Transcripts
1. Welcome: Hey everyone, welcome to mix essentials. Just wanted to say, thanks for being here. Introduce myself. I'm Jesse Ostia here in Nashville, Tennessee where I mix out of, produce out of and right out of. I'm not just the mix engineer, but I'm also a musician. I'm part of many projects. And the one reason I'm so passionate about helping people learn how to mix is it's the one thing, the biggest thing that has allowed me to put out as much content I have been able to over the last ten years, every project has a goal, whether it's passive income or whether it's out to the world. And I know you're in a similar situation. So I'm here to help you fine tune your mixing abilities. This is mix essentials. We're going to talk about EQ compression and we're going to talk about using effects. I'm going to show you how I use them. And hopefully it can show you some ways that you can utilize these tools to better your mixes. Now I know everyone is on a different journey and at a different level. So I've also included in these videos timestamps of things that I'm going through. So if you feel like you understand the frequency spectrum and you don't need to go through that again. You can just jump ahead again. Thanks for being here. I'm excited to away in a start off here with some basic navigation before we jump in to EQ, compression and effects. Thanks guys.
2. Navigation: Hey guys Jesse here, welcome to mix Essentials. I'm super pumped to that you've joined me on this journey. We're going to go through EQ compression and using effects, which other three foundational things that you need to learn to bring your mixes to the next level. Feel confident about the music you're putting out and even generates more income. If perhaps you're a producer and you're wanting to add mixing to your tool belt. So first off, I just want to go through some basic navigation within Logic, just so we're both looking at the same things. And I'm not brushing over things that I would perhaps otherwise think the IRR understanding already. So let's jump in where on the main timeline here I have opened up mix session of this song that we're going to be going through in all of the videos with EQ compression and effects. I produce this song also. So it may look a little bit different than perhaps a session that I would get from a client who's sending me full audio tracks. So your situation is going to depend on whatever you're working on. So you might have tracks that look like this. You might have tracks that are simply the full length of the timeline and the only audio. If you have questions about how to get your song mix ready, if you are sending out or if you need help talking through that process with other clients. Take a look at the bonus video called mixed prep, that will be very beneficial for you if you have questions regarding that. So as I said before, we're looking at the main timeline here, there's two main pages. We have the timeline or the main view, and then we have the mix of you. You can go up to View and Show Mixer, but I would recommend learning the quick keys, which is x. So you can simply hit X and go over TO mixer right here. So these tracks that I have on the left from top to bottom, if I were to click the top that hold shift, click the bottom, and go back to my mixer. You'll see that they now highlighted. So from the main page, top to bottom relates to left, right. Now, at the end, of course, you see here I have some other channels which are buses and affects, which we get a lot deeper into that in the effects video. Also the McMaster class, if you're jumping into that. So we're just going to look at one channel strip here and go through everything from top to bottom to make sure we're understanding everything we're going to be working with. So let's go back to the main timeline. I'm going to unhighlight everything. Let's go up to the kick here and we will go from there. So if you have either done the current update of logic or perhaps your settings on this same as mine right here. You can always go up to View. Channel strip components and you can select or deselect options here, I think the default shows the audio device controls which you don't need. I think that might be gone now in the new update, you also have options like you can put the track number, you can put a scribble strip for notes. If you would like to have that, you just click it and it shows up at the bottom. So let's start from the top to the bottom. So if you've ever seen an analog recording console or a soundboard, perhaps something that looks like this. Before everything turned to digital, there was a literal channel strip for every input on a soundboard. This sound would come in the top of the channel strip. It would get gained up and it would go through all of the steps moving from top to bottom, all the way to the fader where you would choose what volume you want to send out to the speakers or to the tape or whatever you were recording to at that time. So visually that's still how everything is set up. So we'll start at the top and go through all the options if you can understand the signal flow and what is actually happening to the sound as it makes white down the channel. That's going to help you understand everything that you're doing to affect the sound source, in this case a kick drum. So at the top you have a Settings tab. This is where you can go to the JK. We see track folder, which is from my plug and play bundle. And you can choose all of these options. So for example, we could select kick one, and it pulls up the channel strip here for a kick drum, if you haven't dove into the presets, I invite you to take a look at those. Honestly, it will make things so much quicker. You can literally choose the instrument that you're working on and choose that preset. And you will be a lot of the way they are to Abenomics. So the first option there, then we have a little preview here of gain reduction. If you have a compressor on the channel as it's actually compressing, you will see some gain reduction happening here as well. Next we have an EQ preview like this one over here. Really, all that is is if you have the channel EQ, which is the built-in basic parametric EQ. If you have that on the track, it's going to show you a preview up here. You can either click down here to add it or you can also just click up here and it will automatically add it. But it is basically just a preview of this plugin in the Audio Effects section. I'm going to remove that. Next we have the type of input. This is a stereo input. You also have mono inputs. This one right here should probably be a mono input because it is a kick drum. How ever this specific situation, I actually did add a little bit of reverb initially just to widen it up. So I actually made it stereo. In that case, sometimes you might have a mono track, and at some point it switches to stereo because you selected the wrong type of plug-in or something like that. So just be aware that this is telling you what channel mode your input is. Next section we have audio effects. This is simply where you put plug-ins on. So if you're brand new to this, a plugin is simply an effect that we put Inline of the audio signal to make a positive change. So we're going to jump into talking about EQ and compression and effects. And this is where you would put those as you click the drop-down here, it opens up all of your plugins. And you would just select what you wanna do right there. So we'll obviously be doing a lot more of that here in the coming videos. Next we have this sends section. This is where you would send the signal out to a different bus, a different process, an effect, a reverb and delay back in. And we get deeper into that in the effects video. Next we have the output. The default is stereo output, but this right now is sending to a Drums Bus, which we'll touch on routing a little bit in this course. Also, if you just load up my mix template, the outputs and the routing is already set up for you there as well. Next, as we're moving down, we have the group section. This is where you can group two channels together. For example, if I hold shift and click the one next to it, I can click Group and hit new group, call it kick. I didn't even know what that channel next to it is. It's probably not another kick. You can go up and down and they move together. I'm going to say no group because they don't need to be grouped. And then as we move down, we have the automation section here. Everything when you're playing back the song should be on raid. We touch on this at the very end of the effects video. A little bonus for you, but you can change this mode to latch specifically if you're wanting to start writing in some automation on your tracks. And we'll touch base on that in a little bit here. But we dive in pretty deep to automation in the mixing master clause. Next we have pan, which is left, right? Where in the sonic space you want the sound signal to be sitting. Just be aware that if you're working with a stereo track, the default is actually not a stereo pan. This over here is a stereo pan, meaning if I right-click and hit stereo pan, the actual stereo signal left and right, we'll pan together in the sonic space. However, if you keep it on the default, which is balanced on a stereo track, if you pan, you're actually saying, I want to listen to the left side of that signal, or I want to listen to more of the right side of the signal. So just be aware of that if you're dealing with a stereo signal, if you're doing a mono signal, it's simply just pan. And you can put it on the left or on the right. After that moving down, we have the feta, which is how much volume you want the kick drum to have. We have the record button, the input listen button. You're not going to be using those during the mixing process. But if you're doing vocal essentials, you will be obviously using that because we'll be recording a vocal. We have immediate, we have a solo button. So you can listen just to that channel or you can meet that channel. And then we have the scribble strip, which has the name of the channel on it. One last thing, and one of the reasons I love mixing in logic is that if I go back to the main timeline and I have the kick selected, it gives me a preview over here on the left side of what is actually happening on the mixer. So I can be listening to the track on the timeline and still be making adjustments on plugins of here without having to make an adjustment over here on the next page. That is it for basic navigation, we're going to get ready to jump into EQ. Then we're going to hit compression effects. You're going to love it. We're gonna take this track from something that is just dry and bland and doesn't sound all that great and awaken and make it sound amazing, vibrant, lively, and something that I would feel very proud of putting out in the world. That is the ultimate goal here is to get your music to a place where you feel confident. You're able to put out as much content as you want or desire just because you have the ability to mix it and have it sound amazing. So again, thanks for being here. I'm going to jump into a queue next.
