh, clear perspective on it. It reduces the temptation to go back and change synth settings or different instruments and things like that. All right, so you've opened up just a new blank session here and now it's time to bring in those exported audio stems from our production session. So up here in the upper right hand corner, we have the browser, and we can choose between project media and all files with ease. Three tabs here. Now, we put our stems for this song on the desktop in a folder. So I'm just clicking on it here. And if you don't see that browser window, you can click on the home Icahn here, and that will bring up your just your normal hard drive the folders here. So if you have them, if you exported your file somewhere else, you could just browse through and find them there. And so once you have them all here, grab them all just command command A will select all of them. And you could just bring them to the very start of the song Bar one. And, of course, create new tracks because we want new separate tracks for all of the different audio files . Now, this dialogue asks you if you want to import the tempo information and we can say yes and it also will ask me if I want to import the markers. Um, I do want to do this, um, normally, but I'm gonna show you how to set up markers in case you haven't done that in your production session. Okay, so I'm just gonna say, don't import. But if you've already put them in your production session, then yes, you would want to import the markers go. That's a lot faster. So I'm just going to say, Don't, though for the purposes of explaining how to set up markers in this course, and it will slowly add the audio files. Okay, if I zoom out a little bit, you'll seeing We have all of the audio files in place and they're all beginning at the beginning, which is good. And if I hit the letter F, I can minimize that browser windows. I can have a better look here. Now. We could see we have 69 tracks are audio all of our audio files here. And, um, a couple things to mention. First of all, of this would be a good time to save this. So I'm just going to save it right now and just call it whatever and mixed down one like that. Okay, Now our project is saved, and so we're good to move forward. And now a few things that you might notice first is that all of the audio stems are plugged in here in alphabetical order. OK, so we're going to reorder these later, but you can see it starts off with a is and moves down. Um, also that it includes all the silence in the audio file so you could see right here with strings. Nothing comes until the end here, and that's fine too. We're gonna deal with silence a little bit later. And when the audio is done, when there's no more audio, the stem will just end there. So the region only goes up to the point of its last audio. And, um also, if you open up the mixer window by selecting X, you'll see that all of your fader zehr set to zero. Okay, so that's good. That's totally fine. So that's all for now. We've imported Theo audio stems that we exported from our production session, started a new mixed session and brought them all in line and they're all lined up on their individual tracks. And now we're ready to move on to organization. See you in the next lecture. 4. Naming Tracks: Hey, everyone, welcome back in this lecture. We're going to talk about organization. So if I look at this session right here, it's almost impossible to see what's going on. Obviously, I could see some wave form movement, but the names are all messed up, or some of them are messed up. Some of them are unclear. I named them, you know, while I was producing in this. It's weird way that doesn't make any sense to me now. So the first step in setting up the organization of your mix is to name your tracks, and you may be saying, Oh, you know, well, my project doesn't have 70 tracks, and I know what that one audio 47 is. Well, that's fine, but I'm just warning you that if you let this sit for a week and you try to come back and you're trying to remember what different things are, and you have to solo them to hear them every time, it's going to drive you crazy, so it will save you a lot of headache in the future, just to name everything properly. This is also a good time to go through each individual track and um, listen for weird stuff. So every now and then when you're exporting files Or maybe when you recorded a guitar part of something and you just hit this really weird note that you couldn't hear in the production. But if you solo it and listen to it, then you'll hear something weird. Um, and what I like to dio. So just to do this methodically, I'll just start at the top. I haven't organized these the way I want them yet. They're still in alphabetical order, but I'll just start at the top and just give a 11 through listen of each track soloed. It takes a while, obviously. But once you do that, you're discovering a ah what the track is so you can name it properly. B if there's any weird clipping or digital sounds, or like breath sounds that are awkward in the vocal tracks or bad notes in the guitar part or whatever, and you can you know, you can knock those out and see. Ah, the other thing is really cool is sometimes you'll discover like a little magical moment that, um, you hadn't really heard before. Maybe it's like just the singer talking a little bit in between takes or it's like an accident of a of a guitar part that that you didn't intend or that the guitarist didn't intend. But it sounds really cool, and you don't didn't really hear it in the production part. But if you solo the instrument, you'll pick that out. And what I like to do is if I find that thing, I will just crop it out and I will put it in a new track and give it a new color just to remind myself, Hey, this thing is kind of cool. Maybe you should look at it later, you know, And that way you can include just make sure that it pops out a little bit more and you don't forget what it was or where it waas. Okay, so I literally will go through and listen to each individual track. If I know if I obviously know that, like for this ad lib track. I know that nothing happens here until the ends. I'm not gonna listen to the whole three minute song because I just know that this this is all just pure silence. Right? But some of these you know the little things were happening in different places, and you just want to make sure you go through and listen to at least where the sound is supposed to be. You can go through and listen to just those parts and make sure that nothing weird is happening. And if there's something cool, you can grab that and don't forget about it. So I'm not gonna make you sit here and watch me go through a name. Everything. I will do that myself. You can do the same thing and name it something appropriate to you. Um, there are some standards that I have, Like for guitars. I'll always started with GTR for guitar and things like that, um on Fox will usually start with vox. I don't think I did in the production. Yeah, but what I'll do for vocals will start him with box and then, you know, verse one box chorus, different things, like, you know, that's sort of my naming procedure, but you may have your own, and you can sort of develop your own, um, to name a track. All you dio is double click over here, and you can just It's already named but it just named it new Loop to And, um, this one could be pad one is You can see some of these have these, like, bounce in place, things that I was working. I was printing toe audio pad to. And then once you have them named, you can select the tracks right, click the audio region and just select name region by track. That way it's consistent with what you have here, pad to, and it says it on the audio region itself. And then when I open my mixer window here, down here in the bottom of my channel strip it says Pat to there as well. So everything's named consistently and you could see it all very clearly. And that makes everybody happy. Now. One other thing that I don't often use just because most of my songs happen to have a 1,000,000 tracks in them. And it's so it just takes me too long. But if I have a five, a song that doesn't have 70 tracks Ah, what I will do sometimes is used icon. So over here on the left right now. Since these air all audio regions, we just imported them all all of these haven't icon of of Ah, just a audio icon, this blue like wave file. But you can, um So, for example, if I wanted to, um, use a Nikon on my guitar lead here, I can right click on this little icon and opens up a Nikon window here, and you can go in. It has categories, so I can choose guitar, and it's pretty detailed. There's a sitar, and you can decide if this is like, you know, uh, the screaming like Marshall Stack right here, or it's like a more tweedy kind of guitar sound. You can sort of put that in, even has different cart guitars like a Telecaster or an acoustic guitar o R blues guitar, so I don't ever get that crazy with it. But you could just put guitar and that I little icon is pretty easy for you, for you know, your eye to catch when you're looking at your arrange window here. So again, I don't typically use icons all the time, But if it's helpful to you, then go ahead and drop those in. So there's a guitar ones. Do another example. Um, like, this is just our kick drums. I can just right click and go to drums and just give it, you know, like one kick like that. So, um icons names, So go through, name your tracks. And in the next lecture, I will show you how I organize them. See there. 5. Color Coding Your Tracks: hello and welcome back once again. So now that we've got all of our tracks named properly in ways that make sense to us and the audio regions themselves are named properly as well because we named them according to the track name. And then in our mixer window, all the names are set properly as well. Now it's time to organize the tracks. So, uh, different people have different systems for this. You may develop your own system that makes most sense to you, but I'll just explain it the way that I do it. And maybe that would be helpful to you. So the way I do it is starting from the top on the very top will have all my drums below. The drums will have base below the base. All have guitars, you know, acoustic and electric, if you have both and then under the guitars all have sort of the acoustic type instruments , even if their sample based, but, you know, strings, piano organ, things like that. Under that, I'll have my synth instruments and then under the synth instruments, I'll have all my vocals, and I break up each of those larger groups into sort of their own sub groupings, which I'll explain in just a second as we do it on the drums. So I will start on the drums. So what I'll literally do is take my germ pieces and bring them to the very top. So here's a kick. Here's another kick on. I won't worry about getting in these in any kind of order yet. And just making sure that every drum instrument is up at the very top of the window. That includes percussions, hats, clap, snare, filter dot loop, filter, bridge, kick, filter, snare verb loop one, hats crash. Um, uplift that can go up there. What else do we have? Another uplift shaker. A boom, um, crash ride Clap too. Tim Marine down lift. Move that up. And I believe that's all we've got for the drums. Yeah, so I think that's all we have. If I find something later, I can move it around. And now that they're all up at the top, what I'll do is will sort of put them in order of importance. So starting with kicks, snares, symbol and then other percussion elements towards the bottom. So if my main kick at the top. I have a filter kick that can go below that. Then let's put the snare after that. Then I have a reverse near that can go up. Clap one clap, too. Hats can go after that, then adds to kicks in their bridge. Can maybe go up here. I have ah, reverb snare that can go up, Tom. Then maybe some symbols. I have a crash ride and a crash that can go above that. Here's a snare filter with a dotted delay. Loop filter. Bridge can go up here. I could put the loops in order. Loop one loop to loop Filter Bridge. Then maybe some of the FX sounds. I have the down lift. I have uplift one in two, then some other percussions shaker. Uh, where's the team? Marine? Here it is, But that below Shaker Boom. A little jump, Phil. Tom's for the bridge. That can go there. And it's not like the most important thing to have these in a specific order. Other than knowing where things are in terms of, you know, the most important ones at the top, and then sort of going down in, you know, less important towards the bottom. Okay, that's what idea. Then what I like to do is, um so, yeah, I'll do this with all of the different groups of instruments. I won't make you sit and watch me do that for all the different instrument groups. But I've just done this with all the drums. And then after that, I could do the base instruments. You know, the bass synth basins based live and go after all the drums. And then let's just let's just do the guitar so I can put all the guitars, um, up there and you can select multiple tracks by hitting shift to select multiple. Or you can hit command to Dio to select multiple tracks that are not in succession. So I could just take all my guitars and put them after the base, and I think that should be it right. And then what I'll do is all color clothed the tracks after organizing them. In this way, if you hit options, seeing it brings up your color palette, and now we can color the tracks so I'll take all of the drums. Just select them all goes to Tom's Bridge, and they'll color them red. So just starting at the beginning of the rainbow. And then sometimes if I want to be even more detailed, I will take all of the percussion elements. So everything other than you know, the standard drum kit and you can color those a subtly different shade of red like maybe this kind of red orange color. So now I know that these air, my main drum instruments and this more all orange color is sort of the percussion group. Then I could take my base and make those are orange just going down the rain, Boehm. Then I could take all of my guitars and I could make those yellow like that. And then if you want to say, OK, maybe the solo needs some treatment. I know that later on I need to work on the guitar solo. Ah, which is here. So I forgot to name these guitar, so I'll just change the name quickly here. So that's another reason toe have, you know, a standardized naming procedure. Because sometimes you do miss things like that. So color these yellow but me. Okay, here's the other solo. So that is the main solo track. I have, like, five guitar solo drugs. So we'll color this one yellow, but maybe a different shade. Because I know that I need to look at it later. And that that way I know that, you know, I can address it later. And so that way, you're just getting everything organized and color coded really nicely. And believe me, it helps you as you move along in your mix. So go ahead and group all of your audio tracks into their different instrument groups. And you could be as detailed as you like with this. Ah, and then go ahead and color code. Those get him all in order in a way that makes sense to you in in the next lecture, I'll show you how to remove silence from your audio files. I will see you there. 6. Removing Silence from Your Audio Regions: and welcome back. Now we've got our tracks all organized and color coded by the category of the audio type source. So we have the drums on the top. Then we have percussion that we've based guitars, acoustic type instruments, synth instruments and then vocals at the very bottom and evoke. I've broken these groups up into sort of subtly different color variations. So, like my vocals, I have, like, the main vocals here on the top. There's sort of a darker blue, and then the more ad Libs or vocal affect things chance, you know, those are in a different shade of blue. And then with my drums, I have my main drum elements and red and the percussion elements in like a more orange color like that. Okay, And again, you can be as detailed as you want with this, it's up to you. So now it's still kind of hard to see what the structure of the song is, because you have all this silence within all your tracks, as you could see here. So I'm gonna show you how to remove silence. And there are two ways to do this. One would be just visually going and chop up your audio regions and just sort of shape them manually in the way that you do that is with the marquee tool. So if you hold command, you can see this plus sign comes up with your cursor, and you can just literally double click and split up your audio region, and you can just sort of do it a little bit before a little bit after each audio. Each wave form that you see. Then you can just go in and delete thes periods of silence. And that way you can much more clearly see where things were happening and what the structure of the song is. So that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is logic has a remove silence engine. So if I click for example, on this click kick filter audio region, and if you use the hot G control exit, opens up the strip silence window here and you could see here that it has like a visual readout of your wave forms and you have some controls here that you can use to adjust. What kind of silence is being stripped? No, I only take the threshold down to about 1% and I'll take the minimum time to accept this silence more about one second. That's fine because, as you can see, if it's down here at 1/10 of a second, then it wants to chop up each individual. You know, kick hit. Um, and we don't want that. We want that whole group of wave forms, you know, to be one audio region. It wouldn't really make sense to break every transient up into separate audio regions. That's kind of a nightmare. So I'll just do one second and you can increase the pre attack time a little bit. And ah, that that'll just sort of give you some pre roll there. In that way, you're not chopping off any of your way for him. Hit okay? And it will break it up like this for you already. Now, this isn't necessarily my favorite way to do it. It's a little bit faster than doing it manually. But the only problem with it is that sometimes, ah, you know, since you're using one second of pre attack time, then it can get a little weird because it doesn't start like on the bar itself. and it just doesn't line up perfectly. So it's just something to think about. It's up to you. If that bothers you, that's just something you can you can deal with. I usually would just chop it up manually. Ah, and it doesn't have to be perfect because you just need to know where these different sections are great and you know you're cleaning up your window and making it a lot easier to see everything. So I'll just usually chop it up myself so you can go ahead and do that and you'll see that this will vastly improve your sort of visual perception of the track in its arrangement. In the next lecture, I'll show you how to create markers. I'll see there. 7. Setting Up Markers: All right, Welcome back. So I've gone through and have stripped the silence for all of my audio regions. And as you can see, now we have something that looks much more like an actual arrangement. We could sort of see where the density of the tracks are, and those are choruses. And, you know, rather than just this entire long audio region for each track for this, you know, for this one kick filter bridge part we know it's just happening right there. So now we can go in and create an arrangement using markers. And if you haven't done this during your production session, then now would be a great time to do it. Because it helps save a ton of time. And when you just know exactly where the choruses and where the bridge begins and you know , etcetera, that just helps a lot. So up here, above the tracks, you have a disclosure disclosure triangle, which will disclose some of the global track components. You have arrangement, marker, signature and tempo, and you can adjust what you see here by right clicking anywhere on on this track header section and you can select hide arrangement, hide markers show movie. If you're scoring to a movie time signature, you can show or hide all of that stuff. OK, but we're really just working with the marker right now, So what I will do is I'll just sort of play through from the beginning of the song. There's a couple of ways that you can add your markers. The first way is you can just click this plus sign, and you can create a marker that way. Or you can right click on the ruler on this row. This marker row that's in line with this marker, and you can create a marker that way and that will create it wherever the play head is. So if you're listening through and you know your chorus hits right here, you can right click and create another marker there, okay? Or the third way to do it is to just create 1st 1 which be intro like that. It's playing it through, which technically starts here on bar to actually Streets of. Now I know that the verse starts here on Bar six because that's where the vocals come in. So, uh so the last way to create these is to use option. I hold option click and drag this first marker over. Now I have a duplicate marker which I can double Click that name and just call it verse One . The one whatever you wanna call it Theo? Now? Bar 14. There we have another change. This is Ah, you know, sort of depends on what your naming system is. You can call this verse two or like verse one B, because it's kind of the second half of that first verse. Whatever makes most sense to you. You know, I usually do Verse one B. There's porous one. I think this would be what I call usually the post course, which is kind of the section in between the chorus and then the next verse. Theun, Here's verse two just like that. So just like that, I go through the entire song and I just said it. My markers this way. And you know you can do that yourself. I won't make you listen to me do the entire marker arrangement. But one thing to note at this point, that's really cool is that now that you have these marker set up and you have disclosed these global tracks. You can actually use the markers to quickly quickly create cycle loops. So if I just want to loop the second half of this first verse, I can click this marker and it's white and you can see if selected it. And I could just drag it up to the cycle window up here on It creates a cycle region for that verse. One B. Same thing. If I want to do that with the Post chorus, I could just drag it up rather than creating your own cycle region. It just saves you a couple of seconds, but it is actually really helpful. I use it all the time, right? Makes it really quick. Great work. Set up those markers and I will see you in the next lecture. 8. Multing: and hello students. Welcome back once again. So now we've got our arrangements set up with our markers. And that feels really good because now we know where all of the songs sections begin an end weaken much more clearly. See the arrangement of the track. And in this lecture, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what we call malting. Ah, it's sort of shorthand for, I guess, multi tracking Molting is simply taking one audiophile and breaking it up into, you know, two or more separate tracks because, you know, with your digital audio workstations, you really don't have any limit to the number of tracks that you can use. And if you know that you're going toe, want to process an audiophile differently. You know in a different part of the song, and you don't want to use automation, which will talk about much later on in the course. Then you can use what we call molting to break that audio file up into several tracks, and then you can process each of those tracks differently. So for me, my example here will be in the guitar vibe verse track, sort of a vibe guitar thing that happens in the verses. It sounds like this, right? It's just sort of a by B, you know, verb doubt affected wet guitar sound in The Post course, though I'm match this guitar line that I have. I have this guitar line here as well, so just play that right. That's like a distorted guitar line in The Post chorus, and I match that with that same other vibe guitar here and then it goes back. Once gets to reverse, it goes back into the other Nicks normal guitar vibe First. Now let's say I want to take that post chorus part and I want to really emphasize that, but in the verses, I don't want as much of that guitar to be. I don't want it to be as loud in the mix as I do in the post course, so what I can do is break this up, literally chop it on either side of that post chorus, and then I'll just duplicate this track that way. It keeps the same icon and color, and now I could just bring this part down and delete it from the top. Now, one thing to mention with this is to be careful. You want to be careful that you don't get some pops from the audio just splitting off in between. So if you wanted to, you could bring this over a tiny bit and then create a fade. So I'm hitting the letter t which brings up my pointer menu. And now I have all these different options here, and I can choose the fade tool, which is the number zero. So I hit t to bring up that window and then zero, and now I have my fatal and just create a little fade here. And I could do the same thing at the other side if I want Teoh or if I may be, You want this to happen over here, and I want this one to carry over a little bit more and just create a little bit of overlap here. It will be fine in the context of the mix, and it just make things little bit more smooth like that. Okay, It's just a little fade here at the beginning. And then if I hit t t, I could bring back my normal pointer. So now we have this happening. It goes back into the first vibe thing there. Now what I can do is I can maybe add some compression to this duplicate track, or I could just have the volume the fader volume up a little bit louder. I can have it pan differently, and I don't have to bother with automation because I know for a fact that I want this part to stand out. So that way I molted to a new track, and then I can process it differently in a way that makes sense in the arrangement. And then I can call this guitar vibe Post Chorus because I know that that's a separate thing. And then also, probably in this situation, I would want to open up the color palette and color this a little bit differently so that I can see that it's something that's supposed to stand out later. Ron, I might want to address it right and that way, and no, you know. Yeah, I may have to just address that and process it a little bit differently, so that's molting. It's an opportunity to break up your audio regions into multiple tracks so that you can process those multiple tracks a little bit differently because Mitt, maybe different parts of the arrangement call for, you know, different processing Later on. Another part would be another example would be later on. You know, maybe you have a tangerine that's hitting every other fourth note of the bar. Ah, and then maybe later on in the song that tampering goes to 16th notes in the chorus or something. And maybe you want to process those two different Tam Marine playing styles differently. But it's all the same track right now. You will. You can moult those break them up. So the 16th note Trent Tam Marine is in a different track, and now you have two different tracks, and you can process them independently in a way that makes sense for how you know where they are in the song and how they're played. So that's molting. So just go through your tracks and see if there are different things that you want to mult out into a separate track and process differently. Great, great work. See you in the next lecture 9. Setting up Submix Routing: Hey, students, welcome back in this lecture where you're going to set up sub mixes. So we're still in the mix preparation stage here. So sub mixing is the process of grouping together different instrument types and then routing those groups to a separate bus so that you can have just like a smaller number of fade er's that air controlling the entire mix. So, for example, you will have a drum sub mix base sub mix, guitar sub mix, vocal sub mix, etcetera and you could be as detailed as you want with this. Some people just like to have, you know, drums, bass guitar, Fogel's. Some people like to have drums, submits percussions of mixed loop subjects. Pad some knicks, lead some mix, so you see what I'm saying. Um, it sort of depends on what the content of your song is. Obviously, if if you just have, you know, five drum tracks, one based track, one guitar track, one vocal track, then then you basically don't. You know, you already have a really simple mix already, but we have 70 tracks in this song, so we're gonna have to do some sub mix routing before we even get a static mix and it will send you a lot of time and headache in the future, as you sort of progress along your mixto have these sub mixes. So it's very simple. I'll show you how to do it in this lecture. What we're going to do now is open up the mix window. Now you can hit the letter X, and it will open up a mixer inside your main screen set here and now you can see that the kick is on the left and it goes all the way down to the vocals on the right or if you hit command to you can open up a separate mixer window and this is really cool. If you have multiple monitors, you can have, you know, the mixer on the separate monitor. But I only have one monitor, so I just have to sort of work within, you know, one main window, right? And you can obviously make this as large as you like. So now you have all your tracks set up on a sort of virtual mixed console like this, right? And now what I'm going to do is go to the far left take all of my drum instruments, not including the percussion. So from kick to crash ride. I know these are my main drum instruments, and I just select them all with by holding shift. Right. So now they're all selected. And now we have this output row, and you can see all of the default outputs are set to stereo out, but which is just the main mix bus at the end here, this main output, right? But we're going to, instead of sending them there, were going to send them first to a sub mix. So again kicked crash ride. And now I can click on any one of these. And instead of stereo out, I'm gonna choose bus. Ah, and I usually start with at least bus 20 when I'm doing my sub mixing because I want to use my other buses for effects returns, and we'll talk about that later on. But, you know, you could start with 20 or third a 30 whatever as high up as you as you want to go. But we'll start with 30. Okay, Now, Bus 30 is now our drum sub mix. And if we go all the way to the right. You'll see Here, Auxiliary one. This channel. The input of this is Bus 30. So that means all the drum tracks are going into this bus. And what we can call this is drum s M. That's what I normally do, which just stands for drum sub mix. If you don't see this ox channel, make sure that these air selected up here on the top. And this allows you to, you know, filter out what you're looking at in your mixer window. So if it's not enabled, you may not see it right. So just enable dogs. So there's the drum sub mix. Next, we can go from loop one all the way down to Tom's Bridge. That's the last percussion track, and we can choose Bus 31 for these right now. Bust 31 is here Auxiliary to Bus 31 will now be perk sub Knicks perk SM percussion sub mix . Right. And just going down will do base. We just have to base instruments. But that's okay. We can still use, uh, you know, Bus 32 just to keep everything really clean and simple. Base sub mix right there and next. One would be our guitars That goes all the way to guitar Solo is the last one. Select those all and she's bust 33 and we'll go over here. Ox four is now guitar sub mix. And again, you could be as detailed as you want here. If you have, you know, acoustic guitars. You can put the acoustic in one sub mix the electrics and another sub mix that would make sense. Now we have strings and Bell. These were the only two like acoustic instruments, so I'll just call these sample sub mix. You know, I don't really want to call it acoustic cause that's a little bit confusing and might be guitar right? So just call it sample because it's like sampled instruments the next we have all of our since. So that can go to Bus 35 again here. If you wanted to make it more, uh, complex, he could do leads or pads, but for me, I'm just going to do since sub mix. And then we have, lastly all our vocals, so that will be bused 36 like that. So that's ox seven. Now we can call this vox's sub mix like that. Right now, the entire mix is contained within these 77 fade er's. And so those encompass the entire mix. I can solo just the drums, just the percussion, just the base, just the guitars. And then in the next lecture will start getting a static mix, you know, like just a balance of all the instruments. But this helps you get a good balance between the different groups of instruments. So we'll start off getting a good balance of all the drums. Good balance of all the percussion, all the guitars. And then you can just sort of balance the different sub mixes together to get your to get your static mix, which will get us, you know, started down the road of your static mix. Right? So go ahead and set up these sub mixes it. It helps a lot, saves you a lot of time. So all you do is instead of choosing stereo output, all the different groups will go to a different bus and you just name them properly. Now, one thing to notice, I don't know why they don't color code the bottom track on the mixer, you know, according to what you have in the arrange window, that really bothers me. So what I do is you know, I'll go through and you can color code. Uh, you know, I just color code, like all my drums, what I had before. So you can just select these again, and you can right click and go a sign channel, strip color. And then you can just kind of go through and color those red, you know? And you're percussion. You can do Ah, uh, the orange red orange color right Like that. So you can just go through and color code those as well. That helps a lot. It just make it correspond to the colors in the arrange window. All right, great work. See you in the next lecture. 