Mixing From Start to Finish: EQ, Compression, and Mix Secrets in Logic Pro X

1. Intro: [MUSIC] Learning how to mix is one of those things that is so much easier to do when you have something to actually mix that sounds good, that is professional. I remember when I was first starting out learning how to mix, feeling like it was so difficult and I've listened to professional mixers and I was just so mystified as to how they could get their mixes to sound so big and so huge and so punchy when my mixes sounded so terrible and so muddy. My name is Solo Ray. I've been making music for over 10 years, both as a producer and a mixer, a songwriter, a music director at my church every weekend. I've toured across the country playing music. I've been on the high production side of things, working with stems that are very professionally recorded and everyone's a pro and it's very easy to work with. I've also been on the indie side of things where you're trying to make things sound as good as possible for as cheap as possible. Both of those experiences are super fun. But what they have in common is once they arrive to the mix stage, there are certain things that just always happen in the mix. I don't know how I would ever have learned those without actually being in the room with people doing the mixing, without doing the mixing myself and actually getting my hands on the stems. There is a different type of learning that happens when you're able to do that. I wanted to give that opportunity to you guys as well. There's only so much you can do when you're spending so much time fixing problems and not actually making creative decisions to make the mix better. What I wanted to do is make a class that is all about the entire mix process from top to bottom of the entire thing. Give you access to all of the stems for the entire session. We'll go through it together and I will mix the whole thing over again, so from getting the stems, importing them into the session, balancing things, EQing things, panning, literally the entire mix process. What's going to be cool about that is as you do that, you're going to come up with a completely different mix than I will. I think it's going to be super fun to compare mixes and have you guys upload your mixes so that we can compare them and listen and get inspired from each other's creative decisions. I think it'll be really cool working with a set of stems that already are operating at a baseline of high-fidelity. They're already good stems. When you mix them, you are just focusing on making creative decisions on what to do with them. You're not having to quanitize stuff, you're not having to pitch things, all that stuff is taken care of. You are able to just mix and have fun. If you want to use this class just as a resource to learn things and watch, that's totally cool too, but I really encourage you to take full advantage of it and download the stems, mix along with me and create your own mix, upload it, share it with people and really join the community of discussing mixing and trying to learn from one another. There's a lot of knowledge to be gained from doing that and I can't wait to hear what you guys come up with. 2. How to Use This Class: I mentioned this in the class trailer, but I wanted to briefly address it again here. How I envision you using this class is to download the stems for Fertile Ground, and that's the song that we're going to be all mixing together, and I want you to do your own mix as I do mine. Then you can upload your mix here to Skillshare to share with the other students and we can get feedback on it. I'll give my feedback on it, I would love to hear it, and we can all learn from each other and get inspired from each other. I think that'll be super, super fun. Feel free to add whatever you want, if you want to supplement samples, whatever, for sure, all that stuff is open to you. If you want to use this class more as a resource for learning specific things, you can totally do that too, and just skip right to scenes or skip straight to drum compression or whatever. You can do that, but you might be missing some of the contexts of how all that stuff is fitting together, because I'm going to be assuming that you're following along with me step by step. I might reference things that we already did in previous lessons, if you skip straight to drum compression, for example. That might not necessarily be a problem depending on what you're looking for. But if you have the time, I would encourage you to download the stems and mix it along with us together and go through the whole thing. I think you'll learn a lot about how these elements interact, and why certain decisions about the vocal affects the loudness of the mix. Why certain decisions about E queuing the base affect the drum dynamics. These things are all interconnected. It might be a little difficult to see how connected they are if you skip to a specific section of the class. You can totally do that if you need to, but I would just encourage you to go through the whole thing top to bottom, and I think you'll be much better for it. 3. A Word on Plugins: When it comes to plugins, I get asked pretty frequently, do I need to buy third-party plugins? Can I mix using stock plugins? Yeah, you can mix using stock plugins. I think you should. They're very powerful. They're there for a reason. Very talented people have spent a lot of time making these plugins. They sound really good. I just think that third-party plugins, depending on what you're looking for, sound different. That sound can be desirable sometimes, or it cannot be necessary. To know the difference is what takes time. I think by you spending time using stock plugins or using third-party plugins, whatever you're doing, just pay attention to what you're using. Use the same tools a lot to really learn what they sound like and what they're doing so that you can make creative decisions using these things. That you're not grabbing an 1176 because it's vintage and it's cool, you're grabbing it because of what it does to the sound and you like that coloration that it gives. Learning those things and training your ear to notice those things is possible. It just takes time, you just got to do it a lot. If you're just starting out, I would just stick with the stock tools and whatever DAW you're mixing in, those are very powerful, and there is so much to learn by just using the stock stuff. You will get so much better at mixing by just learning your tools and how to use them correctly. If you're ready to take the next step and you want some more exciting mixing tools and you want to start getting into that level, I would recommend a couple of different things. First, in the free world, Native Instruments has some great free tools available on their website that you definitely should download. They're free, and they sound great. There's a whole range of a bunch of different things. For reverb, you cannot get a better free reverb than Valhalla Supermassive. It's so good, I use it all the time. I even have paid versions of Valhalla stuff. I have way more expensive reverbs than that, and I still use Supermassive every day. It is phenomenal, it is so inspiring. It absolutely excels at just exploding these crazy long decays and these atmospheric, whatever craziness. That is Supermassive's bread and butter. It knows how to do that really, really well, and it's free. Please grab it, it's amazing. For paid plugins, there are two plugin bundles that I would recommend. Between these two bundles, you will have literally everything you need. Universal Audio Spark, their spark subscription allows you to run Universal Audio plugins natively on your computer. You don't need to have one of their audio interfaces, which is a big deal. Their stuff, in my opinion, is the best in the business. I feel like it just sounds so good. The other thing I'd recommend is Plugin Alliance, their bundle is just so massive. The value that you get from their mega bundle, just all of their plugins, is insane and they're so generous with how much they add to it all the time. They're constantly adding new plugins. The Universal Audio One or the Plugin Alliance bundle or both of them together, those are some heavy hitters in plugins that give you so much power. You're going to love it if you haven't messed around with those before. During the course, I'll try my best to switch back and forth between stock plugins and then show a third-party alternative, but I'm definitely going to gravitate towards the third-party tools just because that's what I know and that's what I prefer. I like the sound of my tools that I've collected over the years, but you definitely can achieve similar results using the stock versions. They just might sound slightly different, but the concepts of what I'm doing can be applied to any plugin. To sum up, don't get hung up on not having the exact same plugin as somebody else. All they are, are tools, and the better you know your tools, the better you'll be able to mix. 4. Creative Choices vs Technical Choices: There are certain mixing principles that are rules of thumb that should pretty much always be followed. But then there are other things that are completely subjective that are not a matter of doing things correctly, it's just a matter of taste. I think more things fall into that taste column, than they do the rules that you shouldn't break column. As I go through and give advice, take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt if you disagree, if you think that, man, I don't want to cut that frequency, I want to boost that. You are not wrong for thinking that. You should do that. You should follow your ears and pursue what sounds good to you. I'm just going through what aesthetically is appealing to me and I'll try and clarify when I'm making a decision that I prefer the sound of versus a functional decision that's going to help me with a technical thing later on in the mix. Because both of those things happen, there are reasons for making certain EQ decisions that are not taste based. They're just functional for achieving something in the mix like loudness, for example. That's a very functional thing that you're trying to do, an engineering thing and so there are certain EQ decisions you can make to help that technical thing. But there are other EQ decisions that are not technical at all. They're just aesthetic, they're just flavor, it's just passion, creativity. I don't know why this just sounds good. Those decisions also exist in tandem. That's what makes mixing so interesting and fun is it's really using both sides of the brain. It's an engineering thing, and it's an art form at the same time. I'll try and clarify when we go through the class, when I'm making what type of decision. But just know if you disagree or if you want to make a different choice that I made, make that different choice, follow your ears, that's what mixing is all about, and that's what I want to hear. When you upload stuff, I want to hear your creative vision. I want to hear my exact mix that I did. I want to hear your take on it so follow your ears, get your creative vision out there, and let's have a lot of fun. 5. Strip Silence: Here are the stems for fertile ground that we're going to be mixing. Feel free to download these as well and follow along. I'm just going to select them all and drag them right in to my doll. Create new tracks. Wonderful. These stems are a mixture of things. There are a lot of stereo files. There are a lot of mono files. Just cleaning things up here. There's no panting on anything and they're full stem. The full length of the song is just an audio file and then when it runs out, when there's nothing left, it just stops. This is a little confusing as just a big chunk like this. It doesn't really give me a lot of information about what is happening and when. The first thing that I like to do once I open a session and we've got a whole bunch of audio here, is I want to start cleaning stuff up so that if there's any dead space where nothing is happening, I don't want audio there in that region. That only makes sense if we're working with the right BPM. This song, I can see the stems have been labeled, which is beautiful as 131.5 BPM. I went ahead and set my project at 131.5 BPM. Logic has a key comm,and that is really great for speeding up this process. It's Control X and that happens, it brings up this window which is referring to the region that I had selected. I had this acoustic arc one selected and it brings up this window. Now what it's going to do is listen for silence and then make a cut. Then anytime there's audio again, it will bring the region back. I don't want nearly that many cuts. I really want to be extremely conservative with how it's doing these cuts. I'm going to adjust the threshold down crazy low. It's literally just give me a audio and then once it fades out, there's a cut. Even that, I don't want it to cut off any of the tail. The post-release time, I'm going to increase that. It just gives it even more buffer. Because I don't even really want to hear what this is doing. Same thing with the pre-attack time. I'm going to give this some more time to just give it a little bit of space to turn on before the actual audio starts. I'm literally just wanting this to visually clean up the project so that I can tell what the heck is going on. I'll go ahead and hit "Okay" and then automatically made those cuts. Now, because I made those settings, when I go to the next region, hit Control X, it will automatically have that ready for me, which is great. I'll just go through and apply those settings. I might need to adjust them from time to time like this one is a little bit quieter on some of those sections. Go ahead and bring that threshold down. This guy is a little unique in that it's pretty consistent all the way throughout the song. I'm going to go ahead and leave that one there and then just by hand, turn that file up here. Let's keep moving down the line here. Oh yeah, same thing another strong guy will go ahead and leave that. I've got some base. Seems going throughout the whole song. I'll just do this. For instance, on this kick, it's making all these cuts here and that's a little aggressive for me. I'm going to adjust this minimum time to accept as silence. Drag that up. There we go. I'm going to crank that actually to make that even longer. There we go, to chunks. Great. Same thing with these little Tom's. Perfect. We'll just keep going down the line. Logic might have a option where you can apply this to all the regions. They didn't when I first learned this trick. But even if they have added that by now, I still don't think I would use it because I do want to get a quick snapshot just visually of what it's going to do per track, just so that I can see real quick if it's going to cut off anything that I might want or need. It is nice just to get a quick preview of what it's going to do so that I know. Yeah, I'll be safe. That's fine. It's not going to get rid of anything that I want. That's the last one. Now, if we zoom out and take a look at everything here, that's a lot more easy to digest. We can tell that there's some happening here. There's a big section happening here. At a bird's eye view you can tell what's going on. 6. Getting Organized: For me, it's really hard to skip organization, I find it just saves a lot of time in the long run. I don't know why I organize things this way, but literally, I always do the exact same thing in every song. I always put vocals at the top, so