The Complete Mixing Masterclass

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone, welcome, Teoh, My mixing masterclass. My name is Jay. I'll be walking you through this entire experience. Now, I've made this class in a way that I really believe is a must have class for anybody making music at all. Uh, it's not defined by any genre. It's not defined by any tool. It's whatever you are making if you're using a built in if you're using pro tools. If using FL Studio using logic que Base Reaper anything. I've really designed this class so that, uh, you will get the most out of it because we focus on techniques and how to do things that sound good. How to do things that bring out the art in the music and not focus on, uh, any individual software I'm gonna be using able to live in this class. But I've really gone out of my way. Teoh talk about the different tools that are available and how to do each technique that I'm doing in whatever software you're working on. So if you're not unable to newser, don't worry about it. You'll be just fine. Now. There are other mixing classes out there and around, but this class has really been designed to be a comprehensive beginning to end everything you need to know about mixing class. It doesn't focus on any specific little niche thing, but it's about everything. Whether you're doing rock stuff, electronic stuff, country stuff, whatever you're doing. Um, we talked about it all. We spent a good amount of time on drums, vocals and electronic stuff. Obviously a lot of electronic stuff, but a lot of acoustic stuff as well. Okay, so when it comes Teoh how you should pan things, here's what I like to do. So here's my kick. I want that right in the center as it is, the frequency spectrum we call it is what we're looking at here. And these vertical lines are important to know. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through my track and I'm gonna listen for any spots that have that kind of muddiness that don't have. Let's start with the big reason that we would want to use compression, and that is to smooth out inconsistent. So throughout this course, we're gonna go through everything that you need to know to get started at mixing. I'm gonna walk you through doing a professional mixing project of mine, actually a student track from one of my other classes. We're gonna do a mixing project on that. I'm gonna narrate every step of the way. I'm going to stop and show you what I'm doing. What's going through my head? What Micah process is and why I am making those decisions. I have nearly 100 online classes at almost 300,000 students in these online classes, so I can promise you the highest level of class experience. So let's take those tracks of yours and polish them up with a really good mix. And we're gonna make those sound like top quality radio ready tracks. Okay, that's the goal of this class is to take your music and make it sound like Justus. Good as anything you hear on the radio or wherever you're hearing music these days. This is a monstrously huge class, the biggest class I have ever made by far. So there's not a moment to lose. Let's dive in and get started 2. How We Will Learn: Hey, everyone, welcome to the class. So, for the first thing I want to talk about is let's just go over really quick how to learn, mixing and what I'm going to guide you through in this class. The best way to learn mixing and one of the things to really keep in mind throughout this whole class is that mixing is like an instrument. So it's just like, you know, learning to play the trumpet or learning to play the guitar. Um, you're not just going to pick it up and sound great. It takes a lot of practice. It takes a lot of experimenting. There are things like this class that are gonna help speed you along on that. But, um, a lot of it does have to do with developing and here you need to be able to hear what you like. Ah, here. What you don't like Ah, and then figure out how to fix it. Ah, and that comes with doing it over and over and over. So what I'm gonna ask you to do in this class is ah, take the the lessons that I'm showing you and put those into your arsenal of tricks and then So when you approach a piece of music that you're trying to mix, you've got all these tools that you can use, but it's going to be something that takes a lot of practice. You're going to see me work on a couple of tracks in this class. I want you to be working on a couple. I want you to be working on your own tracks as well. And there's something to be said for working on other tracks. Call up your friends and say, Yo, send me a track because I'm practicing. Mixing working on other people's tracks will be really valuable to sometimes. If you only work on your tracks, you're gonna learn how to mix your music really well. But not necessarily be a person who mixes all music really well. So try to work on your own music. But also some music of your friends, music and different styles is always good. Um, anything you can get your hands on and don't expect to sound amazing right away. Ah, the more you do it, they're better. You'll get at it. So keep that in mind throughout this whole class that this is something that takes practice . It takes experiment, experimenting. And if you keep working at it and you use the techniques that I'm going to show you, you will get better at it. Cool. Okay, Now, the last thing I want to say about that is in this class, we're going to start off with a bunch of background stuff. Okay, So the first good chunk of this class is going to be about, um, mixing styles, learning environment, Um, how to set up your sessions. Things that you're going to think. Come on, let's just get to the good stuff. Show me, like how to mix with any Q and a compressor and all that stuff. So bear with me, cause this other stuff is really important that we get you into a good listening environment that we get your track set up correctly. This is all extremely valuable stuff. So, um, if it feels like in the first part of this class, you're like, Come on, let's get to it. Please pay attention to what we're doing because everything is important. Okay, That being said, let's move on. 3. What is Mixing?: Okay, so when we talk about mixing in this class, we're primarily talking about making a finalized version of a track. Okay, so we're talking about Ah, the thing that happens after you've written the track and before mastering, we'll talk. Talk about mastering in the next video. So we're talking about working primarily in software like this. Now let's talk about software for a quick second. I'm going to be working in this class and able to live. However you don't have to be. You totally do not have to be working in able to live everything that I'm going to walk you through how to do in this class. You can apply toe any audio software you want. So if you're unable to live, that's great. If you're in pro tools, it's also great if you're in logic for your NFL studio. If you're in Q base, if you're in, I don't know any of the other ones. Everything works the same. Really. We're gonna be talking about e cues and compressors and levels, and all of these techniques will be able to do OK, so don't let able to live. Um, bog you down. Okay? I like able to live. Um, so I'm gonna be using that. But we're talking about concepts here, not specific software. Now, uh, going back to what I just had up. The reason I had this up is this is live mixing. Okay, so this is what things look like when we're in a live setting, and that's not really what we're gonna be doing in this class. Okay? This is ah, a picture of the person mixing red hot chili peppers for a live show right there working at a big board like this, you know? And there's computers. There's computers involved. This is pro tools over here. I can see, um, but when we do studio mixing, which is what we're primarily going to focus on, we don't really usually have a big board like this anymore. We used to, um And if you see older pictures of recording studios, you're gonna see these big huge along mixing boards like this. Um, you don't need those anymore. And I'm gonna teach this class on the assumption that you don't have one. If you do have a big, huge mixing board, then that's great. That could be fun, but everything that we need to do in this class can be done right in this sequence. Er, we can look at it from a mixing standpoint like this. Let me make this a little bit bigger for us. Here we go. So we can work with everything in software, okay? And it's gonna be a lot easier for us and frankly, a lot cheaper than buying one of those big boards. But if you're doing a live setting, you still have these big boards because you really need to get your hands on everything really fast. Um, so but we're not gonna be focusing on live mixing. Maybe someday I'll make a class on live mixing, but we're focusing on studio mixing. Okay, So getting the track to sound great after the compositional elements, more or less are done. So you made it to tune like we have a tune here, but we need to make it sound really good. We need to make it sound like a professional song. You know, um, it might be the case that your making music and you hear your music played back and you think cash, you know, like, I've got good cores of got good harmony. I've got good drums, have got everything here. But it just doesn't sound as good as you know, the stuff coming out of, you know, mousetrap or whatever. The reason is probably, um, one of the reasons is the mix. Okay, so we need to make that mix really pop. And that's what we're gonna work on in this class. Okay, so let's move on and let's talk about mastering real quick and then I'll move on. 4. What is Mastering?: Okay. One of the biggest questions that I get is what is the difference between mixing and mastering? Okay, so let's talk about that really quick. So we basically have three steps in making a professional track. Okay? We have the creative process, okay? Putting everything together, writing it, doing everything. That's probably that's That's the biggest part of making a track. In my opinion, um is getting everything in the right spot making the music right after that, we go into the mixing phase, okay. And the mixing phase is taking all of our levels and just tweaking them a little bit. Get everything where we want it. Using some accuse and some compressors making space. We'll talk about all of these terms and everything later, but getting it to sound really perfect. Okay, um, then once we're done with mixing, we put out a stereo mix. Okay, so after mixing, we're gonna bounce this down to a stereo file, okay? And that's just like the stereo file that you, um, here on Spotify or anything. It's a it's just in audiophile. It's not in the session. Okay? And that's key to understanding the difference between mixing and mastering when were mixing. We're working with the whole session when we're mastering. Were just working with the stereo audio file. This is gone. We don't have this when we're when we're mastering. Okay, so after mixing, we get this stereo audio file. Let me just pull up a stereo audio file here. Um, okay, so here's a stereo audio file. This