10. Getting a Static Mix: and hello. Welcome back. Once again. Now we've set our mix up beautifully. It's easy to see the markers are set up. We know what the song arrangement is. Ah, we've color coded and named everything we've got our sub mixes. Now it's time to get a static mix now a static mix or just, you know, also just called. The balance is kind of just the first high level, very basic balance of the fade. Er's right. We just want to get a plain old blend of all of volume levels of the different instruments and the way that I like to do. This is all set a cycle loop for maybe the densest part of the song. Like the chorus. Maybe the last chorus is, you know, the busiest part of the song where almost everything is being played. Obviously, some things are, you know, Onley in the breakdown or in the solo. I'm not going to catch that in the chorus, but we'll have to go back and grab that and sort of, you know, go through the different song sections. But I usually start off with the main, you know, most dense part of the song which, in our case, here is the chorus. Then I'll open up my mixer window by heading command, too. And I have my mixer here. So now what I'll dio is I will solo the drums sub mix like this and then all of the failures other than our sub mixes. I'll just go from there all the way to the left. And I'll just set all of these down to, uh, you know, negative infinity, not zero, but digging negative infinity, right, the bottom of the slider down to the very bottom. So now my drum sub mix is soloed. So what? So I'm just going to hear what's going on with the drums, right? And now I can start to bring in. Now I can play just this chorus part and get a good balance of just all these drum instruments, and then I'll add in my percussion, right? So just use the mixer window inside the arrange screen set so I can see both things going on here. So now literally just hit Space Bar to play the song from the chorus, and I'll just start on the left and just get a good blend of these instruments coming in. So obviously this kick filter part doesn't happen in this course. I'm just looking at the top, so I don't have to worry about there, nor does the Kick Bridge. But I'm just kind of going through and I'm seeing what's happening here, and I'll just make sure that I'm getting a good balance of all those instruments to start off with. So skip these two. Skip the snare verb. We don't have that in this chorus. That's near dot Either we have a clap, some high hats. Bring those in second. I had crash beginning there. Crash ride. Bring that up a little bit. Bring these up a little bit. Okay, so that's a pretty good balance for right now. And now let's bring in the percussion instruments. So go over to my sub mixes solo the percussion sub mix as well as the drums, and now we'll start listening and just bring in some of these percussion instruments. Loop there, bring it in seven loop. We'll skip that Luke bridge. That's not here right now. Uplift kind of comes before chorus down with those beginning Shaker have that good level, Marine. See what else here bring that up now. I don't have the boom right there yet, so I'm not gonna worry about that yet. Jump in there. So now I have a pretty good balance of these instruments that are at least the ones that are happening at the chorus section here. Okay, so now what I can do is add in the base. So let's bring in the base sub mix, go over to our base and bring that in. Oh, yeah. We don't have any synth bass in the chorus part, but I do have live base will bring that up, Just sort of addressing some of these things that I'm hearing. Okay, uh, now we can bring in the guitars as well. And do those guitar course leading. Not that one. That one are high stream power cords. Bring me down. Sometimes I have to bring it up too high to make sure I remembered what that one is. The rest of these are so Yeah. Okay, So these air Not in that chorus there. They're just kind of different parts. And moving right along will do the samples, which I think is just the bell there. So it's just address that bell just bringing that a little bit. And I leave things that's not working on just at the bottom. Um, so I can know that I need to address bring in a sense, I have a vocoder there, but we do have this leads Hodess since strike little kind of cool thing. And just like that, you sort of have a pretty good balance for that chorus part. Now, what I would dio is go into a different section, like maybe verse to like this, do the same thing. Where will, you know, keep these all open? But I'll deal, and I'll deal with the vocals later on because they kind of take a little more time. But just for this lecture, just to finish this up, we'll do a little bit of a static balancing for the verses here. Okay, so we can get some of those things we didn't get before. So we see we have the kick filter, so let's bring that in. Nice filter. Kick there. Over there. Started snare. Bring that in. Just do that. First time for the verse there and just kind of going through and seeing what I haven't touched on these failures yet this loop bridge. I'll have to deal with that in the bridge. Um, let's go to the second half of the first year based in these of the guitar chug their leg, guitar five. Star number two can we could deal with the vocoder later. It was kind of a vocal instrument anyway. But just kind of going through. And, you know, we have all these guitars that we haven't worked on yet, But just to show you, you know, takes a while, but just getting a good balance of all the instruments that we have. So, you know, this fader is down at the bottom. I'm like, OK, click it and I find out, Where is that? Okay, it's here in the breakdown. So I haven't worked on this yet, but now just kind of find out where that is, and I could see that it's right before the bridge so I could just play that part and just try to figure out the right balance for that small part, even though it only happens in one party's just like a little lift, right? Just like that. And so you can just go through and get a pretty good balance of all of your different favors here. You know, it doesn't have to be, like, perfect just yet, because we're going to continue tweaking as we move through and, you know, some processing changes. But just a good static mix the goals to, you know, just be happy with what you have at the end of your static mix. It sounds like there's a nice blend of all the instruments. That's what we're aiming for, right? Great work. I will see you in the next lecture. 11. Additional Considerations in Balancing: Hello, students. Welcome back once again, before we move on from balancing and setting the proper fader levels there just a few more things that I want I want to mention when discussing this. So the way that we didn't after we broke out, our sub mixes. Um, over here, we we would just solo the drums that mix and kind of go from there in finding the right balance of the drums, then moved down from left to right. And I just sort of did it, um, starting with the drums and then adding the you know, the base and the guitars. So that's the way that I do it. And I usually, you know, I usually put the drums on the top of the arrange window and kind of go down in order of importance like that. Obviously the vocals are at the bottom, and that doesn't mean that they're not that they're least important, but I just kind of keep them down there so that they're all together. Um, a lot of mixers like to start with the vocals, and it sort of depends, too, on the style of music that you're working with, sort of a good rule of thumb is to when you're balancing to start with the instruments that are most important. So if that's like some kind of synth hook that's like really the meat of the song, especially if it's an electronic song, um, then that would that would be a good place to start. Or if it's, you know, a vocal ballad with pianos and thing, the no strings or whatever. Um, then maybe you want to start with, make, you know, getting the right balance for the vocals first. In this case, I did start with the drums and just sort of a personal preference that I've kind of developed. But I will say from experience. There are a lot of times where I saved the vocals for last, and that really becomes a problem because I've gotten a good balance of all my instruments . But now I have nowhere from my vocals to go. And so, um, it is. It is good a lot of times to start with the vocals in a pop tune so that you can find a place for them to live inside the mix. So we're going to talk all about equalization later on but just something that I just wanted to make you aware that it could be sometimes appropriate to apply some e q two tracks that have a lot of low frequency information before even getting the balance. And then the last thing to mention about getting a balance would be that your failures can tell you a lot about the mix and about the each element of the mix. So if, for example, like my base, my bass track here, I've had to turn this way up here in on the fader, and that's fine. But sometimes, if you're you know, you're really just reaching the top and you can't push it up any further, then that may be telling you that you need Teoh. Use a gain plug in to bring up the gain, for example, or if there's a fader that you, you know, you just can't seem to find the right spot for it. It's either it seems too loud on some notes or too quiet on other notes. That might be a good indication that you need some compression on that track. And so it's just to get just a good thing to know that if If you're having a lot of trouble getting the right balance on an instrument, then it might. It might be an indication that you need to apply some processing to it. So those are just a few things to consider when getting your balance just wanted to point them out before we move along and I will see you in the next lecture. 12. Panning: and hello, everyone, welcome back once again. So now that we've got a pretty good static mix going, we've got our sub mix routing set up, and we have a nice balance of all of the fade er's. The next step is to work a little bit with panning. Painting is the process of spreading out your different elements across the stereo field. So you have left and right outputs, and you can what we call pan, different elements to the left or to the right or center, or any blend thereof. So as it is right now, if I open up my mixer using command to that's the hot key, you'll see that all these rotary knobs are set to zero. These air the pan knobs. It's right below the icon. And if I solo a little piece of this, um, we will work with this first chorus here, and if I solo maybe this shaker, you can hear it there. All right, so it's right down the center now I can move it to the left. You can hear it's coming out the Left Channel or it's coming out out to the right. If I move it to the right, you know, if I move this rotary knob to the right, so that's panning. It's a very simple concept in the goal here is to get some distance between the different elements in terms of the stereo field. So the so that they're not all like, crammed together down the middle. Now it's sort of standard practice to leave different things, like the lead vocals, the kick drum, the bass, some things like that. You know, the most essential instruments in the center. You don't typically want to do much painting with those instruments. You know, kick bass, lead vocals, right? But everything else is pretty much fair game. Ah, and there definitely different schools of thought when it comes to painting, some people do what is called El RC or I guess, lcr, which is left center right. And that's sort of an arbitrary constraint that you can place on yourself in which you Onley pan things full, left full, right or just in the center. So if you look down here in my pan knob for the shaker Ah, in the LCR school of thought, they would say you can only go all the way that the left all the way to the right or all the way to the centre. Right? And don't fuss with, like, any of this negative 19 or plus six, right? Because in the real world, you know you're not. People aren't going to hear these subtle pan differences on. They think that it's sort of increases the stereo width Now. I think that's cool. I don't have any problem with that. I think it's good to place constraints on yourself in It's kind of a fun way to mix if you want to try it sometime. Ah, in a lot of the like classic stuff, like beetles, productions or whatever, you can hear that extreme panning right, so that's totally fine. But you don't have to about obey that rule either. You know, every now and then, I'll use the subtle painting you know, any any rule that you set for yourself. You can break in the right case, right? But the point is just to get enough separation between the instruments so that they they're clear and audible right, a mix with a good amount of panning. Will a lot of times sound a lot more alive or dynamic? or fuller, twinkly, whatever word you want to use, because now there's separation between the instruments and your ear can really hear them more clearly that way, right? But, ah, lot of times when you're working with pop music and since this is kind of a pop tune, uh, you know, you can have it sound nice and strong if you have some a lot of elements in the centre as well. So it's kind of up to you to decide how much painting you want to do right. One thing that I will do a lot of times is I will pare things up. So if I have multiple instruments that kind of occupy like a similar spectrum, uh, like, for example, if I have these two high hats right there, very one is sort of a darker high hat, and the other one's a little bit more like Elektronik, and you know, it's less dark, a little, a little happier sounding right. It's on 16th notes or I guess, eighth notes. So this would be a good chance to pan may be the first hats more to the left, or, you know, you could have the main high hats, the darker ones, you know, pan to the left a little bit and the other high hats you can pan to the right and you could just hear them spread out a little bit more like that. And that just creates, um, fullness. Another great example of this. Our guitar. So I have these two sets of guitar power chords that are a little bit different than different voicings on the course towards Right on there's the second. It's a little bit darker and fuzzier. Different tones, different pickups, right? Ah, and so I would do some hard painting here. You can have the 2nd 1 all the way to the right and the 1st 1 all the way to the left. Then they sound really nice together. It just sounds really full and wide when they're all the way out on the sides. And here's another pair at. We have these two Strom's. They're definitely different, you know, guitar parts, but they sort of have a same there, like in the same family rights you could benefit from from some hard pain and again in the guitar solo part of these super gnarly like really dirty digital distortions so I'll just solo these for you. Here's one of them. Really? Clip e digital distortion. A little thinner there. And this 3rd 1 is an octave lower by, like, used like a knock divisor pedal on that one. Right? Ah, so I could do some hard panning on these as well. So maybe that really lowing could be full left. This one could be full, right? And the 1st 1 could just be in the center. And just like that, you could feel just feels a lot more powerful like that in my main guitar Solo can be in the Centre is Well, just keep it nice and strong right in the middle, right in your face. And then I have some nice spread between these different you know, they're similar guitar parts, you know, in the solo, there really similar. But, um, you know, then now I just have some spread between them across the stereo field. Here's another good example. Here's a bell. It's like an auxiliary instrument. You know, I could just pull this bell all the way to the right. I've some different pads that I could maybe do like halfway panning for the different pads . Um, maybe this sense strike just like an auxiliary thing, too. That maybe could be panned all the way to the left since the bells on the right. So I kind of like to just go through and make some really quick decisions. Not even, like, necessarily lift listening. Okay, here's some uplift. So I have thes two uplifts. Let's pull uplift one all the way. The half with left uplift to halfway to the right and the down left right in the center. So you have this nice impact when the when the when it hits. So again, I like to make these decisions as quick as possible. You can always go back and find tune things and move them around. But it just gives you a little bit of separation across the stereo field for all your instruments. Let's go to this chorus, and I'm gonna pan the crash ride to the right a little bit. Um And then let's see, Maybe the the the reverse snare we could pan to the left just a little bit. Ah, the shaker we pan to the left and maybe the tangerine to the right, cause they do a similar thing, but they're different, so we can spread them out a little bit. Done some painting with the pads center because I'm just kind of going through. And you know the cool here at the end of your static mix and panning stages of the mix. It's just a have a good listenable mix now. It may not sound super punchy or clear. Ah, and we definitely have a lot of more work to do. But, uh, you know that in an ideal situation at the end of this stage, he was should have a listenable mix That's exciting. It sounds good. And, you know, you can only get better from there. You don't want to be at the end of your static mix paintings, you know, stage and just think, Oh, my gosh, this sounds better or this sounds horrible. I'm but I'll have to fix it with plug ins. I know you want it to be. So you wanted to be sounding really good with just the static mix and the panning right. That's the goal. All right, great work. I will see you in the next lecture. 13. The Channel EQ: Hey, students, welcome back. So what is equalization or e que for short? While it's simply using a set of tools to shape the, um, frequency spectrum of any particular sound and so there tons of different hardware and software equalization, um, options, you know, out on the market. And most DEA W's come with one or more built in. And so perhaps the easiest way to explain the ins and outs of EQ you. It's just to show you inside logic how we use the channel e que So I'm just gonna choose any old track here, Um, maybe this guitar delay maybe this guitar verse lead and just gonna plug in a little loop to my verse here, just in case I need to play that later. Now I can either use the CQ thumbnail here on the top of the channel strip below the setting and above the audio effects. It's just kind of a quick route to the e que, which is kind of nice. Or you can choose it from the audio effects menu e que channel eq you Now, while we're here, you could see there a few others their linear phase e que which is kind of used more from mastering. It just has a really locked in phase settings, but that's sort of beyond the scope of this course. Um matchy Q and A single band EQ you, which I will use a lot of times for just a simple high pass filtering. But we'll come back to that channel e que. This is sort of the most like often used in versatile one. So any sound has a particular harmonic makeup. Um, you know, you know this more intuitively than you think. Because you know, a bass bass instrument or kick from typically has, like this low Bumi frequency, right? And not as much twinkly high stuff as, for example, a flute might or symbols or like a triangle, would have all high frequency content very low, very little low frequency competent. So you already sort of know that different sounds have different harmonic makeups. Well, we can use an equalizer to do a number of things. One would be to sort of shape the tone. Another would be to correct correct some sort of weird room frequencies that air messing up with messing up the tone. But the most important and use for e que in the in terms of the mixed session is to prevent frequency masking and let all of the tracks sit together nicely in the mix, especially the most important ones. And we'll get to we'll get to all of that in the in the next few lectures. But first I want to just explain what's going on here with our channel eq you, which is what will be using to do r e que in the mix. So you have a frequency spectrum going here from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz, and this is kind of the the borders of, you know, human hearing. You cannot hear very, very much below this 20 hertz or above this 20,000. It's so, um, then you have these different frequency bands here indicated by these icons on on the top, and each frequency band has a sort of different filter, while these these four in the middle are the same type of filter. But this one is a high pass filter, so you can think of it as a high pass or a low cut. If I click it, then I can move the corner frequency I'll get all this in a second, but you'll see here that this allows high frequencies to pass through. Okay, and we have different settings that we can apply there. That's a high pass. This next one is a low shelving for filter. So it's different from the high pass where this went all the way down to the extremes. As you could see, this just took completely cuts off. All sound. The shelving One is sort of like has just a little shelf there, right? These four in the middle are they're sometimes called parametric, uh, sometimes called Peak, sometimes called bell, cause they look like a bell and you can use it to have a positive or negative value to either boost a section, scorecard a section and like that and you can move it up and down the frequency spectrum. So those four in the middle are this, and then you have another high shelf up here which you ca nber boost or cut, and a low pass or high cut filter at the very top, just like that. So those are the different filters that we have available, and now, below those we have this graphical read out and you can enable the graphical analyzer by selecting this button down here. That's his analyzer. And you can change it to pre analyzer. Uh, so this would be the unprocessed, unfiltered harmonic spectrum. And then post would be after you've applied your filters and you can see how it how it affects it After you have these filters going, um, ounce play little section soloed. See, I can see my frequency spectrum here. Right, OK, so that's our are sort of ah graphical readout here and then for each of thes frequency bands, we have three controls. We have a frequency selector. We have a, um, gain. And then we have resonance or what we call Q sometimes just the letter Q or, ah, bandwidth. It's also called Band With Sometimes. Now the nice thing about the channel EQ you and logic is that is you can see here, Um, the read out of this is really, really helpful. So when I'm just I just putting my mouse over the 750 herds, and it's showing me that point exactly. On the harmonic spectrum. When I move this around, you could see that little point moves around. So this is my corner frequency or the resonant frequency. In addition, when I and bring up the game then, um he's you can see this frequency band is now green, which is the color of this guy. So that's kind of helpful. And then I can adjust the resonance or bandwidth or que, um, I usually just call it bandwidth, so I'll just try to keep it at bandwidth from now on. So the the higher the cue, the sharper the, uh, the peak, I guess. And so we have this option with each of these frequency bands. We have the the frequency selector, and we have a gain which we can go positive or negative with. And then we have the bandwidth. We can change like this, right? Um, if we have this q coupling button down here, which just basically, um, it links the bandwidth to the gain so that it's sort of a relative movement. In other words, if I have cute couple selected and I have for this frequency band, I have, um ah que of one. Let's say like this. And now if I change the gain, you'll see that the bandwidth sort of goes relatively. It will sort of shorten as I braise the gain. And then as I bring it back down to zero, the band with comes out. So it's sort of couples that that, uh, that bandwidth or resonance with the gain so that it's a relative adjustment as I move the gain up and down. If I do not have Q coupling selected, then this bandwidth will just stay the same. So you can see there that that yellow box just stays the same like that. Then you have the type of processing that you can choose here. I usually just keep it on stereo, but you can do mid side or like, left or right. Only I usually just keeping on stereo just to keep it simple. Um, and ah, so that's the That's the tool that we're going to be working with. Its the channel eq you. It's the negative EQ you plug in for logic, and it's it's very basic. Pretty much any EQ you plug in is gonna have the same controls. It's gonna have these different frequency bands filters, and it's gonna have some kind of corner frequency selector, gain adjustment and the band with the jets adjustment. That's really all you need to know. Some of them have an unlimited number of frequency bands and filters that you can choose some of this. This one has eight. So, you know, that is what it is. Ah ah. But I think it is usually plenty if you're using more than eight than maybe you need to go back and re record what you're working with. So I write, uh, that's ah, that's the channel eq. You and, um, in the next lecture, I'll show you how to use it. 14. EQ to Shape Tone: Hey, students, welcome back. Once again, we're talking about e que So essentially, there are three main reasons for using equalization, and I'm gonna explain them in order of importance, at least in my opinion. Okay, Uh, so the first and less least important use of, um, equalization is to shape the tone of the individual track to make it sort of sound the way that you wanted it to sound right. The reason that that's least important is a That's really the job of the recordist eso. If you're recording a riel instrument, you should be able to, or at least you should aim for the You should aim for getting it right at the source and, you know, recording it exactly the way it should sound rather than using equal in the equalizer way a down in the mixed age to get it to sound that way. Right? But that's an ideal. Ah, and you know, sometimes we don't always have the ideal situation. So sometimes you do need to shape the tone a little bit. And the second reason for using e que is to remove or deal with ah, sort of nasty stuff that happens every now and then when you're making music, whether that's like a weird room frequency. If you're recording it in a room, um or it's ah, you know, just some resonant frequency that's poking out that's really bugging you in like a synth part and you didn't really realize it. Now you're now that you have it isolated you you're hearing this like nasty, resonant frequency somewhere you could deal with that. But the third and most important reason for using e que, especially when we're talking about in the mix stage, is to avoid frequency masking frequency. Masking is the phenomenon that happens when you have too many things happening in the same frequency range, and they begin to, uh, you know, just get cluttered up and you can't hear any definition between the between the two or for eight different things that are happening in that resonant frequency. And a great example of this is like piano and vocals. It's actually pretty hard to mix piano and vocals because the piano occupies so much of the harmonic spectrum and especially right in the range that most vocalists air singing. So it's really hard to get them to sit well together. Another classic example of this is a bass drum in, ah, kick drum and the bass because they sort of sit in the same general frequency range. So sometimes it's hard to get them to, not to. It's hard to get them to play nicely to both. Have a nice clarity, and you can hear them individually. But then they mesh well together, right? And so that's what we're doing when we are trying to avoid all frequency masking. And obviously, when you have a a song with this many tracks, it can be pretty tricky to get there. But I'm going to show you some surefire ways to make sure that you're not getting frequency masking. Ah, and we'll do that in a later lecture. But before we get to that, I'm gonna address just a few things about my 1st 2 reasons for e que, which are shaping the tone and getting rid of some nasty stuff. So in this lecture will just talk about shaping the tone a little bit. So, um, so remember, I said a while back that getting the static mix will reveal some processing requirements for your EQ you and your dynamics in one example I gave was that, You know, maybe your kick drum, you're having trouble getting it to the right level because once it's loud, it feels loud enough on the fader. Um, but when you have that fader up, the clique iness is too loud. Or maybe the low frequencies or too loud, So using a cue to just make a quick frequency shaping adjustments will sort of help you deal with that, and then you can deal with the frequency masking later on. So I'm just gonna let's address this kick drum a little bit and go to the chorus here and we'll listen and we'll go back to our fader level for this kick drum way. Maybe we like that kick drum at that level, but it's got a little too much booming nous. We could just make a quick ah, frequency adjustment here. You just filter this a little bit. Um, maybe around the maybe, with this low shelf frequency low shell filter, we can pull this down just a tiny bit and weaken turn on the equalizer to see what's happening here on. Just like that, we're just making a quick adjustment, bringing down the low frequencies just a little bit by reducing, we chose the frequency at 75 hertz to be the corner frequency here for this shelf. We just brought it down eight decibels. Maybe even seven would be better. And that's just giving it a little less of that boom meanness. In that way, we can have our fader set to the right level. Ah, and we're not getting too much boom out of that kick drum. And just to pull one more example, let's go to this basin. Maybe we want to grab a little bit more of the highs with that base, Since you can just take, make a little boost right up here, maybe and maybe bring out little pull down a little bit of this like 400 hertz range. Just making quick sort of, um, tone shaping adjustments with with your e que is OK for now because we're gonna move on to frequency masking later. But if you're just, like just not quite feeling like it sits right, then you can obviously do that Now. Soloing these instruments and making frequency adjustments may really not get you very far unless you're talking about a section of the song where that instrument is, like, really featured as a solo instrument, Right? Because you, when you have a lot going on, the subjective tone of each individual instrument isn't really honestly that important. It's really about how it all sits together. And so that's why I say that that that technique for using e que to shape the tone is really the least important on. It's the least of your worries at this point in the in the in the in the mixed age threat. Ah, but just just to show you how I like to do that, um, a kind of a good rule of thumb with that would be if you're making cuts, you can have a sharper, smaller bandwidth, right? And we're talking about suits attractive e Q and the next lecture. But if you're making boosts, you wanna have a much wider bandwidth. Um, that prevents some like nasty like um e que artifacts that sometimes can happen. If you're making really big boosts with sharp residences, then then it's gonna make some nasty stuff happens, so that's just kind of a good rule of thumb. All right, In the next lecture, I'm going to talk about subtracted e que and removing some frequency problems. See, there 15. Subtractive EQ: Hey, students, Welcome back. We're still talking about e que here and in this lecture I want to talk about subtracted equalization. This is a technique in which we use notches in the frequency spectrum to remove unwanted frequencies. And you can get you can get pretty detailed with this. Um, some mixers like to be pretty extreme, using lots of notches on lots of the instruments. Other people. Their philosophy is sort of, you know, if you start removing to much of the harmonic content than your sort of losing some of the character of that instrument, So just something to be aware of their sort of different philosophies on how much notching you should do. I usually just do whatever I think. Sounds good, right? Ah, that's kind of my rule of thumb. So a great example of removing unwanted frequencies would be with a new electric guitar track, because ah, guitar am's ah, and different guitars of different, you know, lots of different nasty stuff going on. Sometimes that's cool. Sometimes you just you're really annoyed by a certain frequency. And so I'm taking this guitar chorus lead which sounds like this with no e que right now, Right? Okay, Simple one. You know, just one note guitar lead that moves around, Um, and so I'm gonna open up my channel e que And now So this is how we do subtract of equalization. I'm gonna turn on the analyzer, and I'm also going Teoh, you can so you can click on this new miracle access here, and you can drag it up. And that will increase the, I guess, reduced the scale of this graphical readout of your analyzer so that you could see a little bit more detail, okay? And turn on the analyzer. And now I can see here. Ah, as it's playing along that I'm getting quite a bit of, ah, of peak here around, like, 500 50 herds, right? And ah, maybe a little bit up here is Well, I think maybe this peak is kind of a problem. Well, so you could sort of use your eyes to judge. Um, if there's something that's kind of poking out a little too much and I maybe want to take down a little bit of the pick sound as well. Now you also notice when I'm playing this, Although you don't hear a ton of the low frequency content you can see. It's sort of bubbling up a little bit down here, and we can just knock that out. We don't really need that super low stuff, so we can just use a high pass filter. Bring it up toe. Probably even 100. Hertz is the corner frequency without affecting any of the rial tone. Because that guitar, the electric attire, is kind of happening more in this area, right? And so the way that I would find and fine tune that with the way that I would really hone in on those problem frequencies. It's just to take one of these Parametric bands and just create, ah, full gain with very, very high I Q level so very strong residence, just a thin band width like that. And then I would just move this. I'll just sweep this up and down to find that nasty frequency you can see. I'm just moving around this area and it doesn't sound great right here. I have a little bit of that weird squelching, and that's just because I have this high peak, right? You would never really want that. But as I move this around one of those frequencies Really like Whoa, that's a problem. And see if you can hear when that happens. But now, since we're playing a melodic line here, and different notes have different weird, resonant frequencies so it's a little bit tougher when you're having ah, you know, more than one note being played, but you can still sort of decide. Okay, I'm gonna take out a couple of these frequencies because they're gonna be a problem as that melody progresses. So I found, like, right around here, right around 1560 