I always know where they are, I put the drums right below that. Because next right behind vocals as far as like most important thing of the song, to me, are drums. Drums give the feel, so that's why I put drums right below vocals, and then what often ends up really interacting with the drums more than anything is the bass, so the bass is right below the drums. Actually, I put percussion and any effects and things like that, I do that between the bass and drums because those blur the line between what is a drum effect/what is a percussion thing like. There's some overlap here of terms, so I just keep them bundled all together. The Bass is right below all that rhythm stuff and then I put the keys, any pianos, or synths, or anything like that I put there and the song has a lot of that stuff. We'll put the strings below that and then we've got our acoustics and then our real guitar. Okay. Great. This is just completely my preference, so organized stuff however you want. Since I have everything grouped like this, I'll just color things in logic you can do option C and brings up a little color picker here and so I'll just throw all my vocals, make all my vocals pink. Also, I'll start grouping things together that I know are going to be grouped like all these vocal stacks. I'm not going to do much of any processing on these individually, so I'm just going to select those and create a track stack, which is basically just logic speak for creating a bus and it also is a little folder which is just handy for cleaning stuff up, so I'll call this vocal stack, drop that in there, and depending on what these are, might burst these might leave these alone, so I'll just leave those as is for now. I probably am going to want some drum-bass compression going on, but I'm not totally sure how I want to bust that, if it's all the drums together or if I want to bust certain things together, so I'll just going to leave those alone, for now, same thing with the percussion and all this stuff. Bass, for sure, I'll end up doing something to those together so let's just clean that up. Let's call it bass, run that down. I'll leave those as is. The acoustic stuff for sure because I believe, if I'm not mistaken, these are left and right parts since they're always playing at the same time, so I'm just going to go ahead and throw this one on the right and the left, and make a track stack, we'll just call this acoustic arc. We've got strummed stuff here, which looks like it starts out as one layer and then becomes two and this is playing right up at the gap. This is just doing single notes. I think this is preference, I'm just going to go ahead and do the same thing, I'm going to make these full left and right and have it be lopsided in the beginning. I'll mention on that later, but I think it will be fun. Acoustic strum, even though that's not what it's doing, so it's doing single notes and then the rest comes in here. Yeah, nice. Cool. We got that part, yet this was very different. Cool. That's all the basic bussing that I know for sure, I'm going to want and then there might be more down the line, but this is a good starting point for us to actually start listening and getting a rough mix going. 7. Volume and Panning: These stems here are all completely panned right down the middle. There are stereo files that'll have left and right. Those will be panned left and right obviously, but all the mono information is just right down the middle. This is going to be a very mid-heavy, very center-heavy mics right off the bat just by applying everything here. I'm going to go through and I'll let the song play through. I'm just going to start panning stuff around and messing with volume until I get things where I want them. That's going to do a couple of things. For one, it's going to tell me what problems actually exist in this mix. If I just started making things sound cool and going down the line like, let me just listen to this vocal, make this vocal sound tight, and then let's do the ad-libs, and then let's do the BGVs, and then let's start doing drums. Those might not gel super well together. In fact, they probably for sure won't. Whereas if I just using volume and pan get everything situated and in its own spot, that will teach me what this mix actually needs. If I find that, man, I'm having trouble getting the vocal to cut through without just getting super loud, maybe it needs a little bit of brightening or maybe it just needs a little compression or something, that's a problem to solve. If I get the drums just with the volume feeling, this volume voice sounds good but just the tone of it it's not hitting nearly hard enough or it just feels weak. We can mess with that. I want everything to start to work together and I want to discover what the problems are that way instead of just trying to fix things in a vacuum because it's never going to work as well. I'm just going to start from the top and just let the song play through and you'll see me just messing with volume and messing with panning and just trying to get things to sit in the right spot. I'm going to try not to go back and fix anything that I missed. I'm just going to play it through and be searching for things and trying to identify things and soloing things and just trying to get a balance. Here we go. That already sounds a lot better just with volume and just some basic panning of things. I still think stuff can be panned around even more in this last chorus, there's a lot of layers and they're all in the same spot. What I'm going to do is I'm going to let that section play and I'm just going to solo all these keys in the sense and the strings in the guitars, those elements that are going to all be competing for the same spot. I'm just going to pan and just get everything to play nicely. That feels a lot better, just more space. I might even be able to create more space too once I start messing with imaging and things. But that is feeling good. Now, let me solo the drums, all these things, and get this to start speaking a little bit better. The drums, I felt there's so many things that I didn't even hear but I knew were there, these little roles and things, and the kick was coming through but not much else. Let's listen to that and try and get some of those snares and some of that more high-energy stuff to come through. That's a little better. These will definitely need some work, some doctoring. This seems a little muddy with the tom layers and stuff. Let's listen to this middle section where things switch up. Cool. I'm already collecting mental notes about, this uses more clarity. The toms need to hit harder, the snare needs to be a little bit brighter. Everything just needs to glue together a little bit. This is just to me screaming for bus compression, just to slam all this stuff together. That seems like that would sound really nice. There aren't any vocal effects or anything, so we'll definitely need to play with that a little bit. This stack, I like how things are sitting here. That sounds nice. I like that. We'll mess with some effects for that. The BGVs, I think it was just a stereo pair and then the ad-libs just kicked in at the end. I'd like to keep those dry and I like how they're panning around. That might further widen that stereo image if they're nice and dry, but very exaggerated left and right. That's cool. I think we're ready to start dropping plug-ins on things and start messing with sound. 8. Vocal EQ: Now that we know where roughly we want each piece to be in the mix. Now, we can go through and start making mixing decisions using plugins to help guide everything to that place. I'm going to start with the vocal, because to me, that is the most important part of the song. I just realized I could trim this stuff off, strip silence, this bad boy. Because even though it's saying that that is information there, it's definitely not. I'm just going to trim that by hand. Anyways, let's start with a high-pass. That is the first thing that I will always do on every single track is just see how much I need a high-pass. You could totally use the built-in logic EQ, the channel EQ. You can just double-click "EQ" and boom, here it is. This is great. It doesn't sound like anything. It totally will do the job. You can do all your high-pass work, no problem. For me, I like using Pro-Q_3 just because I know it really well. It can do a lot of other Swiss Army knife things that I find really useful. But for our purposes right now, it's going to work fine just as a high-pass. I'm going to let the audio play and find out where the fundamental is, the lowest part of the note. Anything below that is not information that I need as part of the track. For vocal, I'm going to find the lowest note. It's probably going to be in the first verse. It looks like it's like 140, 130. That's the lowest note. Any of that other stuff is not really necessary. I'm going to high pass pretty high, I'm going to go up to 90. I'm not going to go right up to 130 because there might be some trail off as I go up to the note or down from the note. I'll leave a little bit of room there, but that's still a very high frequency to set a high-pass at. I'm just going to do 12, so nice and gentle, nothing crazy. But that feels good. I can't really tell the difference, honestly. It's okay to cry. By doing that on every single track, that low-end will make a big difference of just clearing things up and eating into your headroom of your mix. It's a super, super good habit to get into just high passing everything and to varying degrees. Even the kick and the bass. I'll even high-pass those. When we get to that, I'll show how that works. From just listening to the vocal and after messing with the volume, there's a couple of things that I know, I want to do. It needs a little brightening. It's just a little dull. I don't want it to get harsh, but I do think it could use a little brightening. I'm going to grab an EQ, the built-in logic, this Vintage Console EQ, which is their take on a Neve. I like the sound of this, I think it's nice. This high band, I feel like is pretty so that would sound like this. I like it. I think it sounds good. I don't think it sounds as good as the UAD version, which is what I'm going to use. It just sounds a little bit better. It's a little more subtle. I'm going to turn it on and then just boost a little bit. Cool. That sounds nice. The other thing it could use is just a little bit of low mid reinforcement. I could do that with this Neve, but I feel like the mid band isn't exactly what I'm hearing. This only goes down to 360 or so which is a little bit high I'm hearing something like, I don't know. Like the 150, the 250, range somewhere in there. I could use a shelf to get it. But then I'd have to trim that extra low-end off. It's just not the right tool. I want a pole tech style thing for the mids. Logic has a good one there. This is their take on a pole tech, their Vintage Tube. I don't like this one as much as the Neve one. It's okay. It's good. But I feel like the UAD one, again, it's just a little better. They're split up into three different ones, so I'll grab the one for mid-range. I'm just going to boost a little bit of this 200 here. Maybe to accentuate that, I'll dip some of this 500, get rid of that. Then let's just make it a smiley face. Let's also give it a little bit of mids here just to speak a little bit better. Let's listen to the difference of that. It just brings it in closer a little bit by boosting those lows, which is where that fundamental of the note is. It just helps bring it in a little bit and that's going to be different on every voice. But for my voice here, that seems to be the sweet spot. Just by those three plugins, I feel like this is already sounding a lot better. Let's listen to that in context. Nice, I think that's sounding good. For the BGVs, I'm probably just going to do a little bit. I like them being subdued and having not as much of an impact as the main vocal. I'm just going to pop on this Neve EQ. I'm just going to do everything in here. I'm just going to do the high-pass work in here and I'll cut off a little more than I would on the lead just to further separate them and make it clear that this is what we want people paying attention to and not these. I'll boost the high end a little bit, but not as much. Let me just copy that onto the other track here. Option drag the plugin. Boom, there we go. Let's listen to that. Cool, and then this will need some effects for sure. But we'll get to that. We'll circle back to that. This vocal vocoder thing. Similar thing. I'm just going to grab Pro-Q_3 because I don't really want to mess with the flavor of it. It's got a lot of stuff going on with it. I just want to make sure it's not. I'm going to low-pass this too. Just because there's a lot of high-end digital stuff. It doesn't sound bad necessarily, but it's not really a focal point. It's not important. I'm just going to focus it by just trimming off some of that super, super high airy stuff. Because I want all that air, that breadth information to come from the vocal that we have. It's already supplying that or any sense or drums or whatever. There's so many other more important things that could be doing that job. That I don't need this to do that job. It's going to take us there. There's still plenty of high-end in there. But just not like super, super breathy stuff. Cool, that's enough for now. That might need a little compression later, but okay, the big vocal stack. I'm going to give this a little bit of headroom just because we're clipping this bus a little bit. I'm just going to select all these vocal tracks here, go down to here, and just turn these down altogether. Minus six dB should give plenty of space. Nice, let's grab our Neve here. This sounded pretty muddy to me, so we'll trim this up a lot. But these aren't really like background vocals in the typical sense. It's supposed to be a gang vocal type thing. I'm going to EQ these a little differently than I normally would as a background vocal. Let's see here. Let's brighten them. But I'm not going to go as crazy. I'm just going to trim this down a little bit. Cool, that's good for now, and I will probably go pretty hard on effects on that too. Cool. Those are the vocals. That's good for now. Let's start on equing the drums next. 9. Drum EQ 1 (Kick): Want to sound nice and big, punchy, exciting. Let's see what we got going on. This kick is way louder than everything else, which is not necessarily a problem. But let's see what's actually going on. I'm going to slap Pro-Q 3 on here just so I can see how much of that super sub information is in there. That's super low stuff here, like that, 30-20. I don't know, for this genre of music, I don't really need that. That's going to create more problems than it's going to solve. I'm going to get rid of that, but because it's the kick, I'm actually going to high-pass a lot more aggressively and really get rid of that stuff. But what that's going to do is it's going to create this resonance peak as I'm high passing. As I'm trimming away the super low stuff, I'm at the same time, going to be reinforcing the fundamental of the note. I'll find what that fundamental is by letting it play. It's just north of 58 here. I'll bring this up until it gets there and have it just a little bit. What's weird is that when I put the high-pass on, I'm turning up three db at 50 hertz here. It will sound louder and more intense. But there's actually less low-end. All this other stuff here, this super-suby stuff, I'm