is just a Cymbal crash. But but you look, it's point. Um, so we have two channels, okay? Just two channels. Uh, not a whole session just to So when someone's mastering, this is what they're going to be looking at is just the final mixed down of the session. And then from here, they're going to dio everything that they need to do to master this song. Now, what is that? Mastering is a whole other process, and what it does is it makes it does a couple things, but the biggest is that it makes the album feel cohesive. So if you're releasing a group of five tracks, it makes the levels match and it make sure that everything works well together. Mastering also makes sure that the music sounds good wherever it's played. In other words, when I'm mixing, I'm gonna mix for the expensive speakers I have here in my studio. Right. I'm gonna make it sure that everything sounds really good on my really nice speakers. But when you're listening to my track and you don't have really fancy speakers, you have just some little old stereo. Maybe in your car, you've got blown out car speakers. Uh, we want to make sure that it sounds good there too, right? Not just on my expensive speakers. So that's part of the mastering process. It's making sure that it sounds good and as many places as possible. So they're going to do all kinds of tricks to make sure that, um, no matter where it's played, it has the best shot at sounding great. OK, so a lot of that has to do with negotiating how much bases in the track, how much trouble and finding good balance is there again? Mastering is another art form. It's another instrument. It takes a lot of practice, just like mixing does right there. It They're kind of two separate instruments that need to be learned, but the key take away is that when you're mixing your working with the whole session. When you're mastering, you're just working with stereo bounce okay? Or the export exported stereo files. That is the difference between mixing and mastering. 5. Focusing On The Listening Environment: Okay, let's talk about your listening environment. This is the room that you're in, probably the room that you're in right now. Um, but the room that you're going to be doing your mixing in. So why do we need to focus on this? Can't we just use headphones and then the room doesn't matter? Yeah, kind of, Um, headphones are good, and we'll talk about headphones in a minute. But, ah, the listening environment does matter, because you don't want to always use headphones. So if you can, you want to get a set of studio monitors and we're gonna talk about what I look for in monitors and how to set them up. I'll show you the kind that I have, and I'll show you how my room is set up. But, um, there are other things to consider as well. It's not just about how fancy your speakers are, right? It's about, um, the design of your room matters. The acoustics matters now. I'm not an acoustician, so I can't go into all of the math around the perfectly acoustically treated room. But we're gonna go over some general things that's going to make your room sound as good as possible. And why? Why do we care about this? The answer is honesty, right? Honesty is a weird word to use, but I'm gonna stick with it. So by honesty, what I mean is that we need to make sure that our mix sounds riel. It sounds honest. It sounds how the music actually sounds. Right. So we need good speakers. We need good acoustics. We didn't make sure that we're accurately hearing what the computer is doing right, Because if we have crummy speakers and they're adding a whole bunch of base, that means that our mixes probably lacking in base because we're gonna mix the base low because our speakers are adding all kinds of base. Right, So we need to make sure that we don't do that. We need what we call flat speakers, but speakers that are very honest now, Similarly, if we're mixing in a room and, ah, it's got a higher frequency ring around, I don't know, 4000 hertz or so. Then we're probably gonna pull down 4000 hertz in our mix. So when someone else takes it and listens to it, they're going to say, like, there's really just something missing on the high end here because we've pulled it down because our room was not honest, right? It was giving us false information. So that's why the listening environment is crucially important. Because if it's giving you false information, then it's you're going to screw up your mix. Okay, so that's why we care. Now let's go into things we should consider in our listening environment. We'll start with some acoustics. 6. Finding Acoustic Problems: Okay, so let's talk about some simple acoustic things you can do in your room to make it better. So I've drawn a box here, and let's assume this is our room, OK? And this is our desk. All right. So let's figure out the best place to put our speakers. Now. We're going to do this and a little bit more scientific way in a minute, but this is just kind of a general thing. First of all, if this is your set up, let's pull your desk out a little bit. You don't want to be right up against the wall, Leave a little bit of space here. Um, let's say this is a speaker. It's kind of a big speaker, probably. Okay, so here's the speaker, and here's the speaker. Always have to, Right? Okay. So obviously we want them in a stereo pair. So on the opposite sides of each other Now, we could put them right here, right? If we're sitting right here, let's make a little okay, that's us. That's where we sit. We're gonna sit right in that hacks again. That that is whatever this is, where we sit right in the middle Okay, so now we've got the speakers pointed right at us. So they be pointed this way right at our face. Okay, that's pretty good. However, this causes one problem that we want to avoid, which is we have the speakers right up against the back wall. We don't want to do that, so I would pull them out to here. Overlap. I'm assuming they're sitting on top of the desk or on a stand or something. So to be sure they're symmetrical here, but we don't want them right against the wall, so make sure your speakers are pulled out a little bit from the wall. Another thing you might want to do is put them in the corners because that tends to look kind of good. But corners are even worse than the wall. You don't want your speakers in the corners so away from the wall, not in the corner of a room. Another thing that we want to avoid is, let's do this. Let's say that if your listening room is doubling as a bedroom, you might not be able to put your desk right in the center. You might have your desk over here or something like that. Okay, If this is your case, this is also not good. Um, and when I say not good, what I'm saying is it's not perfect, but I get that a lot of you are probably working in a bedroom, a small apartment, maybe a garage basement. So you do what you can't write. Um, if you have to do one of these things, that's not good. Whatever you know, you'll be fine, but try to avoid these things if you can. The reason this is not good is because we have this speaker and it's close to this wall, and it's also kind of in a corner. And this one is not close to a wall. We want thes toe, have similar kinds of things happening to them. Right? So this one is close to two walls, actually. Ah, and this one is close to one wall. So we don't like that. It would be better to have this right in the dead center of the room if we had to write. Because then the speakers, the distance to the walls are both the same. Okay, but if you want to do this, this would probably be the best. Something like this. Okay, so we've got speakers not up against the wall. With a little space here and the space here, I'd say, you know, if you can get a foot of space between the speaker on the wall, that would be great If you could only get six inches. That's fine, too. Here. We've got plenty of space this way. Um, we've got speakers pointed right at us. They are not symmetrical, but that's just cause of my drawing here. Is that symmetrical? That looks symmetrical. Okay, We want thes totally symmetrical, and we want them pointed right at us. And this is something that we're going to do a little bit more. In a minute, we're gonna talk about how to measure this space and get it. Um, just right. So we'll talk about this angle and everything in a second, but those are three things you can do to make your room sound a whole lot better. Okay, Stay away from the walls. Stay away from the corners and make sure that your speakers are the same amount of distance away from whatever walls or corners that they're close to. Right. So this distance is roughly the same as this distance, right? I don't know why I just got arrows there, but that's great. That's what I wanted. And this distance is the same as this distance. Okay, that's the perfect situation. Cool. Okay, So common acoustic problems that you can easily solve. All right, let's move on to Ah, what kind of studio monitors to look for? 7. Buying Studio Monitors: Okay, let's talk about studio monitors. Now, in this in this video, I'm just going to give you some straight up. Here's what I like. Um, but the the key to selecting studio monitors is two things. One Ah, listen to them. These air really hard to buy online. You really can. You need to go to a store and listen to whatever you can. Another thing you can do is go to studios and listen to what they're using. Just listen to his money as you can. And crucial to that is pick a piece of music that you know really, really well. And listen to that on the as many different monitors as you can. Um, I use there's this one album that I always use to test speakers. It's, um, the Art of Noise, The Seduction of Claude WC. Let me show you our nose reduction kind of. You see, uh, this album. I think I've talked about this album before in this class. The reason I use this album is because a. I really love that music be it's recorded, and it's mostly Elektronik. Um, it's really clean. It's really precise. It's mastered really well. Um and I've listened to it a 1,000,000 times, like I know this thing backwards and forwards. So I always use this album to test speakers. You can use whatever you want, but just use something that's really clean. Um, you can It's not something that's really distorted will be hard. So like, like, big rock stuff will be kind of hard Teoh here, all of the frequencies. Although, if you know it, really well, it might be OK, Um, I really like this album for that, mostly just cause I know it really well, So I always listened to that album when I'm testing out speakers, um, so listen to them and find something that that really, um, speaks to you. And what we're looking for is, um, and even frequency balance. So you want to be sure that no frequencies air popping out? It's not like you. You hear some tone coming out when when the music hits some frequency and you're like, Wow, there's this one silent. That's just really popping out that someone you want, you want it to be really flat. Um, so no frequencies are jumping out at you as out of place. Um, going to make sure the volume stays at about the same level all the way across. So if you're listening and you here