Mixing Music: Learn How to Mix a Pop Rock Song Like a Pro

1. Ian Sutton: Professional Audio Engineer and Producer: Hi, We're here its Signature Sound studios, and this is mixing pop rock. My name is Ian Sutton, and I've been a recording and mixing engineer for over 10 years. During this time, I've had the opportunity to work with some amazing artists, producers and engineers. I'd like to take this time to share with you some of the tips and tricks I've acquired along the way and continue to use in. Almost all of my mixes over the span of this course will be dissecting a recent mix I did for a talented artist and friend of mine, Jackson Price. If you want to learn more about him in the band, you can check them out at Jackson Price music dot com. We'll be using pro tools for the mix, but the methods and techniques shown in this tutorial could be applied to just about any digital audio workstation or analog mixing project. This is an advanced course, and I'll be covering common situations encountered while mixing songs. In this genre, you should already have a working knowledge of basic audio principles like equalization, compression, time based effects and signal flow. Before taking this course in the first few videos. I'll show you tips for setting up your session to maximize the creative process during the mix. By taking care of these boring left bringing tasks first, you can stay in your creative zone longer and play your mix like an instrument. So much of mixing is spontaneous and relies on creative vision and feel the next three sections of the class focus on instruments there, plug ins and effects. I'll go through the mix instrument by instrument and explain each plug. And I used why I chose that particular plug in and the settings used to achieve the right sound for that instrument. I'll also show you which affect each instrument is being sent to and explain how those effects work in the final section will explore automation in the song. Things like adding effects only to certain sections to create tensions and releases and changing the volume of instruments to help guide the listeners attention and keep things fresh. It's the small details that can take a good mix and make it into a great mix in the last video will listen to the final mix as it's recorded onto a stereo track. I'll also talk about different mixes a client may want and how to easily get them. And now for the disclaimer. For this mix, I'll be using common plug ins that come with pro tools, in addition to boutique and specialty plug ins and not included in the standard installation. Some of the plug ins used in this session are available as demos from the plug in makers, and some of them require an investment of additional hardware processing cards. Although Pro Tools comes stock with a great set of plug ins, it's near impossible to find a commercially released record mixed entirely with standard plug ins that come in your d. A. W. I felt it was necessary to represent this reality of today's music industry. Here in this class, it's true you don't need the most expensive equipment to make a great sounding mix. But in this day and age was shrinking budgets and shorter deadlines. Everyone's time is valuable. There are certain plug ins that I always reach for, because I just know they're going to sound good if you don't have all the plug ins I have used in this song. That's okay. I urge you to experiment by trying out some of the settings you see in this class on plug ins that you do have. I think you'll be surprised at the results. Some of the techniques I'll show you in this class I found through trial and error, and some have been passed down from other engineers and producers. Almost all of them have evolved over time to fit a specific situation. So please tweak, change and combine the techniques you already know with what you learn from this tutorial to come up with your own magical mixing solutions. Some of my best results have come through experimentation. Let's get started. 2. Effects Overview: Okay, so let's take a look at some of the effects I used here in Shine the Light. Now, all these affects channels or effects returns. I've pulled in from an effect session that I have set up and it consists of a few reverb is a few delays and a few spatial effects like chorus and flanges and those type of things. Now, I've set this session up solely for the purpose of bringing in effects to a mix that I'm currently working on. So let me show you how to import those from a dedicated effects session. So first off, we want to go up here to file import session data. Next, you want to navigate to the session that you want to pull the effects from, and this is my effect session here. Now you can see in the middle of this dialogue is a list of all the tracks in the session. Now, I've got all my effects in this effect session set up on auxiliary tracks, and we're gonna bring in all of these into the session. And I've also got my master fader and output buses set up here, um, in my effects session and we're gonna bring those in his well, because it's gonna help me save some time in the mix session because all the routing and everything on those master tracks is already done. So to bring in all of these, you hold option click on any one of those tracks. It'll set him up to a new track and then you click, OK, and that is pretty much it bringing in tracks from a different session. Now, I'm just gonna cancel here because I have already brought these tracks into this session. So now let's go through each of these effects one by one, and I'll talk about, ah, the settings and what they all are. So the first effect here is a room, and it's really just more for percussive stuff. Um, not a very big river, but it kind of sits in the background, and it just adds a little bit of ambiance, too. Like I said, our percussion and some of those type of instruments. So I've chosen the room number two preset, um, with a small room setting and 200 milliseconds just slightly over 200 milliseconds. Now you want to make sure that your effects air set to 100% wet if they have a mixed knob on them. Um, we only want to be hearing the effect on these effects channels. We don't want to be hearing any of the dry signal it all. And I've gone through and tweaked these effects during the mix just a little bit. And that's pretty common. So let's take a look at the next effect we've got up here. This is the E. M. T. 1 40 from Universal Audio. This is a fantastic sounding plate. Um, it's very rich, and it's got a lot of subtle complexity happening in the reverb tail. So, you know, I've used this from a short plate. I think it got this for another plate. Might be my vocal plate. Just awesome sounding river. I'm going to use river, be for this plug in and we're adding just a little bit of highs. And we're making sure we cut everything off at 125 hertz. I don't want any big bass happening in this reverb. This is just a ah, nice short guy. Okay, let's take a look at the next reverb here. This is the e m t. 2 50 from Universal Audio. And it's said it 1.2 milliseconds. So just a little bit longer than our last river are short plate. Um, I did add a little bit of high end on this guy and yeah, it just sits really nice in the track. OK, moving on to the next effect. This is the vocal plate again using the E. M. T. 1 40 from Universal Audio. Now, I did add this after I'd gotten into the mix and realized that none of the effects tracks that I had set up really did what I wanted it to do for the vocals. So I set this one at 1.5 seconds for the reverb tail and give just a little bit of boost on the low end, not really much on the high, and rolled it off at about 80 hertz. I did, however, want to pull out a little bit of that mid range from the reverb and the EQ. You on the Mt. 1 40 itself doesn't allow you to do that, so I pulled up a stock dge Q and just pulled out a little bit right around two K. Um, that just leaves a little bit more space for Jackson's voice to really take over that sonic space. I want the reverb, you know, backing him up but not steal in the show. Next we have the longest river been this session, which is our hall reverb. Now I've chosen the lexicon to 24 for this river. It's a great sounding river, very complex, rich, and it really allows those sounds that you want to be in the background to kind of fall into the background and really just get blended together. In this song, I found 2.6 seconds seemed to be the right time for the reverb tail to achieve that kind of softening and blending that I wanted all right, moving on to delays. I use a lot of delays in my sessions. I love delays there. They're great, adding space and depth without clouding things up with too much river. So the first delay that I've got on here is just a simple slap delay from pro tools. I've got it set to 64 milliseconds on the left and 59 on the right. Now this is their stereo version of this delay not to be confused with the multi mono version. I like this version because you get the left and the right all in one plug in window. And, um, you know, I use this delay quite a bit. I'll take a stereo instrument and have the left side going to the right side of this delay . You know, have the left side of that instrument pan going to the right side of this delay. And I really feel like it adds another kind of cool stereo dimension and moving on to the next delay. I've got an eighth note delay. Sit up here, and I really like to keep my delays in time with the tempo of the session. And these pro tools delays make it extremely easy. You just click on whatever fraction of the delay you want this case eighth note, click on the left and the right side, and you've got your delay. You know, it's gonna follow the tempo of the session, which is very handy if you have tempo changes or anything like that going on. Now, I have chosen to roll off all of the highs for the eighth note, delay and do that because you don't want any. The teas and the the season, the constants poking through. You know, this delay just meant to really be in the background and kind of add some depth. I don't want any of those. They nose hard. Constant noise is sticking through. So we've rolled off everything, usually between one and two k. Um, moving on. The next delay is our quarter note delay, and I I love the waves. H delay. This thing is super duper easy to use. Its got a high pass and a low pass filter. Um, the feedback knob e. I mean, it's just it's incredibly easy to use. Now we are rolling off the lows in this delay. This is a little bit longer delay. I don't want a those lows clouding up the mix. So we're rolling off it. 263 hurts, and we are rolling off the top end again, right? About two K. I don't want any of those hard constants sticking through. Um, one thing to watch out for in this waves age delay. This little analog knob here basically is a noise knob, so it defaults to setting number two. That leaves a little bit of noise. You can see those meters bouncing right there. The first thing I do when I pull this plug in up is I crank it over toe off. Um, I don't want any extra noise in my mixes, especially if you're running two or three of these guys. It's the same noise. Basically. It'll it's just gonna cloudy things up, so make sure you turn that toe off. Now, through the course of this mix, I felt that that quarter note delay started to stick out a little too much. Um, I wanted it to be loud in the mix, but it was just too dry. It didn't fit with everything else. So I found this ensemble plug in from Avid. Now I've got the mix set to 50% or so on here, and it's directly after that H delay on the auxiliary channel. So basically, that quarter note, delay is now getting this kind of stereo stereo spread to it, and it really just worked to help blend this delay back into the mix. All right, moving on to the next effect. We have 1/2 no delay. This is again Ah, waves H delay set toe half note rolling off the lows and the highs. A little bit of feedback. Uh, and we do that because this is this half no delay is a much more musical delay. It's ah longer than the other three delays we have in the session, and it's really meant to kind of come up in some empty spaces and really extend some of those vocal ideas after the vocal is done singing now. To accomplish that, I put a compressor on this effects channel after the H delay. Now remember, the H delay is set to 100% wet, so tha signal on this channel is effect on Lee Onley DeLay. Now you want to set the side chain input on this compressor to the same bus as the input for that effect. Essentially, what that does is every time a signal comes into that effect channel and gets delayed, that same input signal turns on the compressor and pushes that signal down. So when the lead vocalist singing the delay is being compressed, and when the lead vocal stop singing, it allows the delay to kind of come up in the background So I've also added a little bit of chorus and a little bit of hall reverb to this delay effect to kind of help it, you know, melt into the background a little bit. And the last one of my delay effects. I really love to uses a ping pong delay. This one is again the waves H delay. He just click ping pong right in the middle and you've got you know, right now it's set to eighth note said it to 16th. Whatever. So you got 1/3 note on the left and 1/4 note on the right. Super easy delay to use once again h delay Love it. Cutting off the lows, cutting off the highs. This is, you know, a delay that just to be sprinkled in the background, don't want it. And while this one you might want stealing the show, um, I love love the ping pong delays. The next effect I use in just about every session is some kind of course effect. You can use the waves meta Flander the chorus from air. But I really like the Dimension D from Universal Audio and Roland. Um, it's a subtle effect. It's one of those effects where you you don't want to hear the effect per se. You don't want to go. I hear a course on there. But you want to push a bunch of stuff into this effect just slightly, and it helps fill out your mix and I'll show you when we get into each individual instrument. What's going into the Dimension D? The next effect we've got is the MX R Flander Doubler. This is just a really cool, special effect. Um, I added this kind of after the fact kind of in the, you know, in the early stages of the mix. But I just wanted something else to kind of fill things out a little bit. So I found a cool preset in here, and we went with that. And that wraps up all of the effects returns for this song. The next video. We're going to be looking at some of the the routing and the Master Channel. So we'll see you then. 3. Output Routing Overview : Okay, So in this video, we're gonna take a look at the output routing for this session. Now, let me first start off by saying the reason why I route things like this is because at the end of the mix, I don't like to use pro tools bounced to disk function. I prefer to record my mix directly back into the session into an open audio track. Now that looks something like this at the bottom of my mix. There is my record track, and that's the mix recorded back in now. This allows a lot of flexibility during the final stages of the mix, which is basically the bounce. If I want to record a vocal up or a vocal down, it's really easy to do that right in the session and keep all those files. These master files within the session, basically on different playlists, and I'm taking a look at the playlists on this track. There's only two, but if you're not familiar with playlists and pro tools, definitely check him out. It's kind like a card file. You've got, you know, an audiophile living behind another audio file, so really, really cool. Okay, Flipping back to the mixed window. You see this master track that I have here? This is actually an auxiliary fader, or auxiliary channel, and I've set the input to a stereo bus and named Master. Now I've taken the output of that master bus and sent that to my output one and two. On that track, I've made a stereo ascend, and, ah, just to a bus and name that bus record that's going to send my signal to the record audio track that I've set up over here. And that's just a stereo audio track that I've named record and set its input to that same bus we just created from the last track. Now, the output of that record track is also going to the main out. Now, you could rout the output of the Master fader you just created to that record track. But I've found you get another extra layer of delay and the delay compensation has to kick in. So, you know, I like to just use thesis end from that master track over to this record track. Now, you want to make sure that all of the tracks in your session are going to that Master bus. Um, whether it be, you know, your group tracks going there or the individual tracks that aren't going to groups, they have to end up at this master bus. Otherwise, they're not going to get sent through that record bus, and they're not going to get recorded onto that track, essentially not going to get bounced into your stereo mix. So every time you create a new track in your mixed session, you've got to remember to set its output to that master bus. Or you can have pro tools do that for you automatically each time you create a new track. So go to set up I O. And it's under. It's under the output tab down here where it's his default output bus. I've already got mine set to master, but you get two options mono or stereo. So for mono tracks, you go down to bus and see up there. Masters checked. I've already set mine up for the mono tracks, so there it is, and you can set that up for stereo tracks as well. You want to make sure you set it up for both, so just click on that and hit OK boom. Now, each time you create a new track in your session, we'll do that. Now check it out. It sets that output to the master bus. So you don't have to worry about setting that output each time you create a new track and don't have to worry about your tracks not getting bounced, which I've definitely done that before, and it is not a pretty one to explain. So that's the output routing that I use in my mix sessions. The next video. We're going to take a look at how to set up your bus compressors for this mix. 4. Master Fader Effects Overview : Okay, so now that we've got all of our effects in the session and our master channel and our record channel set up, let's take a look at the effects that I've got on my master Fader and I usually start out every mix with some sort of tape saturation and a bus compressor. Now, the first plug in that I'm using is the Ampex from Universal Audio. It's a two track tape machine simulation. It sounds awesome. There are plenty of other tape machines out there, you know, plug ins. Ah, vtm from Slate Digital. I think there's the MX P from waves. They're all very good. And they all add that saturation, that warmth, that little bit of harmonics in there. So I highly recommend getting your hands on something like that. If you don't already have him now, the way I set this up is pretty simple. I'm just started out with essentially the default setting. The default setting is a great place to start, turned off the noise here and just turned up the record knob until I saw the meters kind of jumping around right there, right around zero. I'm definitely listening for any kind of distortion, and you want to make sure you check the input and the output metering. Um, you know, hitting the red here is good, but pegging the meters all the way to the right is bad. And you'll hear that distortion when that happens. I'm also constantly checking the clip meter on the master fader, making sure that that's not hitting red throughout the course of the mix. So let's take a listen to how that tape machine sounds. All right, this is with the tape machine in on. If I click this input button right here that lets you listen to the input of the tape machine, which is essentially listen to the bypass, and then the re pro is with the tape machine in. So I'm really listening for the extra little punch in the base and a little sparkle on the highs when the tape machine is active, Theo. So when we pull it out, it loses something. Put it back in that something is back. Yeah. So I definitely urge you to play with these, um, you know, throw him on a drum bus, throw him on a guitar bus. You know, if you need that extra that push in that punch on on a single instrument or even, you know, like a group of instruments. The tape saturation plug ins have gotten really good in the past few years, and there are a lot of fun to play with now. I do want to reiterate that the