actually completely getting rid of that and just reinforcing the fundamental. It sounds deeper. It sounds like there's more low-end when technically speaking, there's less. I'm just taking away this information and putting this information in its place. It shouldn't actually get much louder on the meter, but it's going to sound a lot louder. Here it's [inaudible] . You can see that on the meter. It's actually crazy. When I high-pass it and turn this up, it sounds louder, it sounds punchier, and it's quieter. It's actually hitting less, which is awesome. That's going to give us way more headroom to use for other stuff. That's great. Just that alone is awesome. I'm going to use that same idea, taking away information that doesn't need to be there, reinforcing information that is really important to that sound on the rest of the frequencies of that kick. As we look what's going on here, it's pretty even throughout the board, so I don't need this crazy high-end stuff. I'm going to get rid of that. I'm still leaving a lot of stuff like 11K, that's pretty high. But it's just not that super, super high stuff. I wonder what it would sound like if I reinforce this too. That's generally not a good idea, but let's see. It's like the knock sort. There we go. That's the junk frequency that we don't need. Generally, on drums, 400 is a pretty naughty boy. He doesn't do a lot of favors for just the tone of the drums. It just makes things sound *****. That sound. Deeper. Obviously that's a little aggressive, but that's what I wanted the kick to sound like. I want it to be punchy and deep. I'm not really trying to make this real sounding. I could probably even go with more low-end, but I want the low-end to have a little more character because Pro-Q 3 is great and super flexible, but doesn't really have any vibe or anything. I'm going to grab an EQ for the low-end that does have a lot of vibe that will saturate things and just be a little nasty. Actually, a good, nasty low-end. It's not necessarily super nasty, but the Maag EQs have this sub layer that I think is probably perfect for this. Let's see. Yeah, that gets aggressive. There we go. Nice. Cool. I'm feeling good about that. This is obviously a sample kick from Splice or something, so it doesn't have a ton of work needed to do. These EQ settings are specific to this song of getting it to speak well with the rest of the instruments. Just right out the gate completely on its own sounds great and would probably fit perfectly in a different style of song. Let's move on to the drums now. Because this is a pre-done kick, it doesn't really need any compression or anything like that. It's perfect already. 10. Drum EQ 2 (Toms): That these Toms, however, will need some work. Yeah, that's fine, and there's this other layer to it. Just like the big drama stuff. I'm going to compress these together, could attract stuck with these. I know, I'm going to compress these together later, I'm just going to call this Toms, but we're not doing with compression right now, we're just dealing with EQ. So I'm going to take this layer, which is the more pure layer, and let's do our basic Pro-Q work before we move on to character work. Let me look this section here. That's feeling a little better. I don't mind the air on top of these actually. If anything, I want that too. Well, we are going to get some air from this though, so I'm going to turn this down a little bit, it will be nice and subtle and it's still, we're still leaving plenty of high-end in there, but that Rumi tone sound, I'll get from that other second layer. Now, I want the low-end to punch, I want it to be more, I want it to be Doo-doo Big Toms, so let's grab our poll tech here, but I want the poll tech that has the low-end stuff in it, which I believe is this one? Yes, it is. Let's look in Pro-Q3, let's have it tell us what's going on, so like 70-100, it's like that zone is where they're really speaking. Let's do 60, just below that, will boost that a lot and we'll also attenuate it. That's a cool pull tech thing where it's boosting a frequency and also turning that frequency down at the same time and so it just gets this weird shape to it. Actually, I'll just let it play and turn it up, and you'll hear it happened It's a neat little thing. It's like it's boosting it clearly this is easy to understand. The attenuating is turning it down. When both of them are active together, I don't know, it's very strange. It's cool. I'm sure there are people out there that could explain the science of how these are interacting in a better way than I could, but I just twist the knobs until it sounds good. But essentially, the attenuating is turning it down, the boosting is turning it up and somehow they sound good when you're doing them both, it's magic. That is working okay. I like the flavor and the character that's adding, but there's still something about the punchiness that it's not doing it for me, because the more I turn up this low-end, the muddier it gets because unlike the decay and the tail and stuff, I don't necessarily want a ton of 60 hertz floating around. What I'm going to do is grab a transient shaper, which technically that's knocking on the door compression, but I would argue that I am thinking about it in an EQ way right now. Let me grab spiff, which is basically the same thing as sooth, but with dynamics instead of frequencies, so it's adjusting the dynamics per frequency. I'm going to boost, yeah, just cutting through a little bit more with the low end, which is great. I think my idea for these Toms, so this would be supplying the fundamental of the note and this would be the air, the energy of it, all that stuff together. Let's just jump right in with the flavor on this one. So I'm going to cut out a lot of this low ends here. Not crazy, but get rid of the sub stuff and then just boost the highs here and let's just see how close that gives us. Cool. We might EQ this layer a little bit more at once the rest of the kit starts coming together because there's so much information going on it's pretty full which is good. It's completely consistent. What's useful about that is we can use that to fill in space. Depending on the rest of our kit sound, once we get that going, we can come back to this guy. If we really want it to jump out, we'll look at okay, where in the rest of our kit are there spots where there aren't frequencies, and then we can use this guy because it has something happening everywhere, to be like, okay, there's a real open spot at 3K where there's not really a ton of stuff going on in our kit. Boom, will boost 3K on these tom layer and then the Toms will jump out at that range and we know we won't really have to do anything crazy, it's just simple little EQ stuff. 11. Drum EQ 3 (Snares): The crash. We've got a couple, wait, this is kick. This is more like an effects thing than it is a kick. That is definitely not the case. Let's do that. Great. Let's listen to this crash here. I think the only thing we're going to do is just cut out the low end, make sure there's not any random huge resonances. See all that super low stuff like 20 hertz on a symbol. No, thank you. We don't need it. That one you can hear a major difference. That one does sound noticeably cleaner compared to, see. All that stuff isn't doing anybody any favors. Cool. Cut that out. Same thing with this one. I like the impact that these adds, but all that low-end stuff, it actually is probably fine. It is widening things out, so I'm not going to cut it out completely, but just the super sub stuff, and this super top stuff we don't need. The idea is still totally there, but it gives us an extra dB of headroom. We've got the other little section here. This does sound great. I'm just in damage control mode, I'm not really wanted to change too much of this. This came out sounding great. Same thing. See, there's a super low stuff that on trap house, we don't need. Even that stuff arguably is not super necessary. It's important though, you need it. Then the super high stuff. Just sounds cleaner without it. Great. We got these little snares. Same as before. Let's trim up that low end. Trim up the high end. Great. These reverses here. They sound cool. But because it's like a clap thing, definitely don't need any low-end. Let's just look at where the fundamental is. It's pretty verbed out which is good. It gives us a lot of stuff to work with. I'm going to just ballpark it here and it's probably fine. There's a very real possibility that I will never look at this again in the next sentence, just going to be totally fine. Got the snare. This guy is important. This will need some work. This will pop. I'm just going to move this up here with our kick and toms and stuff because this is going to be a pretty important part of the sound of the kit. No, I don't want it in the tom's layer, I just want it next to [inaudible] . Starters, for sure, we need to brighten it. I'm liking this neve thing. We're on an neve kit. Let's just keep rolling with this punch in the EQ, and let's just brighten this up. Start with that. It gets a nice snap going. Let's find out where the fundamental is. High pass to that, and then we'll use an EQ to boost that, which might be this neve, but it probably will be something else. Nice and gentle. It looks like fundamentals, like 150. This doesn't quite reach the edge, doesn't have a great sweet spot for 150, so let's grab something else here. Let's just got this SSL deal. Let's do find our 150 number here. On the low. Makes sure that it's on a bell, 150, great. Well, let's crank that sucker and listen to it come to life. Some plugins have an analog mode. All that does, it's not all it does, but it just adds noise. Most of the time, I don't really want that. So in the case of this plugin, that's what this knob is, is it just increases noise. I'm just going to turn that all the way off so that it doesn't add noise. Nice. This is not count as compression, it just is here, so I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to add a little bit of compression just to shave off some of the transient that I'm adding with this, just to take some of that level back. Great. Let's listen to that in context. That's screaming for some effects and compression with everything, which is cool. It's like a good feeling when you can start to hear it makes itself start to hear it like, ooh, that's exactly what it needs. Those are good things to find. 12. Drum EQ 4 (Cymbals and Claps): Let's get this other kick going, that comes in on this little bridge section. [MUSIC] You know what? Let's copy our kick settings from over here, and let's just see what that sounds like pasting it because I'd imagine I would do pretty much the same thing and I just want to make adjustments for where the fundamental is and based off of the kick sample, I might get rid of this or do something different here. Let's see. [MUSIC] This one has a little bit more [MUSIC] low-end stuff going on below that so let's make this not as drastic and also not boost that stuff as much. [MUSIC] Let's maybe boost a little bit more of the low sub stuff from here. Cool. Now I'm noticing a little bit of off-centeredness on this and I'm just going to grab Ozone Imager, which is free. You can download this for free, which is great. It's just going to tell me left or right, where things are leaning on here. [MUSIC] Yeah, see, it's slightly pan to the right so I'm just going to take this width and bring it down to zero. So it's right down the middle. Great. That's probably happening on the snare too. Yeah, a little bit. Let's grab that imager and throw it on the snare. Well, this might be a stereo sample. Let's see. [MUSIC] Pretty sure it's mono. Yeah, there we go. The hats probably happening onto because this also came from the OPC, but I don't really mind the hats leaning one way. That's fine with me. These symbols, we need to do something here. These guys, [MUSIC]. Yeah, they are riding on it. So I want a lot of sizzle to come from this so let's pop open Pro-Q 3. This is one of the reasons I like Pro-Q 3 is it's an EQ whatever, you can also do it as a dynamic EQ. It'll basically act as a compressor. It's basically turning up the high-end only when it passes a threshold. It is easier to explain by just seeing it. [MUSIC] There we go. Just making that high-end a little more consistent. I do still want to brighten it overall though so let's pop on our SSL because I actually like this high-shelf section on the SSL. [MUSIC] I almost forgot this little guy. What a cute little 808 clap. We're an SSL town. Let's just stick with SSL. Let's do everything here. We just high pass on here and we'll do a little low-pass, little top boost. Let's see. [MUSIC] Might be too much on the top end. I want that mid-range stuff to come through. I like the sound of that verb. I think is cool and so I'm just trying to bring that out a little more. Cool. [MUSIC] Cool that's sounding good, onto the next thing. 13. Percussion and Bass EQ: Now let's move on to percussion. I can't imagine this needing that much work here. Just typical high-pass, and we'll probably just call it a day what that. [NOISE] It looks like it's already been fairly treated. The sweet spot around there. Cool. I'll keep that in mind. Other stuff going on. We got our shakers. Let's see what's going on here. These were recorded, so these probably have a lot of room junk things going on. Same thing as trim the high end here. Get just the important bits. Nice, it sounds good. I'll go ahead and copy and paste that setting to both of them. Since I don't think there's really much difference. Just do different shakers. Great. Cool. That was quick on percussion. We got this little blocky thing. [MUSIC] I like that high-end stuff there. It's cool. Now let's move on to these effects. These ones, I don't mind they're being extra sub stuff going on as long as it's not too out of control. So many of these things are doing the same thing. At least purpose wise. I'm just going to bust all these together and treat them all at the same time. Just a little high-pass. Nothing crazy, just to make sure it doesn't get in the way of the super low base stuff for any super low kick stuff or anything like that. Let's call these effects. Now we've got our bass. Wonderful. For the bass, we have a couple of different layers going on here. We have this real bass, which let's see where things are living here. [MUSIC] I can't hear that weird little spike. But I can see that it's there and I don't want that floating around in the mix, so I'm just going to clip that off there. With the low-pass, I'm going to trim away, let's go to like there [MUSIC]. Where's the lowest note? [MUSIC] You can see how the fundamental of the note is actually slightly quieter than the first harmonic. You can see there's the first little bump and then there's the second bump which is actually higher, see that's right here. First one is the first harmonic, the fundamental, fundamental first harmonic. To make it as clear as possible, I actually want to boost a little bit here to get that first harmonic to be the thing that is really defining the note. This second harmonic is not defining the note. It's just reinforcing this. What I want to do is, well, before I start boosting stuff, let's see what the synth bass is doing and where those frequencies are landing. This is the synth bass here. Similar ish problem but not happening consistently on every note, like the waviness of the pulse-width or the chorus thing or whatever's going on is making it so