Cinematic Music Production in Logic Pro with an Electronic Influence

1. Intro: Welcome, friends. Today, we're going to get cinematic. Now, I know that cinematic is a very broad term that's thrown around. Specifically, we're going to create kind of a hybrid electronic kind of infused track. It's going to be a little bit mysterious. It's going to be a little bit edgy. We're going to pretend that we're kind of scoring like a gritty kind of indie film, and it's a scene at night. And it's in the city streets. So I'm going to cover everything in this course from finding your sounds, using those sounds, sketching ideas, sculpting sounds, EQ mixing. I'm basically going to cover absolutely everything about the process of starting a track and finishing a track for client delivery. 2. Selecting the Right Sounds for the Project: So before you start, you have to come up with some parameters. So at the very least, you need to come up with a key that you rng in and a tempo. Those to me are the most important things. Key and tempo. So what is the project that you are working on? In this case, we've already decided that it's going to be a kind of suspenseful, edgy, kind of gritty scene. So as soon as I hear all those words like suspenseful or mysterious, I instantly think of a minor key. Why don't we keep it simple? Why don't we go with a minor? Already have that sense of mystery. For Tempo, there's a lot of different things that you can do. If you're scoring directly to a picture, you can actually get the click track going and you can start to fool around with the Metrodome to kind of match the scene. In this case, we don't have any video footage. We can have carte blanche. I've come up with a tempo of about 125 beats per minute. But Tempo is everything. If it's a driving, suspenseful action thing, you're going to want to push that tempo up 121-41-5160, thing you can want to do is come up with some kind of palette of sounds. Now, every project that I start always starts with a blank slate. But in an effort to be able to write and produce quickly, I find it's very important to come up with some kind of palette of sounds that are going to go with your project. Now the last thing I want you to do when you're watching these videos is to feel like you have to go out and spend a whole bunch of money. Because of that I'm going to be featuring a lot of sounds from Composer Cloud from East West sounds, because to me, it is the most affordable option to get really good sounds at a very affordable price. Now, having said that, I'm not a huge fan of the piano sounds from composer Cloud. So I do use my go to piano sound, which is NR piano from Native instruments. Now, Native instruments has sales frequently, and you could probably get this at, like, a 50% off. So again, you don't have to spend a lot of money. If you don't have this library, you can use just another piano library that you have. You can use the built in logic Steinway piano library comes right within logic. I'm just used to using Noir. I'm a piano player, so I'm kind of picky about it. So that's the sound that I have. It's pretty flexible in terms of what you can do with it and the kind of sounds that you can go for. This particular patch is called a resonant vintage. The only thing that I did to it is I went into the AfC panel and I removed the pedal noise. Otherwise, you get this. You do not want that when you're scoring, the next Chris Nolan film. So take that pedal out, and then I brought the mechanical noise down a little bit because otherwise, you get really hits the hammers pretty heavily, and I find it's a little distracting. And that's it. That's all I did to that sound. Okay? So piano is what I almost always used to sketch things out, which we'll get to. But let's go through some of the other sounds. Okay. So we have Darkside dungeon. That's from the Opus engine. We got lots of percussion sounds. Because I decided this is kind of like a hybrid kind of electronic, kind of, you know, Han Zimmer nine inch nails kind of style, and I I wanted something. I wanted something really gritty and really dirty. Okay? Then we have the Hollywood Strings fantasy series. Get lots of flexibility in terms of all these, like, different mic positions and stuff like that. You have soft, classic and epic. So lots of kind of ways to manipulate it. Then we get the Chinese line drum hits from Storm drum, too. This is an old library. Very nice sound. Again, I've never used it, I'm like, Let's go for it. Forbidden planet is like their hybrid synth library, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Got these synth sounds. Lots of different ways that you can get this little planet, move around, change all the perimeters. Very cool. We'll get into playing around with those sounds afterwards. But I want to synth sound. I got another forbidden planet patch. Angels upon us. Then, of course, you can always You can always move those parameters using the mod wheel. So very I mean, you can do a lot with this patch. Okay. Very cool stuff. We got the dark side. Which seems to me might be a little bit of an older library as well, but Epo spring sound. I tend to gravitate more towards hybrid sounds than traditional kind of orchestral sounds. I'm just trying to give you a sense of what my process is in the hopes that you're going to find your own way and your own sounds. Clockwork Perktc. Very, very cool sound. These are very, very big kind of sounds that you can do a lot with. We got a noir, which we already talked about. Let's skip down here. We got dark side. This is a really big sound. I probably based on Somewhere in there, there's an electric guitar, so I like that sound immediately. They were going to use a little bit of electric guitar. Again, I use guitar rig from native instruments. But, you know, I built my sample library out. Small. I didn't just go out and spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars all once and buy all these amazing sounds. One little step at a time. I try to only buy things when they're on sale. Again, native instruments always has killer sales. I've been using guitar rig, I think, since Version five, and every year, they do nice updates, and it is for me, one of the best libraries for sound design and sound manipulation. I use guitar rig. I've used it on acoustic violins, I've used it on vocals, very very useful library. Ever if you don't have a guitar rig, you can always use the built in sounds from logic, and I guarantee you if you spend enough time with their guitar models, you can get some good sounds. So we're going to do something kind of like that. L, crazy sort of You can hear just because you're like repeating and repeating, so very, very kind of cool sound. I don't exactly know where I want to go with all of this, but I do know that you have to start with a good palette selection of sounds before you start your project. The sounds are like the ingredients when you're cooking. If you don't use good ingredients, it doesn't matter how fancy you are, it doesn't matter if you're the bear, you're not going to come up with something that's going to taste good. You have to use good ingredients. You can use affordable ingredients. And again, that's why I've chosen a bunch of sounds from the composer cloud, which I think is a very, very probably the most affordable option to get a lot of sounds. So we have our tempo, we have our key, we have our palette of sounds. Now we got to come up with some music. 3. Sketching out ideas on Piano to Prepare for multitracking: So whatever your main instrument is, that's what you're going to want to sketch your ideas on. You could be a guitar player, you could be a saxophone player, or whatever. It does help considerably having some knowledge of the keyboard and be able to use midi and get things done quickly, but there's no right or wrong. Lots of great composers out there that can't play, you know, a single note on the piano. See if we can sketch something out using our piano track. I'm going to call this scratch, scratch track, which generally means that we're not going to keep this. It's just to get an idea. Most of all of my compositions are based around improvising. So we have our key. We have our tempo that we've already set up. Now, it's just a matter of kind of playing something, maybe experimenting with some cord changes and trying to come up with some kind of idea and then we're going to start to apply those or structures to our other instruments. It's like a journal entry is basically what it is. So let's see what we can do. My chair is squeaking. Here we go. All right. So some of that I liked some of that I did not like at all, but we have some kind of, like, some kind of structure of cord. So we're a minor. So we went to A D minor. Then we had a B or in there. Like a B minor. Which is unusual. I'm not 100% sure about it, but I do like different kind of core changes. It feels like it doesn't quite belong there. That's necessarily bad thing. I might just have to kind of mess around with a little bit. And then we ended up with an F major. So A minor D minor B minor, which may or may not work and F major. U Maybe B major would work better. Let's run it one more time. Let's run one more time. I'm just gonna delete it. Let's do it one more time. I'm gonna try to do a B major instead of a B minor. H. All right. I'm not crazy about the B minor or the B major. I don't really like either one of them. But this is all part of the process. Okay? The A minor D minor works well, the F works well. So let's try something else. Let me see. D T So I'm experimenting with different chords right now. We got we've got, like, a diminished. I like different chords. I like funky chords. We got B flat major. That's interesting. So we're in A minor and B flat major has nothing to do with A minor. I've kind of get into theory a little bit here, but this is part of the process, an interesting matter of of experimenting, trying different, different chord changes. We're going to try B flat major in, which has no business being part of a minor. We're almost like changing keys at some point in time, going from A minor to an F major, which does have a flat. We still have a home key. This is just experimentation. We're going