3. Equalization: We are going to start it off with equalization. Eq is the most important foundation, in my opinion, of mixing and being a mix engineer. Your role is to take multiple tracks and mix them together. And the biggest way that we do that is through EQ and equalization. So in this video, we're going to cover the frequency spectrum. We're going to talk about fundamental frequencies for instruments. We're going to talk a little bit about strategies and how we can use EQ. I'm going to show you a little bit how it works and how a couple of the specific plugins here AND logic works. We're not going to dive super deep into every single plug-in. And we do a little bit more of that when we jump into the master class, if you are planning on being a part of that. And then I'll show some EQ strategies in action. So let's jump right in. Let's talk about the frequency spectrum to begin with. So if you new to this, it takes a second to wrap your mind around it, but let me pull up an EQ plugin just so I can explain it and have something in front of you. This is the EQ plugin, the equalization plug-in that's built in logic. It's just called Channel EQ. This is a visual representation of what you hear from any sound source, which is called the frequency spectrum. So if from the left-hand side over here, we have 20, which is 20 hertz sound is measured in hertz. As it goes past the 1000, you can call it kilohertz. Sometimes you might hear someone say, Oh, that's really harsh around three k. That simply just means 3000 hertz. So on the left-hand side you have 20 hertz, which is very low. You probably will not hear with your human, is, you'll more likely feel it. If you've ever gone to a constant and you've stood right in front of the sub wolf is often you feel it more than you actually hear it because those low sound waves have a tendency to move and affect you and you can feel it. And then over on the right-hand side, it goes all the way up to 20 K, which is 20000 hertz. That 20 K is very high. You also with your human ears, will not hear that. Dogs tend to be out of here higher than humans. So if you've ever seen someone below like a high pitched whistle, that is a little bit hard to hear because it's so high, but dogs just go crazy for it. It's because so high and they have more sensitive hearing and can hear it. So basically, every sound source has every one of these frequencies in it to an extent. But there's specific instruments or different voices. They have a different fundamental frequency of that sound, which is the main frequency that you hear that is at the forefront of the sound of that instrument. That's what we call its fundamental frequency. So as I even get closer to this microphone, I'm probably getting. Loa, loa. And as I move away, I'm getting thinner and you hear more of the high-end. That's called the proximity effect. But just because I'm close or far away, it doesn't mean that those frequencies don't exist. You just don't hear them as much. So our goal is to accentuate the fundamental frequency of that instrument. Now that's just if we're talking about a single instrument. When it comes to mixing lighter on, we start to talk about how we use that in relationship with different instruments and how we carve out spots in a certain instruments frequency spectrum to a different instruments, fundamental frequency pop through in that mix, so to speak. For example, on my voice there some low frequencies. But as I said, the goal is to accentuate the fundamental frequencies so I can scoop out some of this low end. And maybe I'll accentuate some, some of this like 345 K, which is a lot of the vowels and syllables that you hear very easily when someone speaks or sings through a song. Trying to accentuate it that way and maybe clean out some moodiness down below. But we'll get into this a little deeper in a little bit. So I hope that makes sense. The frequency spectrum is what you're looking at here. And every single sound has all of these frequencies. And our job is to accentuate the fundamental frequency is the way we do that is either by removing the non-fundamental frequencies. And the way you remove is you're basically turning the volume down on that frequency. If I drag down here, I'm pulling the decibel level of that frequency down by 11 dB right here. And the same goes the other way. If I want to accentuate for k or 4000 hertz by going up, I'm actually turning the volume up on that frequency, nine dB. So that's how that works. Now a couple of different strategies that we're going to use is there's three main ones. Additive, which I just showed you here by adding a frequency, this subtractive, which is what we're doing over here. We're subtracting a negative frequency or something that doesn't sound good, we're removing that, that's called subtractive. And then we can also, people call it different things but covering. So you're carving out frequencies in an instrument to allow a different instruments fundamental frequency to pop through. And that will be more important once we start jumping into mixing. So let's talk a little bit here about how these couple plug-ins work. I'm going to show you a couple of different EQs that are within Logic. Show you how they work. A couple of the settings within each plugin. And then we'll take them for a spin and see them in action. So. Let's quickly look at the parts of the equalizer right here. And the reason I'm doing it on this actual EQ, which is called a parametric EQ, is because visually it's easy to see what's happening. That you'll see different EQ plugins that are maybe based off of an older analog piece of gear, but it's a digital re-creation that don't have as many parameters that you can change. But on a parametric EQ, you have multiple parameters that you can change. So let me just run through everything that's on this plugin here. So along the top here have different filters. So these dots are the same as these filters up here. And so you have 12345678 different filters that you can use. For example, if you wanted to add a frequency here at 1 k, You can pull some out around 2.5 k and you can bump it again at five K. You can also add this here. But if you've used all of those, That's it. So you have eight, which is actually a ton. You probably will never use that. But so let's start from the left here. This is called a high pass filter, which basically you might hear it called a low cut as well. So it's basically scooping out the low end. It is letting the high-end pass through it. So it's called a high pass filter. Seems like it should be called low-pass filter, but it's known, it's called a high pass filter. While we're at it, we'll jump to the other side. This here is the low-pass filter or a high cut. Sometimes on an instrument plug-in, you might see something that says Cutoff. It's essentially the same thing. And that is the low-pass filter because it's letting the low pass through it. The other options we have here is a shelving EQ that this filter basically it goes up and then levels off. So it looks like a shelf. You can go up, he can go down. And then the next option is a bell filter that just looks like a bell up or down. So these are all set to Bells. And then you can know if you can adjust this now, it's just a shelf on the low and the high up here. So now what are the three different settings on each of these individual frequency is right here. So if you look below, you have three different settings. You have the frequency in hertz, you have the decibel level. That's the gain of it. So if I'm subtracting 3.5 decibels from that frequency. And this one down here is called the Q, the letter Q, or the width. And so basically it is the width of the actual cut that you're doing. So if you wanted to remove a lot down here at 200 and 70 hertz. You could do a wide a queue or a wider width, which so riots to 70. We're pulling down five dB of gain. But as it goes up, let's say at 300, it's not going to be negative five dB. It might be negative 40 dB, and then it slowly goes up. So that is what creates a wider, wider width. If you tighten it up, then it really is at 270, 11 dB, and maybe 275, you might still have 30, 40 dB of gain reduction. However, you're not skipping out as much frequencies overall. You're just choosing a narrow q. You would typically use this for fixing issues. So we'll listen to this vocal here and a little bit and find some problem frequencies and pull them out. But that's how you would use that. There is a gain here. You can gain up as a whole if you like, like if you're subtracting a lot of like, let's say you have a loop that you're using and you just want to EQ it and there's a bunch of stuff in they had to eat. Don't want you want the high hats out and you really just want like a kick drum. But you've subtracted so much that it's very quiet, then you could, you can gain the entire signal up if you need to. Okay, let's take a look at a couple other ones here. I'm just going to recall the default here. Okay, Next one we have here which is built into logic. This is based off of a pull textile EQ, which is an analog piece of gear. This goes great on vocals, kick drums, drum buses, it goes right on anything. So I love this EQ, as you can tell, you don't visually see what's happening if you're comparing it to the frequency spectrum. So you really need to know and start learning what these frequencies actually sound like. Someone might look at something like this and say, Oh, it's a lead vocal. Cool. I need to do. I am male vocal EQ, which this one's actually not as negative as I was just going to explain. But a lot of people might say something like, Okay, well, it's a female vocal, so I need to remove some of this. I'm going to remove 250. It's pretty boxy in there. I'm going to do a couple of dB of gain around five K. I'm going to narrow that up a little bit. I'll, and that's what a vocal should look like. But I don't want you to get too far down that, that way of thinking of how something should look. You always want to be training your ear and listening. And so that's a dangerous slippery slope to go down if you start. Queuing things based off the why they look solely so you want to be able to listen and hear exactly what you need to fix. And here it actually take effect. So that's what I like methods other EQs that on parametric and don't have a frequency spectrum on them, is it forces me to listen and it forces me to lend my frequencies. So the way that this plugin wax is you have a low frequency select. Now let's see if I can make this bigger. Here we go, 20, 30, 60, and a 100. You have a low boost. So this is the gain right here, and this is boosting. And then you also have a low attenuation, which is the same as subtracting again or removing gain. So you might say, well, why can you boost and subtract? So this was something specific about this poll tech EQ that it allowed you to boost and attenuate at the same time, which would give you essentially the net value of what you're adding is a little bit of a bump. Let me show you. I'll explain what I mean using this guy here. So if we took from here, if we took this 30 hertz and we attenuated it, it would look like that, right? But then if we took this same frequency and we boosted it. So now I'm gonna go over here to the next one, and I'm gonna go to 30. And I boost it like that. You can see that we're subtracting and we're adding by if I remove, if I click over here, This blue is the net value of the actual EQ curve. So red is what the settings are saying. Orange is what this settings is saying. But the blue is the net value at what the actual frequency is responding as. So we've subtracted and we've added, and we've kind of done this little bump. So the reason they would do that like this would work great on a kick drum for example. You might want to remove some of the low end, but you might also want to get a little bit of a bump maybe at 35 or 40 or something like that. So that's just a little strategy that people use with these pulled techie he is. You also then have the high-frequency. You have a high bandwidth, which is the width or the Q on here. You can select a frequency and boost it. You also can attenuate it here. Dr. knob here, which is on some of these pole tech EQs, it's nice on here. And then this is the midsection. So in the mid section you have you can only boost, which is peak. You have one dip, which is an attenuation, and then you have another peak. So you could take 500 and you can boost it three dB. Then you could take 700 and you could dip it three dB. You could go up to five K, and you could use it to DB or 1.7 in this situation so that you don't have as much to work with on something like this. But the digital parametric EQ is based off of these original EQ. So since we've gone digital, we have more flexibility now. So a lot of these analog recreations, true to their sound and true to the, the actual controls. Because they want to stay true to that. It's inspiring. It also add some color that an EQ just purely digital could never do. Let's jump to this next one. It's called the console EQ. You've got a low cut or the high-pass filter. You can select that. And then you've got a low, low gain, which is the shelf. And you can select the frequency and plus or minus. You've got a mid bell. Often on plus minus frequency, select hi gain shelf plus or minus. This is based off of a Neve console. You can drive it a little bit. There's also one more that I like here that's built in, which is incredible. It's built in, it's called the graphic EQ, which is based off of an API console. So this is just left to right. The flexibility that you don't have, that you would have on a fully parametric EQ is you have a set of frequencies, 30, 163, 125, and so on. And then you can go plus or minus with the gain from those frequencies. You also have a drive knob on here. Whenever there's a drive knob, just be careful with it. You might be, you might find that maybe your IQ healing for a vocal that's in a verse or something that's not singing very hard yet. And you get the right amount of drive. But then when I jumped to the chorus over the bridge, it starts distorting a little bit beyond what you would like to coal and nice coloration of drive. So be careful when doing that. So let's see these in action. Let's first start off with a kick drum. Let's extend this here little bit just so we get a little bit more drums in the actual cycle. Let's solo this. Cool. So this is an example of the graphic EQ. I had this one up already and that's level this out. So that is just the EQ. Just they kick by itself. So let's take 31 and bump it up a little bit. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of low end with a kick drum. If I pull up this EQ, just to show you on the analyzer, you see that there's a lot of low end here. So what are we looking to do? We're looking to accentuate the fundamental EQ. So I'm going to accentuate down here. But there's also kind of some low mid moodiness and kick drum always like right here. A good way to find out what you might be hearing that might be negative before you subtract it is just bump it. And if it accentuates a bad thing like this, that's just all boxy to me so you can pull it down. Same with the low mids. You can pull them down a little bit. And then just because it's low, doesn't mean that there isn't high of frequencies in a kick drum, it's just not the fundamental frequency. So we're going to listen to that and add a little attack up here. Now that's over the top, but that proves my point and just shows you that E can, the e can really change how a kick drum sounds or an instrument sounds just by a killing it. So this is original. And this is what the AQ. There we go. Let's try another one. Let's try this pull tech one that I was telling you about where we add tube k. Now, also on all of these plugins that do you have like presets, which is pretty cool. Don't be ashamed to use those. A lot of the time. I'll just jump to a preset that I know I like and then change it from there. And there's no reason to start from scratch if you know that there's something that's working pretty well. So let's try drums. Let's try low kick. Ok, so what did this do? This took a 100 huts and we boosted it, but we also attenuated it. Nine dB. High boost, that three K Thai attenuation. And we dipped out some of the low mids and did a little bump at three k. Let's see how it sounds original. And with the EQ. So that's a huge difference. The huge difference for me that I hear is this low mid route, he at 300. If I pull this back and he have boxy that is right around 300. And see that just cleaned it all up. You have high-end, you have low end. And as just a really nice, so that's on a kick drum. Let's do a little bit on the vocal here. Just to give you an example of that, Let's go back over here. Now this song is just as simple. This verse here is just sent and vocals just give you a good idea of just the simplicity of it. I don't want it to be too messy for you to be hearing what the EQ's doing. So become uncle. That's the original vocal. Okay, so let's do a little subtractive EQ. I was telling you before about with a narrow, with an arrow q, you can really find some frequencies. So often what I'll do is I'll get a tight queue and all kind of go. Kind of like I'm fishing for bad EQs, for bad frequencies, excuse me. I don't go too crazy because you can get real deep into that, but sometimes you'll hear something that doesn't feel right and then you'll be able to find it pretty fast. So that's a little too tight. I'm going to widen it a bit thicker. To be hit at 25 is kind of reading. So once you find it, then I'll usually just type it in because I don't want to move it by pulling it down. So I'll just go like this. It will become uncles and this is without B, this is width. So that clean it up a bit. Now let's go over to this tube one. Let's reset this and take a listen. Let's see first if they have a vocal preset. Let's try this pop vocal. So it attenuated at a 100, which is pretty low for a vocal. See, don't really need that. It boosted at 16 K, which is almost inaudible. But you'll hear kinda the sizzle. It did a little bit of honor that didn't do anything. Now they didn't do anything on the mid. So let's see what this sounds like. Normal if they come to be. So it's pretty subtle, It's actually really nice, but I would maybe pull this back. It will become uncle, really hear it. There has to be Federalist attenuation. That's too much. So you can also boost a little bit and see what happens when you get into the whole mix. It's probably not going to make sense to have a whole lot of low end in a vocal. But for the sake of experimenting, will do this. It will be kind of fat and it up a bit. We can also remove some of this. For tan. It will become uncle. Used to be. This isn't on. Make sure you turn it on. And here we go. Just to be so that, sorry, this is not a dip. There, is a peak here, so this would be a bump which she probably would never bump for 10 on the Merkel, too much thicker MCL. But you can see how this one works. Let's quickly take a look here at the console IQ for vocals. If I turn this on here, it has the Neve console. Eq has something about the high mids that's just really musical. So let's try this 4.4 and we can just do a little bump up here. They come to be. This high shelf is also nice up there. It will become a and B. So all three of those together, this was the original list. It will become uncle. This is with the man. Just see how it really made it pop. Especially if you bring the, the piano back in. To be honest, you see how big of a difference that made just by accentuating the fundamental frequencies of the vocal and removing non-fundamental frequencies which don't matter in this situation. So that is EQ in action, or see you in the next video when we jump in talking about compression. Thanks guys.