and you think while the mids are really loud in this mix and I've never heard in this music the mid to be so loud before then you know that that might not be the right speaker for monitoring because you don't want something that's gonna accentuate the mids like that. Um, And then the third thing is make sure it doesn't distort. Um, give it some good volume, crank it up and make sure that you don't get distortion out of it. Um, cranking up the volume when you're mixing can actually be useful. You don't want to mix everything really loud, But, um, there are times when just turning everything up in the lab can be kind of useful. So you want to make sure that it doesn't distort when it gets loud and cheap speakers will do that. So I pulled up here a couple things that look at. I always just like to go to Sweetwater when I'm just kind of looking at prices and stuff. Sweetwater dot com is a retailer in the U. S. So if you go toe shot by category, studio and recording go down to studio monitors and then we're gonna go toe active monitors on active monitor means that it's got an amplifier in the speaker. Uh, let me just show you. I pulled up a couple here, So here's a JBL. If I look at the back right, I can just plug this one into the wall and then I can plug my input into it. I don't need a separate amplifier. You really don't want to deal with a separate amplifier. This will save you money and also save you having to figure out the best amplifier for the best speaker. When you're dealing with studio monitors, I highly, highly, highly recommend. Go with an active monitor. You'll have to plug these right into the wall, and you'll know if it's an active monitor because you have to plug it into the wall. It needs power. If it's not an active monitor, it will need power. It'll leading up. So, um, active monitors is really what you want to look at or powered. Monitor is the same thing. Okay, so popular ones are the JBL, Siri's So JBL is the company. They have a lot of different ones. 305 month to this is kind of a random when I grabbed um, these are popular thes K R K Rockets. I see being really popular lately. We used these that slam academy. They sound really good. I really like him and they're relatively cheap. What is the price on these one? 79 each. So remember, when you look at the prices of these, you need two of them and it is absolutely critical that you get the same speaker, right? You can't have 12 different brands of speakers on the two different sides. Um, you need matched pair. So 179 each. So roughly? Ah, 350 bucks. A little more than that For a pair of the's that's reasonably good. Studio monitors are expensive, right? So 179. Each is a good price. And these air these air nice sounding, relatively inexpensive, you can get some much more expensive ones. Here's the Yamaha HS a eight. This is a popular one that I see of being used a lot. Um, if you flip it over, we can see that it's an active. It's powered speaker. Those are popular. Bit more expensive, right? 3 50 each. Right, So that means 6 700 bucks for the pair, and then we get into the really high end ones. The gentle X. Um, these sound really great, but they're expensive. So 300 bucks. And this is a low end. GenElec um, this is a relatively inexpensive GenElec. This is a powered speaker. I think the plug must be on the bottom. They must be down here a the bottom. But, um, it is powered. So it is an active speaker. Here's a higher end. GenElec these air 700 bucks apiece. The general like 80 thirties. Um, these are nice. They sound really good, but they're really expensive. So you don't need these. Um, you can do just find with, you know, these j b l's or something like that as long as you hear him, and they sound good and you like the way they sound. Um, so the best way is go into your local music store. If they have some studio monitors set up, listen to some stuff. Queue up music that you know, if you're serious, about buying studio monitors. The store will let you play whatever you want through him. They should know this. So try those things out now. The ones that I use, I don't think they're not made anymore, so they probably don't have them here. I use these blue sky ones, which were really popular about six years ago when I bought them. But I think the company went out of business. Um, they sound really good. I'm probably about due for new ones, though, Um, so I might upgrade this and gentle X, but, um, I'll show you what they look like when we get Teoh. Kind of how everything is set up. Okay, so that's my advice on studio monitors. Let's move on. 8. Monitor Setup: Okay, let's talk about the best way to set up your speakers. Now, I'm going to remind you that the way that there is a perfect way to set things up, but the perfect situation never really happens. I mean, it does in a $1,000,000 studio, but if you're mixing in your bedroom and you can't make this perfect situation happen, just get us close as you can. Ah, and you'll be OK, I'll show you in a minute. My set up, which is not perfect. It has problems. So, um, first of all, so let's go back to our drawing here. So this is US K. This is called the mixed position. This is where we're gonna sit, right? Um oops. I didn't mean to spin it, but that's OK. It's doesn't really matter. Okay, so we're gonna assume we're gonna sit right here at our desk. So I have a triangle here. Perfect triangle, equal lateral triangle, if you will. So first I'm gonna rotate this. So what I want, basically, is a triangle between the two speakers and the next position. Okay, so I'm gonna put this I'm just gonna put the tip of the triangle right in the center of the speaker. Okay. And it's, like, a little smaller. Okay, so here's the tip of one triangle. Here's the tip of the other triangle. Okay, so that makes this tip down here. So that means you have to move this out of the way for a second. That means the perfect mix position is right here. Okay, so we're gonna have to slide way back from our desk. We could make the mix position closer if we could move our speakers in farther. Right for speakers were in up there. Let's bring these to the fronts. We can see where our speakers are. Okay? So if our speakers were right there, Okay, now are mixed. Position gets quite a bit closer. Hey, let's bring this to the front to Okay, let's get our That looks pretty good. Okay, Now, arm exposition is up here. Okay? So we want basically the same distance between the two speakers to be the same distance between the mixed position. Now, I'll tell you, my mix position is not perfect in this way. So I have a situation kind of similar to this right here. And I sit here, okay, so that all that really means is that I'm in a pretty good mix position. But when I really want to make sure I'm hearing everything perfectly, then I just scooch back a little bit of that. I have to scoot back a little bit too here to be in the absolute perfect spot. Um, but most of the time in mixing up here, and then I double check it by moving back. Teoh here. And that's okay. I mean, that's not perfect, but it's okay. So, um, three things to keep in mind when you're placing your speakers first is the distance between them. Okay? And that makes this triangle. Okay. Second thing is the angle of the monitors. Okay, so let's say let's make our monitors a square. So if the speaker is right here, Okay, so that means sound is coming out this way. It's heading out, going down in this case. So we wanted to head straight towards us, So we're gonna angle it right to be just like that. So let's say let's get rid of that. And this is actually what we have. Okay, so there's our speaker. Okay? It's heading right towards us. so. And that's typically what we want. You want the speaker pointed right at you? Um, you want to make sure that both speakers are at the same angle Now, one old trick that's been done forever is if you have any kind of little mirror to put a little mirror on your speaker right here and then sit right here and then and put another little mirror on this speaker and then make sure you can see your face in that speaker and that speaker at the same time that will tell you that they're pretty much at the same angle . Um, that's an okay way to do it now. There also. I mean, some people like to sit a little off center. They don't want thes pointed directly at them. Some people like them to be pointed directly at them. Kind of depends on the speaker. Really. Once you get a set of speakers, then you know, you kind of find the sweet spot where you like to sit. Um, I like to have them pointed right at me, right at my ears. Um, so But that's just me. Other people want him a little off center. Okay, The third thing to think about is how they're mounted. Um, you could put them right on your desk, or you can put him on a stand. The most important thing, though, is that you've got a little bit of something in between them and your desk. Let's look over here in this. So what we really want is not this. See how these speakers air sitting right on the desk. That's generally now we want I think maybe they are for this picture. Just because someone was being ridiculous and said, How maney speakers can I get, um What we typically do is put a little piece of put some foam here or, um, even, like a little strip of carpet or something like that can help. Just something so that the vibrations don't push down into your desk. That can cause some distortion in the low end. Um, here you have a stand, and there's probably some rubber or something on the stand and in the stands going down into the carpet. So that's OK. Um, but typically, try not to put your speakers directly on your desk like this. Um, that's kind of a no No. Okay, We don't like that. So try to put some foam in between the speaker and your desk or whatever. They're sitting up cool, okay? 9. Monitor Settings: Okay, let's not quick about the monitor settings. So if you have active monitors and you look in the back, you've got a couple of settings here. So let's go over these really quick. Remember, what we want is something that is super flat, right? We don't want our speakers to be adding frequencies or taking away frequencies. We wanted to be accurate to what, um, the music is presenting. So most speakers will have something similar to this. Just zoom in here. Okay, So here's where your input goes. You can use, um, whichever these your audio card is putting out. Um, as your input input sensitivity is just going to give it a boost or a cut, it doesn't really matter which one of these you use. To me, it just kind of depends on what you think. Sounds better. Whether you need a little extra volume or not, you shouldn't need them. And I think there's a middle setting here that is nothing. But this will add a little volume. This will take away a little volume. Um, whatever you do, the most important thing with all of these settings is that both speakers match. Exactly. Do not set one speaker to do one thing and the other speaker to do the other thing. I need to make sure they match perfectly. Okay, So if there's an e que built into the speaker, try to set it to be flat. In this case, we have this minus three db. We have 1.5 db and we have zero D V, which is doing nothing minus three. Db is gonna pull the volume down a little bit on the low end. 1.5 is gonna pull it down slightly less on the low end. Basically, what this is saying is that low frequencies it's gonna pull, it's going to make quieter the low frequencies. Um, if we set it to zero, it's gonna do nothing. So that's what we want. Okay, so set that to zero is what I would do. High frequency trim. Just gonna be the opposite. It's gonna boost high frequencies, um, or take away high frequency. So minus two is gonna make high frequencies louder. Sorry. Quieter and plus two is gonna make high frequencies louder, or zero is going to do nothing. So set that +120 Also volume depends on what you need for your room. It's just volume. So, um, super important here that these are exactly the same on both speakers. Think minor. Set to three. I have, ah, relatively small room that I'm mixing in. Um, And these speaker, at least the ones I have, they get super loud. So three as plenty of volume in my little studio here. So, um, I have them set to exactly three. And I just like, make sure that I'm exactly on that dot so that I can set them both to be exactly the same. And stuff done here is just your power. Okay, so those are your monitor settings. 