to delete it. We're going to do it again. Let's try it three times chart. Okay. Very kind of strange, unusual chord progression there, but I like it. Okay? So it took me a few cracks. I mean, it could take you ten, 20, 30, 40, 50 times, whatever. You're sketching out ideas. This is my process because I am an improviser. This is generally how I approach all of my projects because I can do things on piano very, very quickly and sketch things out. I'm going to keep this track now. And now I have kind of chord structure sequence. Necessarily a melody, but we have maybe the makings of a theme or at the very least, we have an idea. We have a concept. It sounds mysterious. It sounds a little bit dramatic. It doesn't necessarily sound tense yet, but that's going to come as we add some structure and some meat and some bones to it using some of our other sounds. Let's dive into those other sounds and let's start to build some structure around this idea that we have. 4. Multitracking - Fleshing out the Composition one track at a time: Like to run kind of some kind of synth sound, especially for these types of projects to have something that just runs underneath the whole track. That's very, very subtle. We're actually going to start with this dark side clockwork sound. Now, if I have the mod wheel just in a default position, you got a lot of attack, which we might use. But what we're going to do as I push the mod wheel up, It's about halfway there. It's much more subtle because this is just going to run under the track. What we're gonna do is going to kind of create like a loop. It's going to ad tension, right? So we're actually going to start the track with this. Okay. Something very, very simple, literally just moving from an A to a C in the piano. Now, anytime we have rhythmic kind of tracks like this. We're going to want to lock those into the tempo. Now, I played it pretty evenly. It was pretty much to the click, but any kind of repeated rhythmic track, you're going to literally right click this, select all, and then you're going to quantize it, which means it's going to lock it in to the grid. It's going to be right on the grid. It's going to line up exactly on the beat. You have to choose the right value when you're quantizing. The Thick with that is you need to figure out what is the fastest note that you played in that passage. We have a tempo of 125. I basically played two notes for every beat. I'm so that tells me that I used eighth notes. I'm literally just going to click eighth notes. Boom. See how it just slightly adjusted and moved each of those notes. Now they're just perfectly locked to the grid. Let's go back and listen to it now. Upper a head coring and get that little loupe button. I'm just going to literally drag this out. Let me see. Now, depending on the project and depending on whatever briefing notes, you're can probably have a very specific idea of the length, the track that your client wants you to create. Look at some of other sounds. It's almost we're going for, like, stranger things kind of Cynthi sort of sound, which is very popular nowadays. Let's see. Just kind of kind of going through these sounds. Okay. So a lot of these sounds, especially in this East West composer, really, really heavily processed sounds. I notice in this one, As soon as I get to this octave. We get that vocal. Vocal kind of sound in there. Now, I like it. But it's not very subtle. So I'm sure that you could go in and you can mess around with that for the different sources and different filters and kind of play around with it. But we're probably just going to focus on whatever is below middle seat because I want it to be a little bit more subtle than that. Let's see where we can add this. A Always let that reverb tail go. So when you're recording, you don't cut off the end of it. Okay, so we got something we kind of cycle through the differents. I noticed right off the bat. This first note. See how it dies just a little bit too soon, and I adjust it as I was playing, and I started to hold that out. So literally just going to take that note. I'm going to drag it out a little bit. Just died a little bit too soon. Oh, hey, let's go back a little bit. A click track is going to probably drive you absolutely nuts, but you got to use it. Okay, that was maybe a bit too long, so's bring it back. At it might have been too much now. Let's see. Alright, get to get. Just to the sweet spot. Almost there. Close. Last one. We're getting into the nitty gritty now, so Yeah, that of work. Okay. We're maybe going to bring that sound in a little bit later. I think we're going to use this sound for kind of like accents. It's a really processed string sound. So we're going to add that to a little accents in there, but a little bit later on, you don't want to bring in the really big sounds right off the bat. Okay. I think we're going to bring in this high piano sound. We're going to go in kind of a high octave to just kind of, like, because we have some really low kind of information going on here. So let's find a place where we can just kind of bring in the piano. You basically want to just keep introducing new elements. Just keep adding stuff. There's no right or wrong other than when you find a little spot that maybe starts to sound boring or repetitive. That's when you want to add something new in there. I'll find a place that we can get this piano in here. To. Let that reverb te the last piano chord go. Okay. So with my piano tracks, I try to literally do as few takes as possible because I want to sound really authentic. I want it to sound really natural. I don't want it to sound heavily processed. If you happen to play a wrong note or play a chord in the wrong spot or it was a timing issue, I mean, you can take any one of these notes. Do whatever you want. You can tweak your heart's content because it's in middy, and you can go nuts. But I really try to get it right in maybe the first take second take, third take, and I try to get one big long complete take for piano. That's how I like to do it. Okay, so we've started to add some sounds. We started to kind of build it up a little bit. Okay, so I think we're going to bring it in the sound add some accents. After the piano's been playing for a little bit. I'm gonna match those re changes. O. Oh. Oh. Okay. It's almost approaching a playing a bass instrument. Playing just single notes. Also really good to be aware of the type of sound that you're using. So the longer that I hold this, It's good to know, kind of the at and the release, how long is the attack, how long is the release, and then you want to play it based on that sound. So as you can see, I've left a little gaps between these notes so that we have a nice decay time before the next note comes in to create lots of space for the other instruments. Let's listen back to that. It's a nice little information in there now, but it stops. Okay. So that one there sounded hot to me. Okay, so what we can do with that is we can click on it. This is our velocity. We hit it at about about 82. Let's bring that down a little bit because it came in too hot. One more time. I brought down. I brought down your. Much more subtle. You don't necessarily want things to be jumping right off off the page. Unless that's what you're going for, unless you have a specific need for it. I'm trying to decide what I want to do with this. We're going to do something like that. Some kind of, like, octive thing. So I think we'll start to kind of bring it in over here, and then we're going to start to build up, and we're going to start to add other instruments and then we're going to get into some percussion fun. So let's see if we can find a spot that we can bring that in. Something like that. And again, we might just do a little leap with that. All right. So because it's kind of a, again, a rhythmic kind of repetitive part, we're going to, right click, s, and we're gonna hit that locking into the. Now, let me see here. Okay. I want to end it right at bar 74. So I just went past that, so I'm literally just going to delete that note because I want to keep it in kind of we're going to drag this back. Because I want to be able to loop it as a rhythmic kind of a part. All right. So now we're going to kind of just loop it out. Let's just go to operate a hand corner again and get that loop button. You're just going to bring it out like that. I don't know if I'm going to keep the whole thing, but I want to start to add new things. Let's do that. We'll probably bring the piano back in there. I could just record on the same piano track. I don't like to do that. I like to just duplicate. So you can hit command D. Now you've duplicated that part. I don't want to lay it on the same spot. Maybe I want to overlay it so that it starts before this part ends. Maybe for mixing, I want this part to be louder than the other part. For me, this is my process duplicate tracks, and add a new part in Top. So so I'm gonna bring it back and then we're gonna bring some piano in here, and then let's see what else we can do. O So I think we're actually going to end the track on that last note. It's around the four minute mark. Okay. All right. So now we have something. Again, I'm just following the core changes from the original scratch track that we did. Let me just find out where this ends. It's going to end right there in bar 118. So what we're going to do is we're just going to bring these back. So that we have a nice clean ending. That nice chord. That's why you never cut off the reverb tails when you're playing any kind of instrument. You just record to let the whole thing is so much better for mixed down. You always have to be thinking about mixing. Okay, we got something there. So now we're going to start to build it up and add some more layers and try to build up that track so that we might have kind of a quiet, start build build build, and then we're probably going to end nice and quiet. Some kind of crazy part like that. Let's just try it. We'll see what happens. So I'm going to dial back and I'm going to see where I want to bring this part in. Oh. I want to get a nice long reverb tail going on there. Okay. It's kind of a funky guitar sound. Kind of a funky sound. So much swirling around there. That's all, like, delays and stuff like that. Now that we have some kind of, like, structure, let's get into the next component, which is all going to be focused on percussion. 