parameters you see here or the settings that you see on this plug in and a lot of the other plug ins they're not settings that I just opened him up and, you know, went and ended up with those settings. I'm constantly making small changes to the settings on all the plug ins. Everything you do affects just about everything else. So there were plenty of times during the course of mixing the song where I pushed up something in the mix and I heard a little bit of distortion had to come back over here and pull things back just a little bit or the opposite. I lost a little bit of punch because I pulled some things down in the mix and had to come back over here and push up the reproduce head to gain a little bit of that punch back with that said, Let's take a look at the next plug in here on the Master Fader. So I've put on the slate digital virtual bus compressor. This thing is awesome sounding. It can add punch. It helps glue the track together, help solidify the low end. It's really just a great overall compressor. Now it comes with three different compressor types. The top one, the grades basically an SSL. The middle one is the red, which is a focus, right, And my favorite, the moo, which is modelled off a Fairchild or a manly very moved. Now, I've used the manly, very move the actual hardware version, and it is just a beautiful piece of gear. From the moment you put it into your signal path, you notice that your mix just kind of opens up. And, um, Slate Digital has done a really good job reproducing that. So I started this mix out with just the very move on the mix and about 90% of the way into it. Um, I came back and I just I thought, you know what? What? How would it sound? I'm just gonna try the focus, right. So I pulled out the move and put the focus right in. And I lost a lot of clarity, but I gained this fullness and tightness in the bottom end of the mix. So the great thing about this plug in is you can mix and match the different compressor styles. So I just pulled or pushed up the threshold to get no compression from the very move, but still got that nice sound from the top end. So let's take a quick listen. So this is with both compressors in. I'm gonna pull out the move here and take a listen to this symbols and the guitars. Now you hear how you just lost a lot of clarity in the guitars and a lot of ring and sheen and the symbols. When I put it back in, you can hear the detail of the guitars come back in and the nice, shiny nous of the symbols. So I find if I add the very moved in at the beginning of a mix, it feels like I have to work a little less hard to get that mixed sounding good. And if I add this in at the end of the mix, it feels like my mixes come out a little too bright or certain elements in my mix come out a little too bright because I may have mixed them. Um, you know, just right. And I put this on and then they're, you know, clawing your face off. Next. I want to touch on a question that I think just about everybody has. Ah, how hard should you be hitting the meters on your bus compressor? Well, if you put the bus compressor on early on in the mix like ideo, I mean, I like to hit it right around three db Depends on the music. Of course, it might be kissing four db of gain reduction here and there. But generally speaking, hovering between two and three seems to give me that punch in that pop without giving it the squash. I know if I do a mix and then throw on a compressor afterwards, my mixes usually feel very squashed. So I find that putting the compressor on early and getting you know, between two and four decibels of gain reduction on the bus rather than compressing heavily on each instrument, feels like it gives a bit more natural volume control of the different elements in the mix rather than having everyone squished and up front. You know, when the compressor squishes the loud instrument, it also turns some of the quiet instruments down, helping the track breathe a little bit. Okay, Next, let's talk about some of the plug ins that I have on my output Fader, which is essentially just a master fader within pro tools. Um, I I put an analyzer plug in on my master fader just helps me when I solo an instrument, I can see what frequency it has going on. I may not be able to pick them out with my ear, but the analyzer can kind of help dial in some problem frequencies for us. It also shows me if there's any noise or low frequency home or rumble or anything like that , I might have going on in my mix that I that I can't hear or don't realizes there and especially if you're working at home on a laptop or something like that and analyze is gonna help you see all those low frequencies that you know your laptop is not able to reproduce. So I definitely recommend picking up one of these. If you don't already have one, I'm sure there's some free ones out there. I know waves has their paths analyzer, which I've used extensively in the past. It's great plug in a swell. So the next video we're going to jump in and start mixing the drums. 5. Mixing The Drums: now that we've got our effects channels Master bus and Record channel all set up, it's time to get into the drums for the drums on Shine the Light. I recorded all the tracks dry without EQ or compression. I felt this would better simulate a simple recording session, likely in most home and project studios. I usually start in most mixing sessions with the drums to get a reference point for adding the rest of the instruments. First, we'll go over the routing and the panning of the instruments in the kit, and then we'll touch on the plug ins and effects for each instrument. In addition to the processing on each part of the kit, I'll show you how to use samples, toe ADM. Or Consistency to the Snare Drum. How to get rid of excess Bleed in the Tom Tracks on how to use tape saturation and drum bus compression to add punch and control to the overall drum sound. Let's get started 6. Routing and Panning: OK in this video, we're going to run through the routing and the panning of the drum kit and the plug ins on the drum kit bus. But first, let's take a listen to the fully mixed drum kit. So this is the drunk it with all the plug ins on the tracks. Basically, it's the mix of the full song, minus the instruments that aren't drums. All right, so that's what we ended up with for the final mix of the kit in the song. Now let me just turn off all the plug ins here and the sins so you can hear the dry tracks as we go through the routing. One of the first things I decide when setting up the drum kit is, of course, the panning. You know, where do you want things to sit in the stereo field? Now there are basically two main ways to set up the panning, and in this style of music, there's, you know, the drummers perspective and the audience perspective. With this mix, I felt the audience perspective was really the better way to go. Now what that means is the panning of the drums is set like you're sitting in the audience watching the drummer, so the high hat is pan to the right, and the low Tom is pan to the left. That's assuming that it's a standard pop rocket with the high hat on the drummers left side . So let's take a look at the different instruments and they're panning here in the drum kit . All right, we've got to kick drum tracks. There's a kick in, which is really just gonna be picking up the beater and the kick out, which is going to be focused more on the low end of the base. I've taken these two tracks and routed them to a mono bus, named it kick and then routed the input of that model auxiliary sent to that same kick bus that we just created. So now both kicks are going through that one auxiliary channel, and the output of that mono kicked buses being routed to a stereo bus called drum Kit. So every track in my drum kit is eventually going through this drum kit bus. Now with the snares, I've got a snare top Mike and a sneer bottom mike and actually have 1/3 track here. That's a snare sample added in each course of the song. Now the way the drummer hit the snare wasn't as consistent as I wanted in the course. So I added a snare sample with plenty of snap and crack to make sure that the snare kept its energy during those parts. And I'll show you how we got that in a later video. Okay, so the routing for these three snare Mike's is pretty similar to what we did with the kick drum. Um, they are all being routed through a mono auxiliary send named snare. And that's going through this mano auxiliary track, also named Snare, And it's going through the drum kit bus and the kick in the snare. I've got them panned straight up the middle. We'll just leave him right there. The high hat, slightly to the right, Tom one again, slightly to the right and Tom to God, it said about 45 about halfway over to the left. In this song, I felt one that Tom's were all the way left and all the way right. They were just too big for the song. Ah, you know the drums are not supposed to be stealing the show in this song. So I left him, you know, a little bit more in the middle. The toms are also routed to the drum kit bus. The next two mikes we have are the overheads, and those are panned hard left and hard, right, And you guessed it routed to the drum bus. We've also got a mono room, Mike. Now this mike was set up, um, about knee high, about six feet in front of the drum kit. Pretty much centered, left to right in the room. And that one's going to stay pan to the middle for this mix. I used that to help give a little bit of depth to the kick in the snare. A really nice reverb on it are nice decay. And the last two mikes in the kit are the room Mike's now thes were set about 10 feet in front of the kit, kind of off to the side to the left side, into the right side. So I've got them hardpan left and right again, the polar patterns of these mikes were set to omni directional during the recording. So they really captured the whole sound of the room and signature sound has a great sounding room, and all three of the room mikes are routed to the drum kit bus, and that drum kit bus again is routed to my master bus that we set up in one of the earlier videos. Now let's take a look at the plug ins on the drum bus. So first I added an Ampex to track tape machine. Um, I wanted the drums to have a little more power and control in the mix, but I ended up adding this plug into the bus about 80% of the way through the mix. So I set up the controls a little differently than if I'd added it, um, right away. But let's let's take a listen to what the tape machine does. All right, So when it put it in, you can really hear that tightness of the kick and just the overall control that it adds to the entire kit. Let's take it out here for just a minute. I feel that body in that fullness. Come back in. All right, let's take a look at the next plug in here. This is the sleep digital virtual bus compressor again. Now, this time I'm using the top section, which is the SSL model. I've got a fairly fast attack and fairly fast released times using a ratio of 4 to 1. No high pass on this guy and just a little bit of makeup gain not too much in the gain reduction. You'll see that actually go down a little bit when all the plug ins are added to the rest of the drum bus. And that's it for the panning and the routing of the individual tracks in the drum kit and the plug ins on the drum kit bus next will move on to the kick drum. 7. Kick: before we get into the kick drum, I want to take a minute to talk about grouping similar tracks to take advantage of some of the time saving key commands. Here in the mix window, I have all my drums set up in a mix Edit group. I've also set up a Kick Drum Group, a sneer group, a Tom Group and overhead group and a room group. Now, for each of these groups, I have the solos, mutes and volumes following the group. This helps me mute and solo the different groups of instruments very quickly and easily during the mix. So if you take a look at the group section of the mixed window here in the bottom left corner, there's a cool feature that gives you single key access to suspend your mixed groups. Let me show you how that works. If I wanted to solo just the kick drums right now, I'm hitting solo on the kick and it's soloing all of the drum tracks because they're all grouped by hitting a on my keyboard that suspends the Drum group, and now I can solo just my kick drums. You can use this single key suspend method with any mixed groups you've created as long as you're in the mix window. Now, something else I like to do is solo safe. My auxiliary tracks. So in this case, we're looking at the kick sub Master. To do this, you hold command and click on the solo button of the track. So now, anytime you solo a track in your session, that track doesn't get muted. If you want to hear a track routed through that channel, you don't have to solo that auxiliary track. Now you just solo the track you want to hear. In this session, my kick is routed through the kick bus, followed by the drum bus, then my master bus, and finally out the pro tools Master Fader. I made sure to solo safe all the auxiliary channels in the signal path so I don't have to solo those buses. In addition to soloing, the individual tracks I want to hear. It's just a big time saver. All right, so let's take a listen to the kick tracks by themselves. Now, since these two kicks are grouped clicking solo on one solos, the other so you can use the tip. I just showed you, or you can use the group clutch. And you do that by just holding control and clicking on the solo button. So this will work on any group parameter in the pro tools mixer. Okay, so now let's take a listen to just the kick in. Mike. You can hear some snare bleed into that mike. So the first plug in that I put on there is the stock Pro Tools Expander Gate. Now, since the kick is much louder than the snare, it's the one that triggers the gate open. Now I'm not fully gating out the snare hits, just turning them down like six or seven D V. That really leaves kind of a more natural feel to that kick drum. If you let the gate close totally, it really makes it sound unnatural in the mixing. You'll hear that the next plugging in the chain we have. Isn't he cute? And since this is the kick in Mike, I'm really just pulling out a lot of low end and adding a little bit of high end, and we're doing that really to get the beater sound of the kick. And then we dipped out a little bit at 148. It's kind of a Wolfie frequency there. The next plug in in the chain here is a compressor, and it's just kicking back it, you know, maybe five DB or so, and that's to take out some of those louder kick. It's then I ran it through our room reverb that we set up earlier and then through the short plate, and that's just to give it a little bit more ambience. So let's take a listen to kick out Mike, and by itself, that's pretty nasty. There's a lot of high end in there that I'm gonna want to get rid off. So remember the kick out. Mike is really just for the base for the low end of that kick. So first off, I've got Aniki one here, and they use the low pass filter to cut out all the high frequencies. Um, dipped it at 117 hurts to get rid of some of that wolf Penis there and boosted it at 65 hertz to give it a little bit more push in the low end. I also added a high pass filter at 38 hertz to make sure that there was no inaudible rumble sneaking into the signal. All right, so the next plug and I've got here is the are based from waves. This is basically gonna add upper harmonics of whatever frequency you choose. Here is the root, which is 65 hertz. In this case, it's also going to help the perceive base in little speakers like laptop speakers. The last plugging on here is the transient designer from SPL. This is great for adding punch or sustained instruments throughout the makes. I've got it running on a U A D card, but you can get it for native based systems as well. So I'm just adding a little bit of low and punch to the kick drum with this attack knob rather than compressing it. And that helps keep some of the dynamics of the kick out mike. So the soft hits aren't super Bumi, but they still have that punch in there that we want. And let's see the room here. No, I didn't end up using any that. So let's pull that off. Okay, well, let's take a listen to both of those together, and that's the final kick sound. Now let me let me pull some of these plug ins off so you can hear the before in the after. So there is the before for the kick drum and put these back in and there's the final. So during the course this mix, I needed the kick to fit a little bit better with the base. So I added an e que on the kick subgroup and let's take a look at it. So just ended up pushing up a little bit of 70 hertz and pulling out a little bit. At 41 I felt like it helped the kick push a little bit more through the bass guitar. So that's the kick drum now in the next video will be taking a look at the snare. 8. Snare: Okay, so let's take a look at the snare tracks here. I've got a snare top, a snare bottom and the snare chorus or snare crack, I think, is what it's called. So let's focus on the snare top track first. So right off the bat, you can hear a lot of bleed from the high at the first plug in. On their is the expander gate you could really hear. That makes a huge difference. So again, just like the kick drum, I'm only using the gate to turn down the bleed. Just a little bit, not fully gated out. And you can see him using the side chain filter here. And that said it. 425 Hertz. Now that's a high pass. That's just allowing thedetroitbureau circuit toe on Lee. Look for signal below 425 Hertz. There's plenty of snare living below that 425 Hertz, and there's no high hat, so that helps me make sure that the high hat is not triggering this gate. I have the range set to just negative 8.4, again just turning the signal down a little bit. Let's check it out even really hear big difference there. So because we're gonna be putting this snare through all sorts of river will be compressing it. And we don't want that high hat bleeding into any of the further processing we're going to do on the syndrome. All right, Next, let's take a look at the Cube. And usually the body of the sneer lives around 200 hertz. So we boosted that here, and I wanted a little bit more snap on that snare drum right around 5 to 10 case. So I also cut all the lows there. I didn't want any low frequency beliefs from the kick drum, and there's really nothing usable in a snare drum signal below. It hurt, So just go ahead and cut that out. Next, we added a little compression, and I really like what the 11 76 does to us from this'd the U A. D model, which is very, very true to the hardware. Now the 11. 