10. Adding A Subwoofer: OK? Do you need a subwoofer? You might, um it depends on what kind of music you listen. Teoh. The low end of the speakers, you get, um, a couple quick tips about subwoofers. One is that if you decide to get a subwoofer, really try hard to get one made by the same manufacturer as this as the monitors you have, um, and ideally, one that's designed to work with a specific model of monitors that you have. Um, in a lot of cases, you might not need a sub when you're mixing. Um, it's nice to have a sob. It gives you a really big low end, but it can give you too big of a low end at times. And you'd be surprised at the low end that a good set of studio monitors can kick out. Um, there's kind of a lot of low in here. What I have set up in my studio is I do have a sub, but my sub has the ability to It has a foot pedal. And so I basically have a little, um, pedal connected to it, and it's off by default, so it's hardly ever on. But when I'm mixing and I really want to hear something through a sub. I push the foot pedal down and then it turns on the sub, and then I hear everything going through this up. But most of the time it's off. I just every now and then turn it on to hear what it sounds like. Threw a sub. It's just a kind of focus in on the low end. If you're doing based music, if you're doing dance music, you might want to have a sub. But be careful about, um, relying on that sub giving you a tunnel low end. But if you're mixing so that when you get into a club, uh, you're gonna play that track in the club and that club's gonna have a huge sub than you might want to mix with us up, right, because that's where the music is gonna be played. So you might wanna that might help you mix it accurately. So long story short, you might not need a sub. You probably don't, um, but if you do get a sub, try to get one that's designed to work with your speakers and follow the instructions for setting it up correctly, also important, and that's all 11. Headphones: Okay, let's talk about headphones, so you're probably if you're like a lot of people are getting starting to mixing, you probably are expecting that mixing with headphones is better than mixing with speakers cause headphones get right up on your ears and, ah, you can make things a bit louder. You can hear more minutia, and that is largely true that you can hear more minutia and things like that. And mixing and headphones is actually good. You should mix in headphones, but in the ideal situation, you would alternate between studio monitors, speakers and headphones. Headphones are good for hearing middle of clicks and things when you're editing, but not so much when you're mixing. But, ah, hearing the fine minutia. Headphones are really good at, um, hearing the overall mix. Speakers are better at headphones can also get tiring. Um, on your head just wearing headphones. You Can. We have this thing in mixing called your fatigue, which is when you hear something so many times that everything sounds bad. Um, that's something that happens all the time. When you're mixing, you just need to take a break and walk away, and I think most people find that when they're mixing with headphones here, fatigue happens faster. Headphones are also less accurate, especially in the low end. Um, when it comes to mixing, they have a tiny little speaker in them and even really great ones. Um, there's just some physics involved in getting those low frequencies to be produced by that tiny little speaker. That's just impossible. So, um, the accuracy of the low end is less good. Which is another reason why alternating between mixing with headphones and speakers is good . So if you are going to so I would recommend having if money is no object, get a set of good headphones to, um, they're cheaper than speakers. Um, let me show you just a couple pair. Um, these are the ones I use. Um, these Sony MDR 75 or six is very popular there. 100 bucks for a pair. I mean, it's not cheap, but it's not insane. Um, these air good. Another one thes a k g k two forties. I see people using quite a bit. The thing I don't like about these is that this little golden ring tends to pop off. They still work fine. It's just makes it kind of ugly. But, um, you know, these air less expensive. And I see you know, studios using these, um, these signs risers are a little bit newer, but I've been in some studios that have been using these. They're, you know, 100 bucks. So these are all good options, right? Um, you don't need to break the bank on headphones. Definitely get a higher quality set of headphones, not beats headphones. Those generally are really not very good for mixing. They have kind of a false low end to them where they boost a lot of low end stuff. Um, so they're not good for mixing. They're not flat at all. They're not honest. Um, these ones. I see people using a bit thes air. They're more expensive, obviously. But, um, there really nice headphones, the's air. You know, the headphones you want for mixing or not Earbuds. They're not the headphones that you're gonna use when you're sitting on the bus. These air, higher quality headphones. These are things that kind of wrap around your whole ear and give you a really good acoustic. Um, sense of what's going on. So long story short, you can use headphones, and you should use headphones. Um, but try not to use headphones inclusively. If you do have to use headphones exclusively because of where you are. If you can't be loud and you can't have monitors and things like that, that's okay. You can still do a really good job with just headphones, but in a perfect world, you would use headphones and monitors. 12. My Less Than Perfect Setup: Okay, So here's my set up, and I want to point out with all humility. What's wrong with it? Um, you can probably see a few things that are wrong with it right away. Um, I have a unique situation here. So this is where, um, I work when I'm both making music, mixing music and making these classes so you can see my microphone coming in right here. That's primarily for talking in these classes is not the microphone I would use to record. Um, like a singer or something like that. It was just talking like So. The biggest problem I have is that I haven't insane amount of displays. Right. Um, this is just something that I've grown to fall in love with. That I have these air thes air 34 k displays that kind of wrap all the way around. And they're these curved monitors, and I just really like him. I just like having all of this real estate, and it's important to me to have 100 windows open at once. That's just how I roll. So what that means, though, Um, I when I said when I bought all three of these I was like, Oh, my gosh is gonna be awesome. Gonna have so many monitors and it's gonna be great. However, what I immediately really realized once I set him up is that I can't put my speakers where they should go. They should go right here and right here, right? I can't do that cause I have monitors all the way around. So what I had to do, I was raised my speakers up a little too high, so they're actually pointed down, so the backs of them are wedged up. So they're they're on an angle pointing down at my head, so the triangle is more or less correct. Although, um, the chair is too close. I should sit back just a little bit about a foot for it to be perfect. And this thing of having them too high and then angled down is not ideal. That's not very good to do. But I just kind of had to do it. Um, there was this really no other way around it. The other thing that you might notice is that these are awfully close to the wall. Um, they're not in corners, so that's better. But I just couldn't get farther away from the wall. Um, I could pull things out a little bit more if I wanted to, but that makes other problems. So I just kind of compromise. They're not right up against the wall. That kind of look like it from this. But there is about, uh, seven or eight inches in between the wall and the speaker. So they're not as close is. This picture makes it look, um, yeah, so this is my set up. So it's not perfect, right? And the reason I'm showing you this is because I want you to know that I realize that a lot of you are probably mixing in a bedroom or a room in your basement or something like that. And you don't have the opportunity to make the perfect set up, and that's okay. You can get by with doing this. I have really good sounding set up here. You know, I have My sub is over here on the floor. It's down there somewhere. Have a mixer over here that lets me get my hands on the mix if I need to. Um, I also use this push for mixing a little bit, but mostly software. So if things aren't perfect, that's okay. You know, there's still a lot of good things you can do. All right, let's move on. 13. Multiple Monitors And Mono: The one thing I don't think I pointed out is the whole set up that I'm using here and that you would need to use as well if you get monitors. So basically, what I have is computer down here. Computers connected to an audio interface, which for me, is this box right here. And then the speakers are connected to the audio interface. So, um, if you don't know what an audio interfaces, it's something that makes higher quality audio. If you're using a laptop or something and you just want to plug your headphones right into the laptop, that's okay. But this is going to make a higher quality audio signal, and it's going to give me a place to plug my speakers into for the output so you can look up audio interfaces. If you've taken into my able to in classes or anything like that, you know about audio interfaces. Um, I do want to point out using multiple monitors, we could have another set of monitors appear if we wanted to, and you'll see a lot of people mixing or they have multiple sets of monitors like that image that we saw a minute ago this one where someone has an insane amount of