Hertz is a problem. So now that I found it, I can just take the gain in the complete opposite direction and just take that out completely. And if I want I thought I heard another one over here to do that as well. Maybe right up here. And maybe it's not as offensive, so I can actually notch out a little bit less than this one here, right? I don't have to pull it all the way down necessarily. And I could just have a little bit shorter of a notch and then let's try to find that picks picks sound as well. We'll take another band, and it's OK if you're moving these bands around. Ah, you know, like this band. I can maybe create a peak. And I can pull this one up here too. There's no reason that you have to keep it down here. What it waas? I think that pick sound is right about there. So you just pull this down a little bit as well so I can reduce that pick sound. And then we were getting quite a bit of screeching happening right around here as well. Find that last one. Thank you. Just pull that one out as well. Maybe have a little bit less pull that just like that. So I'm just using these little notches to pull out some frequencies that might be causing a problem. Now again, As I mentioned before, getting a great guitar sound in isolation is fine, but it doesn't really matter if if it doesn't sit well with the other instruments so you can kind Onley, spend so much time in solo just soloing that particular instrument because, you know, you may have to do way more like big sweeping e que adjustments in the context of the entire song, so I wouldn't spend too much time doing this absorb tract of stuff on less important instruments on a lead vocal track. I would spend a lot of time getting that lead vocal to sound great by itself, right? Or even the kick drum like thes super super important instruments you can get. You can spend a little bit more time on those, but I just wanted to take my time to show you sort of the process of taking out these, uh, these, you know, maybe offensive frequencies that are that are going on now. There's no rule against using multiple accused, too. So, like for this guitar chorus lead, I might have this first e que just be my little naci que And then I can just drop in another one. Ah, chain like you after it. And I can use that to sort of, you know, do my frequency masking stuff and and I'll show you what we know. We'll talk more about that in the next lecture, but it's it's okay to use more than one e que on a particular track. So So that's subtracted e que all we're doing is we're finding frequencies that maybe clashing with the tone ality of the instrument and the maybe poking out a little bit too much and we're reducing them by creating a notch and just pulling that frequency out of our harmonic spectrum. So we're just changing the harmonic content by using those Parametric filters in the channel eq you to to notch out little pieces of the frequency spectrum that are causing us grief. Right. But again, you know, try not to spend too much time at this stage doing this subtracted e que on every single instrument. Maybe do it on a couple of the really, really important instruments and then move on because we're going to move on to the next stage of e que, which is the most important one, which is avoiding frequent seem asking. Okay, so I will see you in the next lecture 16. Using EQ to Avoid Frequency Masking (Part 1): a student's welcome back. So we've talked about e que. To shape the tone, talked about subtracted V. Q to remove unwanted frequencies. And now we're onto the most important part of e que, which is getting all the elements to play nicely. In other words, avoiding frequent seem asking. So that, uh, each element as its own little place in the frequency spectrum and nothing is getting in the way of anything else in terms of at least the really important instruments. So how do we do that? Well, there are a couple different ways, and, um, you know, there's maybe not necessarily a right or wrongly, but there a few ways, and I'll just kind of explain some of them. So probably the one that most people do would be to start with the vocals and, um, get the lead vocal tracks sounding really good. Ah, with its in terms of e que. So you can use a cue to shape it, remove some unwanted frequencies and then move on to the other, just kind of go down in terms of the most important instrument after it. So, um, in our case, that might be starting with the lead vocal than moving onto those guitar tracks, which are sort of very close to it in terms of frequency content and then maybe on to some of the pads, which are near it, infrequently content as well. Also, then, then, once we're happy with the way the vocals air sitting with the guitars and the pads and the synths, then we can sort of tackle the whole drum kit and the kick in the base and making sure that those parts it together. Now, if you have a five track song that's like, you know, piano, acoustic guitar vocals and a synth or whatever, then obviously this this process is going to be a little bit easier because you just can start with the vocals and you can just kind of solo everything back and forth and in conjunction with everything and make sure that it sounds good. But with a song as this many tracks, you sort of have to break it up into groups. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, I need to make sure that my vocals, guitars and sort of pads and since are sitting well rights. That's kind of the one group then I'll make sure that the drums and bass are sitting well. And then maybe like my different percussion instruments that those aren't clashing with one another, right? So I kind of break it up into three different like harmonic ranges, right? And I'll make sure that everything in those pieces are fitting together within its own little harmonic range. And then, of course, you have to make sure that everything as a whole sits together nicely as well. But when you kind of break it up, when you have this money tracks, it really helps us sort of break it up. Right. But just to sort of give an idea of how we do this, I'm just going to start playing from the beginning. This is maybe not the way I would normally do it. I would maybe go from the chorus, Um, because that's where sort of everything is located. But just to show you the process of using e que to make sure that everything is playing nice with, just start right here from verse one. OK, so I'm going to the first. I'm gonna solo this lead vocals for the verse, and we'll bring up the channel acute for that one. And let's just get this tone right Whether logins live we keep on chasing the sun So we have a little bit of this low frequency which we don't need gold Where the legends live we keep on chasing the sun To find a light and hopelessness And we got it We can see it Don't look down where on stopping the world Let's pull out a little bit over the edge This moments gold Where the legends live Maybe a little bit And waking chasing the sun To find a light and hopelessness And we got it We can see it Don't look down Where on stopping the world In Crossing over the edge This moments gold Where the legends live there and take out We keep on chasing the sun To find a light and hopelessness And we got it We can see a at a little bit of air Way run, stopping with just a little bit and crossing over the edge. Keep that low like that. Okay, so that's a pretty good start for the queue for vocals. And now we have this verse vibe, you know, guitar vibe. First, that's happening as well. Cold weather legends live. Actually, let's do this one first. Let's go to this guitar. So we'll go this guitar lead. Now we have the vocals soloed and now we've added this guitar lead, which is happening in the same time. So if I don't solo anything, I have a couple of cents and a couple guitars. But really this vocal in that, uh, those two, those two were like the main feature right there. So I'm gonna solo the guitar verse lead and the vocals. And now, listening to the vocals I'm adding in the guitar verse lead and I'm going to shape the frequency, um, content of my guitar so that the vocals arse are not being obscured it. All right, cold weather legends live. We keep on chasing a son, find hopelessness. Maybe a reduced about 1400 can see. Don't look down on top of the world crossing over the edge. This moments cold weather legends live so as I'm sort of finding out where that vocal is really sitting, which is kind of around between 1200 hertz. I'm just kind of moving around this trough in this notch in my frequency spectrum on the guitar lead To make sure that this guitar is not occupying space Where the vocal should be cold weather legends live We keep on chasing a son to find a light and hopelessness And we got waken See it don't look down where I'm stopping world crossing over the edge This moments cold weather legends live chair just like that So I'm just, you know, this is a pretty large band with trough here But I think the guitar still sounds good and the vocals are really cutting through there And now the key is to bypass this And here if you can hear difference Okay Bold weather legends live we keep on chasing son Find a light and hopelessness and we got waken See it don't look down world You can hear that when I employ this, Uh e que the vocals just have a much greater clarity It's almost a Ziff they get louder And that's because the frequencies in the vocal track are being, uh, allowed to be more prominent because I've reduced some of that frequency content in that guitar track. Okay, and I'm gonna ply a low cut filter here is well, because I'm getting a little bit of low frequency stuff they don't need. Now let's add the second guitar. Cold weather Legends live this one. I want to be pretty scoop, too, because I just want to have some of that high, twinkly weirdness. And then some of the lows live we keep on chasing son fund hopelessness. Wait, look down! World crossing Thats moments. Gold. Whether legends live, maybe turn it up, son. Find a way. Have 1/3 guitar that comes in so might as well just deal with the guitars. Cold weather, legends live. I think that actually comes in the second half of the bears. Ears go there, crossing thats moments work marking Zaman's impose. Can you feel can you feel just something like that? That sounds good to me. And again, you can just sort of be as quick as you want with this. Make instinctual changes or you can spend a lot of time making sure. But it's like, you know, I try to move quickly, Azaz quickly as I can because I want I want to sort of have the like, you know the song as my reference point rather than getting really too detailed about everything. Actually, let's wait on the base 17. Using EQ to Avoid Frequency Masking (Part 2): what else we have here? We have a couple pads. Let's add this pad. She's the way un solo that base I see a son. It's a fun. Okay, this pad comes in an intro. It kind of fades out when the vocals come in right here, actually streets of gold where legends live We keep on JC So I'm honestly not even gonna worry about that pad right now. What about the second pad that comes into the vocals? Cold weather is live way, son to find way just taking two notches out of that pad. Nothing. Nothing too extreme. Just couple DBS like that. And just giving that vocal part room to sit right. And then we'll do this last pad here It's here that one down where world this moments word add some high frequencies there, take out about right way. This moment is kind of cool. The vocals are still nice and clear, right? And so now that's that's a That's a pretty good start. I mean, obviously I would spend probably a little bit more time than that, but now we can move on to getting this kick and bass sound good together, so we'll go back to the beginning of the verse. Let's listen to this filter kick, which is our first kick Drum starts off, maybe, um, roll off some of those super lows. Justin Keys, given a little bump around 70 hurts. Now, this is a filtered out kick drum anyway, so I've already done e que to get it sounding the way I like it. But now I will hope I will keep this e que, uh, window open and let's bring in the space And and here's the base and thank you. So I could just sort of line these up and just make sure that they're playing well. And as you could see, this sort of the real meat of the basin is like right here around like, 250 hertz ish. And the meat of the kick filter is right here around 80 hertz, right? So what we wouldn't want to dio is too. Make this bass synth really bumping around that 80 Hertz area to like this, for example, because that might be a little too much emphasis in that one frequency range. And then, you know, you're not getting the right clarity, but if you have our kick drum doing around 80 hertz. It's actually, I guess more around like 100. You can see in the Read out and we have the bass drum. Not 100 but more like 200. Then there each started doing, they're they're doing their own thing and they're playing well together. It might add a little bit more those highs way back in the vocals. Just make sure that the vocals of sitting well with that stuff way and crossing over the edge bypass that examines and pulls can you feel can you feel Yeah, that's a little too much pulling out there. I'm just gonna reduce these old whether legends live we keep on chasing son, Find lighting hope these way. All right, Now we can move on to these other drum things that come in. So now we have a good balance between the base and the kick a t least thes synth bass and the filter kick. Now, let's get a nice, uh, e que balance between the kick in the snares right now. Maybe. You know, we have this, uh, delayed filtered snare drum, and then we have a verb doubt snare drum. And maybe we want those to sit a little bit differently in their frequency content. Maybe this Ferb snare have little bit less clothes that cycle length. They appear more that way there a little bit different. So the harmonic makeup of this delayed, filtered snare is a little bit different from that verb. Doubt. Snare, right, and we'll add this loop ins well, maybe wants some of those highs in here. It's kind of like a little high hat area. It may pull out where that other snare was hitting, and then I usually just kind of go like this, and I look in the arrange window and I see since all my drums air up here, I know that this is what I've got going for the drum section here. So I don't need to deal with the snare necessarily right now, as I'm on verse one B, because there's no sneer there, right, so I have I have my box in my pads working as well as the guitars. And then I have my kick drum and the bass synth working, which is what's happening here. I have these other percussion elements that come in so now I have pretty much the whole intro and verse is pretty much good to go. Ah, in terms of frequency masking, and I could be confident that everything's playing nicely. We can just kind of go from the beginning and listen up to the chorus here. Streets of Gold Way, Way. So it already sounds a lot better. Just with it's the simple e que techniques. Just making sure that the most important instruments are sitting well with the other most important instruments. And it already sounds about 10 times more professional with just these really simple e que moves right? Um, and so obviously there's a lot less going on in the first in the choruses, so this will take a little bit more time to do the courses. But again, the principles the same. You just go with the lead vocals. Find those instruments that are near it in harmonic content, being the pads and the guitars. Or like if you have pianos or organ or something, and then you just go down to the drums, make sure that the kick in the base air happy when the kick in the base air happy, then you can add the other instruments shaping those, uh, each new instrument that you add. You just make sure that it's not stepping on the other instruments toes. And if you go in order of importance, right then, you know, then you know that the most important instruments are are allowed to flourish, and the least important instruments are maybe getting the more extreme E cube chopping right or notching. And ah, you're really messing with the least important ones. Like I don't care if my shaker loop sounds like crap by itself a za long as it's happy with the kick in the base in the snare, right? And this, like one little random Ah, you know, guitar strumming thing that's like not important but just gives me some rhythm. I don't care how that sounds soloed as long as it doesn't step on the vocals, and it just gives me a little chug or something, you know. So that's why you sort of go in order of importance when you are, ah, when you are avoiding frequency, masking and using e que to make sure that all the elements sit well in the mix, right? So I hope that makes sense. If you have any questions, of course, As always, please post them in the discussion area and, um, go ahead and e que your tracks using the most important instruments first and sort of grouping them together in harmonic range, like where you know, the drums in the base and the sense and the guitars and the vocals and the guitars, things like that and e que those yourself and we will see you in the next lecture. 18. What is a Compressor?: Hello, students. Welcome back. So in this lecture, wanna look at the compressor plug in That's native toe logic. And you will find that you know whether you're using logic or other D A. W's. Um, many of the settings will be the same, and the parameters will be the same. So, uh, you will learn a lot from this, even if you're not using logic. But so let's look at this here. I'm just gonna open up an instance of a compressor going from the audio effects menu to dynamics to compressor. Okay. And so in this lecture, we're just going to talk about the various controls that are available on the various types of compressors just in a in a sort of basic way. What's going on here? Then we'll talk Maurin the later lectures about how to use compression. Okay, so on the top, here we have seven different types of compressors and these air sort of emulation of ah, the, you know, popular hardware compressor types. We have the platinum digital studio V C, a studio fete classic V C. A. Vintage BC, a vintage fed and vintage Opto and really all for the purposes of this course. Ah, since compression is very very Ah, large topic. But for the purposes of this course, all you need to know with these different types of compressors is just that they have sort of different sounds different distortion properties, different attack and release like speeds. Um and, you know, just sort of a different response. And really what? What What would make sense for this course is just to sort of play through the different compressor types to hear what? How they sound different and what you like about them, OK, because they have sort of different, um, emulated, uh, circuitry. Obviously, it's also software, but they sort of emulate the different circuitry of these different classic or popular compressors. Right. Okay. Ah, so I'm just gonna go to Platinum Digital and let's talk about the parameters that air that air here that are available. The first is we have gained reduction graph, and you can see it either in the view meter. Ah, which shows the reduction in gain Going to the left here or you can see it in terms of a graph is well, I usually just keep it on meter, but it's kind of nice to be able to view it in both in both ways. Then we have an input gain. So this is the amount of gain that you're sending to the compressor over here, and you have a meter on the left. Then you have these controls down here. Threshold ratio, makeup, attack and release. And me, the threshold ratio and the intact in the release, I would argue, are the most important knobs on this entire plug in. So what are they? First we have the threshold. The threshold is thelancet vel at which above which the compressor will start working. So if I set this to, uh, negative 20 decibels like this, that means any sound that happens over negative 20 decibels will engage the compressor. Okay, Once the compressor is engaged, then our ratio will tell the compressor at what ratio to reduce that game. And you can see it has its, you know, its called ratio, and it indicates the ratio here. So to tow one means everything above negative 20 decibels is what OK, what would what would have been two decibels above negative 20 is now one decibel above negative 20. So if something came in at. It's kind of it's kind of challenging because it's in these negative numbers. All right, so two decibels above negative 20 would be negative. 18. So without the compressor, something that would have been negative 18 decibels would now be negative. 19. Because we're reducing the gained by a ratio of 2 to 1, right? If this is at 5 to 1 like this, something that would have been negative 15 decibels is now negative. 19 decibels, right, and you can go all the way up 30 to one's very extreme compression. It's almost like a limiter, which we'll talk about later, 20 to 1. Ah, that's reducing quite a bit as well. So something that would have been like negative 10 decibels would now be. We'll see down to, uh, negative 30 decibels, right, because it's reducing it by 20 decibels came so you just kind of got to do a little bit of math. But the principles that everything that happens above this threshold will be compressed by this ratio. OK, then you have. I'm just going to go in order of importance here. The attack in the release the attack is how fast does the compressor. Start reducing the gain after it has passed that threshold and you can adjust this in milliseconds. Okay, Same with the release. You can use milliseconds and this is just the opposite. This is how fast does the compressor stop working? After that audio has gone below back below that threshold. So if you just imagine, you know your wave form and you have this Ah, top level set and it's a negative 20 decibels. Every part of the wave form that pops over that negative 20 decibels is now being compressed at a ratio right now of 5 to 1. Then once the audio, once the audio goes above that threshold and it's being reduced by 5 to 1, this attack is saying, OK, don't start reducing that gain until 12 milliseconds have occurred, Right? So 12 milliseconds after that threshold has been crossed, it will reduce the gain. And then once that threshold, once the sound goes back below the threshold, then our releases saying, OK, don't stop compressing until 48 milliseconds after it has gone below that threshold. The makeup gain level here raises the overall gain of the compressed signal. So this is a way to really like So since the compressor is just reducing gain, what we can do is use the gain makeup to bring up the overall level of the compressed signal so that there's less dynamic range without any gain makeup. You might be doing some extreme compression, and the level would be too quiet because you're compressing a lot of the signal and you're compressing it by a lot. And so it's really, you know, it's too quiet. You can use the makeup game to just bring that level back up and then with some of the compressors, you also have some auto gain selections. Here. You can have the auto gain off, or you can have it at negative 12 decibels, for example, or a zero decibels. Ah, these air there's like two into attenuation knobs to attenuation options, or you can have auto gain off, and you can just use your own makeup. Okay, next we have the knee, and the knee controls the transition point between the UN compressed and the compressed signal, so you can think of the need this way as a sort of smoothing operation between the UN compressed and the compressed signal if you have a greater need parameter here, all the way up to 1.0, then you have a much smoother transition between the UN compressed and compressed signal. If you have less of a knee, ah said on the potential ometer here, then you're having a quite a, um, quite an abrupt change between the UN compressed and compressed. So, really, it's just about kind of finding the right setting for whatever you're working with, I would say for like, more natural sounding instruments, you probably want to have a little bit more knee so that you're not the compressing. The compression isn't as obvious. Um, and even, you know, even if you're not a gnawed, eo nerd or whatever, you're just a listener of music. Sometimes you can hear a little too much compression, and it's sort of off putting because it doesn't sound natural, right? You can use the knee to sort of make that compression the compression, Uh, you you can use the need to sort of make the technology of the compression a little less apparent if that makes sense with maybe like, ah, kick drum or something, or if you want some real extreme compression going, then you can have less of a knee and ah, that will that will. That will help it be a little bit more like powerful and crisp. Right hard. Those air sort of the words. I've described a smaller knee as, and you can see the knee in action when you have the graph selected here. If you look a zai, have the descending down zero. You can see this really sharp line here between the UN compressed, which is here to the left, and the compressed signal, which is here to the right. And you could see the slope of this graph has changed based on the ratio, right? So a very high ratio 30 to 1 is is reducing the slope of this compressed line quite a bit. If I have it at at one, then we're getting no compression. You could see here it's the same as before and threshold as I move the threshold. It's changing where in the ah, how many decibels are required to engage the compressor, so it's kind of nice. You could see that graph there now, As I move this knee, you'll see that line really starts to smooth out. Now it's a curve right down at one. It's a nice hard line there. And so that's just sort of, uh gives you the shape of the transition between the UN compressed and the compressed signal like that. You also have an auto button that will, uh, essentially sync up the release time to the tempo of the project. Ah, and this is this is nice, because if getting quite a bit of pumping with their compression, which you can sometimes get it for using pretty extreme compression thin this auto button will, uh, make this occur naturally within the tempo of the song. Okay, so that's those air sort of the most important parameters. And again we will talk more about more about them as we use examples that we have. Ah, some other controls. Here you have, like a built in limiter that you can apply as well. And limiters is really just an extreme compressor where it just chops off. Um, so, like, if I If I have the NIA zero here and I have the ratio at 30 to 1, you could see this is kind of just like a ceiling right, and that's sort of what a limiter does. And you can use the limiter in conjunction with the compression parameters here. And you can set the, uh, the the decibels, the tops even set the ceiling of the limiter here that get negative one decibels, for example. And you could just turn that on in that way, you're not getting any clipping or you're not allowing the signal to clip the output. Okay, uh, and then here you have some distortion properties. You can have no distortion, soft, hard or clip. And there's just sort of three different types of distortion. Um, I tend to not use distortion on these now. The reason they have this is because part of the appeal of strong compression, especially with hardware compressors, is kind of the natural distortion that it gives. And so they've tried to emulate some of that here, and you can use the distortion, but it's it's up to you. I mean, you could try it out and see what you think about how it affects the sound. Um, and of course, you have a mix NOP so you can adjust the ratio between the input and the output. Um, how much un compressed signal to compress signal would be input output and then you haven't output gain, so you can just adjust the amount going into the compressor here and then the amount coming out of the compressor here. Then we have some side sheen controls, which I'm not going to talk about right now because we are going to do a lecture about side chain compression. So we'll just address that when we get to it. Um, and you can see the side chains stuff by clicking that side Jean tab and then output tab is these controls. And then if I just go through some of these compressors, you'll see this studio B. C A, for example, doesn't have any control. Ah, the studio fat doesn't either. Classic V C. A doesn't even have attack or release. And the vintage V c A does have any does have. These does have the auto gain vintage fed, as as all those perimeters in Opto does as well, but they all will. So so some of the compressor types have different controls, and they all sort of react in a different way. Even if I've set the settings up and I'm changing the compressors, but settings are the same, but you'll hear that when you change through the compressor types because of the emulated, you know, circuitry of these different compressor types. It will affect the sound differently, even though my settings are the same, like my threshold and ratio and makeup, for example, right, so that's, er, that's just a quick overview of the different controls on the compressor, and will will definitely dive a little bit deeper into that as we use compression in our mix. Ah, but Glenn and play around with some of these controls and see if you consort of figure out what's going on and and just get acclimated to what the compressor does. I know it could be a little bit intimidating. Um, at least it was for me. The compressor was like, What the heck is going on here? But it's actually not as complicated as it seems. So just spend a little time wrapping your head around threshold, ratio, attack and release. Those were really the four things you really need to worry about, right Threshold. Just to review is the level at which above which ah, the compressor engages the ratio is how much gain reduction you're using. Attack is how fast the compressor will engage after it's passed your threshold. And the release is how fast the compressor will disengage after the sound is gone back below the threshold. So it's actually not too complicated. It's just a matter of kind of wrapping your head around it. All right, see you in the next lecture. 