76 has a set threshold. So you use the input knob to add signal into the unit to get more compression and help put knob kind of even that signal back out. I've got the attack, said here about three and the release set all the way fast to seven. So it's grabbing snare drum right away and letting assumes the snare drum drops below the threshold. I just have maybe five DEA gain reduction on some of the high. It's so is that bypasses Here, you hear the condo sound, you hear that? That's aggressive sound as I put it back in, and I did want to get just a little more snap out of that snare drum without mawr compression. So I used transit model later from Sony Oxford, and it's just adding a little more excitement to the start of that snare. Let me pull it out here. Don't mess again, I put it back in. You can hear that excitement come right back into the snare drum. Now let's take a look at the snare bottom and didn't do a whole lot to this track. Just a little eq you so you can see pulled out most of the low end and add a little little bit of sizzle right around 1.5 K and then a little more at five and 10-K The goal here was really just to get some of that crunchiness of the bottom snares Teoh, come up and cut through the mix. So now let's take a look at this third snare track that I added. This one is where we kind of start thinking outside of the box. Now, when this song was recorded, we had a drummer record single hits at the very end of the session. So soft, medium and hard, kick snare and Tom hits as well as some crashes. So I had found a couple snare hits that were good, solid cracks, good solid hits on the snare, and I used an audio sweet drum replacement plug in to place those new sneer hits on a brand new track exactly in time with the original snare hits. So I'll show you the process in the next video. So I think I mentioned that the drummer was a little inconsistent with the velocity and where on the head he was hitting the snare. So some of the hits here, especially in the chorus, are really, really full, and some are a little thin and weak, and in the course, the snares really need to cut through the mix. So I took those samples we recorded at the end of the drum session and found a snare with a really good solid attack. So listen to that snare. So as we listen to that snare, you'll hear that it's really nice and consistent, and it's gonna help our snare cuts with a mix in the chorus. Now you can really hear the snares hanging on in this sample. And when I added it to the other two drums, it really sounded unnatural. So I'm gonna use the expander gate to shorten the sustain of this snare. I've got the attack of this plug, INS said, as fast as it can go, and the release and whole time set pretty fast, too. So that just allows the attack of the snare drum to sneak through the gate So I e que the sound a little further to remove some of the extreme highs and lows. I added a little to 75 1 K and five K and lastly, just kissed it a little bit with 11 76 so fast attack time and slow release. So let's check him out altogether. That's near sample and put it back in. Yeah, and it really helps at a nice element that snare cut through the mix. Okay, now that we've got all our snares together, let's take a look at the plug in on this snare bus. Let's turn. It was on. So you hear it. Just have another compressive. Another 11 76 is a different model, but essentially the same thing. So I've got all the snares routed through that bus, and we're just using this to control the volume throughout the different parts of the song . Because we added that third snare tracking there. Snares overall get louder in the course, so this compressor is really just there to kind of help. Help came that in the course. So next we've got a little bit of room and added a little bit of short plate, a little bit of long plate. Help draw that two K out a little bit and then a little bit of this ping pong. Now it's pretty low in the mix as it sits right now, and it's in the background for most of the song. But I did push it up in a few spots, have using pro tools automation mainly in the pre chorus and the bridge. So check it out and we'll go over the automation that we used in the song and one of the last videos. So the next video we'll be using an audio sweet plug in tow. Add that snare sample. 9. Snare Sample: in this video, we're going to add a snare sample on 1/3 snare track. It's a sample that was recorded when we recorded the band. So at the end of the tracking session, I had the drummer just give me a bunch of single hits, basically had him hit each drum at different volumes, letting the drum decay fully until hitting the next drum. So I'll be using one of the recorded snare hits for this video. So the first step is to make a new audio track. Now, the drum samples gonna live on this track. I've created that track here and named it Snare Crack, and I've also added that to my drum group and my snare drum group. Next, make a 16 bar selection on the track that you're going to analyze, and then you want to pull up the drum replacement plug in. So I got Massey D R t here from the audio sweet menu so you can use this plug in a couple different ways. Um, let's see. First, go over here and hit. Analyze. Now this is going to analyze that 16 bar selection you made on that snare top track. So the first way adds thes little trigger points based on the volume of the transients in your selection. So you just pulled this little slider over until the only trigger points left are the ones on the snare hits that you want to keep. Now you've got to be careful not to choose ghost notes. Now, I'm pretty familiar with this track, So I know that, um, you know, like this guy, here's a ghost note. It's a little louder, so I think I'm gonna keep it. But that one's a ghost note right there, too. So maybe let's move this over a little bit and there we go. We'll get rid of that one. Now, Massey says the best way to set these sliders up is to mind the gap, meaning you'll most likely get the best results if the slider ends up somewhere in this gap here between the clusters of hits on the left and the right. So next I'm going to click on that snare track that brings the selection down. Then go over here to samples and I already have a sample loaded in there so we'll just navigate to the sample here now this is the sample we're going to use, All right. So go back over to the timeline and go down to the bottom. Right corner hit render. And there it is. Theoretically, those snare drum hits are perfectly in time with the trigger points you set up earlier. I'm just gonna push the volumes up here a little bit and render again to get a little bit louder and let's do it one more time. There we go. That looks pretty good. So that's the first way to do it. And let's just take a listen here. Now, remember, that's got the gating, the Q and the compressor that we put in the last video. So that's why it sounds a little funky. Okay, let's go ahead and undo all this, and I'll show you the next way that Massey will analyze Theo Audio. So the next way I'm going to show you is a deal to use in a track if there's bleed from other instruments in the audio file. So if you click on the learned tab and then make a selection around one of those sneer hits and then hit learn, di rt will learn the Tambor of the selected hit and use that to analyze the next selection that you make. So think about it. If you have ah, loop that has kicks and air high hat on that stuff and you want to just take the groove of the kick of the snare perfect way to do it. So I need to go back over here to the timeline and move these sliders back. Um, then I can flip back over here to learn and move the slider. Using the learned sample to recognize those hits, I find that when you use this function, Massey not only picks more of the right hits for you, but it also places them more accurately in time with the original. It's pretty accurate anyway, but you want to go through an audit. The new audio file against the original now makes your tablet transient is turned on up here and then zoom in a little closer and then just hit the tab key. And visually, just check those out and make sure that they're lined up and they all look pretty good. Except maybe for the 1st 1 Sometimes the first hit can get off, so let's go back there and fix it, which zoom in again, um, a little bit closer and will select around that hit. And then I'm just gonna break it using the B key on my keyboard. So I had be just breaks it and we'll zoom in again and just kind of slide that over. Now, you want to make sure that those tour in phase it looks like they are. It looks like they're all right after everything is visually in place. You'll want to go take a listen through the section and make sure all the snare hit sound good. So that's Massey d rt and adding a drum sample in the next video. We're gonna take a look at the toms. 10. Toms: Okay, so there are just too Tom's in this track. And like we saw in one of the previous videos, I've got them panned audience perspective. So Tom one is the high Tom Pan, just slightly to the right, and Tom to is the low Tom panned about halfway to the left. I didn't have to process the Tom's too much here because I used the same method I showed you in the last video to replace the Tom Tracks with new Tom samples. Now again, these Tom samples were from the same drum kit recorded separately at the end of the tracking session. Remember, the sound of the toms is also captured in the over head mikes. So if you use a sample from a sample library or it's a different pitch from the original Tom, you run the risk of creating a cord from the different pitch. Tom's playing at the same time. Then you have to manually pitch the new sample up or down to match the recorded sound, and sometimes that distorts the sweetness of the new sample. So, if possible, I almost always try to use a good sample from the original kit. Okay, so Now with that disclaimer out of the way, let's take a listen to these Tom's and I'll just select a range here and let's turn those up a little bit so we can hear him. And let's take a look at the e que. Okay, let's flip over here and just change the selection so we can just hear that. Hi, Tom, a little bit. And let's play. Just continue to play this Tom here with the Q ends, you can really hear it now. 700 hertz seems to be kind of one of my go to frequencies for Tom's. There just seems to be kind of this boxing this in there and I almost always end up pulling out frequency right around 700. So let me just put that 700 back in. You can hear that boxing this is back and we'll pull it out. Yeah, and that really cleans up to Tom There I added a little bit of the route frequency, which is right between 101 150 on this one and then at a little bit of crack up there around 2.5 and five k. So Let's take a look at this low, Tom. Pretty much the same. He que on this one. I moved the low shelf around just a little bit, a little bit lower on the Tom, but these were good sounding Tom's to begin with. Let's move on to the effects. So first off, we added some room Nice, big, healthy amount of room to these, and I think we did the same with the short plate. Pretty big gave a lot more space with that long plate. I want those. Tom's a sound pretty big. Let's flip over here to the edit window. Take a look at the way forms Here again, I used massive G R T just like we did on the snare track. But this time, instead of adding a second track in addition to the original Tom Track, you know, with all the bleed from the other elements, I replaced the tracks with the new clean sample. I used a duplicate playlist, and here is the original. So we'll play that for you can hear all the bleed and the low Tom really bringing even when the drummer it's kick drum. So I didn't want any of that spilling over into the mix. Now you can also hear a lot of symbol bleed when he hits the crashes. And then when you add the highs in to get the crack of that Tom, you essentially end up adding more symbols into the mix, which is not what we want to dio. So there's a few Tom hits where this symbol hangs over. So if we were to try and cut out all the junk from this original track, we'd end up cutting off the symbol, decay and also some of the Tom Decay, and you would definitely hear that in the mix. So that's why I chose to use those pre recorded Tom Samples instead of trying to clean up these Tom tracks. Now, if I zoom out here and go to the end of the session there, there you can see where I recorded all the drum hits. Like I mentioned before at the end of every drum session. I like to have the drummer record all the individual drum hits you could see. I've got some lows, mediums and hard hits. Not only does this give me the ability to use them in session, but Now I can keep them for my own sample bank or use them in other sessions if I need him . Custom drum samples. All right, that's pretty much it for the Tom Tracks. And in the next video, we'll check out the high hat and the ride. 11. Hi-Hat and Ride: Now let's take a look at the high hat and the ride. There's usually so much high hat bleed in the overheads, the rooms and the snare Mike's that I almost always end up writing that fader pretty low. However, we still want to give it a little bit of attention, so I'll open up the e que and let's check out the settings. I pulled out all the low in below 180 added a little bit of sizzle at two K and just a tiny bit of high frequency shelf. Now, when we bypass that e que you can hear, it's pretty dull, and it gives a little bit more life when we put it back in. So let's check out the compressor. If you look at the gain reduction meter on there, you can really see that Theo Snare seems to be triggering that compressor more than the high at. And if you look at the way phone there, you can see that's snares poking through a lot of snare bleeding. There it could be pretty tough to get good separation between the snare and the high hat. So what I'm doing with the compression here is really just trying to squash that snare out of a signal or down in the signal. So take a listen to the UN compressed signal and in the compressed signal, I've got that set up with the pretty fast attack in fast release time to just get that snare and then let go. I added a little bit of ambience with the room and the short plate, just to make sure the high hat kind of melts into the mix. And let's get over here to the ride. Um, should get over here to a place where there's some ride playing. Now I'm gonna make a 16 bar selection. I'm using the Ford Slash key on the numeric keypad to put the cursor up there in the numeric text fields at the top center of your screen. If you keep hitting the forward slash key, it will drop the cursor down to the length field. You could just type in the length of your selection pretty quick and easy way toe make a bar or 16 bar selection. So now let's take a look at the Q on this ride. Just push up tear here now as a bypass and UNB I passed. You can hear a little wolf Penis in there, and I really wanted to get rid of that. So let me turn off all the individual bands. So did using the Q three. I was really able to zero in on that nasty frequency. Let's push it up here so you can hear it now. That's actually a little sound that I didn't notice till later in the mix, so I had to pull it out. But once you drop that down, you here. It just really cleans up that ride. So let me just put these bands back in and just took a little bit out. At 7 12 we rolled off the low end and added a little bit of sizzle on the highs and then gave it a little bit of loom weaver. And that's pretty much the ride theme. Next video, we'll take a look at the overheads and the rooms 12. Overheads and Room: in this video. We're going to take a look at the overhead Mike's and the room Mike's. So let's start out by just giving the overheads and listen. Alright. So I've got two tracks for the overheads, a left and a right, and you can keep them on individual tracks or move them to a single stereo track. But I feel like you've got a little more control with two mono tracks. So we pull up the EQ. You here, Um and they're both ik. You'd pretty much the same way. Just adding a little bit of highs, taking out a little bit of the lows, man pulling out a slight little bit of that mid range. Now remember, some of the plug ins down the road on the drum Master and the master fader are adding a little bit of high frequency to the signal, so we don't want to crank up the highs too much here. The overheads are really there to grab the symbols and and, ah, you know, put a natural space around those individual drum Mike's. So let's take a listen with the EQ used off and on. So the EU que setting just adds a little bit of sparkle on top of those symbols and really just kind of clears up those overheads a little bit. So there is a pretty major problem here in the overheads that we need to fix on the right overhead mic. You can hear a lot of extra ambience, and I don't know how that happened during the recording. Could be a couple different things, but most likely one of the mikes was set to omni or figure eight, and the other was set to cardio it. So we've got to try and do something to that, because the inconsistency there is pulling the focus off center. So take a listen and really focus on that right track. You can hear the extra reverb there so you can really hear that extra room on the right overhead, and we want to come try and pull a little bit of that out. And the way that I'm going to do that is with SPL's transient designer. So we use this on the kick drum toe, add a little bit of attack on that kick out Mike, we're gonna use this kind of in the opposite way, so that's control down here this sustained. We're gonna use this to essentially pull down some of the river in that track, so I'll play the track for you and then I'll bypass the plug in and you can hear what happens to the sustain. Let's put this in so you can really hear the river kind of get pulled out. Now it's not perfect, but it's what we have to work with. And I think it works out in the final mix. All right, so let's take a look at the next plug ins down the chain. I've just got the stock avid compressors here, and these air pretty well set the same from the leftover head to the right overhead and again, we're using this compressor toe. Pull the snare down in these tracks. All right, let's flip over to the edit window and take a look at the wave forms here. You can really see the snares poking through, and that's pretty common on most overheads, depending on where the microphones replaced on how hard the snare was hit. But we do have a lot of snare poking through on these overheads. So again, just using this compressor to tame those big snare hits. This is with the compressor in and there's with the compressor out. And we added a little bit of room reverb to these just to kind of help time to the rest of the mikes in the kit. And that's the overheads. So let's take a look at the room Mike's. There's three of Amir without the mono, and the stereo pair will focus on that stereo pair first. So these are nice and big, and I really wanted to capture the big decay of the snare with these mikes. The room we recorded this in is a great sounding drum room, but we're going to slap a couple. 11. 76 is on here, and I have these set up in all buttons in mode, which adds a little bit of distortion and kind of a pumping effect. That sounds really good on these room Mike's, especially when you just want to crush him. So let's take a listen Now. They're sitting pretty low in the mix, and you can hear when they're crushed like that, they just really bring out the sustain of the snare. Now let's pull open the EQ use here and I have them in the track before the compressor, and when we on bypass these, we'll hear that really changes the sound of that signal coming out of the compressor. You can see I took out a lot of the lows and the highs you'll notice in most room tracks and even in a lot of overheads. The kick in the snare, the loudest parts of the signal. And when you compress those down and push the compressed signal back up, the symbols tend to come way up in the mix. So I pulled out some of those hives so the symbols don't jump out and scratch it in the face. I also pulled out a lot of the lows so that the base of the kick drum isn't triggering the compressor. Remember, for this mix, I'm using the room Mike's to make the snare bigger. There's a huge difference between the final sound when you compress the signal before or after the e que. And I want to get even Mawr sustained and less attack on that snare. So I'll push up the attack on the 11 76 as fast as it'll go, and I'll pull the release way back, and that helps give more sustained to that snare. But let's say we wanted to take it even just a little bit further. Open up the SPL transient designer, and we're gonna do the exact opposite of what we did on the overhead. So and we achieved that by pulling down the attack and pushing up the sustained. So take a listen as I'm you the SPL and put it back in the signal. You can really hear the attack of the kick and snare going away. Cool. That's a nice room sound. And it sounds great in the mix. Okay, so I'm gonna bypass all the plug ins so you can hear the unaffected room on let you check it out with the full drum mix here. All right, let's move on to the mono room and pull up the e que Now for this one, I pulled out a lot of the highs and lows again. I also put the compressor after the cube, just like we did with the stereo pair. I tweak the eq you as I listen to the output of the compressor. I really wanted to feel how that was affecting the compressor here again, like the stereo rooms, I'm compressing this track to add sustained to the snare. So as I pulled the low end back, you can hear a lot more of the you know, the base of the kick and same with the highs. Symbols just really jump out, so there's enough symbols in this track already. I just like to get that long snare sound in there. Let's take a listen to the final drum mix, so the mix is nice and punchy, with a lot of room. The snare cuts through, and it's nice and full when it helps Philip the mix. So let's listen with the room. Mike's muted. You can hear when the rooms come back in, they add a lot to the signal. Let's meet the rooms and the river herbs here, so just pretty much the dry drums with no ambience, put all those back and pretty amazing how much bigger the re verbs and the rooms make that full drum kit. Okay, that does it for the drum kit. In the next video, we'll look at some of the additional percussion 