it's not totally consistent, which is cool, that's the vibe. But we can still get away I think with having this steady note be what's really solidifying the low end. This is just adding some flavor and stuff on top. Let's grab a bass. It's going to really sweeten that low-end, which is the pultec sweet spot to my ears anyway. Let's go just to see the effect of what's happening. I'm going to put the PERC 3 after the pultec. Let me like loop a section here. We can see what's going on. It's all this bass. [MUSIC] What I'm going to be trying to do is boost the low end so that those fundamentals will be a little bit louder than the first harmonic. I'll just twist the knobs and use my ear and also the graph because visually looking at frequencies when they're that low can help just get an accurate picture of what's going on. Getting accurate representation of those frequencies when they're that low in headphones or speakers is really difficult. I definitely don't have room nice enough to like I don't trust it to give me a completely accurate representation of what's going on. But I'd visually trust this. I'll just use this as a reference point and use this in conjunction with my ears to try and find them in the sweet spot. I'll let this play, turn my mic off and we'll look at what's happening with the sound. [MUSIC] We'll also add in, I think I'm going to do this across everything to both of them. Let's make sure that this synth bass switches to this, from this rolling deal to the mug. Let's hear what that is doing. [MUSIC] There's that low-end. Great [MUSIC] Nice. We definitely don't need to boost that. That feels great. Lastly, there's these tiny little, tiny as in short, little 808s that fit in-between. [MUSIC] I'm going to begin here. Because I want this to show up on those small speakers, I'm going to add some harmonics and there's a lot of different ways that we can do that. One of my favorite ways is just with some distortions, some very subtle distortion that will reinforce some of those upper harmonics. I'll throw a decapitator on there and we'll see what the plugin is doing. Logics, built-in Distortion 2, I think it's called, is also really great. Actually let's do a shootout between those Distortion 2 and let's see what one we end up liking more. I'll turn it off for now. You know what? I'll start with it and see which one we end up liking better. What I'm going to do is let's turn this to zero and turn the drive all the way down and we'll slowly increase the drive and look for those upper harmonics to show up and we'll hear it brighten. Also let me loop this super low note, which is what we really want to make sure it comes through. I'll turn my mic off so we can hear what's going on a little better. [MUSIC] Not bad. That's pretty great. Let's see what we can get with decapitator. [MUSIC] Cool as you can hear there's a lot of different flavors in there. I ended up liking this n profile. I liked how much noise that added and how nasty was. That seems the most interesting. Now let's just check it in context with everything else. It should pop above the mix a lot better now. [MUSIC] Cool. We might tweak that later once we start getting closer to the finish line, but that will cut above the mix a lot better. 14. Keys and Synths EQ 1: Now, let's start dequeuing all of these keys and sense in all these layers here. Panning, I think is probably depending on level, are going to be the most important things with giving these all their own spot to live in and then right behind that as EQ, compression won't really help give things their own space. We're going to need to carve away things and boost things and reinforce things. Let's try and just re-familiarize ourselves with all these layers and just listen to everything all at once. We have a couple of different sections. There's the verse, the chorus, second verse is pretty similar. Second chorus is also pretty similar. Keys-wise, I think there may be just playing slightly different things, but the slightly bigger things, but same elements. The bridge adds a lot of different things. Then the last chorus is just more. Let's listen to this bridge, and then if we can get the bridge feeling good, and then this last chorus feeling good, everything else should be okay if we can get all these sections to feel balanced over here, then just by taking away some of those layers in earlier courses, it's not going to feel cluttered. If anything, we might need to add a little bit more effects or something to make up for this lost space. But if we can get this feeling nice, then this will feel nice as well. Let's start with the bridge, here let's see what's going on. Cool. So there's this huge push poll thing that's going on, this call and response and I think it's really important to make sure that feels nice and exciting, and I really like how this choir is sounding. That sounds awesome. Let's start there and just clean this up a little bit. Just double-check for any crazy low-end stuff. Yeah, that was pretty clean. Just to be safe. Cool. I love that top end, that sheen. I just want to add more of that to reinforce it and this magg EQs have this awesome air band here, it can go up to 40K, which is ridiculous because the range of human hearing is 20, so I have no idea why this would even be in there, but I mean, you'll hear the difference it makes it does make a difference. That was a slight level adjustment too, it definitely, there is a clarity that it's adding there, which is really cool. Let's do that and that's it. That's it. I'm just going to add some of that top-end. Let's pull this down a little bit. That's what I'm hearing as the main driving thing of that, the column response to that first section. Also the little samples here. The delays that are baked into there, I think they sound rad, but I don't like how prominent they are. I think there's just a little much on the in-between sections. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make some cuts here. I'm going to first just to make a cut here so that the region starts right on the downbeat. You can press Escape. It brings up a toolbar. Just click your scissors there, or you can click from here, there's a bunch of different ways to get them. When you have your scissors tool, you can click anywhere and make a cut like a grate, or press command Z to undo that. You can hold Option and that little plus sign will appear by the scissors. What this will do is it will make a patterned cut based off of how long that first cut is. This cut, that I'm going to make, is two bars long here, so every two bars for the length of this region, it's going to make a cut like that. Now, that's really useful to us right now because we can then take all these in-between regions. Basically, anything that isn't like the main hits, that would actually don't mind it being in there. Just for that stuff, and I'm going to turn all these down, let's go down to negative 10. I want those really quiet. Even quieter. Let's go down to maybe 16. It's going to give 20. I don't want it to be a complete mute, but I do want it to be the bottom drops out so that really exaggerates that push poll. This is just too dark for me. That's got to really pop out and be just the most exciting thing that's going on. We can try this error band and see if that does the trick. I might want a little more crunch out of it. This to me is very respectable and pretty, and this might not be enough. Let's bring our Neve back. I just really love the high shelf on this. I think it just sounds, I don't know why it's different. It just, I don't know, there's an aggressiveness that I think is really interesting, but it doesn't get brittle. Let's try both out-of-control let's see. Yeah. I love how bright that is. I think that's awesome. I will turn it down so that it's not clipping the channel. We'll bring this down a little bit and maybe this one too. Yeah, I think that's great. I think that's what it needs. Because now in contexts that should jump out over those layers. Yeah, cool, and then we'll also, because we're boosting so much of that high stuff, I don't want those highs to be louder than what the fundamental is so I'm just going to go into Pro-Q_3, and just to make sure there's not any random low-end stuff going in. There's not too much garbage up top that we don't need, and let's just double-check where that fundamental is. Yeah, somewhere in there. System overload. That's fine. Yes, so around the 200ish range 220. Yeah, that's close enough. Let's boost that a little bit. Cool. I'm also going to add sooth on this one as well. We did that in the vocal just because there's a couple of little harmonics that are jumping out that are a little hardy and instead of hunting for them, and just trying to find those specific frequencies, I'm just going to throw soothe at it and tell it to just keep an eye on that sparkly stuff, make sure doesn't get too out of hand. Yes, he grabbed it. There was that spike at 4K, and you'll see it like pull it down. Yeah, right there. That's feeling good, there's this other little part here. What's this doing? Oh, yeah, that's right. That's so cool. I love that squealiness on top I'm leaving it in, and should this be panned? Probably. Yeah, that should be like completely over here. Yeah, nice. 15. Keys and Synths EQ 2: We should make sure these pianos are feeling good. I don't really care about this that much, I'm honestly just going to turn this down and just check it over here, because it's fine, but this to me, this piano layer, is much more important. I want that to be nice and exciting and all that clinging strings from a mic piano, I haven't really found a plug-in that can emulate that jingliness, so I want to show off the fact that this is a real piano, so right there. I'm going to make a cut right there. We're going to do the same thing to this piano layer that we did to those sample chops. I'm going to make a cut here, but I'm not going to delete this, I'm going to leave that in there. I'm just making this cut just so that these following cuts will be two hours long. But I still want this audio leading up to it. Because I'm probably not defying perfectly on time. In that case, that actually worked out fine because it's slightly late, if anything. Maybe we can delete it, great, even clean it. All these in-between guys here that just have the tail but they don't really have any notes, let's bring that down, maybe not as much, but let's try 10, to negative 15. Let's pop Pro-Q3 on here, clean up this junk that I know for sure is going to be flipped around and see be able to see all that garbage. Nice, let's crank for highs. We're not even really carving things right now, we're really just making very broad stroke EQ decisions, because everything is arranged relatively cleanly, there's not a ton of overlap yet. 16. Keys and Synths EQ 3: Now there's the other the lead, yes, this guy here. [MUSIC] I know just what I want to do with this guy. One of my favorite EQs, even though we haven't used it in the session yet, it is one of my favorite EQs, it's from sound twice this CQ. It's emulating some piece of gear that I don't know that much about. But its mid-range sounds so cool. You'll hear what I'm talking about in a second as soon as logic decides to cooperate, there we go. These bands in here sound really nice when they just crank them all the way. Nine times out of 10 when I use this plugin, I drop it on there. I loosen it as high as it'll go. Then I'll just select one of these three bands and they sound great, like here. Listen. I'll turn my mic off so you can hear better. [MUSIC] Now is where we're going to get into like carving space out of things. I want this in the piano and I believe there's another thing playing this line as well. [MUSIC] These things I want them to feel like one part. Each element is going to have its own little spot that it's going to be reinforced in. With this Zelda guitar thing, I want that to be the lower part. I'm going to really boost this at 1.5. For the piano, I want to make sure that there's not a ton of 1.5 happening and it's being boosted above that like 3K. So 1.5 we have this, at 3K, we have this and then I want these to be on top of that even further. These are just going to be the high-end of the super high stuff, which is why we're like cranking this high-end a whole bunch and the compression that we add later, will help these smaller guys speak a little bit louder. But it'll be like a three-part sound. We have like this on the bottom, this in the middle, the piano, and then this on top and that will create the sound. [MUSIC] Nice. Let's listen to everything all together here. [MUSIC] Nice. Cool. That's feeling great. Lastly, we'll just carry on that process and clean up the chorus here. We'll start with this last chorus. [MUSIC] This already sounds way better just with the tweaks we did in the bridge carried over here. Really I'm just going to worry about the stuff that's new and just clean it up. Like this super dirty lead thing. I'm just wondering. I like how noisy it is. I just want to make sure it's not super low. Yeah, there we go. [MUSIC] How everything turned up more because we're getting rid of that like super low stuff so we can turn it up and it's not going to clutter or low-end too much. We've got the choir thing, we've got this little emulator sound, which is also on the left. I wonder how the balance is. If we better put that on the right. [MUSIC] Yeah, that is better. [MUSIC] Nice, let me have these 0.02 dueling left and right. [MUSIC] Make sure is not too much longer to hear. [MUSIC] That's a pretty thing. [MUSIC] Nice. [MUSIC] That's everything that's jumping out at me right away. I think this is a pretty good spot. Let's move on to the guitars next. 17. Guitar EQ: Let's start taking a look at these guitars here. We've got a couple of things going on, a couple of pairs of acoustics and then some electric stuff here. The acoustic pairs, I believe, are just doubled tracked. [MUSIC] Just to double-check here. I'm just going to EQ these together on this bus. I'm not even going to bother with the individual stuff. Let's see what we got going on here. I'm assuming since these were mic'd up, there's probably going to be some low-end garbage floating around a [MUSIC] little bit. That turned, though, pretty clean. It's a little muddy to me. It's not poking out as much as I want, especially because we got a lot of low-mid stuff going on with the keys and things. [MUSIC] I want this floating on top, all that nice finger sound. I think it's really lovely, so I want to feature that. Let's grab our nieve and let's start with just that shelf and see what that does. [MUSIC] That's nice. Just to compare, let's mess with the air band on the Maag again too just because I feel like this is a little more subtle. Let's see what that sounds like. [LAUGHTER] Literally, as I say subtle and turn the knob all the way up. [MUSIC] It's just a little prettier sounding to me, so I'm going to leave both of them on but just back off the nieve a little bit. This feels a little grimy or a little more aggressive sounding and I like how pristine the Maag is, so I think just with both of them together sound nice. [MUSIC] Nice. One thing that guitars in general struggle with, and acoustics especially, is just with harmonics. There's a lot of information going on. That's part of what makes them so cool is there are so many harmonics interacting and that's what makes it cool. But also, you can get these random peaks that just poke out way louder than the rest