4. Compression: Hi and welcome back guys. We're going to jump into compression here. This is equally as important as equalization. Just as I stated, the EQ was one of the primary foundations of mixing. Compression is right there next to it. Compression for me is where things start to get exciting. This for me is where things start to pop its way. The vocal will pop out. It's where we can start accentuating the parts of the sound source that perhaps a gentle sounds or maybe not had as much, but we can start to accentuate those kind of aspects of the sounds. We can also use it to level things out so it sounds might have harshness to it and we can label those as well using compression. Just listening to my voice right now as I'm talking, there's parts of it that softer and parts of it that allowed a specificly the Ss and the attacks of some of some of the vowels that I'm using are consonants that I'm saying. The vowels may be a little softer. So what adding compression to a vocal will do is it will level them out. So it will essentially bring up the volume of the softer, gentle up parts of the sound. And it will bring the volume down on the Harsha parts of that sound. Now we have different parameters and controls within the compressor plugins. So we can affect those parts of the sound source differently. But essentially what we're doing is we're squishing the sand down from the top and we're squishing it up from the bottom. So the entire dynamic range of this sound is getting narrower and a shorter, so to speak. So let me show you a visual example of what that looks like. And then we'll jump into talking about types it compresses and the controls parameters we have, and some strategies and you'll be able to see it in action. So let me jump to this piano over here. Let's take a listen. Let's get this guy out of here. It's a pretty soft sand name piano. It's got some reverb on it that I just baked the reverb into the actual sound when I exported the track. So that's why that's in there. And so let's see what happens when we add some compression. So let's listen again. That was actually the original. The compressor was on before. So it's getting a little louder because I have some makeup gain on there. And we'll go over those controls in a second. But let me do this now so you can visually see it. I'm going to bounce this trach in place, which means that I'm bouncing it. Bouncing or exporting is synonymous in most DAW's Logic Pro Tools. So I'm exploiting it. But I'm including, I'm not bypassing the plugin, so I'm including the effect that the plugin is having on the audio source in the exported file. So the compressor essentially as baked into the bounce of this soft piano. So that will quickly bounce that region. And then we'll see the original and we'll see the bounced next to it. So if we zoom in, this one right here is the original. This one is after the compressor. So obviously things we notice is it's a little bigger because I've gained up the volume a little bit. But also seems in some of these like this one specifically right here. It seems longer, doesn't it? The original file is actually that length. However, it gets quieted down here at the tail end of the sound. So the compressor has compressed on the front end. It's leveled out the top. Comparatively the dynamic range of the whole sound is smaller right now. Because the distance from the top of that peak up here to the bottom of that is a lot bigger than from here to here on the new file. So it's essentially squished from the top and it's also squished up from the bottom. So this tile end, which was at 1 quiet, is now louder compared to the lattice pot of the sound itself. So now let's listen. Meet the original. It's a little punchier. The tail end carry out longer looking at the difference here. So that's a visual representation of what compression is actually doing. So now let's jump into the controls. Okay, so let's go to this vocal. Since we've been working on that on EQ already. And let's look at this compressor plugin. Let's pull this over here for you. Okay, so let me jump into compression. We have different options. We have different controls and different parameters that we can use. Now, all of these plugins, the plug-in version, the digital version of this compression. They're all emulating or the old based off of original hardware, analog compressors that were essentially put in line when a vocalist was recording or a drama was being recorded, or a snare drum was being hit in the recording studio back in the day. They still do that today. Recording studios, home studios, even people have outboard compresses as well. I have one that I put on my master bus when I am mixing. So but these digital recreations of it. So just as we talked about with EQ. With the parametric EQ that had lots of options. A digital version of a compressor has lots of options. But digital re-creation of the analog version may have some limitations depending on what the original piece of gear had. Just like some of the original EQs, didn't have an option to change the queue or the width. Same goes for compression. Some of these different types or styles of compresses have less options going just quickly from the top on this top section here. This is just a digital version that's probably from logic that I created. This is based off of a VCA style, FET style and other VCA and an octa compressive. These are all based off of actual hardware, so some of the limitations may change based off of that original piece of gear. So let's just look at this digital one to start with. So what we have here is all of the controls and parameters, the threshold. Let's talk about that. That is the point at which the audio source, the volume at which when it passes that threshold, the compressor will kick in. So Let's just have this vocal going. Ooh. Okay, I'm going to turn it down a little bit to be okay. So basically what we're saying is that once this sound input level reaches negative 30 dBs, I want the compressor to kick in. And you can see that it's going way above 30, so it is compressing a lot. So if I loosen up this, this threshold a little bit, it will think it's going to compress list because it's not so far above 30. If I go to 0 here, the compressor's not working at all because it's not reaching 0 up here. So let's say I go to negative, let's see 10. It's just tickle it. So that's how threshold works. So if you want more compression than the threshold has to be set lower so that it compresses more. So that's the threshold. The ratio is the amount of compression that is happening after the input level reaches the threshold that you've set. So for example, we have a one-to-one ratio. We have a two to one ratio, a three-to-one ratio, and a five to one ratio. The easiest way to explain this is if we're at a two to one ratio, it's basically saying that if your input gain goes above your threshold by two dB, it's going to compress so much to lower that sand level TO one dB over the threshold. So I'll say that again. It will lower sound source from 2D be over the threshold to one dB of the threshold. Basically it's a two to one ratio. So if it was eight dB over the threshold, it would lower it to four dB over the threshold. So as we go up in ratio, it's compressing more because it's now taking three dB over the threshold and lowering it to one. It would be the same thing as lowering nine dB above the threshold to three dB, which is a lot more compression. Even then two to one. Now you keep going up and you can keep going up, adds more and more compression. Now, once we get to tend to one, that's when a thing called limiting kicks in. So a compressor technically turns into a limit at 10 to one ratio. So after ten to one, it's at, if you visually looking at it, it will look more like a slope going up like on an x-y axis. And then at the threshold will take a shop right 10 and go straight across. So let me see if I can pull one up here. That looks that way. I see you. Okay? So this compressor, so here we go. We have the x-y axis over here on the left. So this is this sound gelling up. Let's get rid of this first compressor. Now, as i just the ratio, you can see one-to-one looks like that. And as I go up to 10 to one, it starts to look a lot like a sharp right? Ten. See how that's changing. Now that technically tends into limiting right there. All right, let's jump back to the other one. Okay? So that's ratio. The need essentially is the amount of compression, how quickly it fully gets to that compression. So if we were to look at this other one here, let's say let's go to like a four to one. I don't even know if this has a this is the knee right here. So this is basically a soft knee. See how it's a slope like that. A hardening would look like this. It would be shopping. So it's saying that a hot in NY compresses to the amount of compression ratio quicker. The soft knee. So it's more of a harsh harsh acting compressor. So I usually unless I really want it to stop pumping and sanding compressed, I usually want to do it all the way up there, somewhere in the middle is usually fine. Now let's talk about attack and release. So the attack is how quickly the compressor engages. So let me adjust this so we're not getting as much compression. And probably don't hear the vocal super well, but you see it coming in. And that's going to help us visually figure out what's happening. Okay, So we're doing about five dB of gain reduction. If I make this attack quicker, it is, it looks like we're reducing the gain by maybe an additional 30, 40 dB, which all it's actually doing is it's catching the front end. See it picked to negative 10 right there. It's catching the front end of those harsh words. Oh, I see you. Now if we back it up, it's a slow compression. So it takes a second, it takes 200 milliseconds for it actually to kick in. And now it looks like we're reducing it by less because it's not capturing those harsh words. Right on the front end of it. Glands. Oh, I see you. I usually put it somewhere in the middle. Let's talk about release. Releases, how fast that compresses, going to release off of words that it's capturing. So a quick release, it's going to seem like it's getting back to 0 really quickly. To be. As we make it quicker, sorry slower. It's going to take awhile for it to slowly get back to 0. If we go all the way back here, see how slow that goes back to me. So it's going to be less dynamic because it's continually compressing even as it's moving back. So usually somewhere in the middle is where I like to begin. Now, the makeup gain. So this has an order function on it. But if we were to turn it off, ideally, what you want to do is the amount of gain reduction that you're getting from the compressor, which we're between 37 dB. That means that it's going to be that much quieter. It's compressing it, but it's going to be quiet. So we want to add that gain back. We might want to gain back six dB. First glance, oh, so you can check that just by turning it off and on he is the original volume. It will become uncle. So that matched to the gain. But you'll notice the FHIR more emphasis on some of the syllables on some of the weds. Because it is, again, like we showed you earlier with the piano. It's gaining up some of those low, an accentuated syllables or weds from the vocal already. And it's bringing it up. Let's see what else we have here. Some of these plugins have different controls and parameters that weren't necessarily on the original piece of gear. So things like you can add some distortion. This is a mix. So this would be to use some parallel compression, which I'll get to in a second. Within the one plug-in. Looks like there's also a limiter on here. But you could essentially do that by changing your what, your ratio. Okay, so within all of these, as we go down, there's different parameters. This VCA is based off of an SSL bus compressor. This would go on a, on a mixed bus. This one does not have attack and release. It just has a threshold and makeup gain. If we look at the FET compressor, this would be more like this, which is that traditional 176. The threshold is actually tied in with the input on this compressor. Egi of Eurasia, you have your attack and release, but it's labeled input as opposed to threshold. Now, take in mind that some of these plugins CEO getting light down the road, if you're not using these basic ones, you just need to research how it's functioning, how it's working. Because they might know all look exactly this way or this one. Okay? So let's jump into some strategies and seeing this compression in action. So general rule of thumb is you want to treat compression gently, it's a better option to use multiple stages of gentle compression than it is to use one stage of harsh compression. Let me show you what I'm talking about, for example. So let's look