19. Using a Compressor on Lead Vocals: a student's welcome back. Once again, we're talking about compression and the previous lecture. We just went through the compressor that's native to logic and talked about the parameters that are available. And now in this lecture, I'm going to show you how to select a track that needs were compression. So how to determine where you need compression and then how to use that compressor Teoh. Address the dynamic range of that instrument if it's a problem, all right, So, um, I mentioned before that using the in the static mixed stage that's a great point to That's a great time. Teoh discover which tracks will need some compression in. The reason for that is if you're not able to find the right fader level for a particular instrument, because at some points it seems too quiet. Other points, it seems too loud. That would be a great candidate for some dynamic processing, such as a compressor, and that is because the compressor is like an automatic fader level adjustor. It's very smart, and it's very fast, and it will adjust the fader, uh, just at the exact right time to make it sit properly in the mix and In my experience, the lead vocals pretty much always require some compression. Ah, you may have used the compressor in the signal chain wild recording, and that would be good. But sometimes even in the mixed age, you need to add a little bit of of compression to make it sit right in the mix in terms of dynamic level. Okay, so in this lecture, we're going to look at the lead vocal track in the chorus, and we're going to see that we do require some compression here because I couldn't find the right fader level, and I'm sort of pushing this fader up as high as it can go, and at some points it's still not quite loud enough. And then other points, the singer just saying a little too loud and a lot of times with vocals as well, you know, they're sort of moving around or bobbing up and down, and so they're they're dynamic. Range isn't perfect, which is totally fine. It's just natural. And so that's where compressor can come in and just sort of even things out a little bit. That's exactly what we want to dio. And indeed, if I look at the wave form for this chorus vocals. You'll see here that there there's some words here, right here, that airway quieter than this word and then over here, and it sort of trails off a little too much here. Ah, these These words are a little too quiet. And then there's like, a peek here, right? And we want a little dynamic range, of course. But we especially in a pop tune we wanna have quite quite a quite strong vocal performance that were in each syllable, comes through the mix really nicely and weaken. At least hear every word that's being sung. OK, But as it is now, with this quite dense mix, we're not quite able to hear every word perfectly. All right, so we're going to use a compressor so I can just go to the audio insert effects, go down to dynamics and compressor, and, um, now I can use use the Now I can find the right settings for this particular song. The genre, that performance, all of those sort of informed the decision of what? What amount of compression you're going to use and what type of compressor? Now, what I did not mention in the lectures about the equalizer, and this was kind of on purpose is that with all of the's plug ins or most of them, at least you have some factory presets that you can choose from so I can go down and can choose. There's sort of these groupings of instruments like drums, guitars, voice, some sort of compressor tools and then type of compressor that you can choose I, whereas with the e que. I do not recommend using presets adul with Hugh because there's really no, there's no way that the preset can no ah, what else is going on in the song? And any individual equalization that you're applying to a track are to, you know, an instrument is not necessarily gonna have any relevance to where it sits in the mix and what else is going on. So I don't recommend using any presets for equalization because it depends so much on the objective relationship with the other instruments that are happening, and we talked about frequency masking and etcetera. However, with the compressors, I'm not as ah, strict about using presets, and in fact, I will use presets some of the time, especially with the vocals at least to get a good starting point. Right? So let's listen to this vocal track soloed without the compressor, real quick party, then sunlike shooting through the sky and where fall in, falling even faster now, right? So you can hear. It's a pretty good vocal performance. Ah, but it it does have a little too much dynamic range that loses some of its power in the whole mix, you know, in the mix as a whole. So we're gonna use some compression. Ah, I can enable this again. And now I can go to the presets for voice. And as you could see, there's a lot here. Everything from bright vocal to dance vocal fuzz vocal narration. Natural, uh, has some, like compressor types like Opto vintage, hard limiting. And I'll usually just choose one that seems kind of appropriate to the genre of music that I'm working with. And since this is sort of like a pop rock song, I can choose the live vocal and see if I like that one right. And so this one goes to the studio fete and it gives us a threshold of negative 23 3.5 to 1 ratio, some makeup gain and, um, attack at 50 mil is 56 milliseconds release its 72 milliseconds, so we can hear how that sounds. And we can look at the graph to see what's happening with the compression party, then sunlike shooting through the sky and where fall in, falling even faster. Now you could see that it's reducing the gain of those peaks, and with the makeup, it's giving us a little bit of a level boost altogether. Uh, the knee is sort of soft. We don't have any control, but with this compressor type the fete, we have, ah, sort of a soft Ernie. So it's not as, uh, extreme of a transition between the UN compressed in the compressed signal and sort of longer attack and release time make it a little bit more natural as well. If we wanted to really squish those vocal peaks, weaken, bring this attack time down quite a bit, and then the release time. We would maybe shorten that as well, because that will have the compressor maintain its action after the, uh after the audio level has gone below the threshold, and so that will help bring up those quieter parts a little bit more, so I might just make the small changes. Maybe increase the ratio of 24 as well. Let's hear that party, then sunlike shooting through the sky and where fall in, falling even faster now rights That just gives us a little bit less dynamic range maintains the consistency of the vocal track a little bit better. And, ah, you know, it will make it sound a lot, a lot clearer in the mix. I might even increase this makeup gain just a little bit just to push those out those vocals out, especially because my fader I had to keep it up really high. Okay, so let's close this and let's listen to that. In the context of everything, it's just these little bit more. A little more higher ratio may be a little bit lower of a threshold, so we're compressing even more information and bring the makeup, gain up a little bit more and turn the release time down. Party guy with way. And so, just like that, the vocals cut through so much better because we've use the compressor to tamp down the peaks and then bring the overall level up using the May makeup gain so that there's a more consistent vocal level which weaken turn up higher and without clipping right. That's what the compressor does. It allows you to have the of the overall level up a little bit while keeping those peaks down so that we're not clipping clipping the audio, all right, and I'll bypass this now by clicking this power button and so we can hear the difference as it goes sky with way just like that, you can hear that it sounds a lot cleaner with compressor working now some. One thing that's sort of ah point of debate is whether the equalization should come before or after the compression. And, um, I don't know. I mean, I sort of what I normally do is I'll just flip these around. You can just pull that channel E cube back below the compressor and just sort of listened to it. The pros of that are that with the compressor engaged, the ACU settings might require a little bit different treatment, because when we had set the eq you before, that was the UN compressed signal that we were treating and so with the compressor working some of the frequencies might be a little bit less prominent. Others might be more prominent, in which case you might want some Maury que treatment after the compressor. Ah, the pros to having the eq you before the compressor would be that if you're having, if you're reducing, you know some unwanted frequencies or whatever, or cutting out the lows. You don't want those frequencies affecting how the compressor is working right? So it's sort of just a little, you know, give and take kind of game. And of course, there's nothing wrong with having an e que before and after the compressor, if that's what you prefer as well. So let's listen to this with the EQ you settings as we had set them before. But after the compressor party guy with way. So it's just sort of a personal preference. I was kind of liking it before. Might just be bias from what I was listening to. But, um, you know, just something to play around with, whether you want the compression before or after the e que in terms of the signal chain and just a good point to mention that it does matter where in the signal chain your audio fit effects are because they do go in order. So the audio's going through the Q and into the compressor and then into whatever else I have here. And of course, we haven't done any, uh, sparkle on this vocal. We have no reverb or delay or distortion or anything. So if the vocal sound a little bit kind of like a nun inspiring at the moment, we still have quite a ways to go in terms of making them of really twinkle and have some funds that. But that's just I just wanted to show you how to determine what needs compression and what doesn't. Um, I I think at the beginning of my mixing journey, you know, I was probably over compressing things because I thought it was just what you do. You know, you just you put compression on stuff and didn't really know what I was doing with the compression. And I just thought If there's a compressor on the track, it would sound better. And that's not necessarily the case. Ah, you know, I'm kind of of the opinion that the less processing the better. Um but that's debatable as well. It also depends on the genre, all right, so the key is to look for the tracks in which you can't really find the right fader level, because the dynamics are changing a little too much and you're maybe losing like it's like a tower part. And you may be losing some of the notes and other notes, air popping out too much, Then that would be a good candidate for a compressor and then just go into your compressor and you just adjust these levels to get the right amount of dynamic range that you want. Ah, whether that's very squashed or just a little bit of tamping down those peaks. If stuff is popping out too much, bringing up the stuff that's not too hot so that you can hear it and if maybe it's disappearing in the mix. So that's the purpose of compression. And again, I don't mind going through some of the presets here with the compressor because they sort of at least give you a good starting point of where to, where to move from. And then don't be afraid to change these Ah, these settings and just sort of play around with them and figure out what what you like and what you don't like. All right, that is, uh that's how we use the compressor. See you in the next lecture. 20. Sidechain Compression as a Mix Tool: Hey, students, welcome back. Once again, we're talking about compression here, and we've talked about what the compressor is and does and how to use that we've. In the previous lecture, we worked on compressing the lead vocal track to reduce the dynamic range so that all of the words come through clearly in this lecture, I want to talk about side chain complexion, compression as a mixed technique, something that will help. Ah, certain instruments sort of blend a little bit better and specifically with the kick and the base on the chorus. So citing compression is thes days. It's most often used in, like e g m music with, like, really extreme compression on a baseline or even a synth line, and to wear the sense, like completely cuts out where the bases. And it just gives the perception that the base is like huge right. The kick drum, I mean, is like huge and ah, so that's that's how we used side chain compression in terms of production. I've used it a lot like on on this base inthe here in the verses. You can hear it pumping with Trump so that side chain compression used in production, but we can use it a little bit in the mixed session as well, to get the kick drum in the live base to sit together both rhythmically and harmonically. Now we've already done some EQ you on the baseline, the live base and the kick drum so that they play nice. You can hear both nicely and they're nice and clear and they're not. They're not overlapping in terms of frequency content, but we can enhance that effect even more by using side chain compression with the added benefit of increasing the, uh, the rhythmic tightness as well, because this is a live base. So it's played by human me. And, um, it's not perfect. And rather than going in and adjusting the timing, using art, some audio editing techniques which will address later on in the course more advanced techniques, we can use a little side Shane compression to sort of falsify a little bit more tightness. And this is something that I've started using quite a lot. It's really nice, and, um, it's kind of fun in a weird way, so I'm gonna show you how to do that. So sanction compression at its basic level is using a compressor on a track, for example, on a bass track. But instead of using the actual audio of the base as the input for the compressor, you're actually using another audio input instead. And in this case, well, we will use the kick drum as the side chain input. And what that means is the kick drum is telling the compressor when to reduce the gain rather than the actual base telling the compressor went to reduce the game. All right, so let's put a compressor on this channel. So we put the compressor on the base channel, and we're going to use this side chain menu up here, and we're going to choose the bait. Uh, the kick drum. And here it is. Audio 37 named Kick. Okay, if for some reason you don't see the name kick here Ah, what you can do is go to your kick track and look up here. Ah, where it's his track, and you can if you don't see these controls, you can disclose this triangle and you'll see you have your icon, and they will say the channel that it's going to, which is audio 37 Okay, So if for some reason you don't see kick there in your side chain menu, you just know that it's audio 37. You go there, Audio 37 there's our kick. So now you'll see that this view meter is reducing the gain when the kick drum hits, not when the base is being played. You see it just pumping like that and you can see this sort of like perfect gain reduction here on the top. That's because it's using the kick drum as Theo audio input and telling it when to compress . Based on the kick drum hits right? And if I just solo the bass track in Hit K to bring in my Metrodome, you'll hear that I didn't play it perfectly in time. So it's not. It's not, you know, essential that it's perfectly in time, and I wouldn't want to go in necessarily and use timing adjustments to make that perfect. But what we can do is just make that kick drum and the bass sit together just a little bit better for a little bit stronger impact. So I'm gonna solo the kick drum as well take off the Metrodome and Let's go back into our compressor here now. So what we can do is choose the compressor for side chaining. I like to use the vintage V c A. It's up to you to choose what you like. I don't have a reason necessarily why I like this one. But I just find it works nicely for side chain compression. And so what we're going to do is adjust the threshold ratio and attack and release to just get this baseline reducing just a little bit when the kick drum is being hit and that will have it that will give the perception of a little bit more rhythmic tightness to it. Okay, because then the base hits are not clashing with the kick drum hits because we're reducing the gain of the base just a little bit. And that just sort of gives the the impression that they are a little bit tighter. So make this extreme, that kind of pull it back. That might be a little too extreme. Like that may be reduced this attack time. That right there. Right. Okay. Maybe reduced that ratio just a bit. Okay? And now I'll bypass this compressor. You so you can hear the difference just kind of going back and forth a little bit smoother than me. And just like that, we're just having the kick drum and the bass sit a little bit tighter, using side sheen compression so that they're happy and they play nice and they're not stepping on each other's toes. We've already done some of that using the equalization, but I just wanted to show you that you can actually use side chain compression in the mix stage to increase that rhythmic tightness. And also Teoh sort of aid in your quest to avoid frequency masking right because, you know, if the kick, if the base, if the base is not even prominent when the kick drum is being played because I'm reducing the gain on that base track, then we're just sort of helping that frequency masking problem. Ah, helping avoid that frequency masking problem because there's not even as much base being heard there so you can have them sit together nicely like that Now the only down side of that is, you know, if you're a lot of times, your base line is really enhancing. The sonic quality of the kick and you know, that's why you have a base to begin with. So that's just sort of the That's the outer boundary of what you What you want to think about when you're using side chain compression this way is that you don't want to have your kick drum just all alone out there in the wilderness, with no other instruments being played most of the time. Ah, in most genres so you do want your base in their little bit because that's adding to the sonnet quality and character of a kick drum. But by reducing the gain on the base just a little bit, we can have them sit really nicely together. Okay, let's hear that in context. Wait, I will disengage the compressor now seek near the difference party guy with Wait right, Just like that. Just one cool technique that you can use. Ah, like I said, Teoh, increase the rhythmic tightness of two instruments, especially ones that have played live and then also to sort of help you along in your quest to avoid frequency masking Ah infrequency cancellation. OK, in the next lecture will talk briefly about some of the other dynamics processors like the expander, the gate and things like that, and we'll just sort of briefly touch on those and then we'll move on. See there. 21. Expansion: Hey, students, welcome back once again. So we've talked about some compression techniques, including side sheen, compression, compressing a vocal track. And we've talked about what compressors dio. And now it's time to talk about some other dynamics processing options available to you two of them, namely the expander and the Gate. So in this lecture, we're gonna talk about the expander. Now you can sort of think of the expander as the exact opposite of a compressor, whereas a compressor will take an audio signal, and it will sort of smooth out the difference between the peaks and the troughs. In other words, it will take your wave form, and it will reduce the dynamic range and create a more sustained level across the time field of the wave form. An expander sort of does the opposite where it will actually enhance the loud parts and make that part of the wave form even louder, and it will reduce the gain of the quieter parts. So a good you know, they're there. Many applications for using an expander, um, and one that I like to use, sometimes with different percussion parts where I like the percussion. But the busy nous of the percussion sort of gets in the way of of Ah, you know what the other percussion parts that are going on or I don't want to just I don't want to hear all the in between parts of the of the percussion. In those cases, I will use an expander. So we're gonna put an expander on this tam Marine track, which right now, without the expander sounds like this. I'm just gonna solo it right. It's just a normal tambourines loop, and we have the like, 16th notes going. And then there's like a hand hit on the TAM Marine on the two in the four of every bar. So what I want to do is enhance that two and four and just reduce the gain of those in between 16th notes. So this is a great candidate for using a expander. So let's put one on here. We'll go to audio effects. This is under the dynamics menu, and here it is expander. Drop that on there. And now we have a couple presets that you can choose from. There's just three. So a lot of times, you know, using one of these will be fine, but let's talk about some of the parameters here. So, like I said, the expander is pretty much exactly the opposite of a compressor. So we have a threshold Threshold control here, whereas on the compressor, the threshold determines the level above which the compressor will start working in the expander. The threshold determines the gain level below which the gain reduction will occur. So if I set my threshold to negative 20 decibels than any signal that comes in at below negative, 20 decibels will have our gain reduction applied to it. You also have a knee over here, so you can sort of determine the slope of the, um, unprocessed to processed signal. And you have just from 0 to 1 on the knee. Then you have a ratio control, and this is this again is, like the opposite of of a compressor. Well, maybe not the opposite. But what you what you want is a lower ratio over here. So if I bring this to the left, well, explain it this way. If the ratio was one toe one, there's no expansion going on, and you could see we have a one toe one slope in this graph that's reading out here, Okay, All the way to the left would be full expansion. And that's that. That, uh, left border is 0.5 to 1. So it's half every every, uh, all audio signals that come in below negative 20 decibels will be reduced at a level of 200.5 to 1. That's the ratio, that it will be reduced. And again, this is a little bit confusing. But the attack and the release are sort of the opposite in the expander, where whereas in the compressor, the attack determines how quickly the compressor engages after the sound is gone above the threshold in the expander, the release actually determines how quickly your expander will engage once the audio has gone below that threshold and the attack time is how quickly the gain reduction will reset after the sound has gone back above it. So it takes a little bit of, you know, mental gymnastics to sort of reverse what you just learned with the compressor. But it's not actually too complicated. Just sometimes you're like, Wait, wait, what do I gotta dio? So let's let's turn this on And let's figure out the right settings for this tambourines. So I wanna have some pretty high expansion on this tam Marine, because if I look at my way for him, I'm just gonna hit C. You can see that the these two and four peaks are definitely I hire transient than the in betweens, but we want to create an even greater disparity between those peaks and those other 16th notes on the in between. Okay, So what I want to do now is listen to this and just sort of reduce will leave the attack and release times about where they are for now. And I'm just going to reduce the threshold until I'm really hearing that gain reduction on those in between 16th notes. Just gonna loop these 1st 2 bars just like that. Now, that's that might be a little too extreme, but you can just hear the difference there. Negative 43 decibels. I'm really just doing that. Gain reduction on those quieter notes if this is up all the way at the top in at zero decibels that I'm applying the expansion to everything which isn't really making a dent in what we're listening to. So we can hear that here if I bypasses, it's basically the same thing. But if we reduce the threshold, you can really hear those in betweens going away and we're getting. We're losing a little bit of that transient, the two and four, which we don't want either. So we can change the attack and release times and also weaken bump up the gain If we want now with the expander, I probably wouldn't use the auto gain, so we confined our own makeup gain here. Thio Thio Have this sit right at the right level and remember the release times how quickly the expander will engage once the audio's gone below the level. The of the threshold in the attack time is how quickly the gain reduction will stop will reset after it's gone back above the threshold. So that helps us keep those transients in in line. We want we want to hear that that transient loudly, but we're reducing the gain of the quieter parts and you can use the makeup game to bring this back to the level that we had with the Fader set. If this release time, which is determining how quickly the expander starts working this release times too long. Then we won't be catching those low parts because it will take too long to engage. So we can bring this all the way up and you can hear there that those quieter 16th notes are coming back again. All right, I want to release reduce this release time. Now, if our attack time is too short, then we might be losing a little bit of the nice ringing out of those two and four transients right here, the big ones. And it was just sound kind of like right, But we want to have that. We wanna have that tampering ring out a little bit. So that's sort of our like, determining factor for where we want this attack time to be set. So let's play with that, okay? And we'll bypass this to hear the difference. So now we're getting a lot more strength out of those two and four transients, and we're just reducing the gain of the in betweens, and that just cleans up the percussion loop a little bit. Now you may be thinking, OK, you didn't make much of a change there with the expander, but it's just just a way to show you how to use it. And, uh, yeah, it may. It may be a small change in this, you know, solo track. But when you apply these dynamics processes to these different percussion tracks, it will really tighten up the overall session because you don't have all these different 16th notes kind of like, you know, stepping on each other's toes. And you're really just bringing out the the aspect of that track that needs to be there where, while still leaving room for the other instruments that are going on. Okay, so that's kind of the point of the dynamics Processing is to really get the right, um, to really just get the right balance of your instruments. It all comes back to the balance, and that's why getting that static mix is so important because that will tell you what dynamics and what equalization processing you need to apply. Okay, so that's the expander again. It's just sort of like the opposite of a compressor. And, ah, so you can just think of it that way in the next lecture will talk about gating and I will see their 22. The Noise Gate: Hey, boys and girls, welcome back. Once again in this lecture, we're going to talk about the noise gate. It's another dynamics processor, and it's something I think is very much underrated. And you can have a lot of fun with it doing some extreme processing, and you can also use it as sort of a utilitarian ah, thing, which I'll explain in just a moment. The noise gate, in a sense, is like a form of extreme expansion. So in the previous lecture we mentioned how the expander will allow you to reduce the gain of lower level audio in in some audio region. You can reduce the gain, Ah, below a certain threshold. The noise gate is an extreme version of that where you can just completely cut off the audio below a certain threshold so really good. And probably perhaps the most common application of the gate would be on like a Tom microphone. If you're recording alive Drum kit and you have a Tom Mike right, And it's probably likely that the Germer is not playing the toms for the entire song, obviously, depending on the song. But maybe there's just a couple Tom fills throughout the song well, that that microphone that's on the Tom Drum will be picking up the rest of the drum kit, which may not always be wanted because the settings that you have for the Tom Mike sound good when the Tom's actually being struck. But the bleed that you're getting from the other drums, maybe unwanted so you can do is put a noise gate on that Tom microphone, and then you can just have the microphone than in the mix session. You can, ah, basically cut out all of the bleed of the microphone and have it on Lee active when the noise gate tells it to, depending on the threshold that you set right. So basically you're forcing silence for everything that you don't want tohave picked up right instead of chopping up your actual audio file, which is also an option. But maybe not as time, time effective. Ah, you're you're using the noise gate to cut out all the unwanted noise, right? That's why it's called the Gate, because you're just saying, I just want to allow certain parts of this audio to pass through well in pop production with no live drums, we can use the gate for other other reasons as well. So in this in this lecture, I'm going to show you how to use it on this loop number one that we have this loop sounds like this. Right now, it's sort of like a filtered kick and snare with some high hats. And it's got this kind of other, like, sort of a tonal Cynthy kind of thing going on the background, right, giving us these little 16th notes. Ah, Well, what we can do is maybe this is a little busy for this production. Sort of like what we did with the Tambor Green. And we can reduce the business by using a noise gate on this loop and just letting certain a peaks come through and everything else will just cut out entirely. All right, so let's drop a noise gate on here and see what we have working with. It's under the dynamics menu, and it's the last one. No escape. Bring this closer. So we have some parameters here that may seem similar with when the other dynamics processors you have a threshold. Ah, you have the gain reduction. You have these envelope properties attack, hold and release Hold this sort of knew. But we've done attack and release before. So we'll go to hold. We have history sys, which will have to talk about and also the look ahead. And then we have some side chain features as well. If we're using a different audio input, Teoh, determine the gain reduction, which we're not going to do in this lecture. But maybe later on, we'll give an example of how to use side chaining with the gate came. So what do we have here? We have the threshold. And just as with the expander, it's the opposite of a compressor where the love of the audio that comes in below this threshold will be reduced. So if we have the set of negative 50 decibels, which is the default right here than every audios Ah, than all audio that comes in at low negative. 50 decibels will be reduced. How much will it be reduced? Well, that is what we can set here with the skin reduction slider. Negative. 100 decibels is basically completely off. Right. Um, you can have this reduce just a little bit. Um, you know, maybe 30 decibels or something. I mean, that's still a lot, but it's not as much as 100 decibels reduction, so you can have it reduced as much as you want. But most of the time when you're using gating, you probably just gonna want to have this all the way down, right? Otherwise, you could just use an expander if you just want to, uh, tamped down those lower level. Um, if you just want to reduce the gain of those lower levels a little bit, you could just use the expander. But since we're using, the gate would probably just want to make complete silence came. So that's the gain reduction now Attack, hold and release. The attack determines how fast the gain reduction occurs once the level has passed below that threshold. So it's different from the expander. I know it's kind of a lot to keep track of, but this actually determines how fast the noise gate engages after it's passed the threshold and the release time determines how quickly the gain will the gain reduction Wilbur set once the audio's gone back above the threshold and the whole time as a new parameter that we can use to just sort of drag out that gain the opening of the gate just a little bit. And the reason for this is sometimes when you're using the noise gate, you can get some sort of funky side effects. Ah, because you know, you're trying to find the right threshold that will allow the parts that you want to pass through, but other parts of sort of trying to peek through and you maybe don't want that you can use the hold parameter did just sort of keep that gate open a little bit longer so that you're not getting those weird audio artifacts right that you don't want. Okay. And so we can just really can just sort of play with ease to get the right sound. Um, the history says is a little bit complicated, but this is a sort of another way to deal with those unwanted audio artifacts that happen when you're using the gate. The histories is effectively just creates like a different ah, threshold level for the gain reduction and then the gain reset. Um, and it's sort of a complicated algorithm, but really, the way that you think of it is that you could just leave this down if you're not getting any weird gating sounds Ah, you can just leave this down. But if you're getting a little bit, then you can turn this up, which essentially just allows the different threshold levels for when it resets for when the noise gate resets and for when it engages. Okay, that's just sort of the easiest way to think of it. And the look ahead allows is a kind of an amazing thing to where it allows the gate to look ahead literally in the audio file, depending on the milliseconds that you set here. So it can basically not be surprised by the audio that comes in. And it can sort of pre process what's about to happen in your way of form. Um, again, this is a little bit probably more technical than what we need for this course, but you can just sort of play around with this and see if it helps. Um, if it helps the sound that you're getting out of it, okay. And then lastly, we have these side chain parameters which we don't need in this lecture because we're not using side chaining were actually using the the the the audio itself as the input for the gate. OK, so let's play with this a little bit. I'm probably going to turn up the threshold a little bit, Um, because I want to have a little bit more extreme gating here. So let's bypass this again and just get a refresher of what this loop sounds like. So the reason I want to use the noise get on this is but because, um, there's sound occurring in every, you know, every 16th note of this loop, right? There's something happening and I don't want that much busy nous, but I like the sort of cool, sort of filtered percussion that it has, and it has a nice movement, but I don't want all that business. So let's engage this noise gate and turn up the threshold until we're getting some gain reduction in those little in between parts. So you can see as I turn up this threshold now is that negative 25 decibels. I'm using this noise gate on a lot more of the audio because there's a lot more of the audio that comes in at below this threshold than that then would be at, you know, negative 100 decibels, obviously. Okay, so we'll go back up to negative 25 and we can make this even a little bit more extreme and then use the hold function. I don't want to lose the little high hatchets on the off beast. Okay, so that's kind of cool. So I'm just I'm using the noise gate to allow certain audio to pass through. But the other audio, that's maybe, uh, you know, that has a lower gain in the wave form. I'm just I'm just completely removing that from the processed sound. Um, and let's hear what happens when we change the attack and release times seeking here. Just started. Start sending crappy there because the attack time is too slow and and and so I'm losing the percussive nous of these audio transients. It's like hearing that snare sound. And then it's like, Oh, yeah, I gotto engage the gate and then but it's too slow. So it just sort of sounds flubbed, right? We don't want that. If I increase the release time too much, then were sort of un, you know, negating the negating what we've set for the gate. Because We're leaving this gate open too long and everything's just coming through it right . That's as if we're not using any dating at all. The same thing would be true if I kept the hold open too long as well. It's just the same as the UN prospect. Unprocessed signal. But if we have no hold, it may start to sound a little too choppy. I mean, that may be what you want, but it's sort of up to you and these air. These requires some pretty fine tune, fine tuned, Ah, settings here. So just be careful that, you know, you're just making little changes to your audio, right? And then let's bypass this and hear what we had before. So it's kind of cool. It makes it a little different because each bar, then, is a tiny bit different because the gate is reacting to the audio and just a little bit of a different way for each bar. You know, each kind of little musical phrase there and this What this does is it allows us to set the fader at a proper level, because before in the context of everything, I couldn't really find the right setting for this loop because if I had it up loud enough to hear it, then it just caused a little too much busy nous. But now with this noise gate on where I am telling it, I only want to hear those transience and maybe just a little bit of the in between stuff, but not as much. Now that means I can set my fader at a proper level toe where it's really enhancing the percussive nous of the song. But its not creating too much business. So that's a great example of a time to use a noise gate where the compressor, you know, we don't want a compressor because that would do the opposite, right? It would make it would bring up those lower levels, and it would reduce the transients. And the expander would, uh, would do the opposite of that. But maybe you know, would still be a little too busy because we would hear all those little in between sounds. The gate allows us to just select what we want to hear and open up the gate for the higher gain parts of the wave form and closed the gate for the lower gain parts of the wave form. Okay, so that's the noise gate. It's a great tool to use in your mix arsenal. So try putting the gate on your different instruments, and I will see you in the next lecture. 