5. Percussion - Layering and Quantization: These are all heavily processed. So not really much additional stuff that I want to do with. These are already just laced with, you know, dis and and delay. I tend to like delay more than than reverb, for the most part. Let's listen to this track without the delay. Sounds fantastic. I'm just on its own, but when you have that delay in there, really sound to sound very cool. So my approach with each sound that I use is, I don't go and learn everything about their interface. I literally just go and I tweak and I move things around, and I change the sound and get it to sound the way that I want. And I don't really read too much into what am I doing? Just kind of intuitively, twist the dials, play with the knobs, turn the buttons on and off until you find a sound that you really kind of like. Now, this is a really big heavy sound, so I don't know if we want that rate in there right away, but let's listen to some of these other ones. Okay, we might introduce something kind of a little bit more that. That's not so much in your face. We also have this one. Kind of like a tyco kind of a sound. And then this dark side dungeon is going to be like the big one. So probably want to just kind of ease into it. So let's do something around here. Always a good idea to open up these sounds so that you can see what the playable regions are. This could be very good for adding. Some accents. Oh. But, you don't want to do too much, either. Yeah, just that one note, it's, like crazy, overpowering. So you probably want to hit at a very very low velocity. What we might even do is we might even process that separately under a separate track. Yeah, I think we're going to do that. So we're going to duplicate this track, and we're going to call this kind of like low, and we'll call this high. Can be a lot easier to work with. So the high sounds. Okay, let's try to bring that in somewhere first. Always start small and then work your way. Okay. Something like that. So note when I'm trying to do the percussion part, I could just I'm playing a lot of kind of the same patterns. I could just loop that out. But then, you know, we get all the little variances and velocity layers, which make for a much more realistic performance. So again, select all going to quantize that to eighth notes. Lock it up nice and tight. I had a couple of hits towards the end of that that I don't think that I want. So let's just listen back to the very end of that. Might just just that last hit. Go to take that out. Yeah. Much more subtle end, and then I can hear that last piano note. Okay, so now we got some low parts that we can add. You have to play these very low. These are huge massive sounds. So it's going to have to be very very subtle. Otherwise, it is going to eat up all the head room of your mix. Okay, so this is the same sound that we just did, but now we're gonna add some kind of low information to it. This is how you build up your percussion parts. Oh Something like that, something like that. There's a few too many hits in there, and we're gonna go back through in the mix, and I'm gonna kind of clean that up. You don't want to overdo it. And there was definitely some hits in there that were a little bit too too intense. We're gonna select syncs up to eighth notes, make them nice and tight. Okay. Now there's a few little things. I noticed the piano. They're getting a little crackling going on here. So we have we're peeking for this particular piano part. So you can just bring that back down. In the mix, we're going to sort this all out, by the way. We're also peeking in our master channel. So you might be hearing a little kind of like clicks and cracks and distortion. I don't worry about that too much while I'm tracking. I just want to get everything recorded. Obviously, if you're peeking with audio signals like vocals and guitar and stuff like that, then you want to be very careful to make sure you're not hitting that red. When you're using virtual instruments, everything will be fixed after the fact. I really don't concern myself with it too much, other than if it's creating some crackle or something like that, that's really starting to distract me and then you can mess around with that. But we're going to address all of that in the final mix. Let's see how this is sounding. Let's go back and listen to it. I can tell that, you know, this low percussion is definitely a little bit overpowered. We're going to bring that back a little bit. Normally, I like to save the mix for, like, the very last thing, but I usually can't help myself. I'll do a little mixing as we go along. Okay, so let's bring some of this tyco in. Okay. Now, the only thing that sounding a little bit dry to me, that sounds. So it's very, very kind of in your face. So let me see. We could throw some delay on there, actually. Delay. Oh, I almost works so much better. So I haven't fooled around this too much. So when you're starting to look at processing effects and stuff like that, your first place that you want to start is you want to start within the actual plug in itself. Then there's all these parameters. You can also bus out some effects as well, it depends on your project, but I always like to start with whatever they give me. I could go in here and I could dial up the reverb, I could change the hall and try to find something different, mess around the pre delay and the amount of verb that I'm sending. But the more reverb you add to each of your tracks, the more muddy and messy and swampy it's going to become. Was delay just gets in and it gets out. Okay It's so much more subtle and it decays and dies away. So let's just listen to what is this at here? This is at about maybe three quarters. So let's turn off the delay and let's turn this all the way up. Okay, tons of reverb now, and if we dial that back, turn on delay instead. See how it dies away very, very cleanly. Get in and get out and get out of your mix. So, I like to use delay over most of the time, most of the time. So let's find a place that we can bring this in. So we'll go back to the beginning of this part where we start to add the percussion. Something like that. So again, you're trying to get a full performance. I for my percussion parts, you probably see I was like, really enjoying that. I'd like to just kind of grab a handful of notes of the left hand, the right hand, and just have fun with it and just do whatever whatever's natural, whatever sounds good. Always looking to create different velocity layers. Alright, so we're going to select all. I think I might have had a couple of 16th notes in there, so we're going to bring that down the 16th. Boom, tighten everything up, lock it into the grid. And let's listen to that now. So it might be too much delay. I might have pushed that a little bit too far. Let's go back. We could just bring that feedback down a little bit. There we go. And we're gonna add a splash more to revert. There we go. Oh, so much better, so much better. So it was sounding a little bit too dry. It was sick out a little bit too crisp and clear, sticking out the mix a little bit, so that's why added a little bit of splash more reverb, you just kind of push it back a little bit. And the number of repeats of the delay was a little bit too much. So you just can go back in the feedback. You dial that down so it doesn't continue on for a long period of time. You shorten the amount of time that it's delayed. Okay. So just little processing tricks along the way. Okay. So we got some pretty cool sounding stuff now, and we got this big guns here. Such a big, big, big sound. So let's see if we can find a spot to bring this in, and we're going to start to flesh out some of those other instruments. We're missing in some kind of chordal information where we haven't added those kinds of string low end notes to kind of accompany the piano to help kind of bring those sounds up. So but let's have some fun with. This is all about percussion. So let's see where we can bring this in. There's a lot going on in this Mx, we're gonna have our work cut out for us when we mix all this and process it all a bit. We'll worry about that. This is kind of the fun part. Okay. So we got some distorted drums. We're going to select those. Oh, we're gonna clean those up, tighten them, lock them onto the grid. Let's listen back to hear what we have. Okay, that's pretty good. And now, I feel again, like maybe we've pushed the delay a little bit too far, which I like to do. I like to push those limits. So this is s. So we got the feedback. There it is. There's our delayed feedback at about 50%. Let's dial it back. Alright. Okay. We're also just. I'm reducing the feedback the amount of times the delays. I'm also reducing the level of the delay. That's a little bit too much. There we go. So while the delay doesn't cut up he mix as much as reverb, too much can be a bad thing. All right. Let's listen back to that in the context of the mix. So much better. It dies away and it gets out of the way. Okay, Mucho better. Those tiny little things go a long ways. Okay. So for percussion, we might add some more tracks, but for the bulk of what I do is just take it one track at a time. Get long performances, so you get a whole bunch of velocity layers, quantize it to lock it all up into the grid. When you have a sound like what we did with that this big percussion sound, don't be afraid to duplicate that track and then just record the high percussion and the low percussion, is going to be way easier for mixing, and when we EQ it and all that stuff, we can process them separately. We added four percussion parts, which is not much. They're already overpowering the rest of the mix. You want to just take the less is more approach. Then as we start to add some more parts of the song and more tracks, then we can go back and revisit and see if we want to add some more parts. But in a nutshell, that's what I do with a percussion. I didn't do any additional processing in terms of adding external reverbs or delays because the sounds that I'm using are already loaded with effects. So I don't really need to. Don't feel like just because you can bust out a bunch of these tracks into an auxiliary channel effects. Don't feel like you have to. If you're using sounds that are already just loaded with effects, how much more do you really want to add to it? If anything, you're probably going to have to take away sounds. 