of the signal just for a second, and then they go back down. I'm going to use soothe again to attain those things. Soothe is really great for this sort of thing. Actually, they have a whole bunch of presets in here too, I think, specifically for this. Let's just do break guitar, great, and then we'll see where it's trying to resonate stuff. I don't mind the low-end poking out, so I'm going to turn that down and listen to what this is doing. [MUSIC] Not noticing any boom stuff, so I don't need this one that much. It's just the squeaks. There we go. That helps. Just bringing in some of that squeaky stuff a little bit. Now, for the strumming stuff, even though this starts off just in the right and then it brings in the layer, I'm still going to just process them together. Let's just try copying over our settings here. I don't really think there's going to be anything that different between them. Paste plugins. Dynamically, these might be processed differently, but EQ-wise, I mean, say mic, same guitar, same room, so these are probably going to be pretty similar. Let's see. [MUSIC] It's maybe a little bright. Let's see. [MUSIC] No, it's actually perfect. Let me just turn it down a little bit. Because I end up treating acoustic guitars like shakers, they operate a very similar thing because they're so percussive, I want that to be the real driving thing of the song. I feel like that just makes the drums sound a lot better. [MUSIC] Cool. Lastly, let's take a look at these electrics here. This is going throughout the song, this pattern here. For this track rather, not the same pattern. [MUSIC] I'm going too fast. Let's just trim up some of this low-end, but not too much. This is a 335. I like how much of that pure low-end is coming through on the guitar. I think that's really pretty, especially in the first verse where there's not really a base. I can let this guitar occupy that low-end and then maybe I'll then bring this up once the base comes in. I'll start off cutting away barely anything. Let's also just see if there's any random high-end noise or anything that we can clean up. [MUSIC] It doesn't look like it, but I'm just going to clean this up anyway just in case there's anything there just floating around that I can't hear. Let's see here. Let's do my CQ trick. I feel like that'll be nice. Giving it some space in the mid-range. I think this one, the half-K band here, will be pretty good. Again, like I was saying earlier, the CQ is awesome, nine times out of 10. I just max it out and drop it on one of the mid-range bands and it sounds awesome. [MUSIC] A little low and reinforcement. The last thing, this guitar, which I believe is a mini guitar, I don't even think this is a real [MUSIC] thing, focus it in. Let's do the CQ trick on that one as well, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the sense. Let's see what that sounds like in context. [MUSIC] Nice, awesome. Cool. Not bad for a mix with zero compression and just EQ, panning, and volume. But now that we start adding compression in, it will really start to come to life. That's what we'll work on next. 18. Vocal Dynamics (Compression): Now that we've got some basic EQ on everything, let's go back through and start adding some compression. Now, there might be a little leapfrogging that happens with compression. We might end up compressing something and find that, "Oh, this is actually a little bright now." Then we can play that by here but we'll adjust those things as they come up. For this vocal, I need to track this through a distress or on the way in with a pretty slow attack and release and you can see that on just in the waveform, it's pretty squashed already. This doesn't need a ton. It's already sitting in the right spot but I'm mainly compressing for tone. I want the distortion-ish sound that comes from 1176. I like how it just gives it a little bit extra byte. I don't want to actually take too much compression off because it is already compressed. When stacking compressors, just compressing it multiple times with multiple different compressors, it's really common trick with vocals and it's really great thing to do because you can get characteristics from multiple compressors, then they add up and with each one does a little bit, it creates a really cool effect. I'm not really looking to take more than 3dB off because it doesn't really need that much compression. I just want the extra coloration that comes from hitting the compressor. I'm going to hit the attack and release really fast. Mainly because it's the opposite of the slow settings that it was tracked with. Just to capture a different part of the sound. I want to make sure that I'm not hitting it too hard. I'll really just adjust the input until I'm just controlling it a little bit. Yes. A little bit and then maybe I'll just back off the mix ever so slightly. Nice. Cool. For the backgrounds, I really like using logics compressor for things that, not that I don't care about, but I'm not trying to color. I'm not really trying to have this be fancy or anything. I'm literally just making this be as undynamic as possible. Just super tight attack, super tight release. I actually do like, visually, this little graph. The adults in logic thing, I think that's helpful for understanding what's going on. There we go. That sounds great and I'll just copy that over to the other one with an option drag. Cool. Then we got this prism stuff. This I do want to smash and this will probably affect our key decisions. We'll do 8-1 ratio. It's too fast, [inaudible] fast release. Let's just see what this sounds like. I'm going to do that CQ trick on this because I like that energy that it's adding. I want to do the upper mid-range to that 2k zone. Nice. Then also, this isn't really dynamics but we may as well start getting into the stuff. I'm going to throw imager on there just to get some extra width. I really don't want this to sound like a vocal, I just want it to sound like a lot of vocals. I really want it to be coming up the sides really aggressively. That helps. Then also what I can do, I can do this inside of Pro Q3. Inside Pro-Q 3, with this control, pan things left or right, just inside the plugin. But I can also, by clicking on this, adjust the mid side. The mid signal and the side signal, everything that is just similar between left and right, it will adjust together or everything that is different and those are the differences. You hear the difference between this. Then the middle and then the sides. Just turning down the middle part of the mid-side, just to emphasize the differences between them so that main lead vocal really dominates the center. Nice. We can pump up these backgrounds too, so that it just sounds like one big layer. Cool. Nice. 19. Vocal Dynamics (De Essing): The last thing we're going to do on this vocal, this blurs the line between dynamics and EQ, but just a little bit of DeEssing, if you like so. You could do this with, logic has a built-in DeEsser, which actually doesn't sound too bad. You could use soothe for that too, soothe is great. I end up liking this FabFilter Pro-DS. I just think it is easy to understand. I like its controls. Just makes sense to me. One thing about DeEssing especially when you have lots of backgrounds and stuff, our ear can really only discern one S sound at a time when frequencies get that high, they don't really stack in the same way that low-end stacks. Where you have multiple voices singing, it sounds like multiple voices, but when multiple voices have an S sound, that doesn't really sound like multiple voices. What I think is a smart thing to do is on these backgrounds, I'll really DeEssed them a lot, to almost least B so that the S sounds from the lead vocal are the thing that sticks out and we're not getting all this extra siblings from the backgrounds. I'll AB that. I'll throw this on both of them. You can hear else that solo just this left channel here. It's just an S sounds. I'm bringing it down a lot. Let me get rid of this and copy option drag. This oversight the same settings on both. Now if we listen to all those vocals together, this is really not going to send that least B because the main vocal still has that siblings. Everything is being DeEssed, but I'm really DeEssing the backgrounds a lot. I'm not really touching the lead that much. It still sounds under control. It doesn't sound crazy bright or anything, even with how much brightening we're putting on the vocal, to my ears anyway, that's sounds perfectly acceptable. Now with all these vocal stacks, this will be pretty fun. Let's see here. Let's just slam this. I wonder what it would sound like if we just get super aggressive and throw the Devil-Loc on there, which is just going to absolutely murder it. But then with the mix knob, we can back that blend off. This is with it on there at one. You already hear breaking up, which is awesome. I like that. I think it sounds cool. Because with that Devil-Loc, that might be adding some extra low-end. Let's pop a Pro-Q3 on there to make sure that we're not adding extra low-end from there because it's such an aggressive compressor. Will trim some of that off. That's some pretty good vocal compression, at least to get us through the rough stage. Now onto drums. 20. Drum Dynamics (Toms and Snare): I already know this is going to be the longest section of this class by far. Drum compression, I feel like it's probably one of the most important parts of the mix because I feel like that really determines what the song feels like. The entire vibe of the song, to me, is really from how the rhythm section, what that is behaving like. In this case, we have a couple of different layers and a lot of different style of drum things going on. There's a lot of very sloppy, organic-sounding things. There's a lot of electronic sounding things, some programmed elements here, there's a little bit of everything. There is no live kit, which is good for us actually in this because that's just one less thing to try and balance around. We can decide what we want the vibe of this to be. I want to bus all of these drums together so that I can apply compression to everything, at the same time. The way to do that is I'm just going to highlight everything I want to be in a bus together. I'm just going to select all these main hits. Then in the mixer section, you can press x to bring up. I'm going to move the output from just our main stereo output to a bus. I'll just grab an empty bus that's not being used right now and Logic will automatically create a bus for me. In this window on the left, this left channel will be what you have selected and the right one will be where it's going to. In this case, it's already selected AUX 7, that AUX track that Logic automatically created from this bust. If I click Read on here for the automation, it will actually make it visible in the Arrange view. That AUX channel is there if I scroll way over here. But that doesn't really make a ton of sense because I want all this stuff to be together. I'm going to click Read and then it will move it right here. I'll call this drum bus. Tap [inaudible] again to get rid of the mixer so we can see it in here. Now, this bus, if I solo that you can visually see everything that's being sent to that bus. Cool. I'm just going to loop the chorus here. Well, first, let's just check our level and see how much level we're sending into this bus. It's a little hot. See over here. It's a little hot. Some of that we might gain back as we start compressing things. That will lower some of those transients. But just to make it easier for us, I'm just going to select all these drums and just turn them all down a little bit. Before I start adding compression on the main thing altogether, there's a couple of problem areas I want to address first, and that is the toms mainly. The toms need some help getting them just to sound exciting and cool and interesting. They sound cool on their own, but they don't exactly sound punch and so I want to create some punch. There's a couple of different things we can do to have that happen. I messed around with spiff a little bit getting some transient stuff going on. But now, I want to really apply some compression to both of these layers at the same time to glue them together. I'm going to try my absolute favorite compressor ever on the tom which is this Distressor. For these toms, I want them to get crazy, so I'm going to add a little bit of distortion here. I'm going to drive it hard. Let's get big attack. We're letting a lot of that transient through before it clamps down. Faster loose. Output down a little bit. Nice. Cool. That sounds out of control and very aggressive. One thing that I'll do sometimes to control transients of individual things is I'd use a limiter on the individual channel. Limiter is really common on the master for things like that, but I'll sometimes use them to just shave off transients of specific things. I really like this limiter, the FabFilter Pro-L2. It's staple. I'm not really going to gain it up too much. I'm just going to mainly use this output level control to set the threshold of where I want that level to stop. You can see here. I want it to take off a little bit more. I'll turn this down a dB and then turn this up 2 dB. A little bit more. There you go. It's just controlling some of those beats. Let's see what that sounds like. Nice. It's something better. Now, I'm noticing the kick, I feel like doesn't totally gel with the toms. All that air on the toms sounds really cool. But I'm missing some of that on the kick now. Because these sound like two different things. I want them to blend together a little bit more. There's a lot of different things that I could do to fix that problem. Actually, before I start messing around with that, let's deal with the snare first. Let's smack that more. Similar thing. It got to be the stressor because it's the best compressor ever made. This audio button, this HP stands for High Pass. On the audio thing, if the High Pass is illuminated, it's just like a little shelf trimming off some low-end. Then these are two different types of distortion. It's pretty subtle, but it helps just give some extra character. I'm going to drive it pretty hard. Let me loop a section that actually has a snare on it. Try the cycle over here. Let's punch it. I'm going to get insane and then blend it. Nice. Now, I'm noticing as I'm compressing it, that is affecting some EQ decisions, where now I want this a little bit brighter. Before I brighten it, let me double-check with the other distortion would sound like. I actually like that better. That's solving some of what I was hearing of just wanting, there's a little bit extra energy on top. Instead of equing and before it, because this is distorting it, I want to turn the sound of that distortion up. I'm actually going to EQ after the compression in addition to equing before it, because if I brighten it up before, that high-end is just going to be trimmed by that distortion. I'm not really going to hear it, what I'm doing. I want to turn up the sound of that compressor. I'm going to EQ afterwards to brighten it up. I'm going to use the Maag because I just want a very subtle pristine extra [inaudible] to it. Now, all the drums, and we'll listen to that scenario together. Snare has zero reverb on it too. That will affect how that's going to sit in the mix. Here we go. Nice. Cool. It's a lot more exciting. 