23. Compression on the Drum Submix: Hey, students, welcome back once again in this lecture, I want to show you how to use a compressor on our drum sub mix to make all of the drums glued together really nicely. And this is a little trick I've been using a lot lately. Especially when in, like a pop Brock sort of production where were using different drum samples, you know, different A kick drum sample or snare drum sample. Hi. Hats and symbols and all these different drum parts and they are each individual drums. You know, obviously we haven't recorded a alive drum kit for this song, but we can use a compressor on our drum sub mix, which is another great reason Have our sub mix set up to begin with, um, to really just make that whole drum kit kind of glued together and just sound a little bit more like one full instrument, right, because that's what the drums aren't supposed to be. Um, obviously, the every rule is made to be broken, so you don't have to do to do this by any stretch of the imagination. But it's something that I've used a lot and I think is really cool. So let's pull up our mixer hit X and all the way on the right is our subjects is right in the 1st 1 hears or drum sub mix now just cycled this last chorus and will solo these drums And here are they sound right. That's some pretty good. But let's try putting a compressor on here to make all these drums just sort of glue into one instrument. So just as we did with our other tracks, you can do this on your sub mix, and we'll just put a compressor here dynamics compressor. And we'll find some settings here now that the purpose of this is not to do any kind of extreme gain reduction necessarily, but just to create a little bit of dynamic consistency between all the pieces of the drums , the kick snare, the collapse, the high had that crash just to make it all sort of sit together nicely as one complete whole. Um, I happen to like the fet compressor for this purpose, but obviously you can play around with your different compressor types. I'm gonna turn off the auto gain, and, um, we'll have to find the right gain sitting. But for now, Just keep it at zero decibels. And, um, let's just get this threshold and ratio right first. Then we can work on the attack and release, So Okay, I'm keeping this threshold about, you know, about 18 17 negative 17 decibels. And I don't want the ratio much more than 2 to 1. Because if this goes to extreme, like a limiter, it's going to start losing the character of those. Drum it. So let's hear that thief. I want to keep that down a little bit lower. Now, with the attack in the release time, if our attack time is too short than we're going to lose the punch of those transients thieves in here, that just sounds kind of flooding. So we don't want that to were getting pretty pretty long Attack times. Fine. And with the release time, if this is too short, it will start to sound a little bit unnatural to where the compressor is disengaging a little too quickly. Auto, there may be reduced. Okay, let's bypass this. And compared to what we had without the compressor, you can hear without the compressor, especially with the symbols like the high hat and the crash Cymbals. It just doesn't have the same kind of glued sound that it has with the compressor on. It just makes it sound a little bit tighter, because when the kick drum, which is probably the highest gain part of the drum kit, is kicking in, its reducing the overall level of the entire sub mix, including that those symbols and that just gives it a little bit of continuity because those symbols are being reduced just a little bit when the kick drums hitting right. It's just a little bit to see our game reductions, just a couple of decibels. Nothing too crazy. But I just use a little bit of tightness, and I'm just by passing back and forth because I liked the level of my drum sub mix before . And it's easy to be sort of fooled by adding a compressor when it just makes it louder. And that could sort of fool you into thinking, Oh, that sounds better. But actually, it's just louder, right, and then it messes up your whole mix, so I'm just by passing back and forth to make sure that with this compressor engaged, I'm not getting too extreme of, ah, level difference between the compressor and the non compressed sub mix. Right? And now there's lots of other really cool things we could do to the sub mixes Well, which maybe we'll get into later when we go on to using effects and buses to make it. You know, we could do like another sort of fake room Mike Ah, by adding a bus to this, Or if you want to add just a really subtle reverb or something, you could do that as well, even some distortion that has, like a high pass filter on it. Just add a little bit more natural of a drum sound. You can have a lot of fun with that. And that's just Justin. Example of another thing that you can use a compressor on is a group of instruments to sort of make them all kind of glued together. Right? Um ah, and I do this a lot of times with my drum sub mixing. You can even use the compressor on your percussion sub mix, for example, to make all your little shakers and tambourines and loops kind of glued together and just fit nicely as well. So I just wanted to show you that that you have that options. Well, the compressor does not have to be used on just individual instruments. But you can use it on your on your sub mixes as well. Okay, great work. I will see you in the next lecture. 24. Creating Return Effects: Hey, students, welcome back once again. Now we're going to start talking about using some effects plug ins, and you may have realized that that by this point in the mix, we haven't used any sweetening effects. So we haven't really used any distortion or reverb or delays or anything like that. And we already have a really good sounding mix. That's because we've used just some dedicated time and energy to getting a good static balance, using some dynamics, processing with compression noise, gates, etcetera and also ah, the frequency domain we've handled using equalization. And so the goal at this stage is just to sort of bring some unique characteristics of the elements out using, ah, some sweetening effects and also to create a different sense of space and depth with your mix using ah, re verbs, delays and other sweetening effects. And, um so we're going to talk about a few of them, um, not going to be able to just go through and describe every single effect available to you, and that would probably be a waste of your time anyway, because ah, lot of the fun comes from just experimenting with different things, but I am going to talk a lot about reverb and delay. Ah, which are sort of the most common blend effects, the effects that allow your mix to sort of occupy a kind of coherent physical space, right? And it sort of brings some blend between the different elements and also increases. The ah, sort of perceived space of the mix makes it feel maybe a little bit bigger or wider or different words like that you can use to describe it. Eso in the first lecture here. What I want to talk about is just setting up a bus effects, so send effects using buses. And this is a great technique for many different reasons, one of them being to just save CPU space, which will talk about another one being it creates consistency with using the same like, for example, same reverb effect on multiple instruments. And that sort of creates a consistency with that effect, um, and also just saves you a whole lot of time. So let's set up some return effects here with the vocals, so I have all my vocal tracks here at the bottom. If I open up my mixed window, we can look at it this way. Ah, here we are, have maybe 10 vocal tracks or whatnot. Now, instead of dropping a different reverb, plug in on all these tracks to have. You know, one thing that you maybe have done in the past could do is choose a river, plug in and change the parameters, whatever you want. And if you like it and you wanted on all your vocals, you would just copy and paste this over right now that's there's it's not wrong to do that necessarily. And you may want some different processing some river processing with your different vocal channels. But that will start to eat up your Cebu power pretty quickly. Uh, especially for you doing this with all of your different tracks. If you have five different effects plug ins and all your tracks, you're gonna rendered into some trouble and there's a much easier way. So I'm going to show you how to do that. So right here, above our output, which all of the vocals air going to bust 36. That's their vocal sub mix. You have this send section right here, and you could see it's his sentence in this row so I can choose instead of I can choose a bus here, and I'll usually start with bus 10 for my return effects. And now we have this rotary knob next to where it says bus 10. And this allows you to choose the amount of audio that you're sending to that return channel. Okay. And we'll talk about that in just a second. Now, over on the right are little bus will pop up, and you could see here the input bus 10 and pops out it ox. Third, oxen number eight. And so what? I'll just call this is delay. Okay? And so that now becomes our delay effects channel. And now what we can do is throw in a delay, plug in on this channel, this bus 10. So I'll just go up here. And she was from DeLay. And maybe we could do us. Uh, just a simple echo. Okay. And we have some parameters here. And for this for vocals, I'll probably do like 1/4 note, maybe half note and weaken, weaken, mess with these little bit now, you'll notice here that the wet percentage is that 100%. And that's because this is a send, uh, plug in. Since we've put this over here in the bus, it will automatically set our wet balanced 100%. We don't want any dry balance because we're getting all of the unprocessed audio coming straight out of that channel. Right? If it, for example, if I drop that same delay an echo here now, our default wet balances at 78%. And that's because if you had a plug in on just on the channel itself, you would probably want some kind of balance between the UN processed and the process. The fact right. So in this case, we might want mostly dry and just have little bit of echo on that channel itself. But since we're using a return effect, so over here are delay our eco that's on the delay channel is automatically set to 100%. And you almost always want that right? You just want full wet balance, and then you can sort of create the balance of how much delay effect you want by adjusting this rotary knob so I can have a lot of this channel being sent to that delay by increasing this rotary knob or I can just send a little bit to it. And this is nice because, say, I want to send the first vocals and the chorus vocals to that bus to our DeLay bus, and I want a lot more delay on the chorus because when the corsets there's a lot more musical information and maybe we want those vocals to sound even bigger, right? So we can and just sort of in a larger space. We can increase the amount of this that's going to our DeLay channel in the course, and then maybe, ah, you know something where we could have the bridge vocals, which are, um, down here 62. This one we could send to bust 10 as well and maybe have, you know, maybe somewhere in the middle, like a little bit more than the verses, but a little bit less than the course. Okay, so now what's happening? I'm just going to solo our box sub mix and this delay and we'll go to the verse here and you'll hear the delay coming in the streets of gold. Whether imagines, live right. So that's quite a lot of delay. We maybe don't want that much, and we can even reduce the fader output of that echo channel like this. We keep on chasing the sun to find a light and hopelessness. And we got it. We can see it Don't look down with that. Just gives us a little bit of space with the delay. Um, And then when we go to the chorus party than Sun, like shooting through the sky, you were fun following even fat. And if I just solo that delay channel, you can hear just the delays coming in chew into the sky, right? And then I could even probably change this to 1/4 note delay. Just so I know that this is my quarter note delay Because if I want have a couple other delays like, for example, we can create another bus for a slap back. Right? So now we'll go back to this vox's verse and, um, instead of just this bus, we can add another bus, the bus 11 and now we can go over the bus 11 which is right here, call this slap delay. And now we can throw on another delay, maybe a tape delay or something, and we could just choose a preset. Um, maybe 16th notes slap. Okay, Just like that. Probably want to turn this down a bit. And now we can't add We could send some of that audio to the slap back And let's go to the verse here. Streets of gold making here that slap Keep on chasing the sun to find please And we got it . We can see a toe Look down. Where on stopping? So now I have that quarter note delay and a slap back delay. And I had consent different vocal channels to that slap back. Or, you know, I could send any other instrument to the slap back as well. So now, instead of having a bunch of different plug ins for all these different vocal channels, I just have these to return channels that I can send my different instruments too. And I can find the right balance by using this rotary knob next to the bus on this on the send send row here. And then I can reduce or increase the overall volume of that entire return channel. Using the fader is over here to the right, and i'll usually color these. I don't want these colored the same as the, um as the sub mix sob. Maybe just make it purple or something, just so I can tell that these are return channels, right? And of course, with your return channels, you don't There's no rule in having just one plug in there. So maybe on my slap back delay, I could throw a little bit of distortion. Maybe just a little over drive to just darken up that slap back delay a little bit us. Well, right. So now I have this cool, distorted slap back delay channel that I can send any number of my vocal channels to or other instruments, obviously not just vocals. And now I have these two. All right, let's do another one for reverb Now what I often dio ah is I'll just go to the drum sub mix and create a bus from Here's Will Do Bus 12 and Bus 12 was right here, and we'll call this one a river, and then we can drop in a river, plug in space designer and maybe just do something for now, we'll just choose a like a medium drum plate, something like that, and you'll see again here that we have zero on the dry balance, right? Because this is a return effect. So we have just the reverb blend. We have no dry signal. We don't want dry signal coming in with send effects with the return effects, because that might mess with the phase. And we just don't need it. We're getting all of the dry signal from the drub Said makes itself okay. So let's solo the drums and the reverb, and we can just start increasing this a little bit. I'll cycle up the chorus and we can listen to how much reverb we want in here. That's a lot just like that. And then I would probably go into the space designer and, ah, take down a little bit of the high frequencies. Just make a little bit of a high cut shelf like that, and that would just make it sound a little bit more natural. Maybe increased the reverb amount. This is what the River Channel sounds like. Now let's take off a little more of those highs. And then, if we go over to the verses, that's what the drums would sound like with the river halfway through here. Okay, and we can bypass the percent, uh, send like this, and maybe we'd want just a little bit of referred there. You know, um, if you don't want to apply this to the entire drum sub mix, you don't have to. You can, uh, turn that off or just remove it. No send. And you can go over here to your specific drum instruments. Like maybe we do want some, Ah, bus on the some reverb on the snare so we can send that one to bus 12 and have quite a bit here, right? And then maybe on the clap is well, we can send that to the river. And sometimes, you know, you don't really want any reverb on the kick or anything like that. So that's I'm just giving you a few examples of how to set up these return channels. And let's change the color of this river pier, right click signed channel strip color and just make it that ugly purple there. And now we know that we have these three return channels. We have 1/4 note delay, slap back delay in a reverb and that just freeze up so much space for your CPU processing because I have these channels all ready to go. And I could just send my instruments to them, using the buses rather than having a 1,000,000 plug ins over all of these different tracks . Now, I can just route them to those return channels and used the effects that way. And aside from saving CPU, the other added benefit of that is it creates this consistency where now you have a specific reverb Ah, that you've chosen and that you have adjusted to your liking. And now all of those instruments are going to that same reverb, which creates a nice, consistent blend effect, right? Eso definitely have a lot of fun with that. Um, you know, you can get as detailed as you want. A lot of times I'll set up a really crazy return channel with, like, some distortions and, you know, choruses, other modulation, sources and other modulation effects. And I could just send just a little bit of different instruments to it and just creates a nice kind of interesting, uh, effect return right. And you can have a lot of fun with that. So set up some send some return channels using your buses. It will save you a lot of time and CPU power. And it creates great consistency with your mix. See you in the next lecture. 25. Ducking Return Effects: Hey, everyone, welcome back. Once again, in the last lecture, we talked about setting up return effects and using that to save CPU power and also to just increase efficiency and save time. Right, Because you're using just the same return effect and sending multiple tracks to it helps everybody out a lot. Now, in this lecture, I want to talk to you about something we call ducking. Ducking is essentially the same thing as side Shane Compression. Remember, we talked about side chain compression in ah few lectures ago with where we used the live base. We used a compressor on their and and reduce the gain of that bass track based on the input of the kick drum. Well, we can do the same thing with our return effects. And this helps create clarity in the send return balance. Okay, so what am I talking about? Well, let's taken example here. So we have these vocals in the verse, right, and we have them being sent to Ah, we have them being sent to three buses. Bus number 10 which is this echo delay. Bus 11 which is a slap back tape delay and 13 is a reverb Okay, Now let's forget this slap back for right now, but just just Teoh make this a little bit simpler. And maybe even the reverb is well, so we can hear this. So we have this delay bust number 10 and it sounds cool, but it's maybe a little too busy. So let's listen to that really quick. Streets of Gold Way have that. What is that half note delay coming in? And it sounds cool, but it's just a little too busy. It starts to clutter up how the, um the clarity of the vocals themselves. So what we can do is use ducking to reduce the, um, gain on that return channel wherever it whenever the vocals are being sung. So let's just do this right now. So we'll go to this return channel and we'll drop a compressor on it. So remember, it's Bus 10. We have eco, and then we want the compressor at the end of the chain. So sometimes I like to put it all the way at the bottom of your little stack here, just in case I want to throw other effects on because this is kind of the last piece of the pie. Um, and it doesn't really matter which compressor you choose. You can sort of go through and find ones. I mean, we're not doing anything too technical with the compressor, so Ah, you know, we're not making it work too hard. All we're doing is we're going to choose a side chain until this compressor to reduce the gain of that return channel. Okay, Now try to guess which side chain which audio input will use this side chain. Well, if you said the vocal sub mix, then you are correct. So bus number 36 is the vocal sub mix, you know, why did we choose that? And not just the verse vocals? Well, we did not choose just the verse vocals because maybe we want to use this same ducking in the chorus. We have the, you know, with some of the chorus vocals and other things going Ah, being sent to that delay bus as well. And if we use just the verse vocals as the key that's ducking the return channel, then that won't engage it all during the chorus. Because this on a totally different track. Right? So we can't just use the verse vocals as the side chain input. And and this is just another great reason why setting up sub mixes is a huge help because, um, now we can just now we're telling it whenever there's a lead vocal happening, I want you to reduce the gain of that delay return. Okay, so it's really simple. Now we just need to find the right settings here. Um, I probably want a longer release because I wanted to sort of, um, turn off the auto here. I want a longer release because I want it. I don't want it to sound like to pumping, um, and maybe bring the threshold down, turn off auto gain in ratio, maybe like 56 or something like that. So we'll just kind of listen in here. It's going on streets of gold where the legend way keep on chasing sons, find a way and just like that. So that way we're using that main vocal Teoh key into the compressor one to reduce the gain of the delay. So what that means is whenever the vocals air singing the delay channel is much lower in gain or volume, and it's just sort of and then it sort of returns to normal when the vocal phrase has stopped. And that way the delay trails will kick in, you know, at the end of a vocal phrase or in between the verses or whatever. And it sounds nice there, but it's not getting in the way of the clarity of the main vocal right. And so it's very simple. We can use ducking for lots of different reasons, and this is a great one. And it also shows the power of using send send return effects setups and also the sub mixes for our different instruments, which allowed us to have just that one input for the compressor, right? Very simple. Just play around with it, try to set up some some ducking. If you want to increase the clarity of your channels that air going to these difference return return effects and ah yeah, I will see you in the next lecture 26. Creating a Drum Room: in this lecture, we're going to continue talking about effects processing. And I want to show you how to set up a room bus for the drums sub mix. So this is just kind of cool, because I'm going to open up the mixer window in the second window. So just to sort of take a step back here, um, we have all of these different drums, right? We have kicks and snares and hats, loops and all, all kinds of things. And the main drum kit is being sent to bus 30 right? And the percussion to bust 31. So those are our sub mixes, and they're over here. We have a drum sub mix and a percussion sub mix 30 and 31. We have a compressor on the drum sub mix. We don't have any compression yet on the percussion sub mix, but what's cool about this now is I can even send the drum sub mix to a new bus, right? And so I can send this to return Channel. We'll just keep going down. So, 36 with what was the last one? Uh, sorry. So, yeah, we'll be right here. Bus 12 and here is and we can call this drum room. And so now we have a room return channel that weaken send the drum sub mix to and maybe a little percussion if we want Teoh and we can sort of create a room over here. So just to just to review the signal chain is from the drum instruments that each individual jump instrument is being routed to right here to bust 30. And then, ah, we're sending it to this return channel for a room sound. And then it's going out to the stereo out just the main mix bus. So it's just kind of cool that you can use this sort of complicated routing. Teoh, I'm sending in effect if I put a reverb effect here, brain, I'm sending you know, the kick drum in the snare drum. And ah, whatever else is here a clap. I'm sending that all to this reverb channel. Ah, but I'm Rather than putting the different insert effects on each of these channels, I'm sending them first to the drum room. I'm sorry. I'm sending them first to the drum sub mix and then they're going into our return channels . Whatever we want to set here for our little drum room that is going out to the stereo output. So it's kind of neat. And so what I'll usually dio just sort of as a default kind of thing. His will set up a drum room. Um, usually will do Maybe, like a medium space. Um, but it will try a nice room for now, and you'll see that since it's a return effect, we have just the just the wet balance. No dry balance. It's called dry and rev it's not. That's not reverse its, ah, reverb that confused me for a while, okay? And, um, let's just solo the are drum room in the drum sub mix For right now, I always tried different one. That's not bad. The live chambers kind of cool eso that's the in dreams, and I usually won't. I won't send a ton of it to be just a little bit helps nicely now. The reason I would use the bus here from the drum. Some mix to the to the drum room is is that I don't I don't necessarily want to get in the way of the dry drum mix that I have Uh oh. And I have the compressor on it. Yes, but I don't want to just throw reverb on this drum sub mix itself. Instead, I want to create sort of like a a room microphone, right, Teoh supplement into the drum kit and what I would do sometimes twos have a lot of fun messing around with this drum room. Like maybe take this EQ. You play with it a little bit and give a little boost there, and I probably take down the he's low frequency quite a bit just during doing a little eq. You on the, um on the drum room itself and you can experiment with some different things, too. Like, I think a lot of times what's nice is to put a little overdrive on this and that just gives it a little bit like of grit. Just makes it sound a little bit more like natural and kind of dirty. Just kind of cooling and just rewind. Maybe lost a little bit of clarity there in the top, just like that's probably good. Okay. And then add the drums back in. Rewind a little bit like you don't need very much at all I'm just using a little bit of send to that bus and just have this fader pretty low, right? But it just adds a little bit of nice of a nice kind of roomy character to it. Um and, ah, you know, you can obviously, if you don't like that overdrive or you want a different reverb, whatever, there's lots of different options. But just to show you that I can even send one of these sub mixes to a bus. So that way, um, rather than going back to all these red tracks all the drum tracks and sending each of these to that room bus, that dream room bus, right, I can just send just the drum set mix to the room to the dream room bus, and this saves me a whole lot of clicking time, and it also just makes your mix a lot cleaner. Now, the only thing Teoh sort of worry about with that is that a lot of times Ah, if you're like listening to one of these tracks and likewise there a reverb on this clap, I don't heat. I don't have a re verbs that Then you'll have to remember Oh, Yeah, I'm sending it to the sub mix and then to the drum room. So that's why I'm getting all confused, right? And then just to keep your head on straight, I would ah, assign the channel strip color to the drum room so that we know we have another UPS and I forgot it. Here. Signed channel Strip color. So we just keep all of our return effects in place and we're happy and organized. Write great works you in the next lecture. 27. Stereo Imaging with the Rotor Cabinet: welcome back once again. Um, So we've talked about some delays and some river verbs, and I want to go through just a few more different sweetening effects and some fun stuff that you can dio Teoh just spice up your some of your tracks if they're feeling a little bit flat. Um, like I said, I'm not going to just I'm not going to walk through all of the different audio insert effects, right. But I will kind of describe few that I like to use sometimes in the mixed age to spice things up a little bit because probably you've been using a lot of plug ins during the production session, especially with more like pop and electronica styles. Um, you're using a lot of plug ins for your instruments and making them really weird mingling, um, having fun with that. So in this lecture we're gonna work on is this vocoder? Um and I have this vocoder part that I recorded. Ah, and, um, it sounds cool, but it's a little Teoh, like in your face. It's too centred in the mix, and it's sort of distracts from the lead vocals. So what I'm gonna do is use a Roeder cabinet. Teoh Sort of mask it a little bit and make it spread out over the stereo image a little bit . So let's just hear this part soloed, okay? And then with the whole mix sounds like this. I'll rewind the cycle a little bit that way. Yeah. Okay, so it's cool, but it just is a little too up front. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drop in under the modulation menu, that Roeder cabinet and this sort of, um, emulates having a Leslie in organ cabinet, which is just a big box with a rotating uhm drum in there that blows, blows air in circles and sort of, um, you know, amplifies the sound, um, that way. So it's pretty cool. And there's lots of different fun stuff that you can have that you can change here. You can change the type of cabinet that it is. You can put the mikes in the rear. You can change the mind to like a stereo X y thing. So lots of fun stuff with with all of the effects. You know, I'm sure you know a lot of this stuff already, but just to show you that adding this in create a little bit of movement in the in this vocoder part. Let's listen and I mean and just changed the balance a little bit more to the horn. No. Yeah, so you can hear that That's moving a little bit. I just have the rotation on slow because fast would be a little too much. It's cool, but we'll leave it on slow. And, um, I can change the max rate to That's neat anyway, but it just creates a little bit of stereo movement. It's sort of like a tremolo ah, which we could have used, you know, tremolo. But this is just a little bit more like natural feeling, and it's quite subtle, which is kind of cool so that let's listen to that back in context. Find home way. Got it. Eso just like that. It settles in a lot better, and what's nice is we didn't have to change the fader. So again, this all goes back to your static mix because in order to hear this vocoder I had avid up sort of a little bit louder. Um, but once it was loud enough to hear it just kind of poked out a little too much. Um and so rather than using dynamics, if I use that sort of, uh, stereo imaging insert effect and I just sort of spread it out a little bit over the stereo field, then it will just sit back in the mix a tiny bit more and let the lead vocals come out right. So just little tools like that and just sort of thinking if you take a step back and you think OK, you know that you so you sort of present yourself with the problem, and then you try to find ways to creatively solve it, right? So, again, my problem was it wa you know, in order to hear this vocoder, I had to have it at a certain volume on the fader. But at that volume, it was just too much in the face of the lead vocals. And it wasn't a frequency problem, really. It was just like too much, right down the middle, right in your face. But if I just tried to pan it left to right, then it sort of loses some of the cool coolness of it. So what? What is my solution, that is to use, um, this Roeder cabinet, which sort of pans the, um, pans the sound back and forth a little bit, just a little bit and creates this kind of movement that allows the vocals to sit which are sitting right in the middle. Teoh really be present. And But I'm not losing that vocoder, right? So again, it's just sort of defining your problems. And then, um, really setting out to fix them creatively. Great, great work. And we will see you in the next lecture. 28. Pitch Shifted Delay to Widen a Vocal Track: Hey, everyone, welcome back. Once again in this lecture, I'm gonna show you sort of a classic technique that we use a lot of times to widen out a vocal track. Um, and this is a little bit out of order in terms of what I would do. Uh, I would normally do all of my pitch and timing and audio editing before doing some of these effects, but I I sort of wanted to structure this course a little bit more. Ah, trying to balance between going in order of what? How you would do a mix and also sort of building complexity a little bit. And some of these some of the audio editing techniques are a little bit more challenging and technical, And so I'm saving those for later. But just f y I like I wouldn't I probably wouldn't do too much vocal, uh, effects processing in a in A in a normal everyday mix. Before, until I did all of my audio adjusting and like fixing the pitch or the timing or whatever. So, just just to let you know that, um, you may be saying, Well, we haven't edited any of the vocals yet. but I'm just sort of trying to go a little bit in order of complexity anyway, that out of the way, I'm going to show you this technique. It involves creating two sends for the vocals. Ah, and then sort of painting those left and right with subtly different delay and pitch plug ins. And it's actually pretty simple, but it's a really, really nice way to just widen out a single vocal track. So we have this chorus here potty, then sunlike right, and it's right down the middle. Now that's that's not bad, necessarily. But if we want to widen it out and just make it feel a little bit bigger, we can use this technique, and I'm just gonna show you how to do it now. So here's our vocal track, this chorus vocals, and I'm gonna create two sins so Bus 14 will use and also bus 15 game, and we'll just create Want to say negative eight for both of these. Okay, so you can double click this rotary knob and type in the number. It's a little bit easier than, like, just kind of trying to go in and, like, hit it right exactly eight saves you a little bit of time. Okay, so bus 14 and 15. Now we have them over here on the right, and I will call this, um I mean, you can call it whatever you want, but it's like a pit shift delay so we can call this PSD pitch shift delay or DPS delay, pit shift, whatever you want, and we'll call this one left. And this one PSD, right. Okay, if you want to type it out, pitch shift, delay left. You can do that. You know, if that if that helps you, like, just remember. But I try to keep it as simple as possible. So I'll just I'll just do pst left and psd, right, Okay. And we'll switch the use to mono track so you can click this and choose mono, or you can just eso if you right click, you can select mono. Um or you can just click those little circle with left click, and it will change from monastery. Ok, left will be left, obviously right will be right. So now we have these two cents and all we're doing is changing them to mono and sending them left and right like that. And now we're going to create a delay plug in and a pitch plug in. So, um, I'll just probably I'll use either the delay designer or the sample delay. Really, either one. I think you know it doesn't really matter. But the nice thing about this is we can choose milliseconds, so we're going to de select sink because we don't want it sync up to any grid. We just want to really, really short delay something like 15 milliseconds. So I can just click this milliseconds here and type in 15. Now, we just have one really simple repeat at 15 milliseconds, right? And, um then I will copy this and paste it over into Bus 15. And so to do that, you can hold option, command, click and drag. And now it's over there. But then we need to open the 2nd 1 and change this to something like 18. Right? 