13. Percussion: okay. The next two tracks after the drum kit are the percussion loops. So let's flip over to the edit window here and will make him a little bit bigger so you can see him now. These air pretty run of the mill, and they were added just to get a little bit more high frequency energy in the chorus. They're just standard eighth note rhythm shakers. So let's take a quick listen to him. Okay? You can hear the audio loop pan to the right, and there's the MIDI loop pan slightly to the left. Now, because thes air pretty simple additions to this track, they're gonna live in the background, and they don't need to be huge or over processed. So let's take a look at the plug ins we've got on these tracks on the Shaker loop. I've just got a standard avid compressor, and we're getting about three decibels of gain reduction here on those loudest shakes. So if we bypass it and put it back in, you can hear just kind of taming some of those louder shakes, and that's allowing the quieter shakes to come up and be heard in the mix. Then we add a little bit of room and some short plate and a little bit along plate to the Shaker loop. Let's hear how they fit into the mix. Yeah, those are just tucked back in the mix, that kind of help move things along. In the next video, we'll be getting into the base. 14. Mixing Bass, Electric, and Acoustic Guitars Introduction: in the last videos, we were able to get a nice even drum sound consistent with this genre. In the next set of videos will be looking at the processing on the base electric and acoustic guitars for the base. I'll be using a single recording of a bass guitar recorded direct into pro tools and adding a base and plug in to give it a bigger sound. I'll also show you how to split the signal in the highs and lows and process them separately. This gives me greater control of the low end and allows the mid range of the base to move around independently from the lows for the main electric guitar and shine the light. We only recorded one pass in the following videos. I'll use this single guitar recording to show you some creative ways to add excitement in space to a mono recording. We'll also borrow the guitar part from the second chorus and add it to the first course to create that classic double track sound. At the end of this section, I'll show you how I use the cords from a strummed guitar to create an organ pad in the chorus from one of the software instruments inside pro tools 15. Bass Guitars: the base here and shine. The light has a few different parts, so let's take a minute to get familiar with those because each part requires slightly different processing. Let me get over here to the verse. So in the verse, we basically have just long sustained notes. Oh, okay. And in the pre chorus, it's a much more plucky base, and it's in that higher register, so there's a little less low end in there now in the chorus, we've got a really powerful baseline that really drives this part of the song. So we've got a few different parts to work with, and we need to make sure they all gel with the kick drum and that the low end stays present in the mix. And we want to be able to hear some of that string noise, too. So let's take a look at how we achieve that with the base in the course. Now it's pretty common one recording an electric bass to put a microphone on the base cabinet itself and also record the direct signal from the base. Now, this way, you can mix and match the kind of brighter tone from the D I or the direct and that usually darker, fuller tone of the base cabinet. Unfortunately, with Shine the Light, we just didn't have that option when we tracked a full band together. We're working with the direct signal only. So to help fill out the base, I duplicated the track and then added a bass amp. Plug in on that duplicated track on this plug in the mixed later is all the way wet. So we're getting no direct signal here. Just Aunt Model. Let's have a quick listen to just the direct signal and then the ant model and then both of them together. So this is just the direct signal, and you can really hear that clanking of the string against the fretboard. But luckily, this is a pretty percussive part of the song, and that gets masked by the rhythmic elements of the guitar and the drums. Okay, let's take a listen to our base. Amtrak. Remember, this is just the plug in. Yeah, there's plenty of low end there. Let's check him out together. Yeah, and you can hear that string really come back in. So together, this gives us a much richer tone, then just trying to boost the low end of the direct track. And as you listen to the notes he's playing, you can hear there's not a whole lot of punch on the attack of those notes. So first off, let's try and get a little bit of that attack back. So I added SPL's transient designer. We've seen this a few times in my mix. E I added SPL's transient designer to our base Amtrak. I just pulled up the attack here a little bit to try and get a little bit more that natural punch of the strings being pulled and let go and not the actual clanking in the strings. With that initial pluck that let go so you can hear the difference and you actually see the difference on the volume meter of the track. Let me get back over here to the chorus and will create a 16 bar loops so we can just listen through that again. Okay, check out the volume meter Here you can see the peak is living right around negative five db Now, to get this peak reading, you just hold command and click on the volume readout and the readout changes to the peak meter. So to clear that peak meter, you just regular click it. So see, it's living around negative five db So when I engage the transient designer, you see we get an additional two DB or so of gain on the attack of the plucks. So that really helps add some dynamics back into the bass part. And I did send a little bit of that Amtrak over there to our course bus, which has the dimension d on it. So let's listen to both of these together, and then I'll show you that course. Let's add that in now. What this does is it helps make the base a little bit bigger by giving it a little slight stereo nous. This is a very subtle effect, so it doesn't take focus away from the base being in the middle of the song. Now listen, when I'm you, the send here, it gets kind of thin, and then when we put it back in, their base, just sounds more full, more professional and more polished. So in these base parts, there's a lot of movement from low notes, toe high notes, and I felt like the low end on some of the higher notes was getting lost, so I split the bass tracks up again. I took both the direct signal and the AM signal and routed their output to a stereo bus and then created to auxiliary tracks, both having that same buses and input. So one of them will be for the low end and the other will be for the mids and the highs. So we're essentially cutting out all the highs from this base low track and then running it through our processing and then cutting out all the lows from this base high track and then processing it independently from the base low track. So that really allows the low end frequency of the bass guitar to stay in one spot even when the bass player goes up to those higher notes that don't have a whole lot of low end in them. So let's jump into some of the plug ins that we have on these two bass tracks so you can see here in the EQ U for the low track. I pulled out all the highs right around 180 hertz. Now, as this makes progress, I came back to the base and dipped a couple of those frequencies right at 68 103 hurts. And I also rolled off any of those low lows under 50 hertz and moving on to the next. Plug in. We've got the Cambridge e que This was also added later in the mix on the verse, there was one note that was really resonating at right around 90 hurts. So I pulled it out and it didn't really affect the rest of the track. So I just left that e que in for the whole track. And next I added transit designer again with just the attack and a little bit of the sustained. That's really to add more punch to this low bass track. You can really hear that punch on the first note of those three notes moving down the plug in chain we've got The waves are base with the roof frequencies set at 77 hurts. And that's gonna add upper harmonics of that frequency. So that really helps the bass tone to be heard on smaller speakers like laptop speakers. Okay, let me pull the volume of these audio tracks down so we can take a look at the compression . Remember, since these audio tracks are routed to the auxiliary tracks, the volume of the audio tracks will definitely affect any dynamic processing you have on those subgroups, just like changing the threshold of a compressor. So the last plug and I have here in the chain on this base low track is the L A. To and let's take a listen. We're getting about three db a compression and you can see the volume of this track is hovering right around negative 20. So if I pull the compressor off and take a look at that volume readout, let me zero it out here. It's still peaking right around negative 20. But when we put the compressor back in, you could definitely hear a fullness come back in there. I like this compressor for the low bass track for a couple different reasons. First off, it's an optical compressor, so the release time is gonna very automatically depending on the kind of signal coming in. So if it's a sustained note, it's going to release a little slower. If it's one of these more plucky notes, the compressors going to release a little faster. And and the second reason is the slower attack time of this older l A, too. So the newer l a two ways that you probably see have ah, a little bit faster attack time. This lower attack time helps add punch to the base. Okay, so let's bring in this high bass track. Now. I use the e Q three to remove pretty much anything under 200 hertz. Okay, so the next plug in is Cambridge que. I'm just adding a little bit at one point to Kate. That's really to get a little bit more of the aggressive tone of the base. Now, the next plugging in the chain here is the L A three egg. So this is another optical compressor, just like the L A, too we used earlier. It also has a variable release time. However, this has a much faster attack, and that's really gonna help out with controlling some of the pluck and the string noise that we're getting from this base. So I'm getting about five db a compression, and that's pretty good for this song. Really keeps that base tightened where it needs to be next in the plug in chain. We've got a little bit of distortion now. I felt like the bass tone was kind of getting a little too round, so I wanted to add a little more color in there. Let's put that chorus back on, and we'll just have a listen toe that finished base the way the drums and make sure they're all working together. - Net . Let's take a listen to the sustained bass notes here in the verse. All right, you can hear those nice, long sustained notes of the base. Now they're a little low in the mix. So rather than turning up the base buses, I automated the volume of the audio tracks feeding the base buses. Let me just turn that back on here. So essentially pushed up the volume of these two bass tracks feeding the compressor. And let me open that up here. As we watched the game reduction of this compressor, you can really see. There we go. It's really pushing it pretty hard. So Steve notes were just a little low in the mix, and you were able to hear the pluck of the note. But the new would die off so when these tracks are pushed up into the compressors. Volume of the sustained note levels out and that allows the base is to remain audible throughout the entire section. All right, so that's the base. In the next video, we're gonna take a look at some of the electric guitars. 16. Electric Guitars - Verse: OK, moving on to the electric guitars. Now the electric guitars here and Shine the Light pose an interesting challenge because this first guitar track is pretty much the on lead guitar recorded through the song. It was recorded a single pass and that's it, except for some sustaining strums in the verse. So more often than not in the genre, there are multiple guitars throughout different parts of the song, and I felt this song needed more movement from the electric guitar between the different parts. So we had to try a couple different things to get that necessary movement between parts of the song with the verse guitarist. I duplicated the track and used a guitar and plug in, and I'll show you that here in this video and in the next video, I'll show you what we did in the course through some cutting, pasting and panning. Let's take a quick listen to the original track, and it's well recorded and sounds good, but because the instrumentation in the versus pretty sparse, this guitar needs a lot more help to fill out this section. So first I duplicated the track and routed those two guitar tracks to a master guitar bus on that duplicated track. I also added the soft tube vintage AMP Room, and I chose the Fender model. So this is a great sounding guitar AMP. And because we didn't have a direct signal recorded, we're running the recorded sound of the amp through the plug in, but it still sounds pretty good. So let's take a listen to this duplicated track. Now here's the two of them together, panned about 3/4 of the weight to the left, and right now you can hear that those two are out of phase with Theo. Beauty of this and plug in is that you can take that mike and move it back and forward to get a different sound, just like you would like in a real guitar. So this also introduces a little bit of delay on the signal. Further, the MIC is from the anthem or DeLay. E added an E Q three after it and reversed the polarity to correct that face problem. Listen how that sounds with the e que in and the So if I click this polarity flip button now they're out of phase. And when I click back in you can hear how that really solidifies the signal. The sound is still a little off center in the stereo field, and that's okay. That's actually kind of the sound I'm going for. I felt that when I panned these all the way hard left and right, that sound was just a little too wide. Eso pulled him back to about 75 about 65 70 and and it seems to just bring it into the middle a little bit and help solidify the sound on with that second guitar in there, it's It's a much richer tone than just Pan the first guitar, say, 30 degrees to the left or something. So did e que the guitar. I want to get it a little bit closer to the original that original here. So let's bypass this so you can really hear some tennis in there and kind of some scratching this. So I wanted to get rid of that, so I dropped a little bit of highs, told out a little bit at 2.8 K and boosted up 500 quick, the pretty, wide que kind of give it some body. And then there was some wolf Penis in the low end that I pulled out and let's listen to those together together with the original travel is a really nice full sound that's a lot more exciting than just the original car by itself. Eso still over here took the tarp us, and this is where I affected the guitars as a whole to fit in the mix. So in the last eight years, again was just even at that second guitar. So it made a nice stereo sound with first guitar, the CQ on buses processing the pair of them together. So the mid range dips in this EQ. You are really there to help the guitars live around the vehicle. Guitar sounded great on their own, but when I put the vocal in there with the guitars, there was just way too much mid range energy in the song. So pulling out a lot of one K really helped in the guitar, and I pulled down to K at a little bit of high shelf at three Cake on added a little bit more down there in the mid range, que en pointe, you'll really hear the guitar soften up. It almost beefs up the guitar, So I really like what the E cubed into the center of the next you have here was added later in the mix. And this is just pulling a little bit of 3.5 K with tight harshness in the Final course, when Jackson really gets into that crunchy guitar solo and that you Q setting really helps smooth the guitar. Next we've got a compressor, and this is the L A. Three, a again great sounding compressor for guitars that nice fast attack thistles just on here for a little bit of dynamic control. Just pushing down a few of those really loud notes and we go to another e que. This is actually bypassed for the whole song and total last guitar solo. And what that's doing is bringing back some of those mid range frequencies that are missing from the mess during the last Soul. When the vocal is out of the last plug in on the guitar chain is the twin tube from SPL. This is a great plug in tow. Add some harmonics and some tube saturation to your sound so you can hear this guy ads a little bit more bite without actually adding mid range. And so we're adding some harmonics around two K. That's where we have it sent to, and I'm also adding a little bit of tube saturation down there that adds a little more volume. So I've pulled the output down so that when I put the plug in and pull it out, you don't hear a big volume job. Eso for the first send here. I've got the short delay Now this short delays panned to the opposite sides. Eso everything on the left is going to the right. Everything to the right is going to the left thigh. Short delay is that's all auxiliary channel. We looked at it and one of the first videos, and it's set to around 60 milliseconds, so it's really an and slash delayed signal. Next, we've got the long plate. Just get guitar a little more space, and then we move on to this quarter. Note. Delay. This is actually probably my favorite delay in the whole song. It's got a little character, a little attitude, waves, age, delay, just set the quarter note, and then I got that ensemble plugging on their stereo wit. So if I bypassed the ensemble plug in DeLay just gets kind of bland. Yeah, yeah, when you put that back into really here, the character come back to the l. A. So I love what that quarter note DeLay does to the guitar said, and then and move on to the Ping Pong DeLay. Just a little book for saying behind the seeds. A little bit of that chorus, one of my favorites. Dimension D Again way. Just add chorus for a little effect in there and just help fill it out. OK, go back over here and take a listen to his guitars with all the plug ins bypassed. And then we'll put all the plug ins back in. That's with everything by best, just the dry signal. Actually, those tracks are kind of good buying that start putting things back in, right. That's it for the verse guitars. Next we jump into the chorus electric guitars 17. Electric Guitars - Chorus: all right. As we take a look at the chorus guitars, let me explain what I did to set them apart from the verse guitars. Now, if you remember from the last video, the guitar part was a single take from beginning to end, and that's pretty much it. So we didn't have time to double track the guitars in the chorus like I really wanted to. However, in this song, the guitar parts are exactly the same from the first course to the second course, and since everything was played to a click, I was able to take the chorus guitar from the second chorus and on a new track, paste it right here onto the first chorus, and I did that again with the second chorus. So I took the first chorus guitar part and pasted it on a new track in the second chorus. Then I panned one left and one right, but I chose not to go all the way hard left and hard right. It just sounded a little too wide. Here are the two guitars This one should actually be named right, and I ended up about 85% left and right you can hear. The pre course guitars are just a little off center and then is the chorus kicks in. We get a really nice wide electric guitar sound. So now let's take a listen to how that sounds all right. So had we not been able to copy and paste those choruses on to each other, we would have had to find maybe a more unnatural way to create that head change when they go big stereo. It's really nice head change from the pre course to the chorus and then actually back into the post course. So let's take a listen going back into the post course, and there is a little Pan automation here, but we'll hit that in a later video. Now let's go over the routing of these guitars. It's pretty much the same thing. This new guitar track that I made for the double guitar put that track in the electric guitar group and then busted to the guitar sub master. Now, since the guitar is the same actual recording of the same guitar in