21. Drum Dynamics (Drum Bus): I'm not really concerned about compressing these things here. I don't think those will need much compression at all actually. But I do think the overall drum bus could use some compression just to really squash everything together. I should be able to spare this processing no problem. Let's do another distressor. But actually before we start compressing it, and turn that off and I'm going to add a little bit of tape saturation to everything which is going to just smooth over some of those transients, and make it so that the compressor doesn't have to work as hard. If I distort everything slightly altogether, that will smooth those transients out, and make it so that it just sounds a little bit more together. I'm just going to open it with the preset here. I think if I remember right there's should be one that I liked on a drum bus. I think it's this vintage sizzle. Then I'll just mess with the mixture. It's not adding any noise, get out of here. Then I'll just mess with the input and just keep an eye on that to see how hard I'm hitting it. I'm just going to hit a little harder. Why I'd like barely be touching the red. See, that's a little much so back it off here. Cool. Now when we compress, this is not going to have to work as hard and we're going to get more flavor and just less triggering of things. I'm going to put this on these two buttons, which will make it so that the low end of the KYC isn't triggering the compressor as much as the higher frequencies like the mids and the highs. I do want low end to come through, so I'm not going to high-pass to that, but I do want distortions. I'm going to add this which is going to be not as bright. Let's try and do a big long attack, short release, and let's do something not quite as big. I think, let's start with 3-1 and let's see what this is sounding like here. I'll put down in and put up. Just punishing it. So that's a little much. So I don't want it to be distorted that much. So I'm going to bump up the ratio down the output, down the inputs. That's an option. I'm just going to test out a different drum bus. I'm going to test out this API just to see what it sounds like. Because in my experience, I think this is a little bit more tame than the stressor, and so I know I said that the stressor is the greatest compressor of designed and it is. But this might, I don't know, just interact in a slightly different way. Let's see. I think I'm liking that a little bit more actually. The last thing that I want to do on the drums is just apply a limiter to all the drums together. This is preset I like in here. This Punchimus Maximum. Let me turn the output level down a little bit just to give us some headroom. Just a dB or so. But I like what it does to the sound. It makes it sound cool. Let me solo all the drums and just play those back. I just turned it up till it starts to affect the tone in a cool way. That sounds cool. I like how it's distorting. I think that sounds interesting, that sounds fun to me. It's not like the cleanest thing in the world, but that's not really what I'm going for. I'm trying to make it exciting. I think with everything together, if we play that back, it sounds much better. Nice. I think that is working a lot better with everything together. We haven't even really touched the percussion or anything. I'm not really going to worry about this stuff too much. Compression wise, I want this debris that this isn't a problem, this doesn't need to be compressed. Similar thing with the effects like all these swells and stuff. I don't want to control those. The most I would ever do is let's maybe just throw some limiter on there just to make sure they're not getting too out-of-control. I'm not limiting for vibe or energy here. This is strictly functional, just making sure that this doesn't get too loud. I'm just going to use logics, defaults. Where is it? Adaptive limiter here it is. I'll just set the ceiling. This doesn't turn it down. I think if I turn this down to two, it's not turning it down to dB. This is just turning down. This is the ceiling for how loud it can get. So I'm just going to turn this up until it starts to touch it. Then I'll just look for how much reduction I'm getting and then turn this channel down respectively. If I'm gaining this up seven dB here, I'll turn this down seven dB and see what it sounds like. This can go a lot more. I'm just going to pump this all the way up to 12. Bring this all the way down to 12. It's just barely taken the edge off, which I like just to control some of the boomy stuff happening. Just so I know it's not going to get above that and surprise me down the line. Cool. That is drums and now we're on to the base. 22. Bass Dynamics: For the bass, synth bass, with this type of synth bass, it doesn't really have a ton of dynamics anyway. You can see that on this guy, like it's literally just a big block. Compressing it's not really going to do anything. The Jupiter one though, I want this to be more consistent so the detuned nature of it and the chorusing is cool. But that creates some ''Problems'' with the bass because the low end is fluctuating all over the place. There are couple different ways we can approach fixing that problem. We saw that a little bit in earlier with the EQ where the low-end fundamental is drifting all over the place. It's not super locked in. That's part of the vibe of that bass thing. We have this holding down the low end so this doesn't have to be super locked in. But one thing I want to do because we have multiple bass layers, and they're doing different things and whatever. To help smush all that together we're going to do some multi-band compression in addition to normal dynamics work. What I like to do for multi-band compression is this guy, fabfilters Pro. MB. This isn't going to be like super aggressive. Actually, logics built-in multiprocessor would do the same thing too. Multiprocessor where is that? Too many plugins? Multiprocessor, so this is logics default version, same basic idea. You have your floating bands up here, and then controls for each individual band of what's going on. I think pro multiband is just a little bit easier to understand what's going on. I'm going to take the low end here. Let's see. I just want to make this a shelf, actually. Let's see. I want it to stop compressing scholarly around 200 or so. It's bass and let's listen to what's going on here. We're bringing it down. You can see I'm turning the bass down there. Then I want to bring it up to match so that it is making it consistent. There we go. Now that we've got a little bit more consistent low in there, I'm going to use logics default compressor. I'm going to side chain this to the kick, which let me just find the actual track name of the kick. I believe, it's just hard kick. Audio. Let's go and find drums hard kick right here. Now, switch to the graph, see what's going on. Every time the kick triggers, it's going to turn the bass down. You can see there. I'm just going to mess with these controls. It's not doing it too much. But I want to pump it a musical way. I want it to get back a little bit quicker. That's taking a little bit too long for me. It's taking a little bit too long to get back to zero for me, so I'm just going to switch to these different modes and see if we can find one that's a little bit faster. There we go. Just barely anything, it's just tucking it in a little bit and I'm also going to throw in a Pro Q_3 on top of it just to help with the low-end. This one is also going to be side-chained. But instead of taking the whole signal down, this one is just going to take the low end down. It seems like why do we bother compressing just the low-end to get it nice and consistent, if we're going to then just turn the low-end down. Why wouldn't we just turn it down to begin with or whatever? The reason that I want to compress it to make it super consistent first, and then side-chain it and make it pump is because I really want that steady thing. If I just side chain it to go up and down without it being super consistent first, that effect is not going to be as pronounced. This way let's see. I want to turn that down, but have that instead be triggered off of the side chain. Now let's listen to that. [inaudible], pump a little bit. Just going to mess up the frequency and the shape here. There we go. These are very subtle things. This isn't like a huge side-chained thing. It's just creating some extra low-end space making the bass and the kick dance around each other a little bit. We can listen to just the bass and the drums, and hear how those things are playing together. Nice. Let's listen to the end section. I'm going to turn this synth layer down a little bit. Now that we have this glue going on, this is sticking out a little too much. I like the energy, but I just don't want it to be as crunchy. It helps with the different levels of different notes. Some notes are just resonating louder than other notes are. This is one thing that I like using headphones for, it's because it's easy to identify what is actually resonating louder and what is just your room tone, reinforcing certain notes. To help smooth that over and make it even more consistent, I'm going to insert a limiter in-between the multiband stuff, which this multiprocessor isn't even doing anything, in-between the multiband stuff we did, but before the side-chain stuff we did. I'm going to add a limiter. I don't want this to be that loud so I'm just going to turn this down a lot. I think there's actually a bass preset in here that is built for doing what I'm wanting to do. I'm going to turn it up just till it starts taking off just barely so that as it goes between the notes, you can see certain notes will pull it down more than others. It just makes the bass even more consistent. You can see the lower notes are technically ''Louder'' than the higher ones. Even though musically, I don't necessarily want certain chords to be louder than other chords. This trick just helps balance that stuff out. We're also adding a ton of gain on the bass. We'll need to turn this down a little bit just to make sure that it doesn't overpower everything. But that is sounding a lot more consistent, a lot more high-energy, and now let's start smashing some keys together. 23. Keys Dynamics: It's easy to go overboard with compression. I don't want to compress things that don't need it, but things that do for sure. These pianos here, I thought compression would really help these because I like the sound of the bench and sound of the fingers on the keys and all those things. I really want to bring that stuff up. I'm going to compress it to do that. I'll go to compressors sound that I like is something that's going to be nice and slow to be able to just be subtle and squishy. The LA-2A is great at that logic. Their built-in compressor has a version of that. This is their version, but it doesn't really have a lot of character to it. It does the job. It's going to control the dynamics but I like compressors that will really color the sound and not be transparent for something like this, I just think that's fun. LA-2A, how much compression you want, and then how loud the signal is. I'm going to reduce the peaks a lot. I want to compress it. That sounds awesome. Cool. Now there's another lead sound that I thought needed some help here because there's two panel layers here. That one needs to be compressed too. Just similar thing, just to smooth it out. Which is the same approach here. I'm actually going to try something different here. I don't know, it's just not speaking to me in the same way. I'm going to try this. This is also an empirical labs compressor like the distressor, but it's not the distressor, it's like, I don't know. It's a distressor like, it's not the distressor unfortunately. But it's also pretty good. Just want something to be a little more aggressive to compress a little bit harder than the LA-2A was doing. Cool. There is a lead sound in here. Oh, is in the bridge. That's what it was, is this guy. That needs to be squashed. Let's try that same compressor here because it can get so intense. Cool. Nice. I like that. Similar to what we did for turning on the tails here, the tails on these notes after we compress it too much or not too much, it sounds good. But because we're compressing it so much, the length of those tails might get rid of some of the dynamics here in a bad way. So let's listen to that. These two sections, I want to see what it sounds if I turn these down a lot. I think it might sound interesting. No, that one should stay. Because the melody [inaudible], that note needs to be there, but I just want it to get rid of itself a little bit faster so just add a little fade there. Nice. You can just turn this quite down a little bit too just along the way. This string line too, we could give this a little compression. Not too much because I like how much it jumps out. I think that's cool. I don't want to lose that effect too much. But I do think it could help. I do think a little bit of compression would help just glue it together a little bit more. Let's have this play here. Nice, that's feeling good. Let's move on to acoustics. 24. Guitar Dynamics: We're almost through with compression. Let's take a look at these acoustics here. This finger picking pattern. I think this could use some compression to help bring out that finger sound to make it more of a consistent sound so that the spaces between the notes, all that little finger sound squeakiness, I want to bring that up. I'm going to add a compressor after all of our EQ work. Long attack and fast release, 4-1. Let's hear how that sounds Drive a little harder. I like how that sounds. I'm going to use this little mix knob to blend in some of the original uncompressed signal. What that's going to do is just make it so that this effect of the compressor is a little bit less pronounced and it will breathe a little bit more. Nice, that's sounding good. I am noticing with the compressor added, some of the low mids are poking through a little bit too much or maybe I'm just noticing them more now that it's compressed. Somewhere around these low mids here so I'm just going to take these down, just to hear. Let's bring some top-up too while we're here. Cool. Nice. That sounds good. For the strumming pattern, the single note things. Probably not going to compress these as much. Let's start with the same compressor. Similar settings, slow attack, fast release, 4-1, and let's just start pushing it until it starts to squish and sound nice and we get that finger noise and all those cool artifacts, but it doesn't get too squashed where it just becomes too smashed. I'm going to go to where playing is a little bit louder. Same as before, I'm going to blend some of the dry signal back in. What I'm listening for is, I like the push of the [inaudible] . I like the driving that that is doing. If I compress this too much, I'm going to lose that pulse effect and it's going to just become a very consistent block of sound and I don't want that. I still want it to push a little bit so I'm listening for getting enough sound of the compression where you hear the string noise and the scrape of the pick and those things come through, but balancing that with making sure that there's still enough dynamic that each individual note is heard. Nice. Cool. I think that's a good balance. Lastly, we got the electric guitars and I'm going to stick with this 1176. I like the sound of this, in guitars especially. I feel like, I don't know, just interesting. Fastest release, slow attack and let's start pushing. Cool. That's sound good. One thing that I want to try, I'm missing some width on this. There's a couple of things I could do for that. I want to try using this little tape echo which is just like a delay in reverb combo. One of the things that's nice about this though, is you can pan the reverb and you can pan the delay independently which is pretty cool. For the reverb, I'm going to put the reverb on the right and I'm going to put the delays on the left and maybe find a nice slow delay. These head speeds here will tell me the speed of the delay so I just want to find one that's nice and long. Let's try that. I'm going to leave the tempo unsynced and let's see what that sounds like. Nice. I like that. I'm going to put the compressor after to swap the order of these so that these little effects are getting compressed by this compressor. Let's hear that. Nice. You can hear it almost sounds like you're almost getting a chorus effects from that delay, which is cool. I like that, but it only happens sometimes, which is interesting, I like that. Lastly, I'm going to throw another EQ on top, this Mag to bring up the top. All these effects and stuff and the way that the compressor is bringing them up, I think it's cool and I want to just accentuate that a little bit. With that super high air band, just bringing up that super high stuff. That sounds great. Let's check here. I don't think this needs compression. I would bet that's already compressed just off of the sound of it and even visually you can see there's not a ton of dynamics there. I don't think that needs to be squashed even further. Cool. Compression is sounding great. We did a little bit effects work on that guitar. Let's keep going with effects and start to get some vocal effects going and start to glue that stuff together. 