19 or whatever would just It's a little bit slower of a delay, but it's really close. Okay, so 15 milliseconds in 18 milliseconds. And now when we play this so I'm just soloing leave chorus vocals, party, then sunlike shooting through the sky, you wave. We already have a little bit of widening going on, and that's just because we're doing subtle delays and sending them to the left and right. And that's in addition to the dry signal that's coming out straight down the middle. So we already have a little bit of delay. But there's it sounds a little bit Comey like it's some comb filtering kind of will happen . Um, and with all of these widening effects, you want to be sure that you're checking your mixed in mono so that it's not like just sounding really, really crappy on mono, because every now and then your listener will hear it in mono and, ah, that that, you know, just sort of helps you keep some cohesiveness in your mix. If you're making sure that it's not sounding crappy, what you might need to do is change some of the delay times right. But we're not quite finished yet. We need to add some pitch plug ins, so I'm going to choose from the pitch menu. Ah, the pitch shifter, mono again and semi tones is zero. We don't want any semi tone mix adjustment pitch adjustment. I mean, but for the sense, what I'll do is I'll do you like negative five now ascent. There are 100 cents in every semi tone, and a semi tone is just 1/2 step on the keyboard. Right? So this is like 5 1/100 of of ah, of a semi tone. So this is in between 1/2 step. It's just a very, very small pitch adjustments and will make the mix 100% here. Okay. And then we'll do the same thing. Will copy and paste this to the right channel. Bus 15 instead of negative five will change this to just five. So we have a suspect spread on the other side. So this one is slightly down, shifted in pitch, and this one is slightly up shifted. This delay is at, you know, whatever. It was 15 seconds. This delays at 18 milliseconds. So what we're doing is creating two channels that air coming out one slightly delayed, more than the other one pitch down just five cents. One pitched up five cents and taking all together that will create this sort of a perception of a widening effect, because if you don't have the pitch than it sounds a little bit funky. Um, your brain just interprets the the widening differently, and it can get a little confusing. But when you when you hear just even, I mean you can't even really hear the pitch difference like in isolation. But in this set up, that subtle pitch differentiation will sort of fool your brain into thinking that you're hearing like a wider image. Okay, it's kind of a weird, like, psycho acoustic thing that happens. Let's hear that now party, then sunlike shooting through the sky. You were funnel in, right, so that just gives a little bit of a widening effect. Now let's let's go back to this club course and let's mute thes two buses so we hear how it was. And then, you know, we're but just by passing those buses and then we're going, Teoh reengage them so we can hear the difference party. Then a sunlike Okay. And then with this new PSD effect party, then, son night, right, So you can hear there. It just widens it out a little bit. And then in the context of everything now you might need to go in, and just some things like, I think I might want to have a little bit more delay. But, you know, if you get too much delay, it starts to sort of sound like slap back. And that's not exactly what we're going for, but just to kind of tweak some of these things. But, you know, you may you may have to do in terms of just, you know, not every setting like not every song will require the exact same delay in pitch parameter , so they might have to sort of fudge some of them to get the sound that you want, but just wanted to show you this kind of ah ah, classic technique that we use Teoh to widen out a a track. It doesn't have to just be vocals either. Like, you could do the same thing for for a synth patch. If it's just like a really mono Since patch that you want to widen out or something, you can do that as well. So that's how we set this up in order to widen it out. Um, try that out, see how it works for you and I will see you in the next lecture. 29. Using Overdrive to Even out a Snare Drum: Hey, students, welcome back once again. So what I'm doing now, Just sort of going through my tracks. And I'm just really listening to each individual element, trying to figure out what needs a little bit of help. Right? Um because ideally, you know, we've done We've done a lot of good work in the production, and we like all of our instruments. But every now and then, when you're getting into this mix session, you'll start to find that when everything's put together and you kind of, you know, you have a new perspective, fresh ears. Every now and then you'll find Oh, this track is not quite doing what I wanted to do, right? And, uh, you know, for example, I'm hearing the snare and the snares just a little too like dry and crisp for me. I want it to be a little bit more harmonically rich right now. Since I'm the producer of the song, I could go in and just find a different snare and, you know, create a noose snare sound, and there's nothing wrong with that. But every now and then, you know it's it's a good learning experience to figure out some ways to address these problems. A. And B. Um, you know, if if you're not the producer and the producer has given you the snare, you could get away with using a different snare, of course. But you know, it's it's also just a good exercise to figure out. How can I help the snare? Just sit in the mix a little bit better? So as I mentioned the snares just a little too dry for me, I'm going to solo the drums sub mix here. Ah, here it is. So a Z Comptel. It's just little to crisp and like plain sounding eso in order to deal with some of that crispness and also the sort of it's not very harmonically rich. It's a little too just snapping, so I'm going to use a distortion plug in to add some harmonic content to the snare, and also that will sort of even out the dynamics a little bit more. We don't have a compressor on the snare, and I like to, you know, you know, compression is great, but I like to try to find other creative ways to sort of solve that dynamic problem. So adding a little bit of overdrive to the snare will both add some harmonic content, make it a bit richer. And it will also sort of tamp down that the transient of the snare hit and sort of even it out a little bit. Okay, so I'm gonna go to my snare, and I'm just gonna add some overdrive. And it's just a matter of, like, playing with these settings a little bit. You have a drive amount, you have the tone which sort of shapes the ah frequency response and then the output just the level. Right. So I'm gonna not solo the drums sub mix instead, Just solo the snare. Try to find some settings here. So I think that sounding pretty cool right there and then what I would always do is bypassed this plug in to make sure that our level is very close to what it was without the distortion, right? A little, too. That's about right Now. Let's hear that in the context of the whole drum sub mix. So I can unsold of the snare and just solo the drums a little more tone, right? I think that sounds really cool. Let's hear it without the distortion and I'll bring it back in and you can hear there with the overdrive. It's It sort of evens out the dynamics a little bit, and it sort of gives a little bit more sustained to the snare because it's over driving that audio signal. And that just adds in this harmonic richness and sort of compresses the overall signal in which which gives it sort of the sense of a little bit more sustained and a little bit more just like harmonic body. You know, we can use the word body to describe it just has more going on there and feels good now every now and then you're doing something and you you know that they sound good like this. But you want to make sure that it sounds good in the context of the whole song. And you may need to adjust the fader just a little bit or even some of the e que. So sometimes you have to kind of work backwards. Once you've solved one problem, Uh, oftentimes it can create others. But let's just listen to this year, you know, I'm gonna bypass that overdrive so we can hear the difference here right. I really like. That's cool. So all we did was just at a simple overdrive plug in to the snare, which helped with a little bit of the, you know, the like. Internal dynamics of each snare hit created a little bit more sustained, a little bit more harmonic content, which adds body to the snares. Makes it feel a little bit more sin. Ari to me. Okay. And less like a clap or snap. Um, so we didn't have to go in and find a new snare sound and, you know, re sample everything. We just dropped a no overdrive plug in, and it solved our problem, So that's pretty cool. All right. Great work. See you in the next lecture. 30. Phase Cancellation Gating on the Guitars: Halo Boys and Girls welcome back. Once again in this lecture, we're going to try to deal with a very common problem that will find in a lot of pop tunes . And that is the clash between the guitars and the vocals, because guitars, especially electric guitars, often occupy the same sort of frequency range as vocals. Therefore, it can be a real pain in the butt. Teoh, um, avoid frequency masking with the guitars and the vocals. And obviously we've worked on that in the past, and we have gotten a pretty good blend between the guitars and the vocals. But every now and then, all of your frequency, manipulation and your equalization tricks won't really suffice in in terms of getting the vocals to be clear and the guitars to be strong because the problem with equalization ah, you know, doing e que tricks to your guitars and your vocals is that it's static, right? And so what may be a good frequency blend between the guitars and the vocals and the versus isn't quite enough for the choruses. Ah, or you know, if the vocals cut out and there's just a guitar part, then maybe the guitars will sound a little flat there because you've worked so hard to get the vocals to sit on top of the guitars. But when the vocals aren't happening than the guitars can sound maybe kind of cheesy. And so how do we work around this? Well, we've talked a few times now about using ducking, which it was using a compressor with a certain input going into the side chain to tell the compressor to reduce the gain on whatever track were using. Right. So what we could do is go to our guitar sub mix here and throw on a compressor dynamics compressor and then used the vocal bus this the vocal sub mix, which is bust 36 as the side chain, right? And this way we can tell the guitar sub mix to reduce and gain when the vocals air singing just a little bit. And that'll give us just a little bit of ducking. That would happen when the vocals air singing, and that just leaves a little bit more room for the vocals to sit in the mix. There is a problem with this approach, however, and that is by nature of what we're doing here. The louder the vocal is, the more gain reduction will happen on the guitars, which is actually the opposite of what we want to happen. Right, Because if the vocals are doing a particularly loud part, then we don't actually need as much gain reduction on that guitar part, right? And if the vocals air quieter, that's the point where we need probably a little bit more gain reduction on the guitar so that the vocals come out right. So it's kind of the opposite of what we want just using this ah side chain method for reducing the gain of the guitars. But there's a really cool and very advanced technique that we can use to get around this. And this is something that will make you feel really, really smart and impress all your friends. Okay, so we're not going to use a compressor side Jean. So I mean hit No plug in on this. What we're gonna do instead is we're going to set up a gate as a send effect from the Guitar Channel, and we're going to use the vocals as the side chain for the gate, and then we're going to invert the polarity of that return channel, which will, instead of using side chain compression to duck out the guitar Channel, were actually going to use this inverted polarity of the Return Channel, which will cause some phase cancellation to our guitars and that will, ah, that will do the that will do the right thing of creating the proper gain reduction in the Guitar Channel for when? When the vocals are in. OK, so let's just go ahead and do it and maybe may admit, that may have sounded a little too crazy. But once we do it, you'll see it's actually pretty pretty, uh, pretty normal. Okay, so here's our guitar sub mix. So we're gonna choose the bus and let's do sixteen's Are next bus on a sort of our sins here. Okay. And now here we are, Bust 16. And let's color this purple to start off with like that and actually shame on me. But I didn't do these purple either. So let's do that while we're here, son. Purple there Go. All right. So now 14 and we can call this phase gate or whatever you want to call it. Okay, so we're going to put here. Just a normal noise. Gate Dynamics, Noise Gate like that. And for the side chain, we're going to use the vocal sub mix, which is bust 36. Should be, ah, sort of memorable by now. Now, after the gate, we're going to drop in, um, a utility gain, uh, plug in. And now we can invert the polarity of this using this game plug in by selecting this left and right channels. So we're just inverting the polarity of this whole send, um, this hold return channel with that plug in, Okay, we don't need to touch anything else there. Now, we need to deal with this gate. So I'm gonna just pull up this chorus and cycle this a little bit, and we can even just to get a little bit more clarity, weaken Just solo out the guitar sub mix and the vocal sub mix. - Okay , Now we need to set the threshold, because remember, the threshold is the level below which the gain reduction will occur. So we want to set this thresholds of the point where ah, the gain reduction is Onley gained. Reductions on lee happening when the vocals air hitting and you could see this activity button will light up. And we just want to make sure that this is lighting up right when the vocals Aaron Okay. And then the light will go out when the vocals air out. Okay? Way Don't want this to be stuttering too much, okay? And so now what this is doing is the Since we're using pull this back up. Since we're using the vocal sub mix as the side Jane, whenever the vocals are occurring, this gate is opening up, but the gate is on is being sent to from the guitar sub mix. We need to send some of this guitar sub mix to that return channel game. And, um, since we're sending the guitar channel to this gate, OK, and then the gate is opening up when the vocals air hitting. So what's coming through then is actually guitar. So this return channel is not producing. Vocal is producing guitar. But since we've inverted the polarity of this entire return channel, that means that it's going to send an inverted signal back to the mix in that will clash that will clash with our normal guitar sub mix. And it will cause phase cancellation because the phase is inverted. So that will cancel out that guitar level depending on how much we've sent using this. Senden up here. Okay, party, then sunlike. You can hear a little bit of that there. I would increase the release quite a bit because it's sounding a little bit unnatural, so we wanted to just sort of be a little bit more of a smooth blend there. Let's try that again. Party, then sunlike. Wait a little bit more release way out. It's time. When with liquid party, then sunlike OK, and now let's bypass that send so we can hear the difference. This was no gating. Okay, and now with it. Party, then sunlike guy way. Wait, It's time when live in liquid kings, turn down this history says here, party, then sunlike way. Now, if you're feeling like it's a little too obvious and the gain reduction is a little too obvious, you can both just you could turn down this fader here, this volume fader, because the less that's coming out of this return channel, then that means the less that is canceling out with the guitar slim mix. You can also turn down this rotary knob so we can just sort of tamp down this effect a little bit way rights just like that. So the benefit of this, rather than using side chain compression to create a ducking effect, is that since we're using a gate, this is just a standardized gain reduction that's happening. Uh, no matter how loud the vocal channel is, so we're just creating inconsistent, just a little notch out of the gain of that guitar sub mix. And again, the reason where that is happening is that we have inverted the polarity of this return channel, which it causes, Ah, frequency, which causes excuse me, which causes phase cancellation to our original guitar sub mix channel. Okay. And it's a little bit funky like with all these different guitars happening. Like, I would say, this is probably better served if you just have maybe one or two guitar channels, even one probably be best. But since we have these different guitar channels happening, it can sound a little bit funky. The nice thing is that, uh, you know, we're not. We don't need to have it sounding fantastic with the guitars and the vocals solo because that's not the song, right? So if we put everything in context, it will sound. It'll sound nice. And it will just create a little bit more clarity on the vocals so that we don't have to put all of the work on the equalization side were just reducing the game just a little bit , Um, from the guitar track when guitar tracks rather when the vocals Aaron All right, and let's hear it without that sin life. And so that way you can have a consistent um, you know, e que set up for your guitars. That sounds nice, but you're just hiding the guitar track just a tiny bit when those vocals air pumping right ? And we're not using Side Jean compression because that would make that gain reduction dependent on the level of the vocals, which is which would actually make this effect more obvious and not what we want. Right? So we're just using this gate with inverted polarities to sort of trick our guitars. Teoh reduce that gain when the vocals Aaron All right, so that's a little bit technical. If you need to go back and watch that one more time, Uh, go ahead But once you try it, you'll see. Okay, that's not too bad. It's not too bad at all. And I will see you in the next lecture. 31. Audio Editing -- When and Why to Use It: and hello, students. Welcome back once again. Ah, good to have you back. So now we're going to start talking a little bit about some audio editing, some advanced techniques to tune up, cleanup timing and pitch of your audio files. And as I mentioned before, this is probably something I would normally do quite earlier on in the mix process. Um, and I sort of struggled in this course where to sort of place these concepts, and I decided to have them a bit a bit further towards the back side of the course just because they can be a little bit technical. And, um, I didn't want to overwhelm new students who are new to some of the stuff. And just to kind of show that just a few, you know, quick steps with getting the balance and the frequency content and the dynamics, right. And you can have a really good mix right without getting you to bog down on the audio editing stuff. And also, um, the audio editing that really has a lot to do with what genre you're working with, right? If you're if you're using, if you're using, like if you're recording like an indie rock band or something you don't probably aren't gonna want toe like fix all the timing of all the drums and every other instruments. So it's like super locked in because there's kind of a feel that comes from just humans playing right. But with, like some pop music that this song's kind of a pop tune, the drums are all programs, so we don't really have to worry about the timing for those. But some of the other instruments, like the guitars or the base, or even the vocals, can get a little bit sketchy sometimes with the pitch, just to the point where it's a little distracting and I'll go in and I'll fix some of those things. I'm not a purist in any of on either side of the spectrum, uh, who believes that you should do no timing or pitch adjustments. Nor do I think that you should always make everything perfect and mechanical right. I think there's always kind of a creative tension that happens, trying to find the right balance of feel and vibe from, you know, a natural performance. Ah, but not to the point where it's like distracting and the average listener is going to say, Oh, that sound sounded weird, right? So I'm just going to show you a few techniques just to kind of get you started with some of these audio editing practices. And, um, yeah, so let's get right into it. So I guess the first consideration would usually be how do I know what to fix or what toe work on when I'm doing audio editing, whether that's pitcher timing. And, um, again, I think the answer to that sort of depends on the genre, but also just depends on your judgment as a mixer, right? Um, I think the easiest rule of thumb is as you're working on this other, these other things, when you're getting the balance and you're adding some effects, you're getting the dynamics right. If there's a few things that just kind of bug you and just kind of stick out to you all the time, that's probably a good indication that you should work on it right if it's distracting. And if you're working on something else and you hear this vocal part and the timing's just a little off and every single time you hear it, that's what you think about? Then that's probably a good indication that you should work on it now. Something I haven't mentioned yet. I don't think in this course is the note pad, which I think is really helpful. So up in the upper right hand corner, you have this note pad icon, and you can open this up and you can just type in some notes here. So, like, if I'm going through a mixed session and I find which we're gonna work on in the second bridge vocals a little rushed right. And I just found that the bridge vocals or just a tiny bit rushed towards the end. So I want to fix that. Right? And, Aiken, I can add this little note, and I could just sort of keep a running tab of things that have noticed that I want to look at you can also, of course, change the color of that audio region which will pop out to you when you're looking at your whole mixed session and think Oh, I need to I need to look at that. Right. Um, if the other cool thing here, so you can make notes over the whole project But you can also make notes specific to the track so that you can sort of organized these a little bit better. I don't often use that. I just I usually don't make enough notes to really be bothered by that. So I'll usually just keep it all in the project tab. Right? Then you can close that. So what I've noticed is that, like I said, the vocals heared right towards the end of the bridge or just a little bit rushed. Um, so I'm just going to create a little psycho cycle here for maybe it from right here. Things. That last line of the bridge is just a little rush to me, and it sort of loses some of the energy leading into that guitar solo. So, um, if I solo this and I put on my Metrodome, you could probably hear even a little bit better than sort of. It's a little bit off in front of the beat. Okay, Eyes. You can make thes seconds. It's just a couple of those lines that are a little rushed. So when you're talking about timing, there's a few things to know. Um, first of all, I would try every other technique before doing the actual ah ah, flextime option that you have in logic and flex time. It can be really cool, but the more you can get away with not using it, the more, um, natural sounding your edits will be. So what I would do in this case and this is a little rest. So I'm just going to cut off that part right? I know that this is sort of the problem section, so I just used the marquee tool command and click and just make some edits on either side. And now, if I feel like this is a little bit rushed rather than going in and using flex time, which will do in a second. But just to illustrate, um rather than doing the flex time editing, I would just take this whole region and slide it over a couple milliseconds. And you might even, you know, try to look at these bar divisions and just get some of those transients, like feeling maybe a little bit better like that, and see if that fixes your problem. So let's let's listen to that now. It's just a little bit of movement close your eyes. You can make thes seconds. So I think that sounded good for that first half. But then, once seconds count, come in. Ah, we're swear a little off again. OK, so we're gonna have to use the flex time, which is fine. But just to let you know, with all of these timing things, I would try to move the entire re problem region around, and you might find that that's just solve your problem. And then you saved a lot of time, right? Ah, and you can do that even with just a short vocal phrase or whatever. Um and, um so we'll have to use flex time on this, which we will address in the next lecture just to keep these as short as possible. But let's say that this solved our problem. We're happy with this. And now we just needed to clean up the audio region and make sure it's OK. So you'll notice here that in this gap of silence here, there's a little bit of, like, headphone bleed or whatever. This really low, uh, stuff is, it's maybe it's just headphone bleed from the vocals or something else. And, um, that may become a problem. So what I would probably do is join these together and then create a cross fade in between the two. Now, if I If I'm finding that I can't get these lined up to where they're just back to back, what you can do is just drag it over a little bit and then hit the backslash key. The backslash key will line them up perfectly. And now we can use the fade tool to create a nice cross fade here. Luckily, we're creating a cross fade on just a a piece of silence. If you have to do this in the middle of a note, it may become a little more difficult, but we're doing this over a non sung part, so it won't be too difficult to have a nice cross fade. So if I hit the letter T, it brings up these, um, cursor tools. The default is the pointer tool, but what I want is the fate tool. And so that one Aiken, move my, uh, pointer down. I can click on that, or it can also hit t like I said and then zero, and that will just go straight to it. and it's a great, great thing to get really good at thes hot keys and things like that. So now if I just click on, um, one of these regions and drag over this creates an automatic cross fade, and you don't need anything too big, you know, probably just like this is fine. And what this cross fade is indicating is that the audio region on the left this volume is going to go down and about here, it will cross over to the next one, and it will continue to go down to zero while this audio region on the right starts at nothing and sort of fades in over the light over over the border between the two and then up to full volume. So this just creates a nice, smooth transition between the two. And then we can do another cross fade over here on this side as well. And we'll, um so just hit t zero to bring up the fade tool, drag it across like that. Now, obviously, the bridge just kind of ends here, so I don't even really need this cross fade. Going into this empty audio region, I could just have the I could just have the ah, this audio region just fade out entirely. But just to show you how cross phase work, that's totally fine. Now, in the next lecture, we're gonna have to look at the flex time tool and ah, well, we'll dive into that in the next lecture. See there. 32. Flex Time: Hey, students, welcome back once again. Now, in this lecture, we're going to look at flex time, which is a really powerful tool inside logic. And, um, it's a little bit intimidating at first, but it's actually not too too complicated, so we'll just look right at it. So the way that I would do it is I select this problem region, right? I have just this one part of the bridge. It's just a little bit rushed, so I tried moving it left and right. But some of these different syllables, or just not quite lining up. So that means we need to go in in a just different parts of the audio audio region in line them up a little bit better so I can select this region and then hit command F and that will open up your flex time. There's also this button here on the top. This sort of like, you know, it's swirling. Ah, waveform kind of thing. It's a show hide flex. He can use that, but I always use the hot key, right, Command f. And now we see. Over here we have this flextime button which we can enable and that will turn on the flex time for that track. So command f just shows you what you're working with. And then you have to enable it for that track. Okay, That's why it says enable flex their. And now it will usually determine what the ah type of flex timing that you need. Uh, so it will say Automatic. And in this case, the automatic is polyphonic. Now, that's not exactly correct, because this is a one a lead vocal tracks. So it's actually Monta phonics. So sometimes it's not quite right now in terms of which algorithm you're choosing, It just sort of is a matter of what the audio content that you're trying to adjust is right . So you have polyphonic, which is, you know, multiple notes being played like if you're playing a, you know, a rhythm guitar, something Ah, that would be polyphonic Baseline would be Monta Phonic because it's just one note, um, at at each time slicing. I use a lot of times when, like, I'm really chopping up a drumbeat or something. Then there's rhythmic Ah, we are did polyphonic speed and tempeh phone speed and temple phone. They have these FX next to them. And that's because they're a little bit more warped, sounding like it's a little bit more of an effect. And I honestly don't use those very much. Um, just to be honest, because I'm normally doing flex time for editing anyway, So I'm normally just choose polyphonic rhythmic slicing or monan Phonic. Um, rhythmic would be good if you're doing, like, a shaker loop or something, and you want to change it to swing time. You could do that. Um, anyway, so we're working in Maan a phonic now, and so you can see here. I mean, hit the letters E, and this will just zoom in a little bit on our audio region, and you can see here that it's sort of finding the transience. Transients are the first, like, big sort of peak in the weight in the way of form. Okay. And it usually finds a little bit more than what I want, and that's okay. We don't need to. We don't need to go in and remove these These transients, necessarily, because we're not. It hasn't moved anything around for us yet, so now what I'm gonna do is go in and just find those problem parts that are a little bit ahead of the beat. And I think they're sort of towards the second half of this. Then I'll show you what these tools do with my pointer. You can see my cursor. Here is this. I have this sort of straight line that I have the line with a little point on the top three lines, three lines without the points on the top. So what are all those mean? We'll get the into those in a second. Okay, so let's listen to this in solo with a click track on, you gotta make thes seconds count. You can make thes seconds count. You can make thes seconds. OK, so that's s on the seconds which is right here. That's causing me a problem. So I can click here on this transient, and you could see I have this sort of faded line. It's already sort of found that there's a transient there so I can click there, and now I can move this over. The problem is, if I start to move this over to the downbeat, which is right here Ah, then what? It also does, and this is kind of nice is it will create a border on the next transient before it, and then the transient after it. However, that's not exactly what we want in this case, because we don't want to compress this region. So this white So the white indicates that we're expanding a region, and the blue indicates that we're compressing it. So, um, I want this transient to be right here on the downbeat. Yes, but I do. I want this region right before it to be compressed that much. No, I do not. So I can double click on that line, and that will just sort of move everything over a little bit. Same with the right I can do that. And that will move everything to the right over a little bit. Because now what I'm doing is I'm just I'm essentially taking this whole section to the right of my transient and just bumping it to the left a little bit and expanding it and then everything to the right. I'm just compressing just a little bit, okay? That may have caused more problems, but let's hear it and see if that fixed it. You can make thes seconds. Can you can make thes. And so now that make and Thies is just a little bit before the beat, which is a little bit distracting. So let's take this these and let's bring that over a little bit, okay? And let's hear how that sounds. Now you gotta make the seconds count. You can make thes seconds cow, and now that make is just a little bit slow. So let's move that over just a tiny bit. You can make the second cat. You can make the second right, so that sounds a lot better to me. And the key here, I think, is to make as broad changes as you can because the even if some of these little, like percussive syllables are not quite exactly on the beat. Ah, it will sound a lot more natural if you kind of make the main like rial, punchy parts hit right on the beat, but you don't need to have everything perfectly in time for it to be perceived by the listener to sound good, right? Just needs to be. It's just a matter of finding that balance. Okay, so let's listen to that in the context of the whole track. And if I turn off the flex time, let's hear that theme here. I was just little slowed down there cause I moved this whole thing over and just a little fast in the beginning and slowed at the end. It just doesn't have the seam. Same effect as the having this timing fix a little bit, just nice and punching clear there, landing right on the beat right now just to illustrate why it's important to use these sort of broader changes. Like Like I said, we have some compression going, some expansion going. But there's sort of these larger parts of the wave form like we're not going in and doing every single little transient and just getting it perfectly lined up. And so if I, uh, just to show you why that's better, I'm going to go up here through the inspector and under here. So we have the region selected in this region, and so it's of Oxbridge, and it's the number three cause I have, like, chopped up a couple parts, right so you can see here. This flex button is enabled, just bringing it up to view it. And there's a Kwan ties menu so I can go in. And I could quantifies this by eighth notes, for example, and that will compress or expand all of those transients that it finds or most of the important ones that happened to be on the eighth notes. 