6. Adding Layers & Creating Depth: To start to flesh it out a little bit more, and it's all about adding additional layers to add depth to your music. Okay? We did that already a little bit with this kind of low string sound. So basically, I'm taking what was already played earlier on in the piano, which is up high, like an A, let's say, and I'm just replaying that part. Down low. That's all it is. Now because I'm adding this to a separate part of the song, I'm going to do the same thing. Command D, and now I have a duplicate track because there's less going on in the beginning of this track. If I just record over the same track, I'm going to have balancing issues because maybe I want this part to be a little bit more pronounced in the beginning and less in the end or maybe the other way around. So, of course, you can do that with automation, which we're going to get into in a future video. But from a mixing standpoint, it's a heck of a lot easier to duplicate that track and just record it in a completely new track. Way easier for mixing. Okay. So we're going to start to add a little bit more. When I talk about layers, we're going to do it in terms of layers of sounds. We're also maybe going to add instead of just playing like that one low note. We're going to add some kind of layers of a harmonic information on top. So if you listen to it, if I just play the A, low A. Sounds great. When I start to add these other Now you're really adding tension because you're just building and layering on top. Okay? So let's see where we can kind of start to make this a little bit bigger. And again, you want to build it out over a section of time, not all at once. Let the reverb tail go. Still going. A lot of that sound you're hearing at the end is from the guitar effects processor that just kind of runs in the background. That sounds kind of cool. It's almost like, like, a ocean kind of thing. Okay. Alright, so we've added, as you can see, if you look at this part, I'll just expand that a little bit. H. Instead of playing like individual notes, now we start off simple. One, maybe two notes at the same time. Then as we went along, it started to get a little bit more detailed. The C chord started to fill out a little bit more changes as you can see. If you look at the first part of this piano scroll versus the second part, started to get a lot busier because we're trying to build and we're trying to layer and add more information. Let's go back and let's see. What was the sound? All right. Okay. What was this guy? Okay, so we have this kind of running straight through A minor all the way through. What we might do is add kind of like a base part in there so we can get those core changes in there. So again, same thing, we're going to duplicate this part. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this back over here. I don't mind that it's on a mi the whole way through, but I want to start to work with the chord changes in the second half of the song. Right about there, we're going to follow the piano part where we change these chords. I never write anything down. It's a really good idea to write things down, but we're pretty much in a minor this whole time and then you can see we have a chord change here. Does it change there as well? No, we're in A this whole time and then D minor. Then we have our O B flat F, and then back to A. Okay. So I know these are a little subtle these changes. You can go back and you can see where the chords change. You can also click on the score part and you can see where the cords change if you need to go back in there. I just do it by feel based on how I've recorded the song. Whatever works for you is just fine. Okay. So we're going to try to change these chords so that they go with the piano part. So let's see. Let's do it from there so we can follow the scroll along. Let's do this. Alright, we even had a wrong note in there, which is always fun. Okay. That one doesn't have a big of reverb tail. So, look, you can actually see right in there. So I just I bumped a key in there somewhere. So let's see. I got to find it. M, d, d, d. There it is right there. There it is. There's the offender. Okay. So from B flat to the F. Oops, actually accidentally got a G there, so we're just going to go to zap that bad boy right out of there. It's a rhythmic part, same thing. I'm going to select all. We're going to lock it into eighth notes, sync it up to the grid. And now we have a nice kind of tight part to go with that. I want to kind of build out this part a little bit and where we start to add a little bit more tension. There is a track that we have not used yet, which was this one. The reason we have it is 'cause it's so big. L can really processed the electric guitars out because it's so big. We're just gonna kind of eat up a lot of the frequency room, so we don't want to overdo it. So we're gonna bring it in. Yeah, somewhere over here. Let's see, where we can add a little bit more attention. We'll figure it out. Okay, as you can see, accidentally, start a little bit too soon there. And I came in on the wrong, which is why you should write your s down. But I didn't. That's fine. Easy to fix. I go to take those first two notes. Delete them. So easy. How easy is that? So I literally just ped I played kind of like a I think when you have a sound that's this big with so it's just bleeding with effects. You don't want to add too much. So literally just cas. Far more effective than if I play, like, chords in both hands. It's too much. It sounds cool, but not within the context of the song. So let's go back and let's listen to that part, and let's see how that sounds. Sounds pretty cool. When you use good sounds, can't really go wrong. Now, I hear a part where I'd like to add a second guitar part. So we're going to duplicate this track. It's around this part around one oh 81 oh nine. I'm going to go into guitar rig, and I'm going to change the sound to the I just want more distortion. I want more. I got this really cool sound. Well, it's not me that has a sound. It's Native instruments. Ram fire lead P. Really big thunderous distorted sound. So, we're gonna play over top. That same kind of guitar part that we did over here, but we're just gonna kind of layer it. So let's do it. I don't necessarily want to keep the whole reverb tale. That's, like, a really big sound with a lot going on. Just we're just adding layers. We're adding accents. So we've taken the same guitar kind of pattern that we did with this other kind of heavily processed delay sound and we're just add a little bit of distortion, a little bit of thunder. That's all we've done. So I'm feeling pretty good about the second half of the song. I've add quite a bit in there. Now, usually it's part where I go back and I listen to the beginning, and I see is there are places where it's a little bit empty. And then I'm going, again, it's all about layering, adding more layers. So let's go back to the beginning. I'm going to take the click track off so you don't have to listen to that anymore because it's probably driving me nuts. Oh. Okay, overall, I actually I don't mind. It's spacious, but there's new elements kind of being introduced here and there. As you can see, I'm all about minimalism. We got what 17 track. This isn't even a track, this is a scratch track, the least amount of tracks to get your message across. The more tracks that you add, the more sounds that you add, the smaller your sound is going to get, the more messier Mx is going to get. When we're providing something to a client, chances are they're going to want to gazillion changes. Sometimes less is more. Follow the brief, follow the notes, get it as close to the sound as you think that they want. But just keep in mind there's going to be a gazillion changes that are made. Don't be merry to anything that we've done so far. The only thing that I thought would be cool is if we take this really big distorted drum sound, We're going to introduce it a little bit earlier, but we're going to process it a little bit differently. So I'm going to duplicate that part. And let's say it's let's refer to this as a high cut. I thought it would be neat if we take that same sound, but we really process it very heavily. Okay. So we're gonna bring it in a little bit sooner, but I'm going to show you what I mean in a minute. So let's add it first. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. I just wanted something a little bit more. I wanted a little bit more to kind of hold the track together. Now, that sound on its own. That's a little bit too intense. But first, what we're going to do, just like we did with our percussion tracks is we're going to right click, s, lock it into eighth notes. And now we're going to process a bit. So we're going to slo it out. Okay? So in a future video, I'm going to be talking about the use of EQ to clean up your mix, but that's not what we're doing here. Here we're doing EQ shaping. Okay. The logic is you're going to double click on this on your track. Load up your EQ. There it is. What we're going to do is we're going to click on this. We're going to cut a whole bunch of the high way out. We're going to p this way to the bottom so that you don't hear it as much as you feel it. Okay, let's go back, listen to it, and we're going to start bringing this back. So this is your high cut, and then we're literally just going to grab this icon and we're just going to pull it back until we like the sound. This is the secret sauce, my friends. When you're looking for depth. This is one of the biggest thing is you get these really kind of low sounds, but you push them to the low end as far as you can. And then you have high sounds, you push those high sounds. The extreme frequencies are which really adds a whole lot of depth to your mix. So let's listen to the before and after. If we listen to it without the E Q, sounds very cool. But it's a right up in your face, right up front. This is the early part of the song that's kind of a quiet part. So now we're going to throw the E Q one. Way down low. So we've heard it on its own, but we also, it's also really important that we hear it within the context of the mix. So let's back it up a little bit, then we'll bring it in. Let's adjust it a little bit. Oh. There we go. So really important when you're e Qing stuff. You want to sol it so you can really hear how it's adjust the sound because you don't want to kill the sound, take too much out. But you have to hear it within the context of the mix. I found that that sound was a little bit too much buried. So I just literally took the puck and I just adjusted it. We're still rolling off a ton of high end. Let's listen to the before and after again. So that's without the E Q. That's with the Q. Okay. So let's within the context of the mix again. There. Now you can still hear it, but it's still pushed way down low, way into the mix. It's not interfering with anything. And just adding a little bit more kind of cohesion to the track. Let's listen to it. Oh 0000 Okay. There you go. All about adding depth, adding layers. I feel like somewhere around here is still just a little bit of empty ish sounding. So I want to add something in there, but I'm not sure what. This is where it can start to get a little messy because you want to throw something in there. You don't really know what. So it's a process that you have to go through. It's a process. Let's load up something different here. We're going to load up Um let me see. We're going to load up omo sphere. If you don't have spectrosonic Ominousphere, I will say that if you're interested in writing this particular kind of music, which is kind of edgy hybrid electronic confused music. Ominousphere is the best bang for your buck you will ever spend. Yes, it's expensive. But honestly, it's probably the most useful library that I have. So I would highly, highly recommend it. Maybe Cynthi kind of pad kind of sound. So Okay. Green glass harmonica. Never use the sound. Okay? I dig it. Harmonica. Now, just keep in mind that you can get completely lost in mosphere because it's just it's just a massive massive library. We have a lot of kind of low information going on in this first part of the mix, so I'm going to try to just bring in some kind of highs a little bit. This is just, like, kind of like a little sparkle on top. It's all about the layers. So let's add something in here. Oh. Oh Okay, so literally just kind of single notes supporting that main kind of you know, I can't really call it a melody, but theme and a little bit of sparkle all about the layers. Before we get into the next section, we need some kind of, like, little kind of transitionary sort of thing. Because I wanted to be a little bit more percussive. We're actually going to add an acoustic guitar. Okay, so we got an acoustic guitar, but it's very, very dry. Now for the first time, we're going to use some delay and some reverb. Okay, so we're going to bust that out. Okay. How you can do that is you can literally just go onto your track, it bus bus one, and there it is right there. I'm going to rename this verb. And now I'm going to add and effects unit in there. We're going to use Valhalla reverb Valhalla room, which is my favorite. If you go if you're familiar with this reverb, by the way, this is dirt cheap. If you don't have it, you can just use the built in stock reverb from logic and you can get it done that way. But we're going to get a large hall. You can fool around with your pre delay So if you turned it all the way down, the reverb would kick in immediately. A bit of pre delay, you're creating a little bit of separation between the original hit and the actual reverb that comes afterwards. So you want to kind of mess around with that. Because it's on an auxiliary channel, you always want that to be unity. You want it to be 100%, and then you just add as much as you want. So let's just crank it. Okay. That's not a bad amount of reverb, actually. Okay, so now that's going to kind of sit in the mix. We're going to also process this with EQ, but we're going to talk about that in a future video. Okay, I also want to add a little bit of delay. So I'm going to create a second bus. Okay, we're going to call this delay. This is one of my favorite things to do with guitar tracks, especially iuitar. We're going to go into delay, and we're going to do a stereo delay. This is just just a built in stereo delay. Logic, incredibly useful. Let's just add some delay. Okay, so now we got a nice little delay sound going there. So, let's listen to the guitar without those effects added. Let's listen to it drive. Okay. Now let's add the rever. And now let's add the delay. We might ad even just add a little bit more delay. Oh. There we go. That's the sound I'm looking for. So we're going to bring this in. I'm literally just going to be playing an A minor We're just adding some rhythmic kind of textures. So let's see where we can fit this in. Oh, I changes to acoustic guitar. Yeah ready? Let's add it. Oh Oh Okay. So initially, I just came in a little bit too soon. So that's why I wanted to that's why you probably saw me just stop because I wanted to just come in on eight chord. Okay. Towards the end, you're not even going to really necessarily be able to hear that acoustic guitar because 'cause there's so much going on, but just to add a little bit of texture. So that was a little bit too soon. So we're just going to literally, if you just go to the end, you can just drag that over and you can get rid of that part that you didn't want. Just really background, really kind of just tickle your little ear drums. Just add a little bit of texture. We've added a whole bunch of kind of different layers. We've added some depth, and now we got to start to clean things up. So let's get to EQ. 7. EQ - Cutting Frequencies for a Cleaner Mix: EQ can be your best friend. But I think where it's most effective is when we talk about subtractive EQ, not additive EQ. In other words, carving out frequencies that are maybe cluttering up your mix that don't need to be in there. I'm going to show you my approach to EQ on a track by track basis, and then we're going to listen to it and see how much cleaner everything sounds. Let's get into it. My approach is one track at a time. This first track that we did, we had added an EQ already. Okay. But this was for kind of shaping the sound. This was more like a sound design kind of choice. So for this particular track, I'm not going to do anything additional with it because we've already cut out a whole bunch of that high end to try to make it fit in with the mix a little bit better. So let's start from the second track, which is the same sound. Okay, and we're going to see if we can shape it a little bit. Usually, the problem is somewhere in here. When you're trying to clean mixes up, somewhere between, you know, let's say, 300 hertz and lower. That's where most of the problems end up being. So what you can do is you can grab one of these pucks and bring it up, sweep around until you find kind of sound frequencies that are really not good. So you're going to really exaggerate, and then you can just pull them back a little bit. So let's do that. Okay, so it's starting to sound really, really boomy right around here when I really boost this up. So I'm just going to drag it straight down from that frequency and scoop a little bit of that out. Okay? So let's listen to it again. And you just keep going back and forth, turning it on and turning it off. And then the important part is you want to listen to it in the context of the mix. So if you want to make a very strategic cut, you can keep that very, very narrow, so you're only noting out. You're only just pulling out just these frequencies, or you can widen it right out, and you can kind of scoop out. Don't be afraid to take a good scoop out of there. Okay? Something like that. It's still not affecting the overall sound a whole lot. Okay? You don't necessarily want to change the sound. We're just trying to clean it up a little bit. So we just did a tiny little cut. Let's try the next one. Yeah, this one's a really big, boomy sound. So that big boomy sound is just going to kind of, like, swallow up your project whole. So this one, we're going to want to do some cutting. So we do the same thing, grab this guy. Somewhere around here, probably. That's pretty boomy right there. So we're gonna go straight back? Okay, let's listen to it. That low end rumble that is just going to kind of eat up your mix. It's subtle. Mucho better. Okay? So this is literally my approach to every single track. Let's listen to this guy. This guy, it's mostly high information. There's not a whole lot going down here, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to cut out the lows. Till it sounds thin. So it sounds pretty thin there. I'm going to bring it back a little bit. It might not seem like you're doing much, but what you're doing is you're just cutting out some unnecessary frequencies. If you do that out of every single track and every single sound, it's going to make a huge difference in your mix. Okay? And it doesn't take long, as you can tell. Okay. Let's try this go. It's like our tyco kind of a sound. Now, this sound is not bad. Okay, now, I'm not hearing a whole lot of boominess to that sound. So you don't necessarily have to add EQ to every single track. I'm not hearing a whole lot in that sound that really needs to be carved away. What I'm listening for is like that boomy kind of low end that just kind of rumbles and eats up too much of our frequency spectrum. I'm not hearing a whole lot in that track. So, guess what? I'm going to leave it. I'm going to leave that guy alone. So let's go to this next sound. What we got here. I'm just going to do it for every single track. Except for this one because I said that I wasn't going to Okay. This one, again, is not bad, but we're going to continue to do a little bit of a low cut. It's so subtle, but when you take it away, you can hear that little bit of background rumble that