25. Vocal FX (Delay and Reverb): My approach for vocal effects is going to be as follows. We're going to set up a couple of buses to create our vocal sounds, and then we'll automate those on and off, and the amounts of those depending on the section of the song. To start with just a basic vocal sound, I'm going to create a new bus, by just having a send to a new bus. It automatically creates this aux track for us. I'll just call this vox vrb 1. I'm going to go ahead and make the stereo so that when we send the background vocals to it, we'll be able to retain that info if they're panned left to right and stuff like that. Logics built in has a couple of great options for reverb. The Chromaverb, I think is really nice. I think is good. I think their Space Designer is awesome for very simple transparent things. This is free, Valhalla supermassive, and is absolutely incredible. Actually, we can probably use this on a vocal too. It might be a little crazy for a main vocal sound. Let's see, Best Ballad Vocal. Let's see what that sounds like her. I'm going to dial up the send. That's not exactly what I would call a normal reverb, sounds alright though. This is a good example. I like this sound of this reverb. Not all the time, I think that'd be a little too much. What I'm going to do, and let me just focus this into this drum up some of that lows. This will be our long verb. I'll just call this vox vrb long. We'll have this ready, but not turned on right now. Now let's set up another one stereo vox verb, we'll call this one, medium. For this guy, let's use a different reverb. Let's use Space Designer, built in logic one, I like a lot of stuff in here. There's a plate in here that I like. Is it a large plate? This shimmering plates, I feel like it's really nice. Let's listen to that It almost functions like a delay, almost. There's that right left action that sounds really nice. Same as before, trim up that low-end. I like this as just like an always on thing. Lastly, let's do another one. This one, let's use that space echo. Here it is. Actually, no, let's use the stereo version so that we can pan this. I'm going to bring up the reverb. Let's use one of these. Let's think the tempo and this one. Let me find a rhythm that I would sound nice. Something that doesn't have triplets would be great. Let's try that In a program like this, I hate wet solo because it doesn't really have a mix in the traditional sense, how hard you drive it and then the levels of the effects. If I put wet solo on, that means that there is no dry signal being sent from the plugin, which is great because we have our dry signal here. Now the effect will be just the effect on this track here, which I'll just call this vox verb echo. Let's get some of that going here. Let's pump up the treble, pump up the reverb. I'm also going to set up yet another one. This one I'm going to use Spaced Out, from baby audio. I really liked this one. I do pretty much the same thing every time. I like this random buttons. To actually generate the pattern of the delay, I can just hit "Generate", and it gives me a random delay pattern which is just really fun. I like the randomness. This is automatically side-chains, the vocal signal to the amount of effects. As the vocal sings, it will turn the effects down, and then when the vocal is not singing, the effects come back up a little bit. That's what this dark knob does. Which is great. That just helps create a little more space. This is delay section, this is a reverb section. The reason that I'm doing all these different reverbs, is to create options for myself. I'd said clean because I was reading clean. I'm creating options for myself to automate the sends with. 26. Vocal FX (Automation): For a big vocal sound, we can have everything going at once a little bit and create really interesting effect. Then it goes into the verse, we can pull those effects down. If we tap A, you can open our automation lanes. Then by default it's the volume. We can go in here and see all these different things. In the main folder, we'll see the send amounts. We have vox vrb long, the medium one, the echo, and then the spaced out which we have not labeled. Let me label that vox spc out cap. This is probably the most intense effect of them. I want this to kick in on the chorus, and probably, just not at all on those other sections. Let's find another chorus here. Might be too much there. I don't know. But I definitely don't want it here. Kicking back there in the chorus gets big. You can stay on for the rest of the song. Now, let's look at the other stuff that we have going on. We can switch the view to another thing or we can add another one by this little drop-down arrow. Let me look at the long vrb. This is that Valhalla crazy one. This one, maybe it'll be off in the beginning and then come in a little bit on that pre-chorus. I'm going super fast here. Just ballpark, throwing stuff around. I have no idea if this will actually work or not. But these are rough estimates of where things are going to happen. Similar thing with the other pre-chorus, starts to creep in a little bit. Let's see. This is our spaces sandwitch on which I want on the whole time. Echo, I'll probably want that on the whole time, but just a little bit less in the verse. Let's see, what the verse sounds. Cool, that sound good. Then pre-course happens, it's going to have a little bit more reverb from here you go. Cool. Now with these backgrounds, we can do the same thing. We can use the same vocal effects for them. I want this on both of them. That's our space designer one. We'll put that around here, probably similar level and then I'll also put it on spaced-out one. Let's just have those and see what that sounds like. Nice. Cool. I'm not going to really bother with very much verb on this vocal thing because there's a lot of processing on it already. I'm just going to add a little bit of this space designer one, which is our most normal, just enough to match it with the other vocal sounds. Nice, and as we're automating stuff, let's also automate the volume of these backgrounds to pop up a little bit on the courses. I'm just going to drop a couple of nodes here so that we can just bump up the backgrounds on the chorus. Couple DB. Nice. Cool. Let's do the same thing on the second chorus. Then leave they come in on the course anyway here so we can leave those. Let's also throw this vocal over here. He got some nice happening again at the end. Which should be interior Squared that it should be 16 after it. Same thing with these effective ad-lib things. I like how dry they are so I don't want to mess with them too much. I'll split the difference. I'll add a little bit of our normal plate verb and then the space echo thing. Just because it has the most flavor. During these ad-lib sections, I'm actually going to automate the volume of the lead vocal down a little bit after the main outro this stuff. Because I don't want it to be treated as main lyrics. By just pulling the volume back just a little bit, hopefully, that will feel more intentional. It's not something that should the spotlight is on necessarily. Cool. Nice. That's some good vocal reverb. Same thing as these vocal stacks. We can send these along to those as well. We'll do this long one, we'll do the medium one just for blending and that might be all we need actually because this long one might be enough. See this sounds like. I don't think it actually needs that much. I think that might be too much. I'm going to turn this stuff down and just leave this one here. I don't like the sound of that reverb on the choir thing. This one sounds good. But the other one, it just wasn't the right vibe. This one Let's see. This one sounds. That one feels a lot better to me. It just feels a little less artificial. That when you really hear the tail at the end, I think that'll sound more natural. That sounds better to me. Very subjective. I like it. Cool. Let's move on to drum effects. 27. Drum FX: Let's get some drum reverb going here. Now the toms already have some verb on them because of this really roomy layer. That's a lot of reverb just printed onto the sample directly. Whereas the snare is pretty dry. There's some room tone, but it gets cut off. Similar to the vocals where we have a couple of different verbs, we're going to do something similar to the drums, but not as crazy. Off of this drum bus, which has all of the drums being sent to it. I'm going to send from this to a new bus, call this drum verb. I'm just going to have a little bit of drum verb just to put all the drums in the same space. This is going to be pretty subtle. A reverb that I really like and we used Space Designer on the vocals and we can do that here too. I really like fab filters reverb for very invisible sounding things. I believe they have like a preset in here that I like the sound of or maybe it's in small, these studio ones here. I'll turn it up and you can hear what it's doing. It's a very short reverb, but we're just putting them in the same space. I'm not going for a huge tail or anything. Then we can hear that it sounds it's more symbols and stuff. Nice. Then similar thing that is very standard now we're going to just trim down the low end here and trim some of the highest a little bit too. With that it's like are always on setting just to glue that drums together a little bit. I'm going to pick a couple of things to really emphasize with some reverb. Mainly, I think actually another I'm looking through this it's really just going to be the snare and maybe some of these clap layers. But let's start with the snare because I really want that snare, especially during these hits to just really explode with reverb. Like I want that to have a lot of energy to it. Those tails on the vocal reverbs are so long, I love it. On the snare channel, I'm going to send to a new reverb. This one, I'm going to change the output of this to instead of just going directly to the speakers, which pretty much everything else is, I want to send the output of this snare verb to the thrombus so that this drum bus compression and this drum bus reverb is being sent or the scenario is getting treated by all this stuff. The snare reverb rather. Because otherwise, I like the compression that's happening on the snare, I want this snare reverb to be subject to that same compression and stuff instead of happening outside of it. Let's use a Valhalla vintage verb. It sounds good, but it's normal. Well, let's start here. Let's just crank the decay up to four seconds. Turn it up. Oh, it's a nonlinear. Let's switch to like a, it's like a gated reverb sound, which is cool, but not what I want this to be. Let's try a chamber. Let's see how that sounds. Here we go. Okay, so that's probably a little loud. Nice. It's trim some of the lows there. I'm going to turn it up louder, but shorter and see if we can get it to poke through a little bit more. I'm also with the EQ going to make sure there's not low-end, make sure there's not too much high-end and then I'm going to create a little pocket for it to poke through it. If we can just have this little bump here. Remember it's always best to boost fundamentals and cut away other stuff that doesn't need it because the fundamental, the sneers at 150 and there's another little bell of high-energy over here. I'm going to do that to reinforce those things. Let's on these sections here where the snare hits are super obvious, I'm going to bump these up in volume, but just these ones, just so we can really hammer that point home. Nice school and let's make sure that that reverb doesn't get out of control by the time we get to where it happens more often. See it's a little too explosive here. I'm going to turn the send of it down. I want to in there but I don't want it in as much here. Because they'll be floating around in the background but. I think on this one hit too, I'll have that one hit match the volume of the earlier ones. Just on our first entry point into the chorus, we get a nice little slap and then it goes back. Nice, cool, that sounds good. Similar thing on the last course here. It doesn't really do that because it's this one that I'm thinking of. Just this one hits. That one hit to just have a little bit more impact. There we go. Nice. Just lifts it a little bit so it's not exactly the same. Cool. That's the drum reverb, I'm happy with where everything is sitting in that. There's not a whole lot to it, just controlling low end and then being intentional about where those tails happen. Now I think we're ready to start thinking about mixed bus setting, which is exciting. 