16th Most would be an even more detailed Okay, and let's listen to that. Now you can make the second you could hear. That just sounds really unnatural all of a sudden because we're doing too much timing editing here. It just doesn't sound right on a vocal track. If you're doing a loop, you know, or or some other kind of drum thing and you're using a different flextime algorithm, it might you might get away with it, but with a lead vocal, that's just way too unnatural. Went way over the cliff there. So I'm gonna turn that off, and that should bring us back to the other edits that we made. So here you can see we only have three edits. Thes three white lines are the lines that we chose to line up the the audio track to to the beat in those three edits make it sound much, much more natural than using the quantities function for the flex time. You can make thes second, right? That just sounds way, way more natural. Like we don't have any edits. Really, Which is kind of the point. Most of the time you want it to sound, Ah, unnoticeable the edits that you're making. Okay, cool. So we're all good with that? That was the problem. Part of our bridge. And now it's all taken care of so I can hit command f and get out of the flex time for that . And now my bridge of sounding really tight. Let's look at one more example just to illustrate this. So the live base, Um, it is a little bit off time and some of the court, so I'm just gonna try to find here a little bit of the base. So what I'm gonna do, actually, just to get a little bit more control, what's so little? The base sub mix in the drum sub mix and will cycle up the course. - Okay , so right there there's something a little weird happening right about there. Um and so if I get rid of my mixer window, and if I select that audio region hit Z will zoom in so I can hear it. And I think it is somewhere in these two bars. Okay, Is right there. So it's that beat right here. So I'm gonna hit command f bring it my flex time. Yes, I want to enable it for this track. Has to analyze it a little bit. And we want to do Monta Fonet cause this is base. And now we can look even closer and find out what's going on here. Okay, so it's right here. I have just a little bit of a flub, and it's pretty minor, but I think this transient is a little bit ahead of the beat. So just to get a little more clarity on these pointer tools, you'll notice that if I have my pointer towards the top of the audio region up here, just one line so I can click that and I can create one transient, and then I can compress or expand the whole audio region. Zoom out a little bit, You can see that. Okay. I don't want that, though. If I bring my pointer down towards the bottom of the audio region Now I have these three lines. And what that does is that will create a transient when I click it and will also create a locked transient to the left into the right at the transient before in the transient after it. So all this other stuff, I think, is pretty good in time, right? And that's fine. But we just need to slide this one little guy over a little bit. So this way we can make it a small adjustment here like that. Try to bring that over to see if that works, and that will expand this white part right? And it compressed this other part as we're moving this from here to here. So that means we're expanding this region and compressing this one in order to make that fit. So let's hear that. Just say that that's perfect. So we just slid it over a little bit. We didn't have to mess with any of the other transients because everything else was in pretty good time. But it's just that one little flub that was kind of bugging me. So I grabbed it and I moved it over and again. If you create a point on the bottom of the audio region. Then you can lock in these three transients on either side or to transients on either side so that you're just compressing that one spot right? You're not are expanding that one, that one spot without messing with your other, Um, without messing with your other other parts of the audio region. And if you don't like what you did, you can always double click those white lines. Get him out of there. Okay, so now we just fixed that one little spot and we're good to go. And if I turn it off, weaken. Uh, if I turn it off, you can hear it again. You can hear that move that slide up. It's just a little bit ahead of the beat, right? It's awkward. So just like that, that's flex time. It's really, really easy. Ah, once you kind of just try it out a little bit. It's It's a lot less complicated than it looks, and it's kind of fun to and ah, it's really powerful. So go ahead and play around. Try to fix some of the, um, awkward spots. Were some timing things that are really bugging you don't go too crazy with quanta izing all of your audio regions to make him super mechanical. Unless you you know, that's an effect that you're going for. That could be cool. But just be careful, because sometimes it just starts to sound really unnatural and weird. So, you know, I I usually try to keep this to a minimum. Um, great. In the next in the next lecture will talk about tuning. See you there. 33. Flex Pitch (Part 1): Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again in this lecture, we're talking about tuning. We've talked about editing, timing, and now we're tired. It's time to talk about editing the tuning of certain instruments and again with timing. I sort of subscribe. Toothy less is more school here when it comes to editing the tuning of things. Most of the time I'm editing the tuning of vocals. Obviously, sometimes if I've recorded a guitar part and one of the notes, it's just a little funky. I'll go in, try to fix that. But most of the time you're gonna be tuning up vocals, right? And logic has a pretty cool engine called Flex Pitch just pretty similar to the flex time. But there are many differences, so we're gonna look at it. Ah, here and I'm just going to show you some things. But just from the outset, I would say, Be very careful with editing your pitch because sometimes you know you can be you can kind of get lost in it, and then all of a sudden you're vocals have lost all of their character because it sounds like a bad auto tune job, right? And we're not using Antar is auto tune. We're just using all in this course, we're using all native plug ins just to show you that you can mix with just what you have in your d a. W um but you know, every now and then there will be a little bit of tuning up that will sort of remove a distracting note or just make something a little bit more. Ah, pleasant to listen, Teoh. And that's totally fine. I'm just saying, be a little bit, you know, just be careful that you don't get to a too crazy with your tuning. All right? So just like with, uh, the flex time, what we can do is maybe we can look at these chorus vocals and you can hit command f, and that brings up your sort of flex menu. Now, instead of these flecks times, you can choose flex pitch here, okay? And then make sure it's enabled with this purple twisty wave form can enable it like that. And so what this does is it analyzes your track and it finds the pitch of each note in the vocal track so we can just zoom in on Ah just this first chorus and you could see here in this audio region in the range window, it sort of has Europe. Your pitch is going, and there on top of the wave form itself. So here's the way form going across, and then it has your little notes going right. And now in the bottom, it opens up a sort of more detailed version of that. That note dispersion. Um on that was, Sometimes this happens. Make sure you expand over, just drag, click and drag this little piano keyboard over. And then you could see some of these flex time flex pitch tools a little bit more easily, and I'm just gonna go through them really quickly. So ah, and the nice thing to say I'm scrolling up and down here in this window and you could see my piano keyboard stays the same. But I could sort of see the wave form behind it, and ah, so that's just kind of nice. You can move this up and down. Just be able to see your notes a little bit more clearly. Okay, So what do we have here? We have a pitch correction slider from 0 to 100. And this is the amount of pitch correction of the selected notes. No notes are selected right now, so we're not gonna do that. You also have the ability to time quanta eyes so you can sort of kill two birds with one stone where you can quantifies your track. Um, while doing your pitch corrections again, I would be careful with this, Um, only because, you know, with a vocal track you don't need tohave every like, every little syllable, perfectly quanta ized for it to sound natural and cool and in a lot of times of vocalists will just sort of interpret the lyrics in a way you know, an emotional way where some things are a little rush. Some things are a little pulled back, and and that's what you want. So I to be honest, I don't really ever use the time quanta eyes. If I need to edit some timing than maybe I'll just do a few little things. But usually I just sort of do those as two separate tasks. Right? Then you have a little handy slider called gain, and the gain just will increase the gain of a selected notes. So if I found out that and actually we might do this, Um, this note down here's a little quiet and you could see in the way of forms a little quiet. So if I wanted to just bump up the gain of that one little note a little bit, I could do that here. And you could see the way form increasing. It's kind of nice, right? And then you also have a scale quantifies this I don't recommend using either, unless you want to do some like, really extreme auto Tooni kind of thing where you can select the scale which the song isn't see, So I could say, See, Major and I could select everything and I could. Kwan ties it all to see majors that all the notes are locked into that scale. But again, I think that that's going a little bit overboard. It's much better to find out what your problem notes are and just adjust them that way, right? Um, rather than quanta izing the whole thing because every now you know, a singer will sort of do some bends or some kind of natural sharp or flatness, and that's good. We want that we want that emotional interpretation. If we lose that, then that can just kind of loses some of the emotional impact. So I don't really recommend doing that unless you want to do some extreme auto tune effect , which is totally fine. Just know that that's kind of what you're more going for, right? It's good to have ah, sort of more of a direction when you're doing these things. So now you can see that the notes are broken up into over. The vocal part is broken up into these different notes. So I have one note here. Another note here. Another note there. Ah, sort of smaller note here, right? And we have this keyboard that's going across a swell. And so here we can see this note if I zoom in a little bit. This note, which is sort of a D, is kind of like halfway in between the D and the D sharp, and that's why you could see that it's like black there because the note is halfway in between this D and the D Sharp. However, you can also see this white line. The white line is the actual vocal, uh, you know the actual vocal line going a little bit into the D sharp and then a little bit down straight into the d and then all the way up here into the E. Right. So this is the natural vibe. Rato of the vocalists voice The blue box is just than the root note that the algorithm is finding and again here, this is like a d denote. But the vibrato kind of goes up and his little drip, you know, a little drop, and then it drops all the way down, sort of at the end of the note, depending on what the you know, the PLO sieve is at the end of this note. If it's like the letter B or something when you go, but it doesn't really have a note. So it couldn't sort of dropped and do this funky thing. And then if we just move along, we have this Ah, note up here, which is what f is an f and the F kind of slides down into the sea. Right? Um and so I'm just sort of showing you what you're looking at. You have the algorithm finding this note here, but the actual white. The white line is actually the vocalist moving through that note and then sliding in between the other notes. Here's a little bend up into the E, and then it sort of crests down from here and then have some D's. Okay, so the is another good reason why I may not want to just use a scale quant ization because I may want thes natural slides up and down around the notes and depending on what the syllable is, it may be weird if you're just quanta, izing it to the note itself. So really, the point is to listen to the track and figure out what it needs and what it doesn't need and just fix some things that it may need. 34. Flex Pitch (Part 2): So let's, uh, loop this chorus and I would not listen to it in solo, usually because it doesn't really matter what the vocal sounds like in solo over the chorus because you're not hearing it in solo. You're hearing it in the context of the whole song and in solo Ah, a note that may sound a little wonky, maybe totally fine in the contest context of all the guitars and the base and all the sense and everything. So you don't wanna waste your time editing, you know, tuning That sounds perfectly cool with with the whole song, Right, Right. Okay, So there's a couple things I heard that could use a little bit of adjustment, this one right here since, uh, and this is kind of a good thing to know, too. I would usually give a lot of attention to root notes, and it's the songs in the key of C. And so the sea would be the root note. And if my C is a little bit wonky, I would make sure to make maybe tune that up a little bit because it's the root note. You want it to be nice and strong. So we can see here that the the it's not too badly out of pitch. Let's say things up here, right? If that's how the note the singer saying the note, that would be a problem because now we're in a C sharp like we're between C and C sharp. That would be a problem so you can click this. We have these six points here, and I'll just quickly go through them. This top middle one is the fine pitch. I have fun with that, Um, the left pointer is the pitch drift, which you can sort of think of as the transition between the previous note and this notes. You can sort of funk that around a little bit, which will just address the beginning of the note, and then same thing with the top right button is like the end of the note, right wherever it's going to the next note. In this case, there's silence after it, but you could see that when I move this and moving that drift of my note up and down around , then you have a format shift. The foreman is like the vowel sound, so a lot of times, ah, producers will use this to have a lot of fun where you could select the home, the whole audio region and drop all the for mints down like an octave. And it sounds really weird. Ah, and cool. But, um, you know, if you're just doing editing, you probably don't need to mess with this. The only time this is a little bit more of like a warped effect, right? Messing with the format. It's like the vowel sound. Then you have librato ah, which I actually use a lot when I'm editing the vocals because every now and then the singer saying a little too shakily and they just sort of went wobbly around the note and we can fix that, or if they saying that up to straight we can add a little vibrato, but that's less common. And then you have a gain control, which is the same as the slider over here. So if you found this note is a little too quiet, you can bump up the gain a little bit, and you could see the wave form move when I do that. All right, Just like that, you can create a little bit more consistency that way. Be careful, however, with the cane. Because if you're doing too strong like this is crazy here, obviously. But if you look at the way form, there's just a super sudden jump between those two notes that will sound really weird and unnatural. Where the gain here is that this and then right in the middle of the note, you're jumping up like a bunch of decibels, right? So be careful with the gain adjustments that keeping a natural movement between the notes that the singer saying Right. Okay, so let's look at this a little bit more in detail. So the note of this was okay. And one thing that you can dio is also right. Click on this and set to original pitch, which was find exactly where it was, and you could see that Now this is where the pitch was. It was that one cent higher than the actual See right. So I could just drop that down to zero, or you can right click and say, set to perfect pitch, which will lock it into that scene. So if this was like all right here and I could right click it set to perfect pitch. It would drop it right down to the sea. If I just click the note and move it around, then I can move it up in half steps. You see it like that So you don't have to worry about fine pitch all the way down. You can just move it in actual notes like that. Okay. Said that to perfect pitch again. And now what I might want to address is a little bit of the desperado, because the very beginning of this note is just a little bit underneath the note. Um and I'm not too worried about that. And the reason why I'm not too worried about that is because the flatness of this sea is a B and A B is actually in this scale. If this were a D note, right, like right here. And we have this flatness going below the D and that makes it a C sharp. Well, that's definitely not in the scale of C minor, the C sharp. So that might be a little bit more of a problem, right? Ah, but since since it is a C and R, flatness is a little bit in the beat character, you know, in the B category. That's fine. We don't need to worry too much about it. But since it is the root note and it's kind of the end of a vocal phrase, I may want to address the vibrato a little bit, in which case I can just click and drag this down just enoughto wear, like most of my note is in this sea, right? If I drag this all the way down and make it like a perfectly straight line, I changed the pitch drift toe like this, and now I just have this, like, perfect straight line. It's going to sound way. Well, maybe not way, but it's probably going to sound unnatural. Um, so I can right click and say, Reset pitch curve. And so this is where it waas before I started messing around with everything to show you what we're doing so I could just bring this up a little bit. And the finer adjustments you make, the happier you will be in the longer of life. You will live because it will, you know, sometimes making these tuning adjustments create more problems than they solve, right? So that's just something to think about. So let's listen to that now. Just this little edit. All we did was we set the note to ah, perfect. See? And then we just pulled the vibrato up a little bit to bring more of that pitch drift inside that C note that just gives it a little bit more strength to me. Um, and then what? I might dio as well, just kind of moving along here. Bring the gain up of this note this lower note because a lot of times for singers dropping down low, they can't quite sing as loud as we could. Bring the gain up on that one a little bit. And let's come. Let's just kind of go through and see if there's other things that we could mess with. Okay. And now here on these, uh, these two notes, I want toe reduce the vibrato a little bit, a swell and maybe have a little bit more of a pitch drift between the two, so I can actually do to notes or multiple notes at the same time by hitting shift. So I'm clicking both, and now I can just click the vibrato on one of the notes. Either one, And I can address that for both of them at the same time. And I could maybe just create a little more continuity between these. Okay, I don't want to do that cause I'm adjusting the left side of this note. So this note. I just want a little bit more continuity between the two and on this pitch drift. I can bring this down a little bit and that'll just create a little bit smoother of a slide between those notes. Let's hear that. So that was too much. Don't bring that down again. Bring that up a little bit and let's bring the librato a little bit up in that one, because again, this is the root note. The sea and I wanted to be nice and strong and might even bring up the gain of that last note just a little bit. Okay, let's hear that just like that. So I'm just kind of going through. I'm listening to the vocal track in context, finding out what sounds little week, what could maybe use a little bit of of pitch adjustment, and I'm just making fine, fine adjustments, which will make it sound much more natural than if I were to just Kwan ties everything to scale because if you look here like this note is not in tune. And then I have this really sort of extreme, like drop down here, but in the context of everything, it sounds fine, you know? So I don't need to go in and just select everything and lock it right in set to perfect pitch. That might actually make it sound worse than if I were to just find the problem parts and go in and tune them, okay. And then just to review you have these. For each note, you have these different notes here. There's six nodes. You have your pitch drift, which allows you to adjust the beginning of the note. And you have that on both sides. You can adjust the beginning or the end of the note and how it's sort of transitions from the note before it. You have the fine pitch. Ah, and then you have the vibrato, which is this squiggly nous of the line across the length of the note. Then you have the foreman shift, and I guess I met as well just show you so Let's take this whole audiophile and let's bring all the formance down. Uh, like this. All right, so it just messes with the vocal sound. It sort of changes the length of the singer's throat, Uh, in in in sort of a technical way. Ah, and it sounds weird, but it can You can have a lot of fun. Like messing with a vocal track like this and putting it behind the lead vocals. Right? So that's the foreman and then, ah, then we have the game. We can also adjust the gain of each note. If it's a little too quiet, little too loud, you can mess with it there. And that's just that's That's a really nice way to create a more consistent, um, wave form for that audio region. Right? So there you go. That's the flex pitch. And, um, go ahead and you know the real key with the flex pitches. Just being able to listen for problems and then figure out what the best solution is. And it really just comes from time doing it over and over and over again, and you'll get really quick at it and you'll you'll realize that you don't need to fix is much as you thought you did. But every now and then, there's something that needs to be addressed. And whether that's adjusting the bra toe or the transition between the notes and maybe the whole note itself is a little out of tune, you can play with it and you can get in the right spot. Right? Great work. Try some of those techniques out in your own mixes and we will see you in the next lecture . 35. More About the Fade Tool: Hey, students, welcome back. Once again. Great job getting through the flex time and flex pitch lectures. I know there was kind of a lot covered. Their, um don't be too intimidated by it. It just does matter of spending some time with those, um, those different engines and just getting a good handle on them. But they're not very They're not too complicated. But that was a lot of information. So I just wanted to do quick lecture about. We're continuing on with our audio editing and just wanted to talk a little bit about cleaning stuff up and making sure that you have some fades if you need them. So with the pop track like this, I have a lot of instruments in here that are, um, you know, like a synth bell, right? Like this one right here is just a synth bell. Just a sample bell. It's not recorded. I didn't go out in a room and hit a bell, write and record it so I don't have to be too concerned with having fades on my audio regions now, sometimes in the past, every now and then, I like I get really good about being consistent with just having, you know, fade ins and fade outs on all of my audio regions in my mix. But lately of that, I just I've gotten a little bit slack about it. But, um, since this is a synth bell, I don't really have to be too concerned about pops or really anything weird happening with the beginning and end of my audio regions. But if you want to be consistent and good about it, it's actually super fast to create. Fade in. So just hit t zero, and that brings up your fate tool. You can just create a little tiny fate of the beginning and end. And, like this audio region, doesn't even need to be that long. I can shorten this and create my fade there, right, and that's a good way to do it. You can also, if I undo that, you can also click on the audio region, go up to your inspector Dittemore and just give a little bit of fade in seven milliseconds , four milliseconds out, and that will do it. You can also select all of the audio regions like that. All of my bells go up here. Just give a little fade in a little fade out And now I have one you can see here I have a fade in for each of these audio regions so it doesn't take too long if you want to be really good inconsistent about it. But I like to be I like to just make sure that all of my like, actually recorded stuff has that Ah, and one thing you could do, you know, I could just I could just go in and select all of these vocals, for example, and just make sure that has a little fade in a little fade out and you could see that there's a star here and that's because I have different. I may have had off other fades already placed. And so this little Asterix is just saying, Hey, you have different fade lengths just so you know, right? But now you can see here that all of these have just a little bit of a fade in little fade out, and that will just make sure that I'm not getting pops at the beginning or end of my audio region so you could do it quickly. It's not very difficult, but let's say that we have some issues here. So, like with this chance track, we have a little bit of bleed. That may may not be a problem, but in case it is, we can just address that quickly. So let's listen to these chance here. Yes, silence. So right before those woes, there's a little bit of a sing there. I don't know if it's a headphone bleed or what if I just cycle that portion right there, I can hear it now. The issue, though, is that if we cut that section outs and assuming in close, we cut out that little singing stuff, then we might be losing some of the breath of taken before the chance. And I like breaths. Some people are anti breath in their vocal recordings. I don't mind it, but let's just grab this much. And so I could just hit command and then click and drag, and that selects a portion of the audio region I can literally just hit Delete and Aiken take that out. So let's hear how it comes back in here right now. I may want a little bit more breath than that so I can bring the audio region back to Maybe here and then I get a little bit of that singing. So I'm just trying to find the right length here, and that's probably fine. Now I'm going to create a fade here. Um, so I hit t zero, which allows me to use the fade tool. And if I just go to the corner of the audio region that could bring this over. And I just want to make sure that the beginning of this little like breath area is at full volume. Probably, you know, doesn't have to be exactly right. I can have this go a little bit over. But now a nice thing that you conduce Aziz well, has changed the curve of this fate. So you could see the default fade is this linear straight line, diagonal line. But I can also change the curve of the fade by clicking here anywhere in the like the middle of the fade. And I could just drag it over and so that will create a more algorithmic um curve And I could do that way, or I can do it this way. So doing it this way would have less volume up until right here. And then it sweeps in pretty quickly, too, right there. And that's maybe what I want because I want to get rid of that little singing note that we did. Ah, and that the vocalist did. And then But make sure that I have the breath that comes in before it's maybe shorten this like that just like that. Now I'm getting the vote, the breath coming in, which sounds natural, but I sort of reducing that hum that came before, right? And now, since I've cut my, uh, my vocal region and half here, I can just make sure that I have a cross fade there or a fade out there. So I'm not getting a pop just in case it's there. Then at the end of this chance, there's a little noise here as well that I don't want. So I can just cut that part out as well, like that. Create a fade on this side and on that side. Actually, I don't even need on this side because the vocal region ends. So there we go. So let's hear that just like that have cut out that little's that happened right and Now I have some nice fade ins, fade outs and have talked about changing the curve shape of the fade in on the second half here and sounds pretty cool, right? So just easy, but just wanted to show you that you have these these different options, right? All right. Great work. See you in the next lecture. 36. Speed up & Slow Down: Hey, students, welcome back. Once again, this is going to be a quick lecture to talk about thespian up and slow down options that you have with the fade tool. It's a lot of fun, something that you can do to manipulate the audio, and it is a little bit more of like a production techniques. So it's a It's a little bit of a bold move if you are mixing something for someone else, but you know you can go ahead and try it and see, see if they like it, and you can also use it pretty suddenly. So what am I talking about? Well, we've talked about the fate using the fade tool. Teoh, Um, you know, create cross fades between edits in your audio regions, or also just to make sure that there's not an audio, you know, inaudible audio pop at the beginning and end of audio regions. But there's another tool that you can use inside the fate tool to create a sort of emulated likes speeding up of a tape machine or slowing down, and I'll show you exactly what I mean. So right here at the end of the post chorus going into Verse two and Ah, sounds like this here. I have this little sweep up with some uplifts and things like that, but I'm going to use the fade tool to create a little slow down right at the end in this pad section. So that patent sounds like this has a little ramp up itself, and then it kind of goes back down into this other level. All right, so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna use my marquee tool to, uh, chop up this audio region between the verse and then the You know what came before it in the post scores. I'm not gonna manipulate this verse area here, but I am going to do is to create a fade at the very last bar of the post course so I can hit t to bring it my point or menu and then, ah, zero to bring up the fade tool. Now, I'm just gonna create a fade over this last bar, and, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect, but you can zoom in a little bit and just get that node like, pretty much right at that bar division. Okay, so now we just have a fade out, and that sounds like this. I mean, you can hear the volume fading down like that, but instead of the, uh, fade out, what we're going to do is change this type of fade out to a slowdown. So I have this audio region selected, right? And then over here in the inspector, Um, sometimes these, uh, are not disclosed. You can disclose this triangle with the region heading, and it says pad 1.5 so you can just double check pad 1.5. It names the audio regions, and the next one you could see here is pad 1.6. Right. So, um, now under the more triangle on this may not be disclosed either. So if that isn't, disclose it, and you could see that you have a fade in and fade out. And right now it is a 500 to ah ah, I guess that's millisecond fade out. So you have it says fade out here and then the type is out and you could choose cross fade equal power cross fade, etcetera Oh, or you can select this word fade out and you can choose slow down instead. Same thing with the fade in on. Maybe we can do this to just for fun. Just to show it in a second. You could dio speed up, right? But for right now, we're not going to change that. We're just gonna look at that The slowdown and you can see the color of the fade change to , like, an orange tint rather than the white. Which is this? The fade out. Okay, so the slowdown. So that's what this is what that slowdown sounds like. You write a kind of emulates the likes, just you turn off a tape machine. Just kind of does that, like almost rewind kind of sound. Okay. And eso then in the context of everything, let's just listen to that there. It's just a very settle technique, but it's kind of cool. You use it a lot of times with even percussion instruments. Just a look really quick. Fade out will create a pretty interesting effect. Now, let's do the same thing at the beginning of this 1st 2 with a speed up just for fun. So it's already chopped here so we can start a new fade at the beginning of the verse. It will hit t zero to bring up the fade tool and just create Ah, you know, whatever. One bar Ah Fay, a speed fade in and it's white now is it's a fade in, but instead we're going to choose the speed up. So now this region is selected pad 1.6. And if we go to the inspector, we can see that's what we're looking at. Instead of fade in will do speed up and now it turns orange. So now that pad will sound like this. Great. So it's you know, I wouldn't probably do that in terms of a production standpoint for that verse, but just to show just to demonstrate its the same exact principle as the speed slow down. You know, the speed up just works the same way. Okay, So have some fun with that. Tried on some different things. Percussion instruments of in vocals. Good way to ah, edit out swear words. If you have to do that for, like, unedited version, you could do that on them in the middle of a swear word. Um, lots of lots of options. Their great work. I will see you in the next lecture. 