monitors. There is a value to having more than one set of monitors. This is silly, um, that they have here. But there is value to it, and that is you can set up a button. And in my setting, I do have a button. You see, little green button, right? There might be hard for you to see, but that little green button will let me switch between, um, sets of speakers. Okay, So if I had another set of speakers here, I could listen to my mix on these speakers, and then I could switch by hitting that to a different set of speakers and here it on another set of speakers, which would be really useful, right? Just to make sure that I'm what I'm hearing is accurate on multiple speakers. And when people do that, they might have a nice set of monitors like these, and then a bad set of monitors. You know, there's there's room to buy a crappy set of monitors, just toe have just to listen to your mix through something bad and make sure it still sounds pretty good. That's important. Um That's something that happens in mastering a lot, but you can do it while you're mixing. Also, another thing that's valuable to do is listen in motto What that means. And again, if you have an audio interface, there's there's a button you can find that will mix in motto. So we always mix in stereo, meaning There's a separate signal going to each of these speakers, but it can be useful. And there are times when you wanted just switch over to listening in mono. But that means that you still hear music out of both speakers, but it's the same signal. Okay, so it sends both the left and the right channel to both left and right channel speakers. You hear all the music, but you hear them out of both. That means your stereo imaging will be gone. We'll talk more about that later. Um, but it can be useful, so I just want to mention it now in terms of, uh, if you're looking for interfaces. Ah, finding where the mono button is can be useful. It's not something that you need tohave by any means, but it can be nice toe have Ah, when you're trying to really nail a mix, to be able to switch over to motto more about that when we get to it. Okay, enough on monitors and are listening environment. For now, let's move on to preparing a track for mixing. 14. The First Step In Mixing: Okay. The first thing we need to do is prepare to mix, prepare the session to be mixed. Now, it might sound like I'm about to go into, like, Ah, some not specifics, but this is the first part of the mix. Okay, this is the first part of mixing is to prepare this session for it. And by the end of this section, we might actually have this sounding a little bit better by just preparing it correctly, right? We're gonna get rid of some noisy stuff. We're gonna tune some things, and we're going to set up a couple of effect buses and just kind of run some stuff through some compressors and limiters. Probably. Um so just by doing this process of setting up the session to be mixed Ah, we probably will end up with a better sounding track before we even get into the nitty gritty. Right? So I'm gonna be using this track, at least in this section. Now, I don't think I mentioned this yet, but I I went to one of my student community pages, which I'll invite you to join at the end of this class. And I asked people to send me their sessions that we could work on. So these are all student tracks that I'm gonna be working on in this class. And, um so these are things that students have submitted for me to take a look at. So I encourage you to check out these students and check out some of their music. These are people from my able to in class, maybe sound design class. Really? Any of my classes that are on here. So this one eyes called. I believe it's called High as a cloud. So let's dive in and start working through the process of preparing it to be mixed. 15. Session Copy and Backup: Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is make a copy. We want to leave the original as is, and we're gonna work off a new session just because some of the things we're gonna do are going to adjust the song a little bit. And we always want to be able to go back to the original, right? So we don't want toe change things around with the session completely. So there's a few ways you could do this. You could either. Well, let me show you. Here's the session, Right. So depending on what program you're working in, what I have is this is my actual file. Ah, that is the session. And then these are all like, here's the samples. Here's some project info. Here's backups of it. So these are all things that rough. All of these other folders here referenced this file so I could just duplicate this file or I could go back. And here's the project folder. I could duplicate the entire project folder. Either way is fine. It's not really necessary in this case to duplicate the entire project folder because I'm not gonna be messing with the samples too much or anything like that. So let's do that. So the easiest way is just to open it, and then I'm gonna go to save lives set as, and then we need to give it a name. Okay, so there's a couple different ways you can do this. You can give it the name of the date. So today is 5 16 19 Um, that's one way to do it. Or you can say I like to use an underscore there. And this is just whatever you feel like doing could say mix V one and then b two B three before you can keep adding versions. So the date or mixed version one mixed version two, etcetera. Whatever you want to do, right. But come up with a system that you want to use a lot of people, like using the date. A lot of people like using version one version to version three. Um, I like to use mixed version one, so because I don't I don't know. I just don't like seeing all the numbers in the date. I don't know. The date is great. Ah, this is what I do. You can use the date you can use whatever you want. Okay, so I'm gonna call this mix version one. So now if I look at my file folder here, we have another new and another new mixed version one kept. So if you're using a different Daw, you might have a different set up here. Uh, if if nothing else, just copy this whole folder and make a whole new project folder if you want. Okay, so that's the first thing we're gonna do now. We're always gonna work off mixed version one. If things go haywire, we can always go back to the original. Awesome. Let's move on. 16. Tracking Down Extraneous Noises: Okay, The next thing I'm gonna do is a little tedious. I'm actually kind of a lot tedious, but it's worth it. I'm gonna go through each track, and I'm gonna look for any kinds of little cliques or pops or noise or anything that I don't want in there. That might be something that you didn't notice when you were editing. So really, what? I'm gonna dio. So I'm gonna solo each track, listen to all elements of it and make sure everything is as tidy as possible. Main things I'm looking for. Here are things like an audio tracks cure. Zoom way in on this. Okay? See how this audio track starts right at the beginning. If I zoom way, way and it doesn't? What that tells me is I might want to add a tiny little volume fade right there. Oh, actually, the volumes down right here. Where does the volume come in on this? Oh, it's really slowly ramps up. Okay, well, that's not gonna matter, then. Okay. This is okay. What I would look for is something like this. If the volume was up here, I might say that could create a tiny, tiny, tiny little clique. Okay, so I might do this and that, but way we were again. And just make sure that I ramp up. I don't know that I need to. In that case, in fact, I know I don't, cause this was, ah, gradual fade in. But I want to make sure my audio tracks I don't have any clicks or pops when they enter or leave the same thing when it leaves. So adding a fade into the beginning in the end of any audio tracks can be useful. So I'm going to go through Ah, And also, you know, I'm gonna listen to these midi tracks and make sure that there's nothing strange in them. Um, So I'm gonna pause the video and go through all this and then I'll chime in island posit and walk you through when I find something. So here we go. Okay. I found something. Um, this is super subtle, right? And but that's kind of what we're looking for. We're looking for very, very subtle things. Now listen to this right here. The entrance of this audio file. This is just like a build, right? Like a like a swoosh. Kind of thing. It's just a noise ramp. But when we hear it in context of the whole track, this starts at nothing and gradually fades up. Right, So here's everything right. Okay, so this starts at nothing and just fades up, and that's built into the audio file. There's no fade here. Um, I don't think no, there's no fate here, but when we listen to just this audio file, it doesn't start at zero, right? If we zoom in there, that starts at something and not nothing. So once we get into the mix, that might come forward enough to where you can hear this, enter right and we don't want to hear it enter. So let's just give it a little bit of help here and make sure that it starts off at zero to make sure I don't affect anything before it. But let's give it a nice, good little ramp there so that it actually starts at zero. Ah, and I think I saw in the track this happens kind of over and over a few times, Zoom way forward. There it is again. Yeah, same thing. Okay, so I'm just gonna make a little audio fade and, you know, again, this isn't any, um anything wrong with the way this track was made? That's just what you would do when you would make the track. Because that's what you hear. But when you're going into mix it, we want to make sure that these things are just absolutely perfect. It's got a nice little fade there and zoom out. I think there's 1/3 1 Yeah, do 1/3 time. Okay? And I think that was it. That's it. Okay, so, watching out for those tiny, tiny, tiny little things there. Okay, I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna pause again, see if I find anything else, Okay? I got all the way through the track. I didn't find anything else. So this track is mostly synthesizers and, um, flattened synthesizers. So we have something like all of this midi stuff which has been rendered as an audio file down here, so that means it's gonna be super clean. There's not a lot of like there's no just recordings with a microphone in this track. So if there was recordings with a microphone of like a singer that I might find some other things that I could clean up, but basically, what we're trying to do in this step is just get rid of any extraneous noise by going through when soloing each track one by one, listening through all of the content and just knocking out any noise that might be buried in there. That alone is actually gonna help clean up the track. Kind of a bit. All those little things you can't really here. When the track is playing altogether, they do kind of add up. So we want to get rid of those that we have a nice clean track, a clean slate, if you will, to start our mix from. So I have addressed those concerns so onto the next step. 17. Clean Up The Session: Okay, The next thing I'm going to do is just get rid of stuff we don't need. And