28. Mix Bus: The mix bus is also called the master channel. It is everything that is going out, stereo out, which is just our speakers, left and right. We can apply plug-ins to our mix bus that will affect the entire mix. There are different schools of thoughts and people really like putting a lot of things on their mix bus. Other people like to put literally nothing on it. Just like a couple of monitoring things to check for levels and stuff. I'm not afraid to mess with the mix bus. I think that it's cool and it has a distinct vibe and character when you start adding stuff to the mix bus and I think can be really cool. It also helps you just be responsible with your levels. Right now, because I haven't really been carrying too much about where the levels are sitting as far as headroom goes. I haven't really been looking at that. Now, this is an example of not a what not to do. This is totally fine, but so let's look at the chorus, which is probably going to be like loudest part of the song, and notice that we're probably going to be sending too much volume to our mix bus. It's not going to be clipping, but it's going to be a little too hot for us to make careful adjustments with. We need to find about four dB of volume. We can do that a couple of different ways. We can do that just by turning everything down, and if we just turn everything down like our dB, that would probably be pretty close. Let's start with that and let's see how close that gets us. I could just select everything and turn everything down. But keep in mind, because we have this drum bus going and all these sounds are going to the drum bus first. If I just turn everything down, the drum bus will sound different. The processing that we have here will not be hitting these things in the same way. What I want to do is only select the things that are not being bused somewhere else. I'll select these things and not select any of these drums because they're already going to get turned down by this drum bus. I'll also grab the vocals here. Now I'll press eight open the automation lanes so you can see a number here. I'm going to just turn these down. Let's go down two dB. You'll notice when I turn these down, everything went down two dB. But if I play, I just moved the playhead and look. These are changing, these volumes because there's automation on them. Anything that is going to have automation on it, in order for that to be turned down, you have these little trim sections here. If I just adjust this trim, it will turn all of the automation nodes up or down depending on if I'm going up or down. I'll just bring these down two dB as well and I'll just double-check if there's anything else that has automation. The snare has automation, but that's going to get turned down by the drum bus, and I don't think I automated anything else. Now let's check where our headroom is at. Close. Let's do two more dB. I'll just grab our vocals here, grab our drum bus, all this junk, and I'm just going to select the trim to adjust those automation things. Then I'm going to adjust these as well. Great, that's looking perfect. That cut the reverb tail. Don't have to talk over that. For the mix bus, let's start by, I'm just going to take a look at what is going on. I'm just going to use Pro Q3 and look at the frequencies and see what's going on. Overall, it looks like we have some buildup here in the mids and we need some more low-end, doesn't look super heavy there. If I go to this other part which has more synthase. It's looking okay, but I think it could be even better. I'm going to start with the loudest part of the song, which is this last course here. Just so that I know that there's not going to be any other peaks in the song they're going to cause the compressor to react in an unexpected way or anything. By dialing in the loudest part, it's just the safest for everything else. I'm going to start with just a little bit of compression, and there are specific compressors that are tuned to be mastering compressors or mixed bus compressors. They're just generally a little bit subtler. This is one that I really like, this shadow hills mastering compressor. You can totally use logics built-in compressor, but a little goes a long way on the mix bus, and it's one thing that it's like if you are hearing something that you're trying to correct, then I use the logic compressor, but it doesn't really impart any character or vibe like this compressor does. It will sound slightly different. Let's go ahead and just start tweaking stuff. I like starting with three sets and then adjusting the gain reduction to be subtle enough to where it's adding some character but it's not going to mess with the mix too much. I'm just going to bring the threshold down until I see the meters start to move and wiggle a little bit, and then I'll back it off to try and get it somewhere where it's affecting the mix, but it's not changing it too much. It's just giving you a little bit of squishiness and a little bit of character. Nice, cool, and I should have said this at the top, but this shadow hills compressor is basically just two compressors. It's this an optical compressor and then a discrete compressor, and they each have their own controls, and stuff. But basically, it's just stacking compressors. We've got that going. Let's also know that it's going through that, I'm going to add just a little bit of saturation to everything and I'm going to use the black box for that, this guy. It's got all weird controls. It's basically just adding various very subtle distortion. There is a preset that sounds good, but it's always a little aggressive. I like the sound of this, what it's doing to the sides and everything but I'll generally back off the mix to just do it in parallel. Just adds a little bit more excitement, a little more energy, and let's throw another EQ in here. Just to beef up some of the low end and this is like my favorite mix bus, EQ, the manly massive passive. It's amazing. You'll hear what it does so I'm just going to on a shelf boost the low end here. Nice, and now another trick that I've started using recently is this plug-in called Gullfoss, which it's like a smart EQ quotes is what it's doing so basically it's a dynamic EQ that is constantly changing every second based off of the input. You can hear what it's doing, as I adjust knobs and stuff and play audio through it, you'll see this is the curve of what it's doing, and this is where I tell it not to adjust things. I don't want it to mess with the super low stuff. Let's hear what that sounds like. Pretty crazy. What a difference that makes. I don't totally understand how it's doing it because, I'm seeing everything that it's doing and somehow it sounds really crazy. Anyways, it's adding a little bit of gain. I'm going to turn this down a little bit just to get our headroom back. Now, it's time for some limiters. This can get a little out of control. I like stacking limiters a little bit mainly because there's a trick in one of this Plugin Alliance, true peak limiter here has this XL knob, which again, I'm not totally sure what it's doing. It's some saturation, some harmonics something you'll hear it just, some extra high-end energy come alive when I turn it up. I'm not really using it for limiting, I'm just using it for this little energy knob. Each plugin is just adding a tiny bit more energy, a tiny bit more excitement, and at the end, it will make a huge difference. 29. Mix Bus (LUFS and Loudness): So Pro L2 at the very end. It's always important for the very end limiter of the chain to not master to 0.0 like the absolute roof because if you bounce out an MP3 at that, sometimes the data compression of the MP3, will technically add a tiny bit of gain every once in a while or on certain systems that won't work. Just to ensure compatibility, it's always best to turn this down to negative 0.1 is standard. But you can push that a little bit to 0.07. Some limiters won't let you get that granular with the level. But if you can, if your limiter allows you to get that specific, then you should bump it up because it's just free gain, free loudness. It will never be noticeable, but you may as well. I'm going to pick a preset here. I'm going to do something safe. I'm not going for like crazy loudness, just final few dB. Then I'll bump up the gain until I start to bring it down and we'll start to see where we're at with the loudness. Not even trying that hard, really, just adding a little bit on all this stuff. We're already hitting around negative 8.5 somewhere. So depending on the genre of music that you're going for, of how loud you want it to get, that might depend how you're processing your mix bus and how you're treating your individual channels. The louder you want your mix to be, the more aggressive you'll need to be on your individual channels of creating headroom. Carving away low-end from things that don't need it, carving way high-end from things that don't need it. All that stuff will increase loudness because we are able to push the volume even more because there's not those other random frequencies eating up our headroom. I'm happy with around negative 8. I think that's pretty standard. Spotify will tell you negative 14. Do not do negative 14. It's way too quiet. You can listen to songs on Spotify and anytime you hear something that's been mastered and negative 14, you can tell because it's just like way quieter than everything else. Just do negative 8. That's standard. There are songs that are even louder than that on Spotify for sure. I've measured songs at negative 6 and negative 5. They'll start to get turned down a little bit, but they still totally compete so it's really just use your ears and whatever sounds exciting to you. I couldn't even get this at negative 14 if I tried. If I literally put zero gain, no limiting on the master at all, it's still going to be louder than negative 14. I have it muted here, so we can talk clearly and see. This is with no gain added from limiters and it's well above negative 14. l still am not even close to the threshold of volume so even just bumping it up a little bit to where it's barely going to start touching the limiter. Right there, it's barely started to compress. That's already ''penalized'' by Spotify. That negative 14 number is just ridiculous. So just do what sounds good to you. If you're doing some crazy EDM thing or whatever, push it, have it be super loud. It should be. That's part of what makes that genre exciting. If you're doing a folk thing, then don't worry about the volume, just make sure that's legible, just make sure that you're reaching as loud as you can without touching any compression or any limiting or anything and you'll probably be around that negative 14 if not hotter, just with a proper mix. That's the whole process of getting a rough mix. This is what I would call a first pass of the mix. Then I would send this off to the client and would get notes back and we go back and forth until we're feeling happy with the mix, until we're both satisfied with where everything is sitting and it's doing everything that we wanted to do. That's the mix process. 30. Keeping Your Clients Happy: After all of that, we are left with a rough mix, a first pass. What I would do before sending that to the artist or the client say, hey, here's the first pass. I will take that in my car. I'll take that to my TV speakers. I'll just try and listen to it in a couple different places. Take a break from it, even if it's just for a couple hours and then come back and see if things are different or if certain other things are bothering you or whatever. That first self-edit round, I think is really important. Nine times out of 10, I end up finding something that I realize, hey, that should actually be louder or whatever. It's a great way to catch certain things before you give the artist or the client that first listen. When you do send it to them and say, hey, here's the first pass. Let me know what you think. Be super open to whatever they have to say. Our job as mixers in this case, is to make their song as alive as possible to bring their vision to life. There's a reason they're coming to you. They want your creative input on it, but they're paying you. They are your clients. If they want that kick drum a little louder, then it's your job as an engineer, as a technical, creative, as the blending of those two modes to find a way to achieve that result that they're looking for without destroying the rest of the mix or something. If they want a louder kick drum, it's okay, if they want a louder kick drum, I'm already pushing it as hard as I can. How do I get it louder? Well, I could maybe take some low-end out of this other thing to create room for that. They're not telling you how to do your job. They are providing the target for you to hit. Then it's up to you to figure out how to get that. There's a million ways to skin a cat of how to get to wherever they want to go. Louder vocal, more effects, whatever. There's a million ways to get that thing done. But a lot of times certain artists or clients won't be as technically minded as you are. When they say louder vocal, they might not necessarily mean, I want the vocal turned up. It could be as simple as there are too many synths going on and they can't really hear the vocal. Just turning a couple of things down, all of a sudden, the vocal is louder and they're happy. It takes a little bit of research and just a little bit of awareness on your part to listen past what they're saying, to understand what they actually mean. Because sometimes music production lingo doesn't exactly translate the same way to someone that is just speaking off the cuff. Sometimes they don't even know what they want or what they mean until they've heard it a few times. It might be better just to save this conversation until the following day or something. It just helps a lot of that stuff helps them figure out what they actually want as far as amount of revisions, how much back-and-forth with the client or with the artists that you do. It's up to you. I've done it a couple of different ways. Most of the time I leave it as however many revisions they want to do. I'm cool to do for every one person that is going to really over ask for revisions. It's just constantly back-and-forth bring this up. Now, bring it back down, bring it back up. For every one person that does that. There's five others that are totally cool with one revision. It really is up to you, however you want to structure it. For me I found that just, hey, a flat rate and then how many revisions do you want to do? Awesome. I want you to be happy. That I've seen to have good success with operating that way and people seem to like that. I found that's the best way to keep those relationships in good standing because you want those to be an ongoing relationship where you continue to work with these people. If you enjoy working with them, then you should try and keep them happy as much as you can. 31. Submit Your Mix: Now that you're done with the first pass of your mix, I would love to listen to it, and I'm sure the other students would love to hear it too. What you should do is you could export your project by dragging at the top of the playhead and creating these little yellow bars like this. Then go over to File, Bounce project or section, or you can just press command D. What you're doing with those little yellow handles is setting the length of the song, setting the length of that particular balance that you're going to export. Now once you have that balance, you can call it whatever you want, save it wherever you want to save it and upload it to either Dropbox or SoundCloud or YouTube or anything like that and then create a project in the class and post your link there and tell us about the mix, what you're trying to do, what of tools you used, all that stuff. I'd love to hear it and give some feedback on it. If you'd rather reach out to me through social media, you could do that too. You can connect with me on Instagram or YouTube. I'll put all the details for those things in my profile on Skillshare and click through that. I'd love to connect with you there. There's also a newsletter you can sign up for to stay up-to-date on future classes and just other content for me. If you sign up for that, you'll get a free EXS file instrument that I sampled from my mug matriarch of these pads and these moving oscillators and stuff. I just want to keep playing it. It's so good. It's really, really cool so Check that out too. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. I hope you learned a lot. It was super fun. I can't wait to hear your mixes and until next time, I'm Solo Ray. See you guys.