we're getting rid of. Okay? So I'm happy for that. Let's go to the nice one. It doesn't have to take long, but it's a really important step. S sound really not good there. So let's bring that down. H. Okay. That's it. We're just clean it up. This is just a EQ cleaning is what it is. This is going to be a whole lot of high information in this one. As you can see all of our frequencies are way up here. So we're going to grab this guy. All of those lows. Just pull it over until it gets really thin. See, now it's very thin, and then pull it back. You probably think it's s going to make much of a difference stand, but trust me. It's the sum of the parts. One part of the time, you just keep adding it or taking it away, scooping it out, you clean them all up, right? Let's listen to this low string. We missed it. Let's go back. So the same thing, we're going to kind of roll off these loaves. You can very clearly hear in those frequencies when you take that away, it's like, this kind of, like, way down low, is significant, a? And it doesn't sound nice. So we want to get rid of it. Let's listen to that again. It's subtle, and you have to really listen for it, but trust me, it's there. Okay. This next sound. We just duplicate that sound if you remember. So if you click on that and you hold Option command and drag it, it's going to duplicate that thing. So Option command, click and drag. There's no reason to redo the Q on the exact same sound. You've already done it. You've already done the work. Okay. Let's listen to this guy. Let's see what we want to do with it. So there's some kind of rumbly rumbles in there. So if you're wondering how I decide whether to kind of notch out one of these frequencies or roll off the lows. Well, if I roll off the lows, I'm cutting out all of this information. So we don't really want to do that. So let's just scoop this guy around. That sound bad there. So let's go straight down. That rumble, back low rumble. Then we take it away. So subtle. And the important thing is that I'm not thinning out the sound necessarily. I'm just getting rid of some of that low rumble. Okay? We have the identical sound right here. So if you remember, we are going to Option Command click and drag Boom. That guy is done. We're just going track by track. Okay, Electrici super easy. Okay? We're just going to roll out some lows. Let's listen to it. Easy does it. Done. Just rolling off those lows. We have another electric guitar part was recorded with the same electric guitar, so we're going to just copy that puppy right over there. Now, we got acoustic guitar. Same idea. Roll off some lows. You get rid of the low rumble. So subtle. You almost should not even be able to hear that you're doing it, but you're doing it. Okay. Let's keep going here. What have we got? What's this sound? Oh, yeah. Oh. Very subtle low cut on that one. It's already a pretty big sound. I'm going to have to kind of really mess around with that sound when it comes to our mix, and getting a good static mix, which will be next. The piano. I'm pretty happy without the piano sound, to be honest with you, so I'm going to leave that as it is. Okay. And yeah, and we're going to do one more cut. So as you can see, we've made on this is why we call it subtractive EQ. If you look up here, we've just made little cuts, either low cuts, high cuts for shaping sound or little notches. Less is more. If you scoop a whole bunch out, you're going to absolutely kill your sound. You wanted to just be very, very faint. In terms of boosting and making additive VQ, pretty much, I only ever do that with vocals. And that'll be for a future video, we're going to do a vocal production course. The rest of the time, I'm just scooping out and cutting out little things to try to clean everything out. The piano I'm going to leave as is because I'm happy with the sound, and I'm not worried about it. And then we had the sound over here, which, you know, if you remember, the Tyco sound, already kind of pretty clean. There wasn't a lot of low end boom, so leave it alone. If it sounds okay, works in the mix, just leave it alone. One other part where I want to draw your attention to is the reverb. Our auxiliary channel, if you remember, we added reverb and delay for our acoustic guitar. I'm going to add a EQ, and all I'm going to do is take that low. I'm just get a scoop a ton out of it. I don't want my reverb to have a bunch of low end frequencies added to it. So I'm literally just scooping a ton out of the low end. This is just a really common technique for keeping your reverbs nice and clean. Delay, I'm not so worried about. I'm going to leave that alone, but definitely for reverb, you want to scoop out the low, keep it nice and clean. That is the use of subtractive Q to clean up each of your channels and trust me your mixes are going to be like night and day. If you just do this for every single one of your tracks. Some of them might not need. But the ones where you hear that low kind of rumble, scoop out either with a notch or a low cut, and I guarantee your mixes are going to be a gazillion times better. 8. Static Mix - Balancing & Panning: Now, one thing I haven't mentioned is that when you're doing this fine tuning, it's a really good idea to have really nice monitors and to have a treated room. In other words, you've gone around your room, you've added a ton of base traps. You've added some isolation panels. You've cut out any reflections. And a nice pair of monitors that you can really hear everything very clearly. I have neither. I have an untreated room that's just a big long rectangle. There's reflections everywhere, and I have these tiny little monitors that are not big enough to really get the job done. I'm not affiliated with this company whatsoever, but this is where I highly recommend the slate VS mixing system. I love these things. They've gone through several iterations. I know some people have had problems with bans breaking I haven't had any problems with these whatsoever. So if you have an untreated room and you don't have good monitors, highly recommend the VSX system. Again, I'm not affiliated with them whatsoever. There's no corporate sponsorship. There's no anything. They didn't give me anything. They didn't tell me to say anything. I just love the product, and it works really well. U If you have a decent set of monitors, but you have an untreated room, I would suggest you to mix at very, very low volumes. Just turn it right down, and that's going to help quite a bit. But you're probably going to find that you have to reference your mixes in a bunch of places. That being said, whatever tools you have are the ones that you should use. Don't go out and spend a bunch of money. Use whatever you have and then make incremental improvements when you're able to afford to do so. The key thing now we want to focus in is getting a nice static mix. What do I mean by static mix? I mean that we want to balance these faders, get everything where we want it, and we want to leave a decent amount of head room in our master mix bus. We want to make sure that we're not clipping in any of the channels, and we want to make sure definitely that we have some head room, we're not clipping in the master channel. This is what I refer to as getting a really good static mix, incredibly important step. So how do you do that? You go through, and you listen to your mix a gazillion times over and over and over again. Okay, getting to parts, listening to individual parts. If anything sounds like it's getting buried, or if it comes in and it's too hot and it's distracting, or it's hiding some of the other instruments, then pull back those faders. Incredibly important. So I like to kind of start with the loudest section of the song. So let's go towards the end. We know that this is the loudest part. Let's play that. Let's see what our faders are doing, and our meters are doing. Let's see what our mix bus is doing. Okay. So for the most part, we're doing pretty well, but we're getting some clipping in our distorted electric guitar part, which is way too loud, if you heard it. It's like, it's like making my ears bleed. We're going to bring that down, and then we're getting quite a bit of clipping going on the master bus. First things first, we're going to address this guy. All right. This channel right here. I re that. Distortion. So we know that that one is the distorted guitar track. And this one we'll call heavily delayed track. Okay, so let's go here, and we're going to bring it way down. Okay. I wanted to be there, but I don't want to be way up in your face. So we did a major cut. We pulled it back almost five DBs. Okay? We're still getting clipping all the way across the board. So a nice way to just kind of solve that is click your first track. Hit shift. Click your last track. We were clipping in around five plus five DB. So if you kind of like roughly where your static mix is right here, you just click on the first track. Hit shift. Click on the last track so that it selects everything. Grab your faders and it just pulls everything down at once. So we're going to drop everything about, let's say seven dB. So I haven't adjusted the individual mix. It's all the same mix. But now what I've done is I've created some head room in my mix bus. And now I can start to make some changes without having to worry about my master bus clipping. Okay. Super easy trick, Super effective. Love it. Let's start here. Okay, so one thing I want to do is, I want to create a little bit more of a stereo image. This is also part of this kind of getting a good static mix. So between the acoustic guitar and the delayed guitar. Okay, so let me just move this up so you can see it side by side. So we're going to do a little bit of panning. Little bit of panning. Tiny little bit. An you can hard pan them so that on the far left and the far right, and that can be very effective as well. But just to create a little bit of separation, move one out to the left, and what you're doing is you're kind of widening the frequency spectrum. Very, very effective. So let's listen to that again. I can hear that acoustic. Coming through the left. Still coming through both channels, but more on the left. And then when you