the same AMP, I pretty much kept the same plug ins throughout the chorus first pre course and bridge and since the instrumentation and shine the light is pretty much the same from beginning to end . I didn't feel the need to shape the chorus differently from the verse as faras the e que goes So now flip back over here to the edit window and you could see the two purple regions , those of the cut and pasted choruses. And now here on the end, this big chorus in the longer course, I was able to copy and paste those as well, but as you can see, there's a lot of little edits going on there. So let's jump in there. Jackson is a great musician, but his timing was just a little off from part to part. And that's no surprise. I mean, playing the same part for a couple of minutes straight. Um, you're going to get a little bit of sway there, so I just went in and listen to any of those strums that were a little off and just cut them in an inch them back and forth. I'm actually using the nudge function. I have my nudge set to about 10 milliseconds, and here on the numeric keep head. If you hit the plus or minus key. You could see that nudging back and forth now using the plus and minus keys to nudge Onley works if you have a numeric keypad. If you're on a laptop, you'll need to use the comma and period to nudge left and right. So let's have a listen to how those lineup. Now, as we listen to those two guitar parts, you can hear a little bit of difference from the left part to the right part. There's a few notes in there that Jackson changes from left to right, and it keeps that left and right guitar slightly independent of each other and creates a little bit more excitement throughout the mix. And I think that really works for us because there's a lot of cool vocal stuff going on in this big chorus here. But the guitar part doesn't really change too much, So having that little bit of left right movement is really nice moving on to the next part of the song. I've got this label as an instrumental, but it's really the guitar solo part. Now I've kept the same routing and everything with those two chorus guitars you can see the green region down there. I did add another guitar part, but let's have a listen first. So this is the part of the song where everything's going all out. The drums are going crazy, that bases walking along and the guitars air just blazing in full force. So when it was one guitar, it sounded pretty weak, and this is the part that really needs to jump out and just be going all out. So it was really just missing that elevating element. So I duplicated the guitar track one more time, and this time I put on a different and let's take a quick look at the EQ you first. I did e que this before it hit the AMP and then I went back to the soft tube and grab this Ah, Big Marshall. So I pulled down a lot of the presence and the pre AMP and pulled out a lot of the trouble . It was just really scratchy, and I wanted it to be cleaner. I mean, you could hear it still dirty, but I didn't want it to be too overly crunchy. So I really just pulled the pre amp. And the President's Nam around until I felt like it would occupy that space of a solo guitar or the space that a vocal might occupy. So now there's still a little bit of weird face thing going on here because remember, this is the exact same part now. I did copy the first half to the second half and the second half to the first half, but this third track was just duplicated from that second track that I had made. So to get around that I just nudged it forward or later in time, about 30 milliseconds. So let me fix some of these edits here. And as I play this for you, you can hear it's a little off time, little relaxed. But it still fits into that pocket. Okay, as Faras, the painting is concerned for this, but just left it straight up the middle. Remember, it's taken the part of the vocal in this part and volume wise, it's louder than the other two guitars because once again remember, it's taking up that focal point. So that's pretty much that section of guitars and moving on to the last section here. The outro. The outro is essentially the same set up as the verse guitars, essentially the same as the verse guitars, but with a lot more, DeLay added. So there's a little more river batted as well to kind of draw the audience back. And I also pulled the panning in with some automation. Kind of bring the focus back into the middle here, and I'll go over the automation in one of the last videos. But that's it for the chorus guitars. Next, we'll take a look at the acoustic guitars. 18. Acoustic Guitars - Chorus: moving on to the acoustic guitars in the chorus, we've got four acoustic guitar tracks. There's two highs and to lows, and each one of those pairs are pan left and right. They're basically just double tracked. So I've got the highs 50 to the left and 50 to the right and the lows, 28 to the left and 28 to the right. I wanted to keep them a little bit more in the middle of the mix, because the electric guitars are a little bit wider here in the chorus. So let's take a listen to those acoustic guitars. Let's hear him with the rest of the track. Okay, so first off, they're all being routed to this acoustic guitar bus, which is ending up here at this stereo auxiliary channel. Now, if you take a look at each guitar track, you'll see that I compress them individually Now. I wanted to do this because of the slight timing differences between each guitar and then on the auxiliary bus. I chose to e que them all together so the whole group would fit in the mix, and I also chose to compress the whole group toe help glue them together. E use the l A three a on each star, and I just compressor a lot on yours. It's got that faster attack with the variable released, which is great on acoustic. I'm actually compressing them fairly heavy here because I want that rhythm and element of these guitars to be pulled up. So without the compression to softer strums kind of get lost in the mix. It also helps the guitars to cut through the mix by adding a little bit of attack without making them too loud, also adding a little ping pong delay to the left channels for some additional movement. All right, let's move over to the bus and take a look at the so first off, let me just bypass all the individual band so we can go through each one. So first I pulled out the big frequencies under a on In this case, I chose 1 36 and that gives these acoustic guitars right space to live without taken up energy from the base car. Now there is little muddiness around 200 that needed to come out. I really like the E Q three from pro tools for finding those problem frequencies. So if you pull the queue all the way up and the old shift option on move that frequency, it momentarily turns us into a band pass CQ so you can really zone in on your problem frequencies. There was a little wolf Penis here. There it is. I wanted to pull that out. Next. I did the same thing. Just boxing us here with this mid range frequency so you can hear that honky nous there. There was a lot of high end on the strings in this guitar and just kind of stuck out of the mix in a way I didn't really like. So I cut out a lot of the highs and then went in and pulled out a little bit more that mid range to give the vocal more room to sit in their own space. Next, I compressed group just a little bit, and this helps them sit right back in the mix where they're supposed to be. I think I gave him a little bit of room and the short plate. Now that short plate again is smoother reverb than the room, and it's just a tab longer than the room. Next we added a little bit short delay and let me pull these two ups. You can hear it. So once again, with short delayed just like the electric guitars, it's going through this little slack delay 64 59 seconds left and right on those air pan to the opposite sides of the bus. So the left side is going to the right side of the delay, and the right side of the bus is going to the left side of the delay thistles. That Haas effect, which helps add to the stereo field and kind of tricks the listener into making things sound bigger than they really are. Put all the effects in here so you can hear what it sounds like with everything going on a ping pong back in there. And then he is with way. All right, that's the acoustic guitars In the next video. We're gonna take a look at all the other supporting guitars 19. Supporting Guitars: all right. Now it's time to check out some of the supporting guitars in the song. We've got three different guitar tracks. There's a picking acoustic guitar in the pre chorus, a picking acoustic guitar that only shows up in the second verse and some sustained chords on the electric guitar that helped reinforce the chorus. First off this track is being routed to the Master Bus, and same with all of these supporting guitars. There's no subgroup in going on with ease. Let's start by listening to the picked acoustic guitar in the pre chorus. I pan this guitar to the right. I wanted to fill up a little bit of that space because the electric guitar is hanging out on the left side, and because this verse is pretty sparse, I use the panning between the electric and the acoustic help create a little bit of evenness. All right, let's focus on the effects on the acoustic guitar. First off, I pulled out some of that low end. It's pretty common on everything that's not a bass instrument to remove anything under about 100 hertz, and I'm pulling out a little bit more on this one now This guitar part is a really pretty line, almost dreamy. So I wanted some of the high frequencies to stay in there. However, things boxy frequency here at 4 33 we heard this on the acoustic guitars in the course. It's the same actual guitar, so some of those nasty frequencies are gonna be the same from pre course tracks to the course tracks. So I didn't really like that weird kind of wanking noise around 400 in Section 4 33 on. As I pull that down a little bit, you can hear how it really clears up the guitar. But I did want a little bit of mid range, so I boost it up right around 7 50 Just a little bit. You can hear that frequency right there. Help add a little fullness moving on to the compression. You can see I'm actually hitting that pretty hard. I really wanted Theo guitar to stay right where it's supposed to in the mix. I didn't want it poking out, and the l. A. Three a allows me to squash it so it stays in that same spot. Take a listen, since this guitar is kind of dreamy, and I've already got other delays happening on other instruments. Namely, the delay on this electric guitar. You can hear that kind of Faizi Corsi DeLay that's going on in the background. I didn't want to put any delays on this guitar. I wanted it to kind of live in its own space without delays. So I just put a little bit of short plate on there and a little bit a long plate to kind of help thicken it up. And I also wanted to widen it out a little bit. So I added some dimension D to it, and that really helps fill it out. So that's the pre chorus acoustic guitar. Next will check out the verse, acoustic guitar and these air just nice sustained plucks. Now with this instrument I still wanted to keep with kind of that dreamy vibe we had going on in the pre chorus. So I kept a lot of the highs in here and ended up pulling out that for 44 50 and then rolling off most of those lows. And this guitar is really mentum just kind of live in the background and gonna hang out back there but you can see on the volume meter plucks it. Those plucks get pretty loud. So pulled out the l A. Three a again and once again, hitting it pretty hard about five db, a compression that helps hold it where it needs to be in the mix. Keep those sustained notes holding on filling up that space. Next, I put a multi channel delay directly on the track, and you can see that's just the stock pro tools DeLay and I left the right side mixed knob completely at zero on. Move the left. Mix up a little bit. Put it on quarter note. So check out what that does to the stereo field of the instrument as that. Bring that mix lighter up you can hear it moves up to the right side a little bit when I pull up. That left mix eso Now The dry signal on the left is only about half assed loud. Is the dry signal on the right, essentially panning the initial dry strums halfway to the right on. Then we've got the delay coming in on the left side, so it gives it kind of that cool space with the delay on the left. Now I added that delay to the track after I added the effects on the sends. So I'm gonna mute this delay so you can hear the effects. How I was hearing him when I added first, I wanted to add a little bit of stereo nous to this mano guitar, So I send it through that ambient slap bus. You can hear that weird little wobble in their kind of adds a nice ambiance and help spread it out across the stereo field. Then I put a little bit of plate on it. Let's go back here and put the delay on. Let's check it out in the mix. No way. Now with first base has got those big, long sustained notes as well. So this guitar, with the addition of those effects, really help fill out the mid range. All right, let's move on to this chorus guitar thing is just a nice open strom on the electric. Let's hear how it interacts with everything else in the mix. There's already a lot happening in the upper mid range in the mix, so I really wanted to place the focus in the mid range on this guitar right here. I ended up pulling out a lot of highs and a lot of the high mids. Also a lot of the lows in the low mids. They really just left that mid range. And then I used the factory pro tools compressor on here. But I have this one set with a pretty soft knee in a fairly slow release time with a pretty fast attack. So it's really catching that signal and holding it in place, and you can see that volume is really holding a very steady right there. I sent quite a bit of this to the ambiance lap on. It helps again fill out that mid range, of course, on then, a little bit of that ping pong delay in their Teoh get a little bit of movement and here it with the rest of the track theme. And that guitar comes in again in the other chorus of the song and you could see goes on all the way through that whole big chorus at the end. So that takes care of the supporting guitars, the e que and compression helped him live in their own sonic space, and the effects helped to give those mono recording some space and some with In the next video, we'll take a look at the organ and then it's on to the vocals. 20. Organ: and the last instrument will go over before we get into the vocals is the organ Now. This organ was added after the initial tracking. The chorus just felt like it needed something else pushing it along, and I thought an organ would work well, so we're just using the factory DB 33 from Pro Tools. Now this organ is modeled after the Hammond B three. Let's take a listen to how it sounds, so basically just took the cords from this strummed guitar and added them on this instrument track with DB 33. And from there I just adjusted the draw bars until I got a little bit brighter sound that I thought would work well in the mix. So let's have a listen with everything. It's really nice when you're working with a MIDI instrument in the mix, and you can kind of tone shape before you hit all your plug ins. So there's a little bit less e queuing to do. So let's take a look at the EQ you So. Although this organ wasn't really low, it's still had some base in there that kind of stole some thunder from the actual bass guitar So I cut it about 126 hertz. I wanted a little more fullness in the mid range here and a little more sizzle in the highs . So the EQ you on here is very subtle. Let me turn it on and turn it off and you can take a listen. E was it to get more tone shaping from the SPL twin to. I needed a little more sizzle on the top on a little more crunch in that. So it's adding a lot more that Frenchy air at six cake on a fair amount of to saturation to kind of help crunch it up a little bit more. And I pulled down the outputs lighter to help even out that gain. So when I bypass it and on bypass it, you don't hear that volume jump. Wait 20 was pretty drastic of these settings, but let's hear how it helps the organ fit into the way you can hear. It's a little taller in the mix, and that tube saturation really helps dirty it up. Now let's go back and take a look at the cabinet here, so I've got the speed of the horn set too fast. E faster speed worked in a little better, but I wanted a little more movement than I could get from this instrument. So I went and grabbed the air Vintage filter. I'm gonna use the LFO from this to kind of help filter the sound in and out on even see. It's gonna go at a rate of about every two bars or every. Let me put this back in and hear what it's doing. So let me pull this back down and you can really hear it working here, coming in and coming out now. Initially, I had it set to around five K. I didn't want a hole on a movement, but this helps the organ move around in a different way than I could get from the instrument itself. I felt like the organ was a little monotonous, especially in the final chorus. So this helps take that Oregon and push it in and pull it out. I mean, you hear it, then it filters down and kind of sinks into the background. And then two bars later, it kind of comes back up again and then automatically filters back down. So I'm using this plug in to splash the listener with sound so they know it's there. But they don't get bored with it because it really just repeats over and over and over. And, of course, we don't want it to be completely dry in there. So I sent it to the ambient slap and then also David, wait a bit. A hole the whole helps it melt into the background. Gives it a little more five way. Well, that's it for the instrumentation in the song. In the next video, we're going to get into the lead vocals, then move over to the background vocals and then we'll jump into the automation so I'll see you in the next video. 21. Mixing Vocals Introduction: for the vocals and Shine the Light. There are three main parts. The lead background vocals and harmonies. For this mix, I wanted to make sure the lead vocal was right on top of the instrumentation and stayed present throughout the song. For this reason, I focused on the lead vocal track. After I mix the drums and then fill the rest of the instrumentation around the lead vocal, I'll show you how to use multiple compressors, saturation and very short delays to keep the lead vocal front and center in the mix. I'll also show you how to use side chain compression on the supporting vocals to help them melt back into the mix during the lead vocal parts. 