at this vocal again. Say we have these two compressors on. I'm going to start with this guy. I'm going to set it so that it's only just catching the peaks, the harsh words, the syllables that really pop out. It will become uncle. Used to turn on first. Okay? Yeah, I don't know. It's not compressing it down until we start seeing compress a little bit on those harsh words. We go, we got a little bit. So glad, I guess so that's just getting CEUs not try a hard knee. I feel you close by. And I'm only it will become a one ratio, three to four. Now. What would happen if I slow the attack? It would probably miss those because passed by the time it engages this situation, a fast attack. So I can start getting these words at the syllables. Me. And I want to turn these quickly. So that's not doing a whole lot. Well, I see you. I feel you, but it's still is, is removing just those peaks. So now I'm gonna go with another compressor. Il, think almost now that those peaks are already taken care of, I can jump into this compressor. And then I'm just going to start with a start with a preset, which like I've mentioned before, I'd be afraid to do that. Let's work with our threshold a little bad. Oh, I see you. This one's a little bit of a slower attack. Il think Goma can again it up a bit to be okay, so I'm going to turn this up so you can hear it better now. And I'm just going to go back and forth between these two compressors so you can hear ucsd. It will become uncle. Used to be just taken off the peaks. So together they work, one is together. So multiple levels of gentle compression goes a lot further than one instance of harsh compression. Now, you can use major compression like hash compression. But generally you'd want to treat that more for an effect. So if for example, you might do that on drums. Let me show you what that could look like up here. Let's jump over to this. This is just a family pride here. So I'm going to put a compressor on there. I'm going to really drive it to get a little bit of an effect here. So that's pretty much obliterating that if I turn it off, it sounds like this on. So that would be an example of major compression using it as an effect. Now, earlier I mentioned parallel compression, which of course means two lines side-by-side. So you're using it side-by-side with the original dry sound. So this plugin actually allows you to do it within it. I'm going to adjust this dial. This is saying over here, we're just listening to the input of a. Here we're listening to the output. So I'm going to drag this back and you'll see that it's essentially setting the over driven affected compression underneath and blending it with the dry signal and that is parallel compression. Dry. See how that works really nicely. It's not as harsh, but at just a 50 percent mix, it allows the attack of the original dry signal to come in, but it really adds some punch to that low end, so that's using it in parallel. Another version of how that would work would be is if you actually used a bus. So you would essentially take this track and send out a bus which we go through routing a lot more lighter in the McMaster class. So essentially you have two channels then of this same sound. And then at a 100 percent mix on the bus, you will compress that and then you will literally have two fighters and tame it in as you feel it's going to feel good in there. So that's another example of how you would actually do parallel compression. But for that one, it's built right into plugin, which is nice. You can use limiting as a strategy as well. Often I will do that perhaps on a vocal bus. So I might have all of the vocals going to a bus and I'll do some gentle limiting on it. Also Mastaba table use limiting quite often on there to bring up the overall volume. The way that it works in that situation is it's taking those hot peaks, those harsh peaks. And it's essentially just not cutting it off, but it's pushing it down and limiting it, compressing it really HUD right there so that we can bring up the overall volume of the quiet a Pods. See you squishing it together. But you have to be careful because when you start using compression a lot and if you overuse it, the outcome will be a whole mix will be very dynamic that you want to be careful because you want to use compression to accentuate the best parts of the sound in a positive y, but you don't want to overuse it so that you have a mix that's not very dynamic and it's just squished to sanding. So that is compression. Play around with it. You have many options built into logic. And I will see you in the next video. We're going to jump into using effects, which I love to see you in the next video.
5. Effects: Welcome back everyone. We're going to talk about using effects, which is one of my favorite things to do as a mix engineer. This is the one thing that you can do that is non-existent. When the song begins, which is so cool to me. Every, every track you got was pre-recorded. It was recorded in the studio. You wanted a pot of it and you'll mixing it. But the things that you can add that was nonexistent and I didn't send to you is effects reverb delay, other creative effects. So I love this because this is where I really get to be creative and add my creative fled to the client song or to my song if I'm mixing for myself. But first we have to understand why we would use effects and the types of effects and a little bit of a background of them so that we have a good understanding because it's easy to overdo it with effects. The first reason why we would use effects is because it allows us to add an element of professionality. It adds an element of the song sounding the way that people maybe I used to from hearing on the radio. Or it makes it sound less like it was recorded in a booth or a studio. And the sand like it was either on a stage or it's just a fat o wide a vocal sweeping effect. Sweeping delays all of those kind of things and allows it to take it from just a dry recording to an exciting, vibrant recording. You can really use Effects to do that. So first of all, we're going to talk about reverb, which is probably the most widely used Effect. Reverb is going to allow us to take an instrument and make it not feel just dry and style in a room by give us some space, give it some room to breathe, give it some width and some depth. So first let's go back in history, wedded reverb come from. Where did it begin? You need to understand that using reverb was, it's emulating nowadays natural reverb from real, actual spices. So back when the Beatles were recording and back in the, back in the seventies and eighties and even earlier on, big band and all of that kind of stuff. People recorded these bands in actual rooms, in studios. And people would pay to recall it at specific studios because they wanted that specific natural room reverb sound. Abbey Road Studios in London, for example, is iconic for its room and the multiple tracking rooms and the sound that you get tracking drums or piano in that actual room. Because by way of putting a microphone in front of a kick drum or in front of a drum kit, or next to a piano. Year, essentially miking the instrument. But you're also making the room because you're going to hear the room in that recording, the way that the sound bounces off the walls away, It's bounces off the ceiling the way it bounces off of the Sound panels and the wood paneling and all of those kind of things. That's all part of the natural reverb of this space that people would actually record to try to get that real recording. So nowadays we have digital recreations of those actual rooms. So the negative thing about people recording in those specific rooms is it was tied to the recording. So if you hit a kick drum and you are in the main room or a studio in Abbey Road. And you had that natural room reverb going on. It's tied to the recording. You don't have an actual dried dry close Mike sound of the kick drum because you have that natural room in it, which we just talked about. People paid for that, people wanted that buy in certain scenarios. And as music progressed into pop music, people wanted more flexibility. So the big con was that the reverb was tied to the recording. So after that, the next step was they created echo rooms and chambers for reverbs where they would typically be in another part of the building or even underground. And I would put a loudspeaker from the Recording Control Room in that room. So essentially you're recording a kick drum from a drum kit. And then underground There's a chamber and they would send a loudspeaker down there. And they would put the sound of the kick drum into that room. And then there would be a microphone in the room and they would be recording the chamber. So that's where a chamber reverb came from. And then they would be able to also have the dry recording of the kick drum in maybe a smaller room. And they would be able to blend the two sounds. So that's where that started. Then they started using things like springs from a spring reverb and plates, which they use like sheet metal instead of springs. So the sound waves would bounce off of the springs, bounce off of the plates and create a reverb effect that is not tied to the recording. It would be in a different room. So then you could blend in. So there's many different kinds of reverbs. And then now in modern recording, we have the digital recreations of them so that we can now use them as a plugin. We can put it on a channel we can, which we'll get back to you in a second when we talk about routing and how we should actually correctly use that. And so we have so much access now to things that people use to pay so much money to get or they had to go to so much effort to get. We have just a digital re-creation of a plug-in that we can just put on and turn it on and hopefully use it correctly. But it's amazing the access that we have now. Then we have delay, an echo which people started using back in the day as well, using telephone lines and magnetic type and bouncing sound off of, off of different things. You know, you could slow down the type and it would come back and you would record it on a type again and it would be delighted. So it's a long history of delay as well. But the crux of this conversation about setting the platform for jumping into using effects is that everything at a certain point was a physical thing that was created to create the effect. And it wasn't always a plug-in and it wasn't always just available to us, uh, came from someone. Mind thinking, how can we actually take this sound and affected in a positive way while having enough flexibility to use it in multiple different scenarios. So now we're going to jump into routing now that you have a background of it and how they were used, it's going to start to make a little bit more sense. So for the majority of this video, we're just going to work on the vocal that we have been working on already. So let's look back. We did. We have a couple of EQs, we have a couple compresses on it. I'm just going to play you the dry vocal because this is already pretty amazing. Now I'm going to turn everything on. So that's a huge difference. So now we're going to really make a big difference because we're going to start using some effects. So let's first talk about routing. So just as we just discussed with the reverb, with the chamber Riva. The idea is that we don't want the sound, the effect baked in or printed or bounced or exported whatever you wanna call it, into the actual sound itself. So this is where I see people will make most of their mistakes while using effects. So it seems like this is how you would do it, right? Okay. I want some reverb on my vocal. Okay, I'm gonna go to a plugin and I'm going to find a reverb. Let's go down here and let's use ChromaVerb. Cool. All right, let's see how that sounds. That sounds pretty cool. But he is the problem. We essentially baked into the sound already. So there's a way that you can adjust the wetness. They use wet and dry in a reverb to talk about wet, meaning older revamp and dry is the original sounds. So you could play it like this and just hear the dry sound. And you can bring in the reverb and make it more wet. See what else we have here. Since we're talking about chain chamber reverb, let's do this. Okay, that seems like that would be the way to do it right? Wrong. So we want to go back to when we just talked about the chamber R3. The, the goal is not to bake it into the actual sound itself. We want to have it separate it. So this is where routing comes in. So we're going to get rid of that, get that out of here. So let's go back to our mixer. This is how vocal. We have tracks along the bottom. And now we're going to do some routing for our effects. So the best thing about logic here is that you can do one step and it actually does two steps for