get into the electric delayed, a little bit more in the right. Just opens up the frequency spectrum. And, as you can see, it was just like a quarter turn. Okay, nothing major. So this is all part of what I'm talking about my do a nice static mix. Let's move it forward a little bit. Okay. So I feel like those drums such a big sound. It's kind of maybe hiding things a little bit. So dark side dungeon. Let's bring that down a little bit. Bring it down, tiny bit. Okay? The other sound that's really standing out to me is this dark side brain damage tra way too. It's just baring everything else. So let's bring that down. Electric guitar is still too much. Now, there and again is a perfect example. So I'm just bringing those out. I bring them down. They're burying other sounds of the mix. It's way too much. Even though one is like a synthesized guitar and one is an actual real electric guitar, they're similar sounds. So again, we're going to do the same thing that we did. We're going to just soft pan those out because they're similar sounds. Okay. So let's soft pan those out, and let's listen to that again. And we've also lowered them in the mix. Let's see how much better that sounds. So much better. I actually brought up the synth guitar a little bit. It's just pushing and pulling. There's no right or wrong way of doing this other than you want to make sure that none of your individual channels are peaking, and your mix bus is not peaking. You have a good head room. And then you just want to be able to hear everything. If you're listening and you're like, I can't hear that instrument or that's too quiet. You're looking for things that are just kind of standing out that are kind of dominating the mix, and that's what you don't want. Okay. Let's go back and listen to that part again. So much better. Okay. I can hear everything now. Okay? Here the parts coming through. Okay, let's go back and so we played that, and we still have about three decibel head room, which is fantastic. Nothing's peaking. Things are sounding much better. We've done just some minor panning. Okay. And again, all part of the static mix. Let's go back to the beginning. Don't worry about that little hush guitar sound. We'll fix that afterwards. That's just coming through the effect processor unit. Okay. So this part, this is sounding a little quiet. So we're going to select both those tracks. You ever bring up the piano tan a little bit. Always keep your eye on our head room. The mixed bus. Piano is coming through very, very clearly. I can hear everything. I can even hear this little kind of percussion part. Things are sounding fairly well balanced. Guitar very clearly coming in there because we've soft paned to the left. Percussion is coming in nicely. And you can see, as we pull a couple of things up, we've lost a little bit of head room. We get a little bit closer to that the unity. So, we definitely want to keep an eye on that. Electric guitar is coming in there nicely on the right hand side, nice, wide stereo. It's well balanced. Again, a little bit too close to that. Maybe the strings are coming through because that's kind of holding, like, our harmonic kind of I hate to say melodic. It's not really melodic kind of kind of a song. Maybe just a little bit buried in there. So we're gonna bring up these strings, just a tiny little bit. So let's do that. Bring up the piano, just a tiny a little bit. Keep an eye on this. Alright. I'm pretty happy with that. We still have a little bit of head room. I like to have a little bit more, but so I'm just I'm going to select everything again. That's our scratch panel. We don't really need to worry about it. I'm just going to get us, like another you know, get us down to that kind of, like, another 1.5 down. So let's bring this down to Rat about that. I like to have a good, 3 decibels a head room. Do you really need to not necessarily, not with the new kind of AI mastering tools, which we'll get to. As long as you're not peaking, that's the key thing. Okay? So now we have a nice static mix. We have kind of a nice build from the kind of quiet beginning. We build build build. It gets a little bit bigger, a little bit louder, but we still have nice head room the whole mix. So this is why I talked about getting a nice static mix. We made a couple of panning choices. You can go nuts, by the way. You can go through and you can start to pan different instruments. The rule of thumb that I follow is that if you have two of the similar sounding instruments, you want to just move those away from each other. Just to tie a little bit, don't necessarily have to hard pan, but just enough to create a little bit of separation between similar sounding instruments. That's the rule of thumb that I follow for panning, and you can really hear that small changes make a huge difference in terms of the frequency spectrum when you're really opening up that stereo width. So now I feel like we have a pretty good static mix. So now we're going to go through and we're going to do a little bit of fine tuning. 9. Automation - Fine Tuning with Minor Adjustments: So now we got to do just a tiny little bit of fine tuning. And you always want to do this after you've gotten a really good static mix, which we've done. We've got a good amount of head room. We're pretty happy with where everything is. Now we just need to kind of fine tune things a little bit. So let's take a look. Where we really have to maybe do a little bit of work is in guitar sound. So guitar rig, and particularly, I noticed that there's quite a bit of kind of background noise that sometimes introduced that sometimes there even when the actual guitar part hasn't come in yet. So let's go back and listen to just that electric guitar, see if we could find what I'm talking about. I'm going to play it back here, even though the part doesn't start yet. Okay. You hear that kind of background noise. Comes in every now and again. Okay. And especially right there. So my part hasn't actually started yet. Okay. I probably just have my fingers kind of on the strings, but not quite ready. So a couple of different ways you can do that, you could get your scissor tools and You can make a cut and then delete it. That's one way you can do it. I like to just leave stuff there and we're going to get it done with automation. There's our automation but right here, this tiny little thing. Click on that and it automatically defaults to volume. We're specifically going to only talk about automating volume. You can automate any parameters. You can automate tempo effects. Filtering EQ, you can go nuts. We're specifically just talking about volume. Now we got the electric guitar part. It starts, as you can see, the way files is right there. We can make that bigger by hitting this button right here, and that will open up the wave file a little bit more. So I'm going to click on if you click on it, it'll create a little automation line. If I click on it again, I'll make a little dot. Okay. If I click on this dot, anywhere you click, you're basically adding an automation dot, and then you can drag that down. And then we're going to drag it over and create a bit of a fade on the way in. Over here, we have another dot. There's no information here, but we don't want any kind of background sounds, and we're just going to drag that all the way down. Now we've cut out any background noise. And then I've just created a little natural fade. Okay. Now that fad came in a little bit too soon. Okay? You want to keep everything nice and clean. As you can see my FAD came in before that actual wave file clicked in. I'm going to bring that over a little bit. I'm going to bring this guy over a little bit. Now if we listen to it, super clean. We got rid of all that background noise. Now, if this is a guitar part that I played where I just kept playing and I was strumming the entire time. If you look at the wave form, there's no gaps in between. If there was, you could go in with automation and you could scoop those bad boys out by adding these little dots. Dragging it in and out. Okay. But as you can see, my wave form is very, very consistent all the way through. Now, the other thing that I want to clean up is I'm going to want to clean up the end of the wave form so that it fades out nicely with the rest of the track. Let's play it from let me see it right about there. I'm going to not slo because I want to hear the guitar part. This is where our track ends, right on that kind of Bar 118. So I'm going to click on add a little maybe they're called nodules. I call them Dots, and I'm going to add another one over here, and I'm just going to drag it out and create a nice fade so that it doesn't carry on. You still want to like we talked about not cutting off the reverb tail. You still want to have that ring out, but not just on and on and on, where it starts to sound distracting. So let's listen to that again now. Okay. I might even drag you back just a little bit more. Okay. And now we're going to do the same thing with the acoustic guitar. Okay. So, same thing here. Here's our acoustic. If we s that out. I have to also sold the microphone so you can hear me. Let's listen to this part. It's actually pretty clean. It's pretty clean. The reason is because we're a direct audio connection, and I'm using the Baby Taylor acoustic, which has just gorgeous pickup in it. So clean. Let's stud again. There's nothing there. There's nothing I need to do. So don't do any work if you don't have to. Again, we have a very consistent part where I'm s the entire time, but let's listen to the end. Has a nice natural fate. There's nothing that I need to do with that part. Okay? So we're going to leave that. But let's go to this distorted guitar part. Definitely we'll have to do the same thing there. Okay. Acoustic guitar is fine, but we will need to clean up this distorted electric guitar part. If the automation disappears, by the way, and you're in the automation lanes, just because you need to expand the track a little bit so you can just bring that up a little bit and then it opens up again. Let's listen to this, and we're going to hear some artifacts and stuff like that. Right there. So we don't want to hear any of that, so we're