37. Using Automation for a Dynamic Mix: Hello, students. Welcome back once again. Now we're going to start talking about automation. So what is automation? Well, you can think of it as sort of the extra credit after you've gotten your static mix. So remember, sort of. Towards the beginning of the course, we talked a lot about getting a good static mix, which is simply just a balance of all the different elements using the failures in the mixer, right. We want to have the right amount of each instrument so that you can hear everything clearly and everything fits together. And then when we had some problems with some of the some of the tracks we used dynamics processing Ah, we used some frequency manipulation with e que To get everything to sit together nicely. And now the state At this stage, what we can do is use some automation to give the mix a little bit more dynamic impact. Um and so that's sort of the purpose of automation. Because if you think about it, you know, the guitar lead in the verses might be a good level, because there's less happening there, and then in the choruses, it may need to be a little bit louder or something like that. So you can use automation to change the, uh you know, the fader levels over time, the volume You can use automation to change really any parameter that you could possibly imagine within, uh, within each effect. And I would do that a lot of time. So we're gonna just give a few examples of how you can use automation to make your mix a little bit more dynamic. So let's start with maybe just the most basic form of using automation, which would just be to use volume automation. And let's take a look at this guitar vibe verse, right? This guitar sounds like this, right? It's just like a really vibe e spacey kind of guitar part. Now I think the level is really good during the verses, but it may be it may be just a little too much. Once the chorus hits and everything else comes in, that might just add a little too much busy nous Um, and it might occupy too much of the frequency spectrum. So what we can do is just use a little volume automation to drop down the level of this guitar in the choruses, as it does carry over into the chorus, is okay, So I'm gonna hit the letter A on my keyboard, and that brings up these automation options for you. And so here's our guitar vibe verse. And now if you look over here on the left now that I've hit the a key, you could see there a few different options that are available to you. You have these automation parameters that you could choose, and we won't get too complicated with how this works because there are some some more technical things that you can do. But we'll just keep it pretty simple in this course. So here, where it says volume, this is like the default automation parameter. Okay, now, if I click on this, I can choose some other parameters. Uh, there's volume and pan, but you're kind of the two most common. And then also under the main menu, I could choose different volume options between absolute and relative. I can choose the pan painting which is left and right, and I can, uh, solo this out in certain sections. I can also mute it right where I can bypass my insert number one which is the channel eq u . And then, of course, you can go inside the channel EQ you and you can automate the different parameters inside the channel e que which we'll look at a little bit later. That would be true. Also, if you have several other insert effects here than you could choose from those insert effects and automate the parameters inside those like if you have a tremolo, you could automate the depth of the tremolo. Ah, were you know, if you have a compressor, you can automate the ratio you can automate pretty much any parameter inside any effect or if you're doing production is, well, just f y I You can automate the different parameters within the synth that you're working on, for example, right, We're going to keep it pretty simple, so we can just do a little volume automation. Now you'll see here if I zoom in a little bit, we have this line going across and this is our volume line. So are our automation parameters. Selected volume and there it is is at negative 7.4 decibels, which, if I open up my mixer, go to that track and you could see that that's where my fader is set. And if I move, this could move this up and down. You can see the line automation line going up and down in the arrange window, right? So let's put that back where it waas because we liked it. And now there's a few ways to go about doing this. One thing that you can dio is just creating nodes by double clicking here and now. I have a note here at the at the beginning of the chorus, and I could put another note at the end of the chorus, like right here. And I can maybe if I want to have it slowly kind of ramp down. I could put a note there and a note there, and now I have this sort of I have the volume of this track dropping down a little bit and then popping back up. Okay, and I'm just gonna delete that because there's a little bit of an easier way to do this. What I can Also dio has hit command, which brings up the marquee tool. And then I could just draw a region across that chorus, which will and then If I click on that line, I could bring it down. That creates these perfect nodes at the end at the beginning, in the end of where of drawn that that marquee box. So if I wanted to do just a little spot like that, I could do that there as well. And this just creates a little bit of, uh, volume reduction. And of course, you could do it the opposite way. You can increase the volume of a particular part like that. So that's just a really nice way to create thes steps that will create some dynamic movement in that track in terms of the fader level. And if I play it, you'll be able to see the Fader go up and down for Bring Back up the mixer, play this little way. Obviously, that's a little weird to just have these random steps, right? But if I remove what I did there and I just have my little chorus drop now you'll hear the guitar vibe of the verse will be a little bit louder, and it will be at negative 11.4 during the chorus. I think it's just a way to create some movement in some of your instruments. Now, this is really helpful, too. If you have, um, maybe just a guitar part that's 11 spot of it is super cool. And you know you can't really get the right fader level, Ah, to have it be the right level for the most of the track. But there's just one part that really you really want to pop out. You can just grab that little section and bring up that volume just a little bit right there and that that will really help you just create these nice, special moments where you want that guitar part to really pop out. But the rest of the song, you know you want that fader level said at what it was before, right? So automating the volume of each track is a really helpful way to just make sure that ah, good parts are coming out strong and maybe some flood be parts or something. That's kind of a problem or a little distracting or kind of overlaps the vocals a little too much. You can drop it out there, right? Um, and so that's kind of the most simple way to think about automation in the following lectures will look at some other options that we have and play with those. I will see you there. 38. More on Automation: Hey, students, welcome back once again. Ah, we're talking about automation here to make your mix more dynamic. And we've spoken about using volume automation as a simple way to bring out different parts of your track. Maybe some parts, you know, need to be a little bit louder. Other parts need to be a little bit quieter, and you can't quite get that tow work with your dynamics processing compressors and gates and what not? And you could just use simple volume automation to move those favors around. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, Ah, there's a lot right with it. It makes your mics sound more alive and dynamic. Um, but there are also plenty of other ways to use automation. I'm just going to go through a few of them to just give you a taste of of what? The possibilities are here. So a few of the simple ones would be first. We'll be panning someone hit a to bring up my automation window. So we're just going to take a look at our bell track here, which, if I solo sounds like this and as you can see, it's panned hard, right, right now. So what we can do is instead of volume, you can choose Pan. And now you could see that this line is at the very bottom of the automation area. That means it's panned hard, right? I can create a couple notes if I wanted to do like a simple tremolo on this one bell region . What I could do is create a note here and then create another note at the top. And, um, you know, it's maybe going every three bars back up and down, create a node like that and then maybe back up or whatever. And so if we listen to it, you'll hear it panning back and forth Now, just like that. Now, I don't really want that in this track, but I'm just showing that you can create some movement, um, without using a tremolo plug in. If you just wanted on wavy one section, that's an easy way to do it. You just have something moved back and forth, so that's panning now. You can also have some options from this main menu, which also include the pan and volume. But you can also do solo balance and mute, and I use solo and mute. I use solo left less often, but I will use mute somewhat often because, especially in the production stage, when you're working with the just the raw audio at this stage in the mix, it's actually just a lot easier toe like just cut out a section, just chop up the audio. But just to show you can use mute to your advantage. So what I want to do here's have the bell mute on that last bar of the guitar solo and so sounds like this unsold low on I have that that bell that hits the on the fourth beat of that bar so I can just click and drag on that fourth bar, and now I can create a little muted region like that. So what that does is it actually mutes the track. So if I have my play head before the track, you'll see it's colored in green like that, and it's not muted. And then when my play it is over this muted section, the whole track itself actually muted. Okay, so it would sound like this. And just like that, I want to have a little bit cut out. I could do it like that. Now the one thing to mention when you're doing automation with mute or solo is every now and then you'll forget that you've done that. And, you know, you may be working on your mix and you're like, I just want to meet this part or whatever and if you try to a mute it over here, I can't because I have this mute automation going. And so it's confused. It's like, No, it's not muted because you've already created some automation, right? So I'm just gonna leave that there. I think it's cool and I want my bell, so don't have to worry about that, but just it just doesn't note. You may forget that you've placed thes automation nodes and then be really confused. But even if you do that with your volume as well, you've created volume automation. Then you try moving your Fator cause you want it a little bit louder, and then you start playing the track in the fader goes down. You're like, Wait, what? And then you realize, Oh yeah, I created some volume automation, So just something to be aware of. You may have to hit a and check and see. Oh, yeah. Did I do volume automation on that one? So just something to think about. Um Okay, so those are some of the built in automation parameters? Let's do, um OK, so let's go to verse to here, when I want to do is to create a filter effect like a rising low pass filter on the guitar verse lead which comes in here. I just want have a little bit of a of a rise in a filter on that guitar verse lead. So what I can do is click on that track and I can go into my channel. Eq you right? So we have a little bit of a cut here. Quite quite a significant cut here, as well as a low cut filter high pass filter at the bottom. When I want to do is enable this low pass filter, which is the furthest filter selector up here on the right, and we can just leave it as it is for now. But if this isn't enabled, we can't do any. If we do automation, nothing's going to happen. But just to look at it visually, what I'm going to do for that second verse is have this, um, low pass filter start like maybe right here around 500 hertz and just kind of slowly rise up until the second half of the verse. Probably probably what I want to dio. It'll just create a little bit of an interesting movement right there in the beginning of verse two. So hit a bring it my automation. And now, for for our automation parameter, we're not gonna choose volume Pan mute solo or anything like that. What we're going to choose is a parameter inside our channel e que and that that channeling that parameter would be the high cut frequency. Okay, now, the the high cut frequency is the same thing as the low pass filter frequency. Okay, High cut means you're cutting out the highs. Low pass means you're letting the lows passed through. So you have to do a little bit of like, you know, mental gymnastics to remember that the high cut is the same thing. Is the low pass okay? But for their standards of their naming standards, they use high cut, so choose high cut frequency and that should be around 20,000 hertz, which is that in 19 800. So what I would dio is use my marquee tool and just drag it across the entire length of that first part of verse two because the verse changes at verse to be it, uh, you know, the drums kick in and everything. So now if I click that little region that I just selected now I have two nodes. So what I'm gonna do is go in and create another two nodes, or at least one note right here, and I'm going to have it go down to Maybe we'll try, like, 400 hertz or something like that. And now this film, this low pass filter frequency is going to rise up, and we're gonna just this in just a second. But just so we can listen to it in solo, let us check it out right now. Right? So now, listening to it, what I know is I want that filter to drop a little bit more. I want to change the curve of the automation, and I want all those high frequencies to be in that little leading note right here, which happens right here at the very last bar e want this transient toe have the full frequency balance that I had set previously, too. Doing this automation. Okay, so I'm gonna move that node to right before this transient right here and then I'm also gonna drop this down a little bit, and I may bring the beginning over, so there's a little bit more of a gradual movement there. And I want that that that bottom node to happen before this transient came. Now I can also change the curve of this line, which is pretty cool. So instead of just having a straight linear line clips, why did that move down? There we go. What I want to do is make this more a little more algorithmic so I can hit t to bring it my point or tools. And instead of zero for the fade tool W is the automation curve tool. So this is a nice tools, Aiken. Click now on this line, and I can change the curve to be really, um, you know, like a like a parable a there, or I can have it go the other way up like that. You can even make s curves, which is kind of neat. You can make s curves as well. But what I want is an algorithmic curve like this. I wanted to be a lower at the beginning and then sort of rise up a little more quickly, which just creates a little more energy. Okay, so let's listen to that A just like that. So now it's rising up, but it has a sort of a different movement than it did when it was just linear. And I'm also gonna shorten this drop a little bit because it seemed a bit unnatural. But in order to do that, I need to go back to my normal point or tool. So hit t t. And now I can move this about about right there should be fine. OK, All right. Now, let's listen to that in context and see how it sounds. Way going to things I noticed I dropped that filter probably a little too far. So I'm gonna move this back up to around 400 hertz, something like that. And I also have to increase the volume of this section and, um, just a little bit to bring out that filtered sound a little bit more cause we kind of lost it. OK, so and this is a good example of using multiple automation parameters. So we'll go out of the channel eq. You instead will go to volume. And now what I can dio is just create a similar thing. But it's actually gonna be like the opposite of that other curve, because as the high frequencies come back in, we can bring that volume back down. So what I'll do is I'll just increase the volume a little bit, like, probably eats right. There will be fine, um, and then, But this time we're gonna do a line down, and we're going to choose T W to bring up our curve tool and will create a little algorithmic curve down like that to sort of do the opposite of what the filter is doing. So let's listen to that now. Sky like increases way going and let's listen again as I change that beginning way going now. So something like that will work just fine. I would probably spend a little bit more time really fine tuning that just getting that balance right, because when we cut out those low frequencies, we do hear volume drop perceived volume dropped. And so we want to address that with this volume automation as well. And now you could see that I have my ought, my volume automation going and you could see this sort of less dark blue line in the background. And there's my filter, right, Thea, the low pass filter. And if I go in, I could go back to that channeling Q. And now I can play with this but maybe want less of a filtered sound or whatever. And then I could go back to volume, Change that there so you could just sort of quickly go in between. You're different automation parameters, and you can have many multiple automation parameters on each track, so you can really just go crazy with this. And so this is showing that, um, you can use automation on different parameters inside any of the plug ins. If I had a distortion plug in here, for example, like a bit crusher, I could go in and I can choose from the bit crusher plug in, and I can automate these different parameters. Clip level clip, mowed down sampling. I can use automation lines for those different parameters as Well, so you can really go crazy with that. And it just creates a really alive mix when you're using automation in this way, it just feels like, um, each part has all of the elements right in the right place, and it just feels like it kind of lives and breathes a little bit more. All right, so have some fun with your different automation parameters. Try to bring your mixto life a little bit more and subtle changes. Do you make a big difference? So don't be afraid to make subtle changes than in in In Summation. With all of those subtle changes, you'll notice a big difference in the life of your mix. Great work. I will see you in the next lecture. 39. The Notes Stage: and hello students. Welcome back once again. So at this stage in the mix, it's time to start asking yourself, Am I finished? And this simple question will often cause me many sleepless nights. It's sort of hard to know when a mix is finished because, you know, if you think about it, there's always something more that you could do. You could try changing the settings on a plug in. You can try, you know, different arrangements and muting different things or just adding a little extra synth pattern or something. So you know what? I think it was the Vinci that said, Ah, work of art is never finished, only abandoned. So maybe the question should be Can I abandon this? And so I'm going to give you a few practical tips to help determine when or how a mix is finished in this last section of the course. Okay, so the 1st 1 that will discuss here is notes making notes, and this technique is really powerful and very, very easy to over look, and to not take your own advice or take my advice. But I found that when I used this technique, I'm a 1,000,000 times happier with my mix at the end of the day, and it saves you a lot of insanity. Okay, so what is the notes process? The notes process is very simple. It's not complicated at all. It's just a hard to get yourself to do it for some reason. And what you do is you get out a piece of paper and a pen. You can also use the note pad up here. If you want to type it on. If you don't have pen and pen and paper handy, you could do that as well. Okay, so you get out of a note pad and a pen, and you can. What I usually will do is all right out Verse one first, you know, chorus verse to whatever post chorus chorus to bridge breakdown solo. Just write down the different sections and have some space in between so you can make notes for each section. And then what I will do is either put my monitor to sleep Ah, or just close my eyes or whatever. Look away. You don't want to look at your mix session because looking at your mixed session will sort of bias. What your ears air hearing. If you're looking and you know the course is coming and you could see all these tracks here , then you're your brain. Sort of automatically thinks it's going to be louder or it's gonna be more exciting. But, you know, the average listener is not or no, none of your listeners are going to be looking at your mixed session, right? So you don't want to buy us what your ears air hearing with what? Your eyes. What? Your ears air hearing with what your eyes are seeing. Ah, you just want to have Ah, sort of natural listening environment came. So I'll just start from the beginning and I'll just start going through. And if I hear something that either bugs me or that I want to change, I'll just make a note of it. So maybe l say in verse one. The basin needs to come up a little bit, so just I'll just write under verse one of my note pad basins up game, and then verse one B comes in. There's maybe a little guitar thing that is like, kind of flubbed or something I didn't notice before, but now I'm really listening very intentionally. And I'll say, Oh, you know, guitar note, out of tune, need to fix. And the key is And the reason why this is actually such a difficult task is it's so tempting to just stop and just be like, Oh, I'll just fix that now and then I'll start over. But if you do that and if you're especially if you're adjusting the level or something and you know if you're changing the basin, you may find that Okay, it came up there, but now it's too loud in the second verse or something. And then you forget that you made that change. And so when you're listening through the second time and get to verse two of the bass synth is too loud, you just undid what you did for the first verse and you bring the level down, and now you're right back where you started and you didn't make any change. But what you actually need is some automation. The basin needs to be louder in the first verse, quieter in the second verse. So then you would use automation to address that. But if you're just making these quick changes, you'll forget what you did, and you're not actually helping the dynamics of the mix. That's why you have to just play it from front to back without stopping and make all of your notes. Uh, and you know, I would. So what? I would normally do just the full process play through, make notes for each section, and then I'll just go down my list and make those changes. Okay, I turned up the bass synth and verse one. It seemed fine inverse to, So I don't have to deal with that. Just change it for verse one. Cross it off. And then I had a weird guitar thing that happened in the verse one. You know, guitar part tuned up that little guitar part or edited it, edited it. Cut it out. Whatever. Check it off the list and there's a vocal part that needs to come up like a vocal ad. Lib needs to come up another vocal Idlib that needs to come down and check them off the list. Check him off the list. Then you start over. You create a new piece of paper with all the sections on it, and you start from the beginning and you play it through again and you make new notes because now you've made these other changes. But maybe there were more things that you couldn't write down fast enough or you didn't hear the first time and you hear it the second time. So now you have a new list and you go through and you cross those things off. And probably your second list is shorter than the first list because they're you know, you've already addressed things, then your third list is probably shorter than the second list. Maybe there's just two items on there that you need to change, and eventually you'll get down to the point where you're thinking, all right, I'm I don't think I can hear anything else that's causing me grief, and that's a pretty good indication that you're really, really close to the end of your mix. If your list is super long and you know it just has a 1,000,000 things on it, then, okay, I definitely need to do more work, and you can go back to the other processes that we've talked about with dynamics or e que or whatever automation you can go back and then you can save your notes stage for later on . But you're probably ready for the notes stage at this point. And that's just a great way to just make sure that you've tied up all your loose ends and anything that is bugging you you've addressed because the worst thing is when you turn in a mix and you're listening to it a month later and you're just like, Oh, crap, that thing is really annoying. And I just didn't hear it cause I've been sitting with this mix for a week, and I just over over looked at you. You'd be surprised at what your ears will choose to not hear. If you've been, you know, working on something forever, you just think slip by you, you know, and that's OK. Probably you're the only one noticing it, but still you want to be happy with your mix, so the notes stage is a great way to go through your mix, play it from front to back and just make notes. Check them off the list and your list. You get shorter and shorter and shorter, and you probably have to do it five times and then, ah, before you know it. You've addressed all of the things that bug you, and it's so much more efficient than starting from the beginning and making changes as you go along. Because, as I said, a lot of times you'll just undo what you did the first time through and you end up making no progress. Okay, it also is important, and I hate to just harp on this, but it's also important because you have to take into consideration the entire trajectory of your song right, something that maybe is annoying to you if you're soloing out a new instrument or listening to just one section while in the context of the whole song, maybe it needs to be that way, because when you're listening from front to back, it's a very different experience than cycling through one bar of the chorus, right? So it Zim Porton to think of it in the context of the whole song, and you have to make your mix decisions that way, so that is the notes stage of your mix. And as I said, it's very, very simple task. It's just remarkably hard to motivate yourself to do it right. You think that you're better than that. But you're not. You have to make your notes and cross them off the list. OK, so do that. And in the next lecture will talk about the car test and the friends and family test. All right, I will see their 40. Exporting Your Mix for Mastering: and hello, students. Welcome back once again. Well, we're now at the very exciting last stage of your mixed session, which is preparing your mix for mastering. And this is really just creating a new audio file that you can then bring into a mastering session and master yourself or send it off. I am not a mastering engineer, not even a mix engineer. But eso I would always Opto have someone else master my track. A I don't have all of the hardware gear that the pro mastering engineers have and be I just spent, like, a month on this track and mixed it myself. And I want somebody else to do it right. Ah, but, um, either way, you're going to have to send them Ah, high resolution wave file. So I'm just going to show you how to export your mix session for mastering. Now, the first thing to talk about in this stage is the length of your song. Uh, I want to make sure that my song that the actual project contains all of the song and all I mean by that is for some reason every now and then, if you're end, if your end marker like cuts off a part of your song here. And you don't want that right? You want this to end just at least a bar, a couple bars or whatever after the song ends. Same thing with the beginning of your song, you might have that messed up a little bit or whatever. Also, if you accidentally have your cycle region selected and you try to bounce your song, it's just going to bounce your cycle. So if I hit command be, you'll see that start in end positions. All right, 38 bar 38 ends at Bar 46 we don't want to just bounce the 1st 2 right. We want to bounce the entire song. And if you also just so you know, if you have a region selected like this and then you hit command being you try to bounce that it's just gonna bounce that little audio region. Ah, well rather than your whole song. So just something to be aware of. Make sure nothing is selected. Just click on an empty part. You don't have a cycle region selected in your start and end. The nodes are actually at the beginning and end of the song and that all of your audio is going to be encompassed by those markers. So I hit command Be, um you can also, if you know, for whatever reason, you can also manually set this so I could change it to start on bar eight if I wanted. Right, But I actually want to start em bar one and ends at bar 107 That's totally fine. Okay, so what are some of the other parameters here? Some are nerdy and not super important. Others are a little bit more important, so we'll just kind of walk through them. The first is the destination selector. So the the PCM is the sort of higher quality un compressed, Um, audiophile and I always choose from these settings, um, wave file and the resolution 24 bit. Ah, the sample rate. If you know this is going to be you probably gonna put this on soundcloud anyway, eventually. So either do 44 1 in a 44,100 you can do 96,000 but that's that's a much higher sample rate . And, you know, it's probably not going to be necessary, but these air sort of the two most common. But I usually just do 44 1 like that with the final type. If I'm mastering this myself, inter leaves. Fine. If you have to for some reason, go into like a pro tool session later on or you think it might be sent to pro tools. You can use the split file type, but I usually just use inter leaved anyway. Ah, and with dithering, you probably don't need to use this, but you would want Teoh use some dithering. If you have 24 bit recordings and you're sending this to 16 bit, you know you want those 24 bit recordings to go into 16 bit, then you might want to use dithering. But we're just gonna use 24 no dithering. Ah and ah, so we have. We have our starting and times. That's fine. With real time and offline. The bounce mode most of the time offline, will be fine. Um, especially if you have a lot of plug ins. Going offline might be best because if you noticing that when you're playing attract your prop project freezes up often than using real time might become a problem, but you would want to use real time if you're bouncing. This is probably more for the production session, but you would want to use real time if you're using, like external midi or instruments that have a lot of like synth instruments that have a lot of that require a lot of processing power. And that would just make sure that what the synth is doing it's really doing that every now and then. If you don't use the rial time and you're bouncing like us, you know a really big synth file, um, a really powerful synth instrument. It won't do exactly what it was doing while you were working on it, if you know what I'm saying. But at the end of a mixed age, offline is probably fine I don't ever do. I don't normally do the normalization on or overload protection on Lee. I'll just keep it off because I've been monitoring my project as I'm mixing it, you know, and I'm not getting any clipping. All my levels are below zero decibels, so I don't need to use normalization. It's not wrong, but I usually just don't even use it. Okay, um and so that's for our PCM. Now, if I select the MP three, I have some other options. Sometimes if I'm bouncing it and I want I wanted to go to MP three and the way files, I'm gonna I'm gonna send it to mastering, but I just want to have an MP three version for myself. Like my own demo. Whatever. You can enable the MP three as well. And you could choose from some of these other nerdier settings again, you have a mono bit rate in stereo bit rate 96 1 92 are pretty common. Um, I don't even know what the burial but rate encoding is to be honest, and I'll use the the high quality vesting coding. That's fine. We don't need frequencies below 10 hertz for an MP three anyway. Ah, joint stereo. If you want to write, i d three tags these air like the artist and name of track. And that way it goes, you know, just is tagged with the the right settings, so you can go to your settings and you can put in the artists and the album track number. Whatever. Okay, does that different information there. Right? So that's your MP three. You can also choose to burn Teoh CD or DVD. I don't have a CD drive in, so that's fine. I don't need to worry about that. Most of the time, all were worrying about here is the PCM in these settings here, but just went through a few of the others for you. Okay. Ah, And then you just hit bounce, and it will bounce your track into a, uh, stereo wave file of a high quality of high sample rate and it's ready to go off to mastering. See you in the next lecture. 41. BONUS: Thank You and Next Steps: Hey guys, Just wanted to hop in and say, thank you so much for enrolling in this course. I really hope that you enjoyed it. I hope that you've learned a lot. And most importantly, I hope that you feel better about going out there and making music because that's why I create these courses. So if you want to stay up to date with what I've got going on there. Fewest do it first, subscribe to my YouTube channel. Here I'll be posting free tutorials, slug interviews, music reviews, and all kinds of fun stuff. Second, follow me on Instagram, Twitch, Tiktok, using this handle. And I would love to stay connected with you. Finally, one of the most important things you can do to help me as rate and review this course. It helps with others students who are thinking about enrolling in the course. And it helps me get better as an instructor and make my next course even better. So once again, thank you so much for everything and we'll see you guys in the next course.