you. So when we talk about effects, there's two things. There's a send and there's a return. So basically, back to the original conversation in the very first video that you watched, going from top to bottom through this channel as if it was a soundboard. Picture and analog soundboard where there's knobs old way from the top all the way down the bottom. And then on each channel, historically they would be plugins called insets. So this is where you would send the sound out to be affected by a different device and send back in, for example, a revamp. So you would historically taken out of his sand and you would go to a reverb, an actual device, and actual hardware revamp. And you would send back to a different channels. So you had a fight to use the volume of just the raven makes sense. So we create a send and also we need to create a written. So the send is done right here. It says sends, That's way you ascending the dry signal of the vocal out. So you need to send it from the channel to the reverb. So instead of putting the reverb on here as a plugin, we're going to create a send to start with. I'm going to click here. And we use what are called buses. So I will go up here, I will select 10. You can select whatever you want. Let's get rid of this guy. And you can see that. It created a new AUX over here. Now. But a tip in logic is when you create one cm highlighted here, my channel strip is over here. It will automatically put this right here. It will put the new AUX right there. So I always, once I create it, then I look to my left and it's over here, and I immediately double-click and I call it Vaux Verb 1 because we might have more. Okay, so he has this send. The ox that was just created is the return. So we have a send and we have a written in. I will pull this down to begin with. So now we have to decide how much of the sound we are going to send to it. Now, there's two schools of thought here. Some people like to keep the return at unity gain and they like to make adjustments here. Because you'll see when I turn this encoder, it's essentially sending more of the dry signal to the reverb and then it'll come back. So before we get too far down that road, let's add our reverb to the return. So let's go up here. Now is when we put the reverb on here, we didn't put it on the channel, we put it on the return. So I'm gonna go to Chamber, local chamber. And now the thing you want to make sure when you have an effect on a bus, you want to have 100% wet. Why is that? Why don't you need any dryness like we did earlier, because you have a separate track which has your dry signal on it. So you want a fully dry track here, which we do. And you want your reef tend to be fully wet. With the effect. I'm going to apply this. You're not going to hear anything because I haven't sent it to the return yet. So you'll see as I do this, you'll start to see signal come up into the revamp written. Now I can meet this, pull it down. But it's still sending. So he has the two schools of thought. Some people like to have their return at unity gain and I like to make adjustments here. So maybe you'll have multiple vocals sending to this one reverb, which is another benefit for doing that because you then don't have to put the reverb plugin on every channel. You just duplicate this send and send it to the same return. So some people like to make this adjustment this way. If I want more reverb, I'm going to turn up the sound. But this is how I like to do it. The other option is you put the Send at unity at 0. Old boy. To plus 0. And then you use the Phaedo for taste. So that's how I like to do. I like to put this at unity, meaning at 0. And I like to use the fighter because we're used to using fighters for volume, right? We're not used to using these encoders. And once you start getting into mixing and having to do some automation, you don't want to have to be automating these moves. You want to be automating cytometers, it's a lot easier. Let's jump into the next thing. So that's sends and returns. Now we have pre-fader and post-fader. So let me explain this. So as we talked about the Sends and returns on a physical soundboard, the inserts, these Sends have an option. You have an option to send it, pre-fader or post-fader, which is exactly what it says. So if I say pre-fader, it means, okay, sand is coming down this channel, down this channel. And I'm going to send it out to the external device. In this situation, the reverb written, I'm going to send it out before pre, it gets to the fido. So that means it is getting to send to the return and it's not going to consider the volume of the Phaedo. Now the opposite is post-fader, meaning that it will take into account how much volume is on this volume fight up before it sends. So right now, if you press and hold, this gives you the option. So default is post pan, which you want to either select post-fader or pre-fader. So I like to use pre-fader because I don't want the amount that's being sent to the reverb to change based off of the volume of my lead vocal, if that makes sense. So if I let, let me show you that, give you an example. So post-fader. So this is post this vita. So it's not all the way up, okay? The sand is at 0, the fica is at negative six dB. And let's see how much volume we have coming to the return. So that is post fight up. But now if I go pre-fader, what's going to happen? Because the fight is down. If I go pre-fader, it should be louder. There should be more going to the reverb written because it's not taking into account this negative six dB of the fighter. And that's exactly what happens. So it depends on the situation. Sometimes on a vocal I might want to have it post vita. Sometimes I might want to have a pre-fader. Generally, I'll use pre-fader. Because then because I don't want it to change. Because if I go to post-fader and I'm automating this vocal to go up and down. You can see the vocal verb is going up on the left-hand side as well. But I don't want that necessarily. Sometimes you might want the reverb to die with the volume. But I want PRE, so that if I go up and down, still sending to the vocal, still sending to the vocal verb. So a situation where you might want to have it post-fader is maybe if you do have a lot of volume automation on your vocal, if you don't want to. If you're not happy with how the reverb sitting. If the vocal is not at a specific volume, then you might want to change it to post fight us so that the reverb adjusts with the automation. Um, but for something like a snare drum going to a drum, something that you're not changing the volume of, perhaps at all throughout the song. You might as well. I mean, you can do post-fader and get it set that way, but you might as well do you prefer Aida because it's not going to adjust if anything changes. So you can play around with pre-fader, thus post-fader. Let's quickly recap. Here. We have the sand and we have a return, and we have the option for pre-fader or post-fader. I hope that makes sense why you don't want to put it on the actual channel. Because then it's going to be baked into the sound. There are specific situations where I would maybe do that. It's not going to be something like a vocal. It because if you add it on a vocal, you're losing some of the dry signal. And I want all of the dry signal I can get. So I can accentuate that with my compression and my EQ and I can make that pop. But something for example, that I don't necessarily need all of the fullness of the dry. Like. Let's do an example here. Okay, so let's look at this symbol sweep, for example. You could send that to a drum reverb or percussion reverb or something like that that you've set up on a bus. But I don't necessarily need all of that dry signal, so I might just go over to a reverb. This is a cool one that's free, that you should download a Cohen digital and then you would want to adjust the mix on that. So this is dry. But now you hear that reverb is a very short whole reverb. It's only kind of fattening it up. So and without and with key of that tile and on it. So in a situation where you don't necessarily need the full dry signal, you can do it just on the channel, just know that that's become now pot of the actual sound. But the main thing that you're going to be spending your time on with effects reverb delay is your vocal. So in that situation, you want to utilize a sand and a return. I typically will default to pre-fader send. Let's mess with this vocal little bit and see what we can do to make it sound the best and most professional vocal possible. So I just wanted to take this one. Let's try another one. Let's try adding box web tier. Remember over here, double-click box web to press and hold pre-fader. Going to go all the way up, pull that down. And now let's find a different reverb. So that was a pretty short one. Let's try something that's a little longer. And again, remember that you need this to be a 100 percent wet. So you can hear that this has a much longer tail on it. So I like that. I'm going to use that. So let's go down here. I'm going to remove this a little bit and just bring it in. I like to recolor these so that they recognizable here. So let's try it without great. So now that they're on a fader and they're not on the channel. Lighter when I get into automation, which we talk a lot more about in the full mixing master class, is I can automate when I want this to come in and when I want it to fade out. See, you might decide to do it like on a pre-chorus or something. You know, maybe the verse is like this. Second half of the pre-chorus. I see you see how you can use them differently. Now a little trick here that you can use is see how it was pretty sibilant. You kinda had that coming out here. The high-end. So one thing I like to do is take an EQ, which you've already learned about. And I like to put an AQ before the reverb. So I'm still having the full amount of the vehicle being sent. But I'm IQ healing out some of the frequencies that a gelling to the reverb. So if I do this, if I take out some of the high-end, all of a sudden that reverbs DACA makes sense at my carriers. Farsi might have to turn the volume up. But if there's something you don't like about the reverb, you don't necessarily have to find a new reverb. You can affect that reverb as well. You can do stuff before. You can also do something after the fact. If you want to EQ at, after it's gone through the reverb. This is essentially a new instrument and new channel now. And you can do all the same things you do on the vocal, but on the reverb, it's just coming from a different source. Okay, So let's try a delay here. So OK, six. I'm going to call this Vox to lie. Gonna change it to pre-fader. Option click will bring anything to unity is a trick. So for example, over here, if I click this male BGP, it goes all the way up. So that helps a lot when I'm putting everything to unity was 0 dB for sending Kodos. Okay, here we go. We have this delay. Now, let's add a delay. Here it is. Let's try stereo delay. These are just built-in. Let's see what kind of default presets that I have. Let's do a dotted eighth note. And again, remember one thing to check, make sure your mix is at 100%, which it is. So that's obviously pretty crazy. One thing I like to do, just like we did the reverb, like to do this a lot with delays. Because the high sibilant stuff on delays is just going to be distracting. So you want it to be kind of a DACA delight often, unless you're treating it as a specific accentuated thing, you know, like if she was saying you become a ghost and then there's a gap in the woods. And you want it to actually say, you become a ghost, ghost, ghost you and maybe treat that delight differently than one that's kind of washing underneath. You might want that to have more high-end to it because you want it to cut through. But you don't always want your device to cut through. You want them to help create an atmosphere so to speak. So let's see how that sounds now. Coarser, that's nice. That just kinda fattened it and widen it up. So now let's just listen to this. Without the delight. To be. Maybe we try something like a, Let's just try dotted quarter note. Let's use that in a bit. I'm going to create a different one here. I'm going to call this long delay. I'm going to create another one here, cold pre-fader. Send it all the way. They're going to call this Vaux short delay. If you have my preset or my template package, a lot of these are built-in to that preset. So you start a session and you have this routing already set up and ready for you, so you don't have to do it every time. Let's try another one. Now I'm looking for like a slap delay. Let's have a look here. Could do it with the sample. Maybe. Let's try 16 slab. Let's try that. You see here that it's very subtle. But without it. It flattens it out. So how would I treat this? I