you might think, like, how is that possible? Everything in this session you need? Well, not really. When you're making a track, a lot of the times you have an idea that doesn't pan out and you ditch it, and that means you end up with unused tracks. So we want to get rid of some of those. Let's make sure there's something that we need on every track. Okay, this is here. But is it? Actually, this track is muted all the way from beginning to end. I checked, so this doesn't need to be here because it's totally muted. Let's get rid of that track. Ah, it's just gonna be in our way. And it's not making any sound, however important, that you might have a track that's muted. That's actually being used in a side chain or something like that. If that's the case, watch out for that. Um, but in that case, it wasn't being side chain. This one appears to be muted also. Let's see here I think this one is muted, Um, because it's rendered in this track. It's of this. And then they added it over and over, so we didn't need that. Um, we have that. We have that This is a group track, which we'll talk about in a second. So we do need that. This is another group track which does not appear to be doing anything everything in this group. So it's labeled intro V S t. So I think this was all the intro material which has been made into audio here, so I don't think we need this at all. So we're gonna get rid of that group. Here's intro again. So here we have some audio, audio, audio, audio, audio, audio. Okay, here's another group. This is drum stuff. Lots of stuff happening here. This actually is muted. So this is another case. What they did is they had ah midi track here, and then they turned it into an audio track in the track below it. You can do that with either re sampling or just recording it. Um, if we look at, we would be able to tell the output here would be set to the next track if they re sampled it. So they just freeze and flattened. That's enable Tim thing. But if you're in a different program just called render in place or it might be called re sample or something like that just means that this is the same material on So this one is turned off, so we don't need that anymore. You would want that, though, in your track. Because if you wanted to go backwards and change some notes, you would need that many track. But we're not gonna do that when we're mixing so we can get rid of it. Same thing with this one. Okay? And everything else looks good. Okay, So now I simplified my session a little bit, actually, um, by getting rid of some of those tracks that we didn't need if I close these groups down to a quite manageable couple tracks good. OK, so that's the next step. Get rid of the stuff that you don't need in the session anymore. 18. Tuning Tracks: Okay, The next thing I would do is a little tuning. So if I had any singers, Um, especially if I had singers, maybe some other instruments to like any recorded wind instruments or anything like that. I go through and run them through a tuner, um, and apply some tuning. If I thought it needed it now, I would. I'm pretty judicious with this, so that doesn't mean run him through auto tune and crank it up. What that means is you can run him through auto tune, but be subtle about it. You don't need it to sound like a robot to use auto tune. You could have a subtle amount of auto tune where it doesn't sound like they're being auto tune, but it's just putting them in tune. Auto Tune only sounds like auto tune when you crank it up all the way. Um, so you can do this by we could tune tracks by pulling them out of the sequencer and just looking at the individual tracks and running them through a different program to tune. Um, like a program like Melody Line or something like that. That's probably the best tuning program that I've ever worked with, um, Melody Line is just fantastic. Or we could just do it with the plug in and Melody in will work as a plug in as, well, auto tune or any of the other ones like that. So if I had any vocal stuff or instruments, I would run them through some tuning right now before we get into the mix. And then I realized that everything's out of tune. Um, guitars are harder to tune because they're accord instrument, and you kind of have to tune each individual string. Um, so we kind of just are gonna hope that you know, guitars and pianos and things like that. We're gonna hope that those are in tune. Um, if they're not in tune, it can sometimes be easier to tune other things to them. Um, so like, if if the guitar is a little bit sharp and the singer is in tune, uh, it could be a little bit easier to ah, pull the singer to be a little bit flat so that it's in tune with the guitar. That's ah, more complicated thing. We'll get to that later. For now, Uh, if you've got singers or anything like that running through some tuning plug ins? Cool, I reckon. Him. I recommend Melody line. All right. Off to the next thing. 19. 19 SortingTracksV2: Okay, The next thing we're gonna do is arrange our tracks a little bit. And what I mean by that is we're gonna put them. We're gonna put similar tracks together. So, like all our since together, or all our guitars together or all our drums together, things like that. We're also going to take this opportunity to label our tracks super super important. And these tracks are arranged pretty well so that similar things air close. But, um, the labeling is not great. Like this says nine Omni sphere. What does that mean? Well, um, let's try to put a name on this groups wait to call that, um I'm going to call this clicky synth. It's a sense. It's kind of cliquey. The reason I need to label things in some kind of colorful way is so that when I'm listening to everything and I hear, like, what is that clicky synth that I could be like, Oh, yeah, that's probably the one called Clicky sent. Um oh, I called it click. I want to call it clicky since Okay, so here's effing base. Uh, let's hear that. That's not very basic to me. Okay, so I'm gonna call this single note, Ping. That's one note kind of a ping sound. Um, see what we've got here. This is a group. This is an empty group, isn't it? I think I need this. Gonna leave that for now. It looks like it might be doing something. Okay, so here we have I'm New Sphere, which we call that. Okay, I'm gonna call this Echo Pulse, and I'm just coming up with colorful things. I have a friend once who told me that when he asked to name tracks like this, he has his infant Children do it because it'll be like that Sounds like burnt cookies. And then he'll call the that track burnt cookies, and it somehow makes sense to him sometimes. But that's kind of what we have to do. So, um, it's gonna come up with names for stuff. There was a weird little clique, wasn't it? Gets here that Yeah, this loop has a weird little clicking it. I didn't catch that before. That's okay. So what, we're gonna dio we're gonna try. I can't really cross fade those. Can we? Yeah, I can. Well, that might be better. Okay, that's a little bit better. Um, okay. This one to me is really thick. So I'm gonna call this thick pad, and now I'm gonna go through and just label all of these tracks so I'll pause the video and spare you me going through each little thing here. I found something. I just want to point out here. I've got this drum track here were here. I would call it a snare drum snare drum. But if I go up forward a little bit, I've got, like, a shaker. So this is why we kind of want these to be on separate tracks. Um, so that I can label them correctly. So I'm going to do here is I'm going to duplicate this track, okay? And then I'm gonna delete all the snare stuff from it so that I've got two separate tracks . We're gonna call this top one sneer stuff and this bottom one, we're gonna call Shaker stuff. Okay? What is this? Sneer stuff? Shake your stuff. Okay, so here I can call this snare shaker. Cool. So good to separate those sounds. All right. Um, I've gone through and I've labeled everything in a way that makes sense to me. My favorite is the duck. Since it sounds like this, it just sounds to me like a duck being poked with a ah, hot poker or something. I don't know. Weird, but we gotta put a name on stuff. Okay, Next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna arrange these by type of sound. Now, what this person has is they have things arranged by and where it happens. Like we have intro stuff kind of groups together. Um, And then later things grouped together. But that's not what I want. What I want is similar sounds groups together. Okay, so what the top here? I have basically that the main drum beat. Okay, so I'm gonna leave that together, so I'm not gonna break that up because I think combining all of those things into one. Ah, chunk is good. Ah. So let's see what's in this cliquey synth group. It's actually not a group. Sorry. Uh, let's see what's in this cliquey sent here. It's just this Oops. It's just this. Okay, so let's keep that in mind for a minute. Um, here is a single. Oh, that single note thing that we looked at earlier this so That's a sense. Something to drag that down to be with some of these other sense. Okay, And here's this. It's this kind of percussive. Let's leave that there. The spirt thing. I didn't rename. Yeah, because that's the one we don't I think is doing anything, so let's get rid of that. I'm pretty sure that's nothing. Now, Okay, so now we have all these intro sounds, but I'm actually gonna put thes where I think they belong. Okay, so this is a percussive synth. So let's put that down with rhythm sense, because that's what it is. Um, that's another big synths. So let's put that down there. Oregon, it's in Oregon. I'm gonna put all my since together, Um, so I can tell, despite the names that these are big sense. OK, so, boom, I'm just gonna pull this boom and the swoosh out of this intro group because all right, so I don't need that intro group, so I'm gonna get rid of that group, So I've got boom swoosh be. I think I just meant to write swish. Uh, and I have this cliquey sense still appear, but let's put that down with all our other since. Okay, so boom, swish more drums. Let's put that whole group of drums up the top. And now here's all my sense. Now here I have noises. So these little noises are like noise bursts, and they will go just great. Combined with the boom and the swoosh, these solutions will go good with the other switches. Okay, there's another swoosh and another swoosh. Okay, so I'm just trying to put similar sounds together so that when I'm mixing, I know what I'm doing here. Okay, so I have drums, drums, boom, swish, swish, swish noises, good rhythm sent, sent synth, quickie synth, single notes, Sands Bright synth duck synth bunch of sense. Great. Um, So now I could group my tracks. So let's go into a new video and talk about grouping tracks. 