going to go right before the wave form starts. Click on it once. You can get the line. Click on it again to add the little nodule. Okay. And then we're going to click on another one over here, and we're going to just bring it right down. Same thing. We're adding a little fate. Okay. Now, if you remember at the beginning of the track, we have to also go in there and just bring that right down. There's a little extra.in there. I'm not sure how that happened if you just click on that. You can delete it. All right. So now we know that this is zero all the way over until we get to the actual guitar part. There's 1 million different ways of doing this, by the way, but this is the way that I do it and is the way that I find this is the easiest way to do it. I'm trying to show you efficient work flows. Let's listen to that again. That's a bit too soon. I'm going to drag this guy over just a bit. We don't want Okay. So it's still we're so close now. I'm going to line up the playhead, so it's pretty close to there. I'm going to line this up so it matches with the playhead where the waveform starts, and I'm going to bring this over. I want it to be very, very clean. Very close. We're getting there. We are getting there. There we go. Okay. Now we've gotten rid of all that extra information. We're going to do the same thing to the end now. So a nice thing that you can do is we get kind of similar parts here, both guitar, both electric guitar. I'm going to line up my playheads so that they line up with these. So you'll find and when you add another thing, you can kind of match it up. Let's go back through and let's listen to our fade now. You want to just fade out into oblivion, and you don't want to hear a whole bunch of extraneous kind of sounds going on there. You would do a lot of automation with vocals for bringing certain kind of phrases and words up and stuff like that. You also do it in the beginning and kind of ends of sections just to kind of clean things up. Let's go back to the end of our track and hear how clean everything is. Where we're listening for is our re verb tales. We want to make sure everything just kind of decays nicely, and it's not distracting clean button finish. Haha So I'm hearing, I think what I'm hearing. Everything is pretty clean. We did a pretty good job of kind of keeping our end nice and clean. But I feel like it's probably this brain damage sound. So if you keep an eye on this meter, I feel like it's going on a little bit too long. Okay, maybe, maybe it's not that sound. Okay. Let's go back. Whoops. Let's see if we can find it. There it is. Okay. It's this Epo string sound. So sometimes you just have to go through it and you got to find it. You can solo tracks out to try to find that. I just find it's going on a little bit too long. So same thing, we're going to find our place where we have. See if we have other fades here. Okay? We're going to click on the track. Get our dot. We're gonna add another one over here somewhere, and we're just going to drop that down. Now let's listen to it, see if that cleans it up. H Good. Okay, so that clean it up. Now, it sounds like maybe the piano is just the same thing. The decay is just a little bit long. So we're gonna find our piano track. This is all for taste, by the way. Okay, and we're going to dray that down. This one, we might just dray past a little bit more. Now let's listen to it all again. Now, I might have cut it off a little bit too much. Let's just drag it out of to a little bit more. It's an art form. That's pretty nice there. That's pretty clean. Now, there's a little bit of that this delayed guitar sound. You can hear that it just picks up another little thing, but I actually kind of like that. So I think we're going to leave it. We have a nice clean finish. There's something that really kind of stands out. So I'm going to click on the automation, and that's it. This is just your fine tuning stage, and it all depends on what you're doing, again. If you're doing vocals, there's going to be probably a lot more automation. But we've kept things clean. Let's just listen to the being in the track again. Okay. So one thing you want to do. You could do if you want, if you don't want that to come in really strong is we can add a little automation lane for this particular sound. I just fade it in a little bit. So we click on it. Let's add a little nodule and let's fade it in. Let's see how that sounds. Whoops. Maybe just want to drag it a little bit more. I want to be very, very smooth transition. There we go. It's a much more subtle transition, and that is it. Just a couple of minor little tweaks for fine tuning. Again, save this part until after you have a really good static mix. Otherwise, things get me. 10. Mastering, Stems & Meeting Client Demands: Alright. We're happy with the mix. We're ready to send it to the client, but let's run it through a mastering chain. There is a mastering tool through logic. There it is right there on your Mx bus. You can click on that. You can play around with it. It's not bad. If it's only one they have available to you, then by all means, use it, tweak it, have some fun with it. There's, of course, Ozone. Which is another good one, but my personal favorite is L andar. I've been using it exclusively for quite a while now. I find that I get the best results. And all I'm looking to do at this point in time is to clean up a little bit of mid range kind of mud. So I'm looking to get a little bit of clarity, and I'm looking to get a little bit of volume, and that is it. Those are the only two things that I'm looking for. Lander is a little bit pricey to buy on its own. I pay for, like, a monthly subscription through Lander, which also gives me the ability to distribute my songs. Use whatever tools you have available. If the only tool that you have available is the mastering within logic, then use that. So I'm just going to go through it. We're done with our mix. I'm going to click on here. I'm going to add it to my master channel, audio units, Lander Lander Mastering. Okay, so you navigate to the loudest part of the song, and you let it do its thing. All right. Let's do it. There you have it. Okay? So I'll play before and after so you can hear the difference. Or I'll just kind of going back and forth by bypassing it. Okay, so here is the unmastered. And then mastered. By passed. Master. He master. So it's a pretty significant difference. Now, I find the best thing to do is just try to leave all these parameters alone. Just let the AI do its thing. I like the balanced, so I keep that right in the middle. Sometimes I play around with the loud, loudness, so you can push that a get a little bit more volume, and sometimes I push the stereo field a little bit. But more often than not, I just it do its thing. I find it does a really good job both in adding clarity. And in adding volume. So I'm really happy with how it works. Ready to send it to the client. So you're going to go down to file, bounce, project or section. You want PCM because you want to wave file, generally, 24 bit, 48,000 interleaved dithering, make sure normalize is off, and then you can bounce it out. You do want to make sure that bouncing the section of the track that you want. There's a couple of different ways you can do that. You can use this looped region setting by literally just clicking on it and dragging it and because you only want to bounce out just that individual file. So I usually do that first. Then you can go to bounce project or section, and then you can see that it's actually having an end. Then you bounce it out, it creates a wave file. You can share it with the client. Never be married to whatever this final version that you've done. Because chances are there's going to be just so many changes, so many iterations, respond to the client feedback, make sure that it's very clear, make sure that you understand what they want you to change. Make those changes, create a new file that's like Version two. I've never sent a song to a client on the first version, and they're like, Wow, it's perfect. It does not happen no matter how good you think it is You're working for them. Even if you're freelance, you're working for the client, you have to respond to their requirements, their needs. Usually, it's a team of people that are listening to it, and not all those team members are going to agree. I've been part of some messy projects, and you just have to keep making those changes, keep making those revisions until you finally get to the magical number where they don't want you to change anything. So be prepared to make all kinds of changes, never take it personally. Just look at it as a little bit of a problem that you have to solve until the final version is what they want. When you finally get to that final version and you've sent them just like a wave file for them to listen to, whatever it says version 64, then your very last step is going to be going to export and you're going to do all tracks as audio files. What this is going to do is this is going to break down each of your tracks and it's going to save them as individual audio files. We refer to this as stemming out. You're creating all the stems for each of the individual parts. There might be some final steps that they want you to do depending on who's mixing the project. They want you to remove all the EQs and effects and stuff like that and possibly panning. They'll tell you how they want the files, but you'll want to stem it out so they have all the individual parts and they can do with those parts what they want. That's what I'm going to do for you guys so that you have access to all these individual stems and you can remix them, you can add them to your own projects, You can manipulate them, process them. Whatever you want to do, these are your files to play with and have fun. From start to finish, that is my process of writing, composing, recording, and mixing. And I approach every project the exact same way regardless of how large it is. Thanks so much for sticking to the end. I know this is a long course, but I really didn't want to leave anything out. Go forth, create upload your projects, and I can't wait to hear them and hear what you've come up with. Cheers.