22. Lead Vocals Part 1: Okay, now let's take a look at the lead vocals. There's actually quite a few interesting things going on here with the lead vocals in this mix. Now one of the first things I did is duplicate the track, so I've taken the lead vocal track, duplicated it and renamed it Vox's Two Effects. Really, before I put any plug ins on then for the duplicate track, I said, It's output to know output at all. And the reason behind this is this track is only going to be sending signal to certain time based effects like reverb and delay. As you can see by the plug ins on the track, it's very minimal. No compression, just a little bit of e que. Now I'll flip over to the edit window. It might be easier to see what's going on with the vocal tract by actually looking at the way forms. So the main reason for using the UN compressed vocal is all of these little vocal peaks. So these are all gonna be kind of splashed into the vocal effects like reverb and some of the longer delays, the compression and EQ. You pretty much have evened out all the peaks in the lead vocal track. So I don't want this. You know, this even wash of reverb and delay effects going on. I really want the reverb in the delay to kind of splash in and be louder naturally, when Jackson sings louder so kind of explain this a little bit more. Um, think about it From the time you were born, your brain has been trained to associate louder sounds with more reverb so we can use this unconscious association to our advantage. When we mix, it basically creates the illusion of Mawr dynamics. At the same time, you were actually removing dynamics with compression on the lead vocal, so it frees up space in the mix because you're not drowning in reverb. So I'll hit, play and show you how that sounds. So on this line right here, really listen, you'll hear a lot more of the delay and reverb on a couple of these louder lines. Ah, like I said earlier, that really allows for these natural little splashes of the delay and reverb. I started doing this a few years ago, and I really loved the effect that I get from it, so that's the duplicated vocal two effects track. Now let's go through and take a look at the plug ins I've got on the lead vocal track. Bypass all the effects sends and plug ins and weaken. Just hear what's going on with the vocal Wayne, even though you hot. So with most pop music today, everything's got to be pretty well in tune. Um, Jackson. Actually, he's son. This very well, but I still through all attitude on their with a really slow retune speed, really just kind of tighten him up of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot grow up. So that's very minimal. Pitch correction once again just to tighten things up a little, All right, moving on to the next plug in. Actually, let's look at all of these here real quick. You can see I've got an e que a de esser, another e que a compressor, a second compressor side chain compressor, a tube saturate er, another di essere and a very short stereo delay Plug in. At the end, you can see I have a couple of accuse a couple DS er's and a couple compressors, and each one is doing just a little bit rather than having one handled the full load. And each one has a specific job, you know, some accuse or better at pulling things out and some accused or better at adding musicality . All right, the first e que! Is the e Q three from Avid. And once again, I love this as my first e que! In the effects chain. It's really a great plug in for quickly finding those problem frequencies and dipping them out. So let's take a listen to Jackson's vocal part of confusion. Will you Let go? Went even though you hot grown called despite so during the course of the vocal performance , I heard some nasty frequencies in there that I wanted to pull out. And finding those frequencies on the E Q. Three is really, really easy. Um, I know I ran through this method in one of the guitar videos, but because I use it so often, I'll show you again just how easy it really is. So first I'll put the queue all the way up to 10. Then, while holding shift and control on my Mac keyboard, I'll adjust the frequency knob up and down in the vicinity that I hear the problem. Frequency of confusion Will you let go? Went even though you have using this really steep band pass filter method helps me quickly find all the group that I want to get rid of. Will you let go? Went even know you hot uncle by would ever. So right here at 6 52 there is this kind of nasal e frequency that needs to come out. So I'm just gonna end up dipping that a few db like four or so id repairs. It repairs itself. Repairs itself are No, you let go. Uh, when Even though you hot grown cold and I did that same thing at 1.33 K I moved the mid frequency band around and found that there was some things going on there that I didn't really like. I felt the mid frequency in his vocal was a little too overpowering at times. So I dipped that down a few db and the twin to buy added later down the chain helps kind of add some of that great back in there. So there's some interplay between the different plug ins going on. I also pulled out a little bit of 2 15 and on the pole, techie que further down the road ended up pulling out a little bit of 100 as well. But we'll get to that. So I always roll off the low end on a vocal, especially on a lead vocal. Um, I tend to roll off the highs, right About 12 or 15 K It's still a little too high there. It doesn't sound very pretty in it ends up just really being a bunch of harshness. So and then I added a little bit of high frequency shelf it like 2.2 K All right, the next plug in down is the waves di essere of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot grown cold this by whatever you and I'm using the wide band for the first di essere so that when the S triggers the attenuate er, it pulls down the whole signal, not just the highs. I find that when I used this setting, it cuts down on that list factor that happens when you have too much ds ing. I usually end up setting the frequency writer between six and eight k and then just pulled back the threshold until I got the amount of DS ing that I wanted. All right, moving on of confusion. Will you let it go? Next? We have the poll Tech pro from Universal Audio. It's very musical. E que. I think there's a bomb factory version out there that comes bundled with pro tools, and there's a ton of other Coltec models out there. There was still some harsh mid range in Jackson's voice and this poll. Tech did a really nice job of gently pulling those down right around 1.5 K I pushed the knob up here, which is actually the dip frequencies, so it pushing the novel actually pulls down 1.5 K This is not necessarily a decibel rating . It's just how it's labeled on this e que. I also pushed up some four K and then down here on the E Q. One p portion of the plug in. I attenuated a little bit at 100 hertz and also boosted some at 12 K They set this to a broadband with here, so it's actually boosting, probably back down to like six K and all the way up. But remember, I cut off all those nasty high frequencies appear in the e Q. Three, and then I gave it a little bit of attenuation at 10 Cate to kind of soften it up. So let's have a listen with the plug in, bypassed and then plug in engaged of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot grown cold this by whatever you been told it repairs, it repairs itself. Repairs itself are no, so you can really hear that mid range clear up. It's not so nasal Ian Harsh and this boost right here at it, a little more air to his voice. Now the next plug in is Theologian, 76 actually, the blue faced 11 76. I love this compressor. It's very, very fast, and I almost always use a pair of compressors on my lead vocal, and this is the 1st 1 usually so it's a fast attack fast release, and it's really to take down those peaks that just poke through. So I want the compressor to quickly grab those peaks and then let go as soon as that peak is done. I don't want that next word to be compressed also. So on the 11 76 turning the knobs all the way to the right puts it on its fastest setting. Let's take a listen of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot grown called this by whatever you been told it repairs, it repairs itself. Repairs itself are no of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though, So you can see I'm getting about five db a gain reduction. And that's a I mean, that's a pretty fair amount. Um, you know, But here again, this compressor is really fast. Both the attack and the release just there to grab those peaks, and it adds a little bit of character as well. Now, the next plug and I've got on here is the Fairchild, which has a warmer, richer sound to it. This'll one is set to time constant one, which is also a fairly fast attack and release, but still a little slower and smoother than the 11 76. So let's take a look at the way form. Here. You see these peaks and valleys like, um, pretty big peaks in big valleys, one after another. This vocal performance is very dynamic from word toward So I wanted to make sure I had another semi fast compressor on here. Let's take a listen of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot grown cold This by whatever you been told it repairs it repairs itself. Repairs itself are no. You can see on the Mir were hitting maybe 4 to 5 db once in a while. So we're getting a total of about 10 db again reduction between the two compressors. So, you know, about five on the 11 76 and another five or so on the Fairchild. So we're pushing it pretty good, but I think it really helps glue the vocal in the right place for this song. And the way that the two compressors play off each other sounds really nice on Jackson's voice. 23. Background Vocals Part 1: moving on to the background vocals. I've got them highlighted here and you can see we have two mains to lows and to highs, and I'll flip over to the edit window here and show you what they look like. So let's go ahead and take a quick listen to them. Actually, let me over to the originals on this other playlist. There we go. Oh, oh, so they're sung very well. There's a little bit of pitch discrepancy between the two sides of each pair, but we're gonna fix that. I initially tried to put Auto tune in auto mode on each one of these tracks, but they were too far out of tune, and Auto Tune actually pulled them to the wrong notes so you could open up on a tune and do it in graphic mode to fix each one of those. But I think Melody Line is a little bit easier to use for this situation. So on each one of these background vocals, I added melody line to the first insert slot. Then, within Melody line made sure that each note was correct. From there, I recorded them on to new tracks. Let me show you how to run through that process. There's a couple cool key commands that make things a lot easier. So the first thing I did is create six new audio tracks. So there we go and they show up here as audio. 12345 and six. I didn't bother to rename them, because I'm just using them to record the melody line audio to those tracks. And then I'll move the new clips over to the original tracks on new playlists. So first off, I want to set the input to each one of these tracks to a bus. You can go through here and pick a bus for each one, but I'll show you a cool key command here in pro tools that will actually cascade all the inputs in ascending order. So on this first input ah, hold shift, an option that will apply whatever function you do to all the selected tracks. But if I hold command in conjunction with shift and option, so I'm holding shift option command on my Mac keyboard and click and select a bus. I'll select 50 because you noticed that six of them, after 50 year old white and that means they're not being used. So we've got enough. So I'm going to select Bus 50. And now I'll let go of those key commands and you can see pro tools cascaded those inputs. So I've got six brand new buses feeding six new audio tracks. Then we'll go back over here to the original tracks and select the last one. Then I'll hold shift and select the 1st 1 Now they're all selected. Then I'll go up here to the sends and once again, hold shift option Command, go to my buses. Select bus 50. It's actually off my screen. Here we go. So select bus 50. Now I'm going to let go of those keys. So you see, we've got bus 50 over here and here. Bus 51 here, us 51 over here, 52 and six buses feeding those six new audio tracks. Now, if you hold command and click on the arrow next to the send, that'll pull up the favors for those sins, hold shift option again and click on one of those failures. And that brings them all up to zero and still holding shift an option. Click on the p to make one of those pre Fader sends. That applies it to all of them I'm using Pre Fader sends rather than changing the outputs, because I want to record the tuned vocal at full volume to those new audio tracks. If I had changed the output to the background vocals, I have to set the volume 20 and I would lose those settings that I have already chosen for the mix. So then let's go over here and, ah, let's get this out of the way So we'll select all those audio tracks, then hold shift, option and click on the record arm button to enable all the selected tracks. Then I'll flip back over here to the edit window. And since these air essentially just copied from the first part of the chorus to the second part of the course and then copied Teoh each course, I only tuned and will only record the 1st 4 bars here. So now we'll hit record. Oh, uh oh, there we go. There they are, recorded in at full volume, the tuned vocals. So now we'll go back up here to my original tracks, and since they're all grouped together. When I create a new playlist, they're all going to switch to new playlists. So I'll grab those and dragged them straight up to the new playlists. Let's get him all. Here we go. And since I have already got an eight bar selection, so here's my length. Eight bars. And I know that when I made this selection, it's right on the downbeat. But let's just make sure so going in here 32 1 and ending on 41 K that Zabar's, I'm just gonna hit Command D to duplicate these clips and then will make sure that they play in time here. Then we go back over here to the mix window, and I'll just go ahead and deactivate all the melody lines, doing that by holding control, command and clicking on the plug in. Now I do that because I just don't want melody in playing the whole time, chewing up my DSP and rather than going into melody in and pitch, correcting the same four lines over and over and over and over again, or trying to copy and paste them within the plug in, which is actually more trouble than it's worth for many reasons, I chose to record the pitch corrected vocals onto the new tracks, pull those back up to the original tracks and then duplicate them from there. This just makes life a lot easier, so now I'll go through and delete all those tracks that we don't need. Then select all the backgrounds, hold shift an option and choose no send to get rid of those scents. Then hold command and click on the send to go back to the assignments. So I conceal my buses again and let's flip back over here toothy edit window and that's it . That's pretty much pitch correcting the background vocals. Now let me just choose my oh to playlist. That's the one with the pitch corrected vocals that I actually did earlier. So I will have those duplicated throughout the whole song. Now let's take a look at the plug ins and the routing of these background vocals, so I was sent them all to a bus, so I created a new auxiliary channel named It Owes and set that to the bus and named the bus owes all of these air just going straight, Teoh 24. Lead Vocals Part 2: So the next plug in down the road is the C one compressor side chain from waves. And I think this is one of those plug ins that gets overlooked, Uh, because it's not really understood. So it's essentially a frequency dependent compressor, kind of like a de Esser. So in certain phrases in Jackson's vocal, some of those high mids the really the midst a high mids jump out and sort of claw you in the face for lack of better term. If you use an e que to cut those out, you run the risk of having the vocal sound dole in some of his more controlled phrases. So this compressor allows you to pull out those troubled frequencies when they get too loud . So to make this work the way we want it to, I'm going to set the frequency to about 3600 Hertz, and I'll set the e que mode to split. That's that little red button in the middle of the plug in there, and that tells the compressor toe on Lee. Pull down the frequencies around the value that we set, so when that gets out of control, it's just gonna pull that down. So let's take a listen to what that does for the vocal. Here, this is with the bunion of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot grown cold this by whatever you been told it repaired and here's with it in of confusion, will you let go? Went Even though you hot grown called this by whatever you been told it repairs it repairs itself. Repairs itself are no. Oh, all right, let's take a listen to this in a different section of this song. Bear with me while I pull this up and there's no one around. There's no lights to be found, just two called Doc. Damn! And there's no one around now I went through the whole song to make sure that it wasn't pulling out too much. Um, you can also automate the threshold to get mawr less gain reduction if you need it. Let's take a listen to this next part dirty show on the line. Send me on my way back home and silver sky Sterngold In the midst of confusion, you let go and even know your hot grown cold. Despite whatever you've been told, it repairs it repairs itself prepares itself. I know. So now on this plug in, I have it set with a fairly fast attack and release here again. I just want to grab those nasty frequencies and pull them down, and then let go them quickly. I don't want any compression artifacts there, so let me get back to the original section. We were looking at standing in the shadow, uh, of confusion. Will you let it go? Okay, there it is. Now, the next plugging on the chain is the twin tube. And you saw this back in one of the guitar videos? I think so. I'm just adding a little bit of harmonics right around the two K range. And I felt that that helped add some excitement to his voice without being harsh. And then I added a little bit of saturation to kind of fill things out and also pulled down the output gain to match the input volume of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot wrong. Called this by whatever you been told. It repairs it, repairs itself, repairs itself. No. And this plug in just helps the voice cut through the mix. A little bit more Still moving on. I've got another di essere and after the compression and pushing up a lot of high end with the poll tech, I felt like the S is started to get a little too in your face. So I set this one to split mode. So now it's on Lee attenuating those high frequencies of confusion Will you let go? Went even though you hot strong called this by whatever you been told it repairs it repairs itself, repairs itself. I know So moving on to the last plug in in the chain here, This is just, ah, left and right delay that I'm using to kind of fill out the vocal a little bit. This one's thedc uber Time Cube. But you can get this effect from the pro tools, short delay or just about any other little stereo delay. Basically, this is two very short delays. A left and a right, So the leftist set the seven milliseconds, the right is set to 20. There's a little bit of high pass filter there, but nothing else really going on on the e que, um, the echo volume as it's named on this one is set maybe about 10% or so, not too loud, but it really helps fill out the vocal in the stereo field. So there's just a slight delay on the left and a slightly longer on the right. Let's take a listen of confusion. Will you Let go? Went even though you hot grown cold this by whatever you been told it repairs it, repairs itself, repairs itself, I know. So that's a fun little trick to kind of add depth and with to your vocal without, you know, noticeable delays or reverb or anything like that. It's also known as the Haas Effect. All right, moving on. Let's take a look at some of the effects on the compressed track here for the 1st 1 we've gone. It's sending through the eighth note delay, and this is just a very short, almost a slap delay of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot grown cold. I wanted that to be very subtle, so I didn't want it fluctuating with the loud words like it did with the reverb and the long delays on the box to effects track. So I put that send on the compressed track. Same with this ambient slap. Here. Check it out of confusion, will you? Let go Went Even though you have grown cool this by whatever you been told it repairs it repairs itself, repairs itself up. That's not mixed in very loud. It's very subtle, but it all adds up in the end, moving on to the next effect, which is the chorus. And that's sending over here to our body dimension D I'm not sending very much just a little bit to help fan Enough of confusion. Will you let go Went even though you hot grown cold This by whatever you been told it repairs every bet. Okay, The next send is to a vocal side chain. This one is going well. Where is this one going? Okay, this bus is being picked up by the side chain input of a compressor on the background vocal sub master And I'll show you that more in detail when we get to the background vocal video . But basically this is a pre fader send and it's output. The lead vocal is triggering a compressor on the background group fader. So whenever Jackson is singing the lead lines, the compressor on the background vocals attenuate the group by a couple DB. And when he stopped singing, they come back out to full volume. This is actually a really fun effect that we will go over in the next couple videos. Okay, on the UN compressed track sending to the effects. I just haven't e que on here, pulling out some of the lows and then pulling out a little bit of the nasal e frequencies in the mid range. I didn't want to much mid range popping up in the delays and the river herbs. And remember, this UN compressed track is not being routed to the main output. So you're not hearing any of the direct signal. This is just strictly sending to these effects. So the vocal plate, that half no delay and the ping Pong delay