would probably have the slab, have the short. I'd probably in the pre-chorus. Well, maybe in some gaps here with the long delay. So obviously too much. Let's try that again. Basically, I try to play around with the fader to get an idea of what I might want to do with automation and doubt out and see affect. Crazy. So you can do a lot with effects. It is crazy. How big of a difference you can make it. For example, That's just vocals. You might do stuff like this is, this doesn't have typical instrumentation necessarily because there's not really a kick and snare and high hats. But if you had like a drum kit, you'd probably want to create a drum the web so that you always have something. You can just send a little bit of an instrument or a high hat or heads to just to kind of fatten it up or widen it up. It doesn't just have to be for vocals. You can do it for drums, you can do it for anything. Sometimes I'll do it on keyboards or even a kick drum just to give it a little tiny bit of space, doesn't have to be intense just as we talked about with compression, that multiple layers of small moves of compression is a better option than one instant of heavy compression. Same goes for effects. You can use many different effects, just a tiny bit to make a much more positive final product, then just using one affects Return to do everything for everyone. You know. I even sometimes have a like all, all have a return of just kind of a very long ambient delay reverb. Sometimes I'll put a delay and reverb on the same return. And I can just depending on like if it's a composing thing I'm dealing like I might just. Send a bunch of stuff to it and just kind of play with it and be creative with it. I'm going to leave you with this. This is a little bonus for automating effects, which we jump into in a masterclass when we get to that point in the mixed process. But that little spot where I just wanted that long vocal delighted poke through. I think it was back here. That's still a little high end here. I don't want that much in there. Mm-hm. How he practiced that. There we go. That DACA Delight feels a lot better. So if you know that, that's what you wanna do, here's a little trick. You want to change this to latch. And you just wanna do it. Press Play. And then it jumped over here because I tend to this on, I'm might 10, all of these effects on and then I'm actually just going to bring them all back here where they were. Put it back on, Read. Now watch this meeting by itself. So when you do that, you're actually writing in the automation. That's what that actually did right there. If you were on this page when I had done it, you would see that this would be moving. See if I go to latch and I just hold this here and this is often how I do automation for this. I watch it happening and I draw the automation with them. But make sure you go back to read because then every change you make is going to be writing it in automation. So let's end this with listening. With how we started. This is how we started guys. Doug. Sounds like it was recorded in a studio which was in turn everything on once we get back to the beginning of this loop here. And that's a huge, huge difference. It's obviously a little over the top for the vocal effects, but you get the point of how to use them. So EQ compression using effects of those, the foundational essentials that you need to jump in and start mixing. I'll see you in the next video. We're done with effects. And we'll wrap it up here shortly with Al makes essentials.
6. What Next?: Hi everyone. You made it through mixes centrals. Just wanted to say, thank you, thanks for going through that with me. I'm convinced that once you get those three foundations under your fingers, get some reps in that. I'm going to take your mixes to the next level, again, would take you a productions to the next level, your songwriting to the next level. Those are three things that lot of people overlook. And I think I'll just figure it out as I jump in. And honestly spending an hour and a half that we just did to learn about EQ compression and using effects, it's going to make a whole world of difference in everything that you're dealing. So what's next? I have a couple options for you. Kinda depends on where you currently are and where you want to end up. If you're still pretty new to this and you're not quite sure what is next as far as how to get better as a producer or a songwriter. Maybe you're a vocalist or maybe you're getting tracks sent to you and you're singing on top of them. I have another entry level program, cold vocal essentials. So that would be what I would recommend for you to go through next. I have so many people say to me things like, man, I just can't get my vocals to sound good. Or I can't get a great sounding vocal if I'm not recording in a professional studio or having a professional and engineer mix IV only. And that's just not true. The reality is that there's a few simple steps you can take to get your vocal Sandy professional and radio ready from home using Logic Pro and even the built-in plug-ins and some of the free plugins that I've suggested to you. So that's an option for you. If you're really interested in tech and you'll mixes to a whole nother level. Maybe you're mixing engineer or you're a producer, and you just want to add an extra 500, $1000 to your income a month by being able to mix for your clients as well. I recommend mixing Mazda costs, which we go through a song from start to finish. And you'll also have access To start to finish a to Z mixes as well in addition to the actual one that I'm teaching on. So if that's you, that will be the next step for you. And hey, if you're like me and you're a mix engineer, your producer, and you're struggling with how do I set my rights? How do I raise my rights? How do I actually turn this more into a business? How do I become a better mix engineer, but also a bit of business or in life. That's you. I invite you to apply for my mixing mentor-ship, which is an invite only. I just loved to have a conversation with you on the phone and see if we'd be a good fit to see if I can give you the value that you actually need to get from here to there and make more money in the production world. So there's a few options for you. Vocal essentials, the mixing masterclass, also the mixing mentor-ship. So again, thank you for joining me here with mics essentials, and we'll see you again soon. Thanks.
7. BONUS Mindset for Buying Plugins: Hi guys. Has gallon just wanted to code these bonus video and just chat with you a little bit about plugins, give you my $0.02. A lot of people think you need thousands of dollars with plugins in order to actually make great sanding mixes happen. And that's absolutely not true. Especially if you use AND logic has a bunch of great built-in stuff. As you can see in front of you right now. This document is my plugins document, free, cheapest and cheap that I use. Sound great. It's constantly growing. I have so many actually in my DAW, I'm still figuring a still working on getting them on this document here. But you've seen the document because you subscribe to my email list or your you download the plug and play mixed bundle or maybe a part of the mixed masterclass or something like that. But just want to give you my $0.02 about how I feel about plug-ins. It's a very slippery slope. And if you think that you need more plug-ins to get better sanding stuff, then you might fall victim to the same things that I have fallen victim to in the past, which is buying plug-in sick and I'm going to use them in the night. Don't use them at all, maybe once or twice. So always ask yourself, comparing it to the price. How often will I use this plug-in? What, what is it getting me? Is it getting me a y bet a sound? And it's proven that I don't have to do a whole lot of tweaking or I don't have to be, uh, you know, I'm a user manual diver to actually get the most out of the plugin. Can you do that also? Is it going to save you a bunch of time? That's also a valuable reason why you would buy a plugin if it's going to save you time. And just be aware of why you're actually doing it. Don't just do it because you think it's a good idea. Do your research and see if you can replace what you think that plugin will do for you with other plugins you already have. So I've lightly had to really challenge myself and I'd tell all my clients or students this, I say use which he have a main IV. It's 2020 right now when I'm recording this video and all of all of the Grammys are going to people who were recording in their bedrooms and not all of them, but a lot of them. And so they using what I have, it's a new day. People are making hit records from bedrooms, just using crappy enough faces and stock plug-ins. And so you don't have to get too deep down that rabbit trail of plugins. But I'm also not naive enough to try to tell you that I am use free plugins. I don't, I do use a lot of great plugins. I'm spent quite a bit of money on them. Not as much as a lot of people who I know have, but I just wanted to show you a few that I do love and that ID is. Then I'm just going to show you on their websites, the actual companies. And then I'm going to jump into the DAW and show you a couple of plug-ins that are really love. So let's start with Universal Audio. You do need to have a universal audio interface in order to use these. Otherwise, you can get the Universal Audio satellite, which is just basically replacing the, you know, if you have a different interface you love, you can use that. It's essentially DSP cod that will allow you to use their plugins. I use quite a few of those. I think I have the analog. Analog Classics is called Plus a couple, couple reverbs or something like that. But I'll show you here what I have in a second. But I do love this stuff. I use quite a bit of fab filter stuff. Honestly, I got a really good deal on it. So I, just yesterday I actually looked up how much it is. And man, for the whole bundle, It's like a thousand bucks for everything. That's a little hard to swallow for me. So I mean, I wouldn't call this something that's like completely needed. However, let's see what else they have. Pro bundle 730. Honestly, if I was going to go this route, I would look for the cheapest bundle that has the EQ in it. Because the, what's in here, procure, procure is really great, which looks like nice by itself, by itself. So I love that. You can listen to the actual gesture frequency using a really enjoy that. And I use the compresses sometimes. Actually don't have this one. My bed, it's probably also multiband compressor. The limit is really great, so this would be good pack, but still it's like 500 bucks. I do use Plugin Alliance quite a bit. I was buying them like a $100 at a time as I could afford it, but now they have an everything bundled. I got in early it was like 19 bucks a month, think is 25 bucks a month now and you get access to everything. So if you're going to do anything, I would suggest doing this first because Plugin Alliance plus with built-in logic stuff, macaca wrong there. I use this rule tech pull, tech EQ just because I love how it sounds. It's 50 bucks. But you also have a pull textile which is the to, the teach to BEQ that's built in, which is also great. I use quite a bit of acoustic of plugins which aren't the cheapest. Also because they're in euros. But they kinda of abode teak plug-in company. They also have free stuff that comes at all often when it's new, like right now, this one is new and it is free, which is basically the midsection of a pull techie queue last month that they had. They call it selection for free, which is basically the SSL fusion. And that's great. I'll show you that in a second. I also use some isotopes stuff kind of spendy by dy is quite a bit of this stuff, probably not with spinning at 1000 bucks on it. I use vocal synth. If you're doing a lot of like restorative type stuff, the RX series is good. I use neutron and ozone inside. I used that actually quite a bit. So I mean, it's really good stuff. I still have an older version of it, so I think it was cheaper at that point. Anyway, let's take a look at these. So as you can see, I've kinda organized stuff here which i, if you're in the mix bundle, eyes are in the mix master class. I do a video just shown you quickly how to organize your plugins, which she can search YouTube and figure that out if you want. But I use sand toys a lot. Which sound toys is great for? A lot of effects and stuff like that. Echo boy, I use that almost all the time for delays and stuff. Tremble ITA primal tab. And I have just a little plate reverb which is 99 bucks. That's cool. So I use a lot of sand toys. Okay. You use the Cambridge? I used to use that a lot but now use procure more from FAB filter because I can listen to it, but this one sounds great. You don't have to do much changes for to actually make a huge difference. Yeah, this is all from the legacy bundle, the analog classics, That's really great. My favorite plug-in that I use all the time is the Fairchild. I use that one. I honestly uses Vox child preset on a lot of vocals, and I also use the orchestra. One on a lot of buses, even my master bus, I use that waves. I don't use a lot of ESTs at more. Vox is cool. It's basic, it's just an easy compress. That's cool. Base is cool. I have the IPR, honestly, this is another example of going down the rabbit hole. I bought this because it was a good deal. Haven't used it, played with it for a second and didn't love it. Fab filter stuff here, this is pro Q and what it looks like CIA, obviously to analyze analyses gray, What is this here? So like he probably went here this but So I can just listen to the frequency I'm doing, which is really helpful. I'm sure there's other plug-ins to that. Acoustic. This is the stuff I really do like these. I use the diamond EQ a lot. These CPU hogs, so you have to be careful. A lot of their plugins have a preamp which just kind of gives it kind of this analog white to it, which is just so cool. Selection. This is the celestial. This is the one that's based off the SSL fusion. I use this a lot, especially this drive and third harmonics. Texture knob is really cool, especially on drum bus, acoustic. And then I have a bunch, I mean, this is that rule tech that I told you about. Like that a law. But honestly, this is the vintage or the, you know, the vintage EQ version from logic, which is just as cool. Honestly lately I've been using the graphic EQ, the IPI one with the drive is really cool. So like on guitars could be really cool. Dr. it a little bit more, especially maybe if it's direct guitars, then I have just a bunch of like free stuff in here that's in that list. That's kinda cool. From Clang helm. This is like an l2. I, pretty cool. Free. This one frontier is a limited that is free and his awesome. So that's also on that list. I use quite a bit from Valhalla. We have here, those are just the freebies, but the RAM reverb I use a lot. And then all the other one I was going to show you was the UI, the EMT 140. I use that a lot. That one's a really cool. Let's see what else do I have here right now? If you have Native Instruments, honestly, I love this solid bus compressor, which is really cool. I also use the anytime I'm Syed changing anything, I always use solid dynamics. I have like a USA basic side chain preset that saved. That's really great. Works really well. Native instruments that have an E key replica is great. You can get, I think these basic plug-ins from Native Instruments for a 100 bucks. The complete 12 Stott, maybe it's cold or basic or something That's a great delay. Stephen slide, I use trigger quite often for drum replacement. If you're doing live drums mixing with that, which you can do manually, It's just sucks. Virtual Mix Rack. I use revival sometimes which is a free one on there. These ones I've been loving, these are 29 boxes on that plug-in list gives it the IPI vibe, you can drive it. You also have an N version which gives you the nave, excuse me, the nave vibe. And that is probably is so mean compared to a lot of people. I don't have a whole bunch. I mean, he is he is the eyes, the isotope stuff. I mean, you can use ozone seven if that's all you wanted to do for mastering. It's not like amazing, amazing if that's all you're doing. But I use the vintage, vintage limited quite a bit and neutrons pretty cool. This is again the older version of it. But I mean, you can choose a preset on here. I do this often like specially stuff like background vocals. I'll just do like this easy backgrounds. It gives you an EQ in two compressors. I'm at different thresholds, which is what I teach people to use and do anyway, just manually so that it's kind of a speed thing can save some time. So anyway guys, that's kinda my $0.02 as far as it goes on, plugins don't get too far down the rabbit hole of needing a bunch. Just use what you have and you can make grit sanding mixes, especially with built-in stuff and just make good decisions. Use good routing. And just figure out how to get good sounds with what you have and it's absolutely doable. So again, you might just randomly be stumbling cross this video, may be offering it for free at some point, or just sent it to you. Because I've noticed on Facebook or something that you really talking about plug-ins, whatever the scenario is. If it's that or you're jumping into the McMaster class, you'll be able to see some more things that I do and techniques that I use. But you can make dry sanding mixes and always reject me instagram, Facebook, whatever in PMO questions happily help you. But happy mixing, see guys.
8. BONUS Mix Prep: Hey everyone, welcome back. This video is going to be covering getting your song mix ready. So this video is for the producer who's watching this. This is for the musician who's watching this. You're calling yourself the produce. If you're creating this song and you're not mixing it, and you're sending it off to a mix engineer. You'll have to go through these steps here so we are getting your song ready, full mix. So few things we're going to cover. Also. I mix a lot of my own music. I have multiple projects and I'm mixing from my own music as well. Often I will do this same process. Export everything as if as if I'm gonna be sending it off to mix engineer. Sometimes I'm working on the song so long and I hear it a certain why so many times that I want that fresh, those fresh IAS, because honestly sending a song off to mix engineer, one of the best reason you would do that, and one of the most valuable reasons to do that is to get their opinion. They are, is they are creative. Touches on this song. So you can also go through this same process, export everything as if you're sending it to mix engineer and pull it into a brand new session to start over before you mix. If you're needing that extra creativity. Sometimes depending on how deep you get into the mix as you're creating. If you're like me, who you are, kind of mixing along the y, sometimes it might not make sense. It might be too much of a step back fee to do that. But in specific situations where I feel like I need to step away and have a fresh eat a fresh IAS on it. I'll actually do this same process and an export it and pull it into new session. So, but let's go with the Azi, a few other producer and you are exploiting this song here for four mix engineer. So again, you a song mix ready? The two separate processes. So you've obviously got you've obviously got production, right? And then you've also got the mix. Some of you might be saying, What's the difference, okay. That's why you, yeah. You're learning the different. So production. You're creating the song, you're writing the song, you're recording vocals, you're recording the instruments, you're creating all of the parts. When instruments come in, when they go out, the mix is dealing with the volume, the sonic space, the EQ that compression, the things to do with every single individual track and how they fit together. You're essentially taking the drum tracks. You're taking all your piano tracks, you're taking the vocal in that guitar lick that you love and you're putting it all in a big bowl and you're mixing it together. I know that's a lame metaphor, but it's literally what you're doing. So you've got production and then you go to mix. Again, some of these are tied together because you produce a my mixing. Well, obviously the goal for a lot of you here is you are producing it, but you want to be adding mix to what you have to offer to your clients. You want to be making an extra 500 thousand dollars a month just because you're able to mix and you're not sending it off to people. So those are the two separate processes. The next next thing we're going to cover is what should you print? And when I say print, I mean like, what do I need to essentially bake into the files as I'm sending them out to mix engineer. So we're going to cover what should we print. Also, how you exporting, getting clarity on the files that the mix engineer needs. And then we are going to jump into what I call the mixed sheet. That'll be a separate video, but that'll be next. So today we're just going to cover like, how do we exploit, what do we print? And how do we package all of these files together so it's easy to deliver to the mix engineer. Cool, Good, awesome. Come back to that if we need it. So here we go. So this is my session here. We have, this comes into a big course of here. Oh boy, cool. So I have quite a few effects gathering and everything just because this session right now is actually mid mics for me since I'm mixing it for myself, My didn't actually export everything on this one. So this might be a little further along than where you would be at before you're sending it out to mix. But Let's cover a couple of things here. So you want to also make sure that your files are ready. Your files need to be ready. What does that mean? That means cross fades. I done. It means the edits are made. It means that you've checked for clicks and pops. These are all roles of you as the producer before it goes to the mix engineer. If I get something from a producer and these things done, I can hear that things went across, fight it or fight it. And this pops in the vocal Edits. I'm going to send it back and say this stuff needs to be done. If you're dealing with real drums, you need drums to be in the pocket. If that's the vibe. If you're going for a real like foci, Alternate, Alternate like music vibe and you don't care, that's great, but don't expect you mix engineer to align your drums. If they already lined up. So we're going to look quickly at here cross fading, grammar and logic. This will look different in whatever DAW you're in. But making sure edits it done. I can show this No Pops. We want to listen through the lead vocal, especially make sure that there's not any double breaths because of a bad edit or anything like that. So you want to go through with a fine tune, fine tune comb and actually listened to all of that. Vocal tuning needs to be done. That's not the role of a mix engineer unless you have figured that out with them ahead of time. If I'm tuning vocals in addition to mixing for a client, I'm charging extra for that. So you have to be upfront and know what your expectation, what the expectation upon you is. These are general expectation, expectations from my experience in the industry. But make sure you are asking you a mix engineer specifically what they, what they want. So let's jump in here. This is not gonna take very long, but for example, like he is a, he has a kick coming right up here. So for example, what I would be doing he is honestly, you probably should be doing this as you're actually creating. Like I would take all of these way, I've found the best way to do it in logic is I go over here, I can go to more and I'll just go fight out one and a decimal. And then if you have your Maki tool up here, you can hold command select J, and then that creates a new file. Just like that. Sign with these you want to go in. And I would if they created like you can't back some of these up. So it's harder to do crossfade, but see there's plenty of space and they see you gotta go through and gonna do all those cross fades. You can take all of these like that. You can go in and do the fight out like that, do them all at once. It's easier if you are doing this along the way as you, as you are actually producing the track. Because they're also going to have to come back and do it all at once. And that's going to take ages. So same with these all of these swells. I'll take those, I'll do fade in, fade out. Make sure everything's fade in. Fade out one. You get the idea. So you want to make sure everything's crossfade. And I was creating this drum part, mainly on this song. So I was actually putting the Sam, I was using samples in a loop on this one. This is a pretty basic drum track, is no real drums on it. So I know that everything's on the grid because that's how I was creating it. But if you had a real drum kit here, you'd want to jump into editing those drums, making sure everything's lined up, et cetera, et cetera. So let's go to the lead vocal here, ageing and it's hell, I've already kinda chopped it up. I'm going to solo it up here. Let me show you what this was. Like that. So the breath breath was in there. Sometimes I want to leave breaths and sometimes it doesn't. So I'm going to you're going to go through and listen, make sure I'm not halfway through a breath right. Now. This is where you're going to hear things like click bleed and noise from headphones that was, that made it into the microphone. So those things you might not hear well, you're producing it. But when the mix Enginius dots compressing that vocal and E queuing that vocal. You really going to start hearing that stuff. So you need to go through these tracks. You have to clean them up. Make sure that there's nothing in there that is going to cause a problem lighter. When you get the mics back, you don't want to hear the click and you don't want to hear. A drum groove comes through just through the headphones that maybe isn't no longer in the track because you made a decision light after according the vocal, you know, those kind of things happen. Again, cross fading, fighting and fighting out, making sure there's no pops. But also we talk about drums, edits, fades, pops, cross fades, cool. So let's assume that this is ready. This is pre export, the May. So a lot of these, I've already fight it and joined into a new file. So a lot of this is already done, but stuff like this, for example, right here. This is some gang vocals. I would highlight them all and I'd make sure to cross-fade all of them in there like that. Makes sense. Take them all. Fade in. Fade out. Just like that. You've crossbite it, everything, everything is fight it and fight it out. Good to go. Okay, let's jump into what should we print. So if you've been creating and producing, you're probably using plugins, right? You'd probably have to use plugins. So obviously, if you have an instrument track that is playing, like if you're leaving the midiin, you obviously want to print that because you want the sound of the instrument. Also, general rule of thumb for me is if it makes it better, if it's if it would go to where to go to a jury and they would all say yes, the sound is better. I would leave the plugin on. But if it doesn't really matter, I would delete it. So or Amit it. So I literally go through the tracks from top to bottom or flee a well-organized here. Okay, this reverse pop hit. What do I have here? You want to check it? Guys? I'm sorry about my computer recording and so much happening in this session IS so I'm going to leave that because I specifically did that. It was too harsh, so I'm going to leave that on. So when I export it, all of the exports are going to take an account, the plug-ins that are on. So now I'm gonna go to this one. I have a, I just have like a this is kinda saturation thing here. I've got a EQ that's on, I feel pretty good about where it's at. This compressor is kind of doing a lot. Let's take a listen. We close a couple of things here. Okay, So it is better. But if I was sending it off to mix engineer, I don't want to give them a little more flexibility, so I'll mute that. Then. I'm going to go down to kick this one. I have some verb on it and I want some bare-boned. So I'm just going to leave that. Yeah, I pulled out some weird frequencies in there, so I'm just going to leave it because it's better. Obviously. You don't want to like, you know, I'd maybe back this up a little bit, the high-pass filter. Because you don't want them to have some sonic frequencies that they might need. So you could do some edits like that, but I like how that sanding, so I'm keeping it. Dq, dy, d, cap potato. I have that on this PECC thing. I'm just leaving that it's more of a type of saturation vibe, nothing on that. So I'm looking at here obviously clicking on it and checking with plugins I have on Sub drop. I can mix engineer can adjust this if they want to have a compressor on there. What is that guy? Yeah. See if it's part of the sound, I would leave it. So I'm going to leave those on subdural to store base. So if you if you intentionally made a decision on a plug-in for reason which you should be. You can leave it. Let's listen what this EQs doing that just to check. Yeah, I'm gonna take that off. So I'm going to give them the whole frequency spectrum of it. This is also like a this is obviously part of the sand now because it's pulsing and so I'm leaving that on. Let's go down to the next track. As you can see, I'm just working my way down. This is the vibe of the, of the actual input. And output here, the preamp, it's driving in a little bit, so I'm gonna leave that on. That's not much What's happening there. So I'm going to take it off. Not a game changer. Acoustic has some verb on it. I'm going to take that off. What else do we have? The piano that is preamp and transformer. That's what the other one I was the word I was looking for earlier here, this true ion, that's a transformer plugin. Okay, So I'm going to label that soft piano and nothing. Also, if you using midi, sometimes like these were originally midi. So I'll be bouncing in place along, along the y to save processing power, but also bike in those plug-in, the vibe from the plugins that already have on them. So at that point then you're not making that decision lighter. So you could be doing that throughout the process to eliminate some of these steps as well. So I'm just making my way down. Okay, here's the big thing. Vocals, I have a lot of processing happening here. So this is the vocal. Without anything. Huge difference. We're going to cover mixing vocals lighter in light of modules here, but not in this video. So obviously, all of this will be happening during mixing. So let's listen through what each of these, uh, doing. So I'm just going to loop this right here. Fairchild. It's not really doing much tickling. Excuse me, compression wise, but I do love the vibe of the emulation of the actual model, the grandchild that's on that. So I'm going to leave that this transformer gives it kind of an API vibe. I'm going to leave that this is another limit of its eliminate mode. I'll leave that off. This is a DNE a lot, so I'm going to leave that off and the DS remanent leave leave off because I want them to be able to do that. Okay, male vocal. I'm going to leave the Fairchild takeoff. The console, which was that last plugin we just looked at. This one's distorting a bit, which I want it to destroy it, but I'm gonna take this guy off. Lead vocal, okay, so I'm leaving the pitch correction on this one's manual plus pitch order. So I'm going to leave Fitch old neutrons off because that's a lot of EQ going to leave this transform of back on like I did previously, and remove these two. This one's doing some limiting, I think, multi-band compression. And then this one is doing some EQs and compression. So I'm going to remove that. Gonna go all the way down. This one is over driven a bit. I want that baked into the sound, but I don't want the EQ and compression on. They're going to leave the Fairchild on because I love it. And this guy, that volcano one is what's filtering it. So I'm going to leave that on because I'm not going to expect them to get that filter and put it on there. So I'm going to leave that again. You get, if it's part of the sound, leave it on male vocal transform of a child or leave on takeoff the EQ compression on the console. Echo boy, and leaving that on because an effect on the actual sound of that vocal swell. Okay, all of these background vocals just have a high pass filter on them. I'm going to remove them all. No plug-in. And here we go. This one at the end is like a ad lib, something what's happening? Okay, So that needs the delay and needs the volcano which is doing the glitchy genus. And then the EQ is taking some of the high-end off. I might skip these back. So he, so he or she has more, more flexibility with frequencies here, which really does open it. I'm just going to attain that Dan little. Even though I would choose to roll off more, I'm going to give it to them. Okay, cool. So that's it. So we've gone through the channels. That is what we said. The files are ready, the edited when figuring out what are we going to print and now Anika exporting. So this will depend on what you've done as far as hiding file, hiding channels. So if you hit H, pulls up all of your tracks, these green ones a hidden. So what I do here, because if you select top and bottom, It's going to export all those hidden tracks and I don't want that. So I'm going to select them all and Command click. I mean, you can delete these, but I always keep them because most of these are just Midea and I've bounced them out to audio. So once I do that, I'd take them all and I drag mold of the top. Cool. So now I'm going to select. So you'll see that that seven, you just want to make sure. So get rid of h 789, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 before it was like 78, 12, 15, 16, 17, 21 because those tracks were hidden. So as long as you're just counting all the way up, you have actually what am I doing? I didn't drag it to the top. I drag it to the bottom because this is going to be easy. Drag it to the bottom. Now get rid of them. There we go. Now we have 123456789, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26. You get it. Take a quick look through those. This is actually a small session, so we have 31 tracks. So I'm going to select the bottom. Well first we need to select the cycle. So we want it from the beginning with plenty of time here at the end. Checking some sort of just in case you had a fade, none. Okay, So now that a cycle is turned on, I'm going to select one. I'm going to shift and hold 31. I'm not exploiting my buses. I'm also not exporting my effects because I'm going to leave that on them. If you did need something baked in, if you wanted the effects or the delay or something on like on that, you would need to actually. So for example, if you wanted to bake in the reverb on the vocal, which would kind of be silly. What you would have to do is if it was being routed as a send and return, which these returns, as opposed to the reverb being on the channel itself, which you never want to do for vocals. And unless it's for a specific reason, which we'll cover lighter. But you would have to select, you would have to solo the vocal. Which if you solo the vocal in logic, it's going to automatically listen back and balance out with older returns that's being sent to you if you're in Pro Tools was something else like ribo FL Studio, I believe you have to also click, Select the verb that you want to hear. And then you would actually just bounce to that file out all the way through to bake it in. But you're not going to do that. So we just have tracks one through 31 selected. Then we're going to go up to File Export. You want to say export 31 tracks as audio files. You can rename them. You can add track nine plus something if you want. That's fine. If you want to put the name of the song or I personally don't like to put the name of the song in there because it's just extra stuff. When I pull it in as a mix engineer, I delete it anyway. So let's go through here. You want to I would, this is one thing logic does is it will trim the silence at the end of the file if you allow it to. So mix engineer will pull in files, but if it was only once, like if it was a symbol hit on vest to it's going to cut it off. So you want to exploit the full cycle so they're all the same size. The length. You're going to export bit depth the same, the same that it was when it was recorded. You don't want to bypass the effects and you don't want to include pan and volume automation. Okay, so now I make sure I hit New Folder and I say files for mix, glass, wool, name of the song, Create, and then export. Then it's going to go through and it's going to export them. And they are going to show up in this folder. Look at those, they shop just like that. One more thing that I will do this might take awhile, so I'm not going to record it, but once it's done, I will go into the folder. I will, I will click on the first one, click on the last one, and right-click. And it will give you the option to add a new folder with, and it'll tell you the amount of files. Basically, I just want to see 31 files. So I want to make sure that I have everything because I know that I'm exploiting 31. I want to count what's in that folder to make sure I'm not missing anything. Again, this will cover lighter as we're prepping for. Prepping to start em mixed, but you want to make sure that things are labeled. Obviously, I didn't touch base with you on that, but I would probably there's probably a few of these that are little too random that I would have renamed. Renamed. See you want to make sure you're doing that as well. Um, that is exporting. And then that will be the folder that you will send over to the mix engineer. So just in review, we covered getting your files mix ready, faded, making sure they have the cross fades done, No Pops, no clicks, anything like that. Things that time aligned. And then what to print and then exporting. So all these exports, why don't you go over that stuff and if you have any questions, feel free to send them away. But that is how to get your song mix ready. Thanks guys.
Jesse Keller, Mixer | Composer | Artist | Music Biz