20. Group Tracks: okay up next. We're gonna group tracks now. You can do this in any audio program. You should be able to group things. So these air groups right here. So this is kicking base. I'm gonna rename that. So unable to his command are to rename something. But, um whatever program you're in, you can rename it. I'm gonna rename this, um, that beat. What would I call that beat? Um, it's the word I'm thinking of. I was gonna call it beat in all caps here. This is more drum stuff, so we'll just call that drums for now. Okay? Boom, swoosh, swoosh noises. So I'm gonna highlight all of that stuff and then able to in its command, G But whatever you want, whatever program here and just go to file, make a group or track make a group. Um, however, it works in your software. So now I made a group that I'm gonna call clicks and noises. Yes, because that's what all this stuff is. So I'm just gonna group things by their big sections. Kate. Now, here's all of our sense. So new group, we're going to call this since Boom. Look at that. Look, how clean our session is now. Just four tracks easy. But what's important here is that, um, this is not Actually, there's actually something important happening here because when we put something in a group that actually helps us a lot because we can mix groups right, we can turn the volume of this whole group up or down. We can add effects to this whole group. We can pan the whole group. Um, there's a lot we can do to the whole group, and that will be really useful. For example, let's say the sense are all getting kind of out of control, and maybe I just want to throw a compressor and limiter on all of the sense. Um, I could just throw that on the group, and then it's done. So having things in groups by similar kinds of sound, really valuable, a great place to start. Cool. Okay, let's move on to just a few more things to do to get us all set up 21. Marking Sections: Okay. Next thing this is going to save you some time. In the end, we're gonna mark are sections. OK, so in any program you could do some kind of marker or locator or something like that. Um, it's usually at the very top of your session. So for me, it is kind of control. Click up here, add locator, and then I can type something in, like, intro or whatever. Okay, That's not actually where I want that. So I'm gonna delete it. You don't need one right at the beginning. So the intro is the intro. That's fine. Um, but you would want a mark, Like, if you were working on, like, a song, you'd want to mark the chorus 1st 1 verse to the bridge, things like that. So, in this song, let's just listen through it, See if we confined main sections by where the beat enters. Its gonna be right here. Nothing there. Oh, I'm so load. Huh? Okay. - Okay . So I'm gonna mark right here, and I don't know if I'd want to call this the verse or the chorus or what, but probably I'm gonna call it in this case, I'm just gonna call it, uh, beat enters. And if you want to be fancier about it, go back to bars at a locator to buyers before your locator that you just added and then do the same thing. But I like to do like dash dash ero are, ah, open bracket to make a tiny little arrow and then right, beat enters. Um, what this means is that I can click here and jump right where the beat enters, or I can click here and jump to bars before the beat enters. That helps give you a nice little leading. Great. So ah, whatever marker you make, make 12 bars before it. Also, if you want, It's just kind of a nice thing. Okay, So I'm just gonna go through and Mark anything else that I find. Find out that. Okay, I'm gonna call that something. I don't know what I'm gonna call it. Let's call it, um, percussive synth enters, Okay. And then we'll go back to bars. I will say proc synth. Okay, let's keep jump forward a little bit. Okay, Um, this is the new section, so let's just call this, um It's called his big beat, too. That's just what I'm gonna call it. And then this transition to big beat to is useful. This is gonna take me think this is going to require some intention to jump into this section, Get it just right. Right. So having this located here will be really good, because really, I'm gonna want to work on making this really kind of pop. Probably Mark that, um perk Synth enters again. Go back to bars. Accents. Okay. Here. I'm gonna mark this as drums out. Okay. Here, I'll mark this one again as, ah, big beat one, because it's kind of going back to pick. Meet one. Don't really need 12 bars before that, because I have one right there. So okay, here. I'm just going to write out and then because everything kind of stops there and then big beat in there. Okay, let's do cookie synth enter again and let's get that right where I wanted it. Okay, um, to do out there, lead into out. Okay, Here. Let's dio since I want to find where those drums come back in, Okay? Drums kind of fade back in, but I'm gonna call it right here. Big beat one big beat one. Okay, so with beef fades out, So right here will just say how true. And then we'll say here how true? I suppose. Great. Ok, so now we've got markers. Right now I consume way out if I want and just say OK, take me to that clicky synth entrance right there. So having those markers really valuable, Um great. Two more quick things. 22. Create Effect Busses: Okay, The next thing I'm gonna do is create a couple of effect buses. Um, so depending on the software you're in, this might be called in effect bus. It might be called Ascend or return. Um, it could be set up to be either way. But really, What this is is let me go into we're going to some of my drums here. Let's look at just this one, for example. Okay, so right here, I can. This is this is an effect bus. So what I can do is turn this up and it's gonna send this much of the signal down to send a okay, what's called send A, which is actually this track down here. So the reason I would do this is let's say I want to put a delay on something, OK? But I want to put the same delay, unlike a bunch of different tracks. Okay. I would put the delay here. Actually, have one set up right here. So here's a delay. I can say I want this. This and this toe all go down to that delay, right? Maybe not all of it, but a little bit of it, So I don't want to actually do that. Something turn these off. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set up four effects down here that I'm gonna use later on . This is just kind of a starting point, OK? Nothing fancy. Um, now, by default able to and gives you a reverb and delay down here, I'm gonna change those a little bit. I'm gonna change this to short reverb that I'm gonna add another ah, return Call it long reverb here. I'm gonna have a short delay And here I'm gonna have you guessed it Long delay sums. Gonna make reverb short long and delay short Long. I'm gonna set these up so that when I'm listening and I say, Oh, I wanted to throw this to, like, a long delay for just a second. I've already got one down here and I could just throw it to it. We'll talk more about how buses work later. This is, uh, just a set up thing. You might find that you have effects that you love to use over and over. If that's true, set him up on a bus. Okay, so, uh, I'm gonna get rid of this and this. So now I'm just going to go into my effects. Audio effects reverb have to say ambient room for short reverb. Okay. And then I'll use that same one for long. Reverb accept. What I'm gonna do is for short reverb. I'm going to go into do a short, little pre delayed here. I want my decay to be a little bit longer than that, but one point 1.5 seconds, Okay. Always make sure the dry wet is all the way up When you're working with sentence like this , bus tracks like this sends return buses, bus tracks, whatever all the same, more or less. Okay, so now in this one, I'm gonna set my pre delay to be a little bit more, but still not that much. Maybe four. No. Sorry. I mean, I'm gonna set my pre delay to be really short my decay time to be, like, four seconds or so. That's too much. Let's say three seconds. OK, that's a long river. Now, here is gonna put some kind of just plain delay, not a green delay. Um, the new one enable 10. 10 would be great. This echo will work pretty Well, so what I'm gonna want here is all the way wet. Actually, let's not use Echo. Let's use, um, the ping Pong delay. This one's just a lot easier. And is it years, so feedback pretty low. This is a short one. Try wet all the way. This is like a week. You kind of And this is actually sink to the beat. So this is our short one, So I'm gonna make it like a 16th note. Well, this will be an eighth note. Let's make it 1/16 note. And then same thing on our long delay except will make this one quarter note feedback down dry, wet up. Quote. So those are the things I want. Awesome. Now I'm all set up so that when I want to do that, let's just let me just show you what it's like. So here's this thing said now, here are my four effects. If I want to send it to that long delay, I just turn it up here. There it is. The long reverb is here. Short reverb. I will be able to hear in this case a short delay cook. All right, let's turn those pull those back down, so we're not sending to it. But those are all set up now so we can use them quick when we want him. Okay, One more thing. 23. Compressors And Limiters: okay, The next thing and then do the last thing to get us set up is some compressors and some limiters. So these are volume effects effects that manage the volume of different things. We're going to talk more about what these are shortly, but just to get us started, what I want to do is preemptively throw some of these on tracks that I'm nearly positive. I'm gonna need him. Um, for example, this particular compressor is called a glue compressor. This is able to specific thing, so if you're not using able to and you don't have this, but, um, any kind of compressor will work. I'm gonna throw that on a drum group. Both drum groups in this case here is just a normal compressor. These cliques and things not positive is going to need a compressor. These since probably won't. If I had a singer or drums anything like that, I would throw both a compressor and limiter on those, um, and then bypass. Um, you know, just set him up, and then, um, turn him off because you're probably gonna want to use them. We don't know for sure, but probably so it's a good idea just to throw them on there. So I put one on this whole beat, right? So just having this compressor going already just by its default setting without doing much . Ah, we probably just kind of improved this mixed quite a bit. So let me just here. A little bit of it where it kind of cooks. Oops. Um, soloed on some stuff. Okay. See, it's already a little crisper. Not a lot, but a little bit just by putting that compressor on there, tightening up some of those noise things. And then in addition to that, we've got ourselves all set up so that we can dive in and start doing some real mixing without too much distractions. So now we're all set to go. Okay, moving on. 24. The Art Of Mixing: Okay, So in this section, we're going to talk about, uh, the main elements to the mix. Now, this is really important to understand, because for the rest of the course, we're gonna work through, uh, how we build each of these elements into our mix. There are really six elements that you want tohave represented in a mix, and maybe I'll just point out here There's a lot of different ways to approach mixing and a lot of different ways to approach a mix. But