let me turn the focal plate on here and let's turn that track back on. And let's get rid of these for just a minute of confusion. Will you let go? Went even though you hot grown cold, Just buy whatever you been told. It repairs it, repairs itself, repairs itself. I know of confusion. Actually, let me play a different vocal. Let's let's go over here. Let's try this one. And it takes up all my time. Yeah, you can really hear it on the word takes it just pushes into that reverb and just it spreads it out quite a bit. Um, now I did on this lead vocal track end up using the clip gain to kind of pull the word takes down. It was just kind of hitting the compressor a little too hard, so you could really hear that kind of sucking the energy out of the vocal. So I manually turned that word down. But for the most part, I was happy with the compression. There were a couple words that didn't quite get along with the compressor, and I went and turned those down manually as well. But, um, I didn't do really didn't do much of that on the UN compressed voice again. I really wanted this to just gonna splash the effects. So let's take another Listen and just listen to that word takes the and it takes up all my 1000 clouds up above and it takes up all my okay. Now, the next effect on here is the half no delay. I won't see. Let's go ahead and take a listen to this one. Let me find the spot. Feeling like a rocking chair, moving back and forth and going nowhere. Now you're spot mean, your web. Okay, let's find this plug in so we can take a look at it. Um, here is the H delay. Now you can see I cut off the lows and the highs. So anything under 3 15 and over 1.72 is not going to pass through the delay. I also put a compressor on this track after the delay, and I'm side chaining it with the same input that's going to this auxiliary track. Now, I'm only sending a couple of tracks over here to use this delay. So that's why that side chain will work. Um, let's go ahead and take a listen to it feeling like a rocking chair. Now, as you're listening to this, keep your eye on the gain reduction meter on the plug in and listen to the level of the delay. Kind of tucking back behind the lead vocal, feeling like a rocking chair, moving back and forth and going nowhere now you're spot mean Your Web left me hanging in for the day, feeling like a rocking chair. So when that lead vocal is playing, the compressor is compressing here it working. It's on Lee compressing the delayed signal. So when the vocal stops, playing that delayed is free to kind of come up and hang on after the vocal stops playing. So that's another really cool effect to kind of help add a little bit of movement feeling like a rocking chair. Eso the next effect here is the ping Pong delay feeling like a rocking chair moving back and forth and going nowhere? No. All right, so on this guy, I pulled out a lot more lows and pulled out a little more of the highs. It's set to eighth Note said it on Ping Pong. Turn that feedback up so it pings back left and right, left and right, left and right, feeling like a rocking chair movement. Now let's take a listen to the dry vocal with no plug ins or effects, and then listen to the vocal with all the plug ins and the sentence, feeling like a rocking chair, moving back and forth and going nowhere. Now you're spot mean, Your web Love me hanging for the day. Well, just sample the verse Here, let me turn all of these back on feeling like a rocking chair moving back and forth and going nowhere. Now you're Spahn mean your web. You left me hanging in for the day feeling like a rocket. Cool. So that's the lead vocal on this song. In the next video will check out some of the harmonies and then onto the background vocals . 25. Harmonies: okay, It's time to take a look at some of the backing vocals for this song. So the 1st 2 tracks here are the Harmony tracks, and I've already got those soloed up. And as you can see, there's two of them, both named Chorus Harmony. They're the same lines just some twice, and one is pan to the left, and the other is pan to the right. Let's flip over here to the edit window. Now I've already got a range selected here so we can just take a listen to him dry, even know you know it's grown cold, despite whatever you been till now, those parts just pop up in the chorus. So here and here and then towards the end and then at the big chorus, we've actually got a little bit different line. So check that one out. You gotta shine the show on the shot, The Shot in the Shine showing the shine, the show on the show in the shop showing the shine, the show in the sunshine. Now these parts air sung very well, so there's not a whole lot of difference in the timing between the two parts level wise, they do jump around of it, tuning wise. There's a little bit of fluctuation in there, but I've got some auto tune going on. So for the background vocals at the harmonies, we want them to stay pretty well in tune with each other. Remember there, Really. They're just helping support that lead vocal, and we don't want them to draw any attention by having any wandering pitches. They're also tucked back in the mix a little bit, So let's take a look at the plug ins on these tracks. I have the same plug ins on the left and the right channels here, so let's just take a look at the 1st 1 First in the chain is our attitude. So I've got the retune speed set here in the middle and the tracking Not too fast, Not too slow, kind of in the middle is well, Jackson was pretty well on here. Just need a little tiny bit of tightening. You get a shine The show The show on the shine Shine, Shine Shine the show on the shine Shine, Shine, Shine, Shine, Shine. Now I've gone through the whole track and made sure that nothing pulls funny. You want to make sure that you listen to your auto tune if you're going to use it and make sure it doesn't pull any notes to the wrong note, Keep in mind that auto tune will pull whatever notice sung to the closest note, and sometimes the vocalist is actually closer to the wrong note. So if you're not careful, attitude can make a performance worse. If you know the key and the scale of the song, tell auto tune what to look for, and it will work a whole lot better for you. But if you don't know the scale or it jumps around, you can automate the key. Try to keep it out of chromatic, though. If the strong stays in one key. That what you reduce. The chance of auto tune pulling the pitch to notes that are not in the scale. If you're not familiar with how to use auto tune, there's plenty of auto tune tutorials out there, and I think we might even have one up moving on. The next plug in here is the E Q. Three. I wanted to pull out the lows and any of the highs, and there was kind of his nasal e frequency right here around 6 50 You got Shine The Shine The Shot on the shine The shine shine shine Shine the show on the shot And let's put that in the track So they're tucked back in there pretty far Remember just playing the supporting role So I didn't want any muddiness or scratching us in there So here it is again with the eq you and you Got shine shine, shine, shine, shine, shine, shine The you got the shine shine shine the It's a little smoother and just sits nicer in the mix Next down the road We've got a simple DS Or the same one from waves that I always use It's quick and easy And this one is just pulling down A little bit of the sound You gotta shine the shine The shot on the shine shine shine The show The show on the shine The shop All right, so that's the D S ER And next down the road we've got the compression now I did compress thes pretty heavily, So I want them to sit in their own spot Just tucked back away in that mix, you know right at that decibel level that I set them. I don't want them to pop out at all. They're they're just playing that supporting role. So I used the L A three a on the background vocals, partly because of the faster attack that it has, then the L A. To A, which is also another optical compressor. Now the optical compression is going to release automatically based on the material coming into it. So this is a great plug in. It works awesome on background vocals. Let's take a listen to the vocal line with the compressors You Gotta Shine the shine The Shot on the Shine The Shine Shine, Shine, Shine Shine The Shot Showing the show In the show you get And without the compressors You gotta shine the shine The show on the shine The shine Shine the show on the show on the show on the shot showing the sign So now we'll play the vocals without the compression in the track. And you can really hear him kind of moving around a little bit. And here's what The compressors Booth. Yeah, that tucks him in there pretty good. They don't move around at all That's exactly where I want him now. I did want to kind of thicket him up and give him a little bit of extra sheen. So I sent him through the chorus bus, which is going to Dimension d Take a listen what that does that really helps. Kind of make him sound sweet You gotta shine, Shine The shot on the shine The shine shine the show on the show on the shot The shot showing the show The show on the Now I've got that volume pushed up pretty high on the send Sending two Dimension D And we're getting a lot of that chorus effect and it sounds really nice, but you've got to be careful, though on this dimension D It's not a 100% wet plug in And what I mean by that, is it still let's a little bit of the dry signal through. So let me pull it up here, all right? Yes. So you've got five setting off 123 and four. And even that Number four setting, which is the highest setting, is not 100% wet. So by giving it mawr chorus effect on the send, I actually actually made the whole signal louder. So to fix that, I pulled back the fader here on these original tracks. You got shot, Theo? Yeah, that sounds really nice. That chorus effect really helps put that sheen and shimmer on those chorus harmonies. So next I added the ambience lap. Just a little bit of that one. And just a little bit of the ping Pong delay to give it some movement way. All right, so that's the big course. In the end, let me find some of these other chorus parts. Handle. Have you take a listen to the same effects on these other lines? The same effects that we added in the big chorus work well here, too. Way. So I'm really happy with the way those sound and how the effects help them fit back in the mix. In the next video, we'll take a look at the rest of the background vocals. 26. Background Vocals Part 2: Now, the reason I'm adding the compression and eq you to the group is that all of these air meant to be one cohesive unit. There is not a whole lot of volume changes throughout them, so they don't really need to be compressed and acute individually. I save some CPU usage by processing them all together. And had they been different lines or different words sung differently? Um, I wouldn't want to compress them all and e que them together. I mean, I still might want to eat que them all together, but I wouldn't want to compress them all together, But they're all pretty well close to the same tone. And they're the exact same line. So in this case, it's OK to e q and compress them all together without having affected any of them individually. So let's take a look at the first plugging on here, which is the e que First off just removed a little mud right around 50 range and pulled out a little bit of that honky nous right around one K. And I wanted to soften them up a little bit, so I pulled out a little bit of that 3.5, adding a little harshness in, um, I also pulled off all the high end. Don't need him in here, and you can see there's no di essere because there's really no s is in these. These are just owes. So normally there's a de Esser in my vocal chain, but I didn't need one on this bus. I did, however, used the waves side chain compressor again. Um, this one was with E J J P Girls box preset. So Jackson has a little bit higher voice. So this preset just really seem to work nice for his vocal performance. And again, it's just pulling out that harsh frequency it about in 3200 hertz. Something like that. So when the volume of that frequency crosses the threshold, thinks compressor is going to dip that frequency. Uh oh. And I'm only getting a few db of gain reduction, and that's just really to remove some of the harshness and don't want a huge effect happening with this compressor. So next we've got some compression with the Fairchild. Now, this is again just a really smooth compressor. Um, I do have it on the fast setting of time Oh, oh, ah, it's not compressing too much. Like I said, there's not a lot of variation in the volumes here. I just wanted a little bit more glue holding those together. And then next down the road, I've got this vintage filter. Oh, Oh, So this is actually a plug in that supplied Onley in the breakdown. I haven't filtering in and out, and we'll go over that in the automation video. And the next plug and I have on here is actually kind of fun how this works. So I put another compressor at the very end of this chain, and this is being triggered by this vocal SC bus. So on the lead vocal, I created a bus, named it vocal SC and made that pre fader send and I'm sending the lead Vocal out that So let's have a listen to how this compressor is reacting to this lead vocal triggering it Oh , oh, let me turn the lead vocal on here so you can hear it interact Send me on my way back home and soup disguised turn gold In the midst of confusion you let go and even lower your hot from cold Despite whatever you've been told it repairs, it repairs itself. So there's really only a couple lines there that the lead vocal is not playing. When the O's are. I wanted the owes to kind of ducked down just a little bit when that lead vocal Linus playing and then have them come back up for that other tiny bit when the lead vocal stops. So to do that, I use this side chain bus. So I'm essentially sending this vocal out that bus that I renamed. I think it's the one down here all the way down to the end. There you go. Vocal side chain all my side chains air down here So I said the lead vocal to a mono bus and renamed it Focal SC for side chain And on this compressor under the key input. I just found that bus and selected it. So now this compressor is only compressing when the lead vocal is playing pretty cool rather than going through and automating everything by hand, which on occasion you may still need to dio. But this is really neat and most of the time this will work better than going in and automating by hand, so it's going to save you a lot of time and probably in a sound better. So definitely listen to it when you use it in your mixes and make sure it gives you the effect you want now. Usually when I use this effect, I use it as the last plug in insert on my track. And I do this because I want the sound to already be compressed and held exactly in place. And then I want to add that side chain effect of that ducking effect that really gives me complete control of the volume there. All right, so that takes care of the plug ins on that track. Next, let's take a look at the effects sends here. So I really wanted these to melt back into the mix, so I sent them to the whole first home. Next, I sent them to the quarter note delay. Then I sent them to Horace Effect, thinking him up a little bit. Oh, last I sent him to the Ping Pong. And then let's hear him with all the effects in the mix here. Yeah, check out that ducking again. Um, right here in the first line of these background vocals just a split second. After those background vocals start, the word Shine comes in and just kind of pulls them back behind the lead dio. So I really like that vocal side chain effect to help tuck the backgrounds in there and along with the effects we have on there and the processing those background sound really good, and they just they fit right in their own little spot in the mix. That's it for all the tracks on the song. In the next video, we're going to go through the automation that I've added to give the track a little bit more movement and help add some more excitement to the mix. 27. Automation Introduction: the last videos in this class will focus on automation. Automation is usually one of the last things I do in a mix, although on Shine the Light, I experimented with effects and transition automation early on. Transition automation is generally the automation done right before the song moves from one section to the next. With automation, I usually listen to the song at a very low volume to make sure I can hear the most important instruments. I'll use this as a guideline for figuring out what instruments or parts to pull up or down to keep the song moving here and shine the light. There's a healthy combination of volume panning and plug in automation. Let's check it out. 28. Drums: all right now moving on to the automation. So the way I tend to approach automation is that there's really two kinds of automation. There's automation to fix a problem. And then there's automation to add excitement or some kind of effect. So throughout shine the light, there's both types of automation. First, let's take a look at the drums and the different kinds of automation that I've got going on in the drums to help, kind of even things out and to help build excitement throughout the mix. Let me click on my drums here, and I'll show all the volume Automation lanes first off for the corrective automation. I've got just a little bit going on here in the pre courses. So starting with the kick drum and the snare drum, especially in the first pre course, I felt they were a little loud. And I wanted things to be a little bit softer in the beginning of the song, to let the excitement billed as a song progressed. So in this first pre course, I pulled the kick and the snare down, and then in the verse and the second pre course, I pulled the kick drum down just a bit. It was a little too overpowering for those sections. Then down here on my drum sub master in the very beginning, in Verse one, only the high hat is playing, and I kind of lost sense of the drum kit there. So I chose to boost the drum group Fader during the first verse and then pull it back down as the pre chorus came in. Now it's only boosting at D B and 1/2 or so, but remember, it's boosting the whole kit. So take a listen to the high hat level as the song moves from the verse into the pre chorus for the day. And there's no one around there. You now you can hear the high hat kind of fall back in the mix a little bit when the pre chorus comes in. But that's OK because there are more drums supporting it there, in addition to the vocal coming in and really taking the listeners attention. So let's take a look at the breakdown here, let me get over there now. I just did a little bit of volume automation on the sub master to get rid of all of the symbol splash during the breakdown and let's take a listen to that. First, let me deactivate the volume automation here so you can hear it without the automation. So the symbols hang on for quite a while and I'll play it with the whole track. And that probably would have been OK. But I wanted the drums to come all the way out when the O's come in. So let's listen with the automation engaged. It's a really small thing, but it helps those owes have a little bit more impact. And, of course, I'd brought it all back up here for the last course. Um, that's pretty much all the corrective automation that I have on the drums here, and I suppose that last little bit could be more on the creative automation side. But let's head back over here and take a look at the pre chorus going into the chorus. I wanted to add a little bit more excitement coming out of that little break going into the chorus here, so let me just play that for you first. Let's see, let's deactivate these two effects so we can hear it dry. Okay, Now, I added a little bit of volume to the last snare hit of the pre course, and I did that on the room tracks here and again, up on the snare tracks duty. Oh, let me solo them and play that again. So that helps add a little bit more punch to that last hit, making it more forceful going into the chorus. I did that for each section. So the end of the first to pre courses into the chorus and at the end of the breakdown now to give it even mawr impact. I automated the send to this long plate, and I just did that on the snare drum. Remember, I've got this snare top in the snare bottom routed through this snare subgroup. So on the snare subgroup, let me go to the long plate level automation lane here. Um, let's pull up the long plate fader so you could see that in action. I splashed that last hit all the way up into that long plate, So check it out. Let's hear that with everybody in duty. Oh, so that helps add that extra layer of impact. Now let's check it out with the automation off Duccio feels really dry coming out of that snare hit here it with the automation on again duty. Oh, yeah. So that's just a nice little extra touch. Little detail, um, some kind of little layer of detail that will help set your mixes apart from just, you know, goody Q and good compression. All right, so moving on here in the post course, I added a little bit of Level two. That stereo room here, you can see. I think it's just high hat and maybe a little bit of snare playing in there. So let's take a listen to the automation there. Yes, so I just added a little bit more stereo room to that section. Now let's go over here to the snare track and check out this ping pong delay. So I added more Ping Pong DeLay. Let's pull up the level here during that post course section. I just splashed it in there, so let's check it out. You can really hear that delay going left right? And I did that same move over here at the end of the bridge, and I also pulled up all three room Mike's for that bridge portion and then let them all sink back down into the breakdown, so they just kind of work their way slowly down into the breakdown. And then, for that final burst into the last chorus, I pushed up the room, makes even more and then pushed up the entire kit for that last hit. So it's just gigantic. So let's take a listen to that. Now let's have a listen to that with everybody in all right? Yes. So that helped add a lot of going into that final chorus. All right, so that's pretty much all the automation for the drums. Next, we'll check out the automation on the base. 29. Bass: There's not a whole lot of automation here in the bass instrument. Um, the bass guitar is pretty driving and really keeps the song moving, for the most part. But I did have a couple little small volume automation moves. So here, during this long, sustained note at the end of the first pre course, I pulled that no down. Now, turning down that bass note, there really just made room for that cool little thing the guitar does right before the chorus kind of going into the course. The other bit of automation was here in the second verse, so these long sustained notes kind of start to get lost without that little volume automation I put in there. So if I hold command and click on the volume automation lane, that will turn off the automation. So let's take a listen to it with the automation off, standing in the way your attention to like So I definitely felt like some of those bass notes were louder than others, and the way I had the compression set already for the rest of the song didn't really catch the notes in this part of the song, like I wanted to. So when all those bass notes started off loud, and then they really tapered off a the end, and some of them really got lost now, since these based tracks are feeding these auxiliary channels and the compressors are happening on the auxiliaries after the base audio tracks, pushing up the volume on the base audio tracks actually pushes up the volume into the compressors. So if you remember on that base low track, there's the L A. To and on that base high track, there's the L A three, So the L A two is a little slower. L. A three a little faster. So let's take a listen while we watch those compressors and we'll see how those compressors react to those bass notes coming in. So I'll play it first with the automation off, and then I'll flip the automation back on, and you can hear how that really stabilizes, the bass notes standing in the way, like in this town. All right, so that was with the automation off. You can hear the bass notes kind of getting lost. So now flip the automation back on standing in the shadow. In this, you can hear how pushing that volume up into the compressors really rounds out the bass notes and helps pull the base together and just really helps glue it right where it's supposed to be in the track. 30. Lead Guitars: all right. Moving on to the electric guitars first, let's take a look at the pan automation. Now remember for these lead guitars. This top track plays throughout the whole song, and his panned further to the left. So it's actually further to the left in the chorus than it is in the verse and the pre course. And these two other guitar tracks here are the corresponding right hand sides. So this one is for the verse. This one is for the verse and the pre chorus, and this guy's for the chorus. So for the verse and the pre course, the panning is set to around 65 left and right, And then in the chorus, things get panned further to the outsides. About 85. Now that really helps create a different space when we jump from the pre chorus to the chorus is really a nice little head change for the listener. Now, there's also this other little part here. Let me zoom in for it, um, this little guitar riff coming out of the pre course, and I've panned that back to the middle, so it really helps bring the focus of that guitar here again back to the middle, and that also makes the jump to the chorus even bigger. So let's take a listen. Coming out of that pre course, just you can hear how the guitar really comes into focus during that note and then jumps back to the outside to the left, into the right for the chorus. Now in The Post course, I brought the guitars back to the middle again because the guitars are really are the lead instrument in the post course, Then coming out of the post chorus going into the verse, they kind of fall back to the sides, rial gradually, So check it out, coming out of that post chorus standing in the shadow. So with that automation on the pan and a little bit of volume automation that lead guitar in The Post course just kind of melts back in the background when the vocals come back in. And it's really a nice kind of seamless behind the scenes way to pull that guitar back behind the vocal. Then in the course, they go white again and then come back in for the bridge. And then on that breakdown, I did the same thing with that big guitar note right there. Pan it right into the middle. Oh, theme that just comes right into the middle and then goes back out to the sides for the course, and pretty much stays there throughout the course in the instrumental part and then at the very end, throughout the guitar Outro. I've got the energy focusing back in the middle and pretty much stays there in the middle all the way to the end. So right now let's back up here and go over the volume automation. So on that jump out of the pre course into the course, I've got a nice little volume ramp. Just kind of ramp it up here on that guitar line. That's just one more thing that helps kind of propel the song right into the chorus and in the post course, since that guitar is the main instrument. I turned it up about a DB, but it did it all from the lead guitar bus, and then in the second verse, I dropped it down another DB or so and then when the vocals come back in, pulled it down another DB and 1/2 so check it out and when you listen, really pay attention to the volume of that lead guitar standing in the shadow. So, yeah, it's down there, a couple db down for the verse, and then it comes back up for the pre course to add a little bit more energy. And then there's some interesting stuff going on here in the breakdown. I'll touch on that here in just a minute. But let's take a look at the end of the song here for the big chorus. I turned the overall guitar up to help really elevate the energy in the song and then towards the end of the instrumental. There's some booze and owes happening there, so the guitars come up even more toe, you know, help raise that energy again, really, to fill that lack of a vocal and then for that really distorted guitar part. I brought the volume up in the second half of that instrumental. So let's take a listen to that whole instrumental part. - Yeah , that's cool. You can really hear that guitar come up in the second half of that instrumental and just kind of take command of the middle of the song. All right, Now, Let's go over here to the breakdown and let's take a look at the automation I've got going on here on this lead guitar subgroup. So first I'm going to suspend the automation. And let's take a listen to how this little guitar riff sounds you can hear. It doesn't have a whole lot of excitement in it, and I'm sure Jackson played it with plenty of flavor. But you know, the compression on a guitar amp can soften the original expression. So take another listen without that volume automation, but this time all solo it so you can really hear that guitar part. I feel like it was supposed to come in hard and then really leave with a punch, so I kind of had to add that in myself. So I automated the beginning of that lineup, and then there's a little dip in the middle. And then on that last hit, it really comes up quick, and I wanted it to end pretty abruptly. So let's take another listen without the automation. Then I'll plug in the automation, and here it is with the automation, so there's a lot more attitude in there. Let's check it out with the whole track. Ah, that's a nice little bit of flavor coming out of the breakdown. So let's go up here to the main guitar tracks. And the last thing I did was pull down that long sustained note. It's kind of along the same lines as what I did with symbols. So if we meet that automation, you can hear that that note just really rings out way too long. Let me put that automation back in and you could hear it. So I really wanted it to be totally out before the those come in. Okay, Now the last thing I've got going on here is in the ping Pong delay. So let's pull that up and take a look at the level here. So in the post course, just like with the snare drum, I automated more ping pong delay in there. So that helps add a little bit more flavor to that part and the same thing here in the bridge. Now I really cranked it here at the very end. You know that guitar outro? I thought the Ping Pong delay was really cool on that part, and it helped give this kind of crazy atmospheric thing to the Outro. All right, that's pretty much all the automation for the lead guitars now. There wasn't any automation in the main acoustic guitar parts, so there's really nothing to show you there. But there is some automation on these other couple of guitars. Not much, but just a little bit. So on this pre chorus acoustic guitar and there I just raised the level. A couple of DB Jackson played this pretty quiet for the first pre course, and it seems just to get a little bit lost. So I pumped it up just a little bit and there's no one around. There's just and there's really no automation on this verse acoustic guitar. It's pretty straightforward on this other electric guitar that happens in the chorus. I think the Onley thing I did was bring down the last note. Yeah, that note just seem to stick out a little too much in both of those choruses, and I just brought it down a few DB say three or so, and that's pretty much it for these guitars. So next, let's take a look at the automation for the vocals 31. Lead Vocals: for the vocals here and Shine the light. There's a few different things going on. I did some clip gain automation and some regular volume automation. So remember this top track here is the Box two effects. So this track is on lease, ending its output to the effects. So really only sending to this vocal plate the half note delay and the Ping Pong delay. And then this Vox's track is the one we're actually hearing. And it's sending its output to the main master bus and also a few of these other effects. The very first thing I did was play with that first phrase. So remember the first phrase of the song is probably the most important. If you get it wrong, the listener is going to remember that for the whole song, and it sort of sets the mood and the tone for the rest of the song. So it's really important to get that first phrase right, and I just felt like the last part of the first phrase was too loud. So with the clip gain, I just pulled that down a little bit, feeling like a rocking chair moving back and forth and I pulled things up here a little bit in the box to effects track because I wanted the listener to get a sense of the effects happening here. And then the volume came back down just a little bit. So there's still a lot of dynamics here in this track to splash those effects in. So I'm really not worried about it. Okay, let's see what else we have going on here with the cliff gain. Um, let's check this out. Love me Hanging on for the day and there. Okay, Here in the chorus, thes two phrases were a little bit quiet. And then here in the second verse, these 1st 2 phrases were really quiet. And if I go here and bypass the clip gain, you can see and actually more importantly, here, the difference standing in, especially on the word above, on the last part above part just gets completely lost. So let's go back here and turn the clip automation back on. Take a listen standing in. So I really had to push the end of that word up quite a bit so you could hear the tail end and a little bit more clip gain over here on this phrase some time. Give it some time. Yeah, so that really took care of that phrase. And then over here in the chorus, pushed up those same words from thesis and chorus. And then there was a little something going on here. This little guy just pushed up that do. And then on this last do I just brought that down a few db. Now remember, anything you do to the clip gain is going to affect the level of the signal going to the compressors that you have on that channel. So it's usually a good way to take care of some of your dynamic problems without having to compress the life out of the track. Now let's check out some of the volume automation. So remember the track volume. Automation happens after your inserts. So after the e que. And after the compression. So when I'm making the volume moves here, I'm actually turning up or turning down the compressed signal. Whereas the clip gain is turning up or down the UN compressed signal. Alright, So back over here on the volume automation, there's a few things going on here at the chorus, so I pushed up the volume just a little bit to give it more energy as the song moves into that chorus. So it's not very much just a Devi or so let's see, negative 3.4 to negative 2.9. So, yeah, about a DB and 1/2. And then there's a little boost on that last word coming out of the chorus, all right, and then a little bit more on the very end of this word in the second verse. So I still thought, even with this clip gain here, that that end of the phrase could go up just a little bit to kind of pull it forward in your face. And that's pretty much the end of the volume automation on the lead vocal here. So now let's take a look at some of the other automation going on on these vocal tracks. So let me find the next bit of automation here. There we go. We've got something happening on this cendy levels, and that's the half note delay. So in the bridge part, the delay comes up. Check it out itself. I know. Give it some time, give it some time. So This is 1/2 note down here because it will be you give it some time. Yeah. I really wanted the effect on sometime. I wanted that word to just kind of ring out. You? Yeah, I really wanted that phrase to delay out as the O's were coming in. So let's check out the rest of what we got. Okay, So send E here. That's the ping Pong delay. And in the chorus, I just wanted those words or a few of those words or parts to jump out and up into the ping pong delay. So here is the send going to the ping Pong delay from the vocal effects track, and that effect is pretty subtle. So let me solo that up for you. So you can really hear it, Sean. Send me on my way back. Home and service guys turn gold in the midst of confusion. You let go Oh, and even know your hot girl. So I did that same thing throughout the course is same thing on the second chorus and the third course, and that's pretty much it for the automation on the lead vocals. 32. Harmonies: And since these were treated as a group, if you remember, they're all just going to this owes subgroup all the EQ you and compression and filtering and all that stuff is happening on that sub group. So really, most of the automation is also happening on that sub master. Let me zoom in here and get close so we can see what's going on. So for the volume, the first thing I did was to pull up that 1st 0 just a couple of db So negative 5.42 negative. 3.8. So check it out. The 1st 0 comes in a little bit stronger than the rest of them and then they dropped back down. And what that does if you don't know that it happened. Hopefully as a listener, you wouldn't realize that they came back down in level. So you splash it up a little bit more up front and then you can bring it down as the song progresses. And hopefully the listener doesn't realize that it dropped back down. And this leaves a little bit more space in the mix. So I've done that on all the other courses as well and then here again in the breakdown. Since the O's are really the only thing happening, I turned the overall volume of them up. So let's take a listen. Yes, so the who's really become the focal point of that breakdown, and then when the chorus hits, they get pushed back down into the background. So let's take a look at what else we've got going on here. There's some pan automation during the breakdown and let me just open up that second pan automation lane. So get that open, all right for the beginning of the breakdown when they come in their panned to the middle, as you can see here. And then as the breakdown progresses through those 1st 2 phrases, they spread back out fully left. So here again, for this breakdown part, the use of that Pan automation there really helped bring those vocals into the middle of the stereo field and then really more into focus. Okay, and let's move on through these lanes here. So that's the hall. So for the breakdown, I just pulled that up a little bit to give it a little bit more hall through the breakdown and then moving on, we've got send be mute. That's gonna be the quarter note delay. So I just unm you did that quarter note delay Onley for that section. So in that section it's muted, and now I'll play the section here in the breakdown with it a new muted so you can actually hear that delay happening on these shoes. Do you remember that quarter note delay? I think that's the same one we used on the guitar. So let's deactivate these other ones so we can hear just that quarter note. Delay. Yeah, that's that Faizi Spacey delay that, um, that we used on the guitars earlier on. So that just happens in the breakdown for these owes and let's bring everybody back and then moving on here, send sea level. That's the chorus. So there's a little bit more chorus effect in that section, and then the last little bit of automation here is the filter. Let me pull up this filter here, get over there. So during the break down, these vocals air filtered out just a little bit. There's a high pass filter, so it's cutting all the lows, and it doesn't move around a whole lot but it moves a little bit. So what do we got? Um, from 3 44 up to 5 37 So let's take a listen and watch that cut off move so you can hear those background vocals really thin out over the course of that breakdown. Now let's check it out with the whole mix, Theo way you could hear after the breakdown. When the chorus kicks back in, the background vocals go back to being full, but they get pushed back down in volume, so they're just kind of sitting there in the background, all right, and that's the rest of the automation. 33. Conclusion: all right, Well, that brings us to the end of this Siri's. And there are countless ways to mix different instruments in every genre, And what sounds great on one instrument in one song may sound horrible in another. I hope you'll be able to successfully apply what you learn in this tutorial to your mixes. Remember, the average listener doesn't care what compressor you used on the lead vocal of the third song on that one record. As long as it sounds good, that's the main ruled of mixing It Sounds good. It is good. I hope you enjoyed this class. Thanks again from signature sound, feeling like a rocking chair, moving back and forth and go in the way way. Now you spot me. Your, um left me hanging for the day and there's no one around. There's no just let go even know you go by my like in this town, you know, all the some. Give it some time, way, - way , way