this is how I learned how to do it, and this is the way that a lot of people do it. I should also say so. With that in mind, I want to re emphasize if I haven't done this enough already, that there's an art to this. You know, there's an art to mixing, and I'm not just going to be able to give you a formula that's has turned this up. Turn this down, and at the end you'll have a great sounding mix. There are certain things that we will do in order to make things sound better that are usually true in most cases. But in order to make a great sounding mix. You're gonna have to work in the same way that a painter works. You know, you're gonna have to say like, yes, I should put, you know, a blue cloud here. But what if I put a red cloud here? You know, what if I did something off the wall here, and that might be the thing that makes it brilliant, you know what I mean? So you need to approach this as an art form and there are and what we're gonna learn to do , uh, is identify kind of these main elements that were looking for and find what is the normal. And then you should be able to say But in this mix, I want to do something different. I want to focus on something really unique. I want to give it a lot of color. I want toe just really paint it really bold this time. So you'll have the freedom to do that once you understand how these things work. So there's the three dimensions of sound in the three dimensions of music. OK, so, um, let's just really quick talk about the differences between sound and music. This is a big philosophical thing that we don't need to go into, but basically to me. What I'm talking about when I talk about sound is I'm thinking more about the mechanics of the recording. I'm thinking about frequencies. I'm thinking about panning things like that when I'm talking about music. I'm talking about more of the musical elements, uh, in the mix, so I'll differentiate those a little bit more as we get into them, which is right now. So let's jump next over to the three dimensions of sound. 25. The 3 Dimensions Of Sound: Okay, The three dimensions of sound. Now, keep in mind there's gonna be a section on each one of these moving forward eso right now, I'm just giving kind of big picture. Then we're gonna dive in deep on how to craft these shortly. So the three things we're talking about when we talk about the three dimensions of sound are frequency panning and space. Um, so let me define a little bit of those frequency. This is the easy part, right? A lot of the time when people are mixing what they think their job is is just to make one thing louder than the other. Right? That's balance. That's different. That's a musical element that we'll talk about in the next video. What I'm talking about here is frequency. What we need to do here is basically make sure that all frequencies are coming through and all frequencies are easily represented. Let me show you what that might look like If I just take a spectrum will be working with spectrums a little bit later. Let me open this up. There are a lot of different spectrum utilities you can use, but I put this one on the master track, and I'm just gonna look at the frequencies of my music. Okay, so in the vertical here, we're going to see the volume and in the horizontal, we're going to see the frequencies. We're going to see low stuff down here, high stuff up here. And then how high it goes will be how loud it is. Okay, so there's what my track looks like. Okay, So what do I have here? I have. So what I have here is a lot of low stuff and then decent amount of mid stuff on the high stuff trails off right, And that's OK, That's pretty normal. But we want to craft this a little bit more and maybe make sure we have a little more high stuff. Maybe the low stuff isn't getting too overpowering, like that's a pretty serious low end right there. And this shouldn't curve all the way down like this. So we'll look at how this works later. But what we're seeing here is this is a spectrum and we're seeing all our frequencies represented, and we can tell what needs work and what doesn't need work. So that's one element of what we're going to be working out is making sure all the frequencies are coming through, and there's a good representation all the way across of all the different frequencies. Another element of sound is the panning, So the panning is the left and right balance. It might also be a three dimensional kind of panning if we're talking about mixing and surround sound, Um, I'm not sure if we'll talk about that in this class or not yet. Maybe we'll save that for a future class, but panning we will definitely be talking about. You know, that's if something goes in the left ear or the right here. We call that panning, and that is a key element to the mix. Um, the way the music feels in the two speakers and everything in between. It's not just left and right. There's things you can do to put music all the way, uh, in basically and as wide as you can see. We put music in that space, and we want Teoh again. Go back to the painting a picture analogy. We want toe paint, a picture that takes up the full canvas right? Not just one little spot on the canvas we want to use the full canvas, and we do that with panning. That also takes us a little bit into the third dimension, which is space. Okay, so space you can think about as more of a three d space. Think about, um, something that's really close to your face and something that's really far away. Okay, that's space. So panning, in a way is the left to right space and what I call space. Other people call it dimension. Things like that. I like to call it space. Depth is another thing. Depth works pretty well. Um, so panning is left and right. This is forward or close and far. Okay, so you can do something like like if somebody's recording, like right up on the mic like this, like they're right in the microphone like I am right now. Then my voice is really close, right? And you can do that in a mix to give a certain effect. But I might also add a bunch of reverb to something to make it right now. Different kind of death. Now, ST. But see how using this in a more subtle way adds a lot of space to the mix right way. Want things to feel like they're in way. Want the listener feel like maybe we want to feel like they're small will That has a lot to do with, um, how we mix. We want to put people in this space, and that is how we do it. Okay. Those three dimensions of sound frequency, panning and space. 26. The 3 Dimensions Of Music: now there's also the three dimensions of music that we deal with now. There are a lot of dimensions of music, I would say, and I'm using this word dimension a little weird, but, um, the ones that were concerned with when were mixing our balance, dynamics and interest. Okay, so let's talk about balance first balances that first thing that a lot of people think of is mixing. It's Are the drums too loud? Are the vocals too loud? Um, what needs to come up? What needs to come down? That's balance, right? And a lot of people make by doing that and then just stopping there. But there's so much more to mixing as we've just seen those three dimensions of sound. But balance is one of them, right? So we don't want to forget about that. That is an important element, making sure the balance is right, making sure that we hear everything where we want to hear it. We want to hear the vocals in front of the guitars. We want to hear the guitar solo in front of the backing guitars, all of those things so Balanced definitely plays in, and we will work on that dynamics is another one. That's the volume of the the whole Let's say so. We will look at. Is the chorus louder than the verse? Should the bridge get quiet and be quieter than the chorus? But these are dynamic questions that we're gonna ask. It's not, Ah, is the vocalist louder than the guitarist like? That's a balance question. The dynamic question is, for the whole, right. So should the chorus be louder than the verse for the intro? Be quieter than the first verse. Things like that you want to have some dynamic contrast that's important in a mix. If everything was just full force all the way through, then um, you're gonna exhaust the person listening to it. You know, they're going to get to the end of that song and be like, Oh my gosh, I can't hear another track by this person because it's just an assault, right? So dynamics is an important thing. The third element is probably the trickiest and requires the most interpretation, and that's just interest. So what is interesting about this mix now the thing that we tend to focus on is finding in the music the most interesting element. OK, so finding something unique in that music, finding the thing that needs to be the focus. Okay, I talk a lot about the focused element. Um, we'll talk more about that in just a second, but finding that interest point and then making sure that it is clear that it comes to the front, the thing that is the most important is the most prominent thing in the mix, right? So that's the kind of interest element, so we'll work on that to later in this course. So those are the three dimensions of music, as I like to call them. So, combined with the three dimensions of sound, we have six main things that we need to work through. We have the six dimensions of sound, which are our three dimensions of sound, which are frequency panning and space, and then the three dimensions of music which our balance dynamics and interest 27. The Focus Element: Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about this interest point or the focus. So I think of this like a camera. You know, I've been using the painting analogy for a while, but but let's switch over to a photography analogy when we're working with the camera. We might see a lot of things in the picture, but there's one thing that we're that gets the focus of the camera, right? So, in music, that could be a lot of things. Now it's really easy to say. Well, it's gonna be the lead singer, right? Um, it's easy to say. The lead singer is the most interesting thing, but it might not be, um, so I want to talk a little bit more about what I mean by focus here. Um, what is it in this song? You know, this song we're working on has no singer. So what's the focus? What should we focus on here? I don't know. Um, I'm gonna have to analyze this a little bit more and get a little bit deeper into it to really try to figure it out. But a lot of times in this kind of music, the main thing to focus on is the groove. Um, the groove can be an element to focus on, and all that really means is we need to be absolutely sure that the groove comes forward, that we really feel that groove. And so all of our mixing needs to go into making sure that that groove comes out and people feel that groove. Another thing. It might be a guitar riff. Even if there is a vocal, it could be the group. Or it could be this guitar riff. So a guitar riff. You hear songs all the time that are just built around that guitar riff, and they're mixed around the guitar riff, even when there is a vocal, Um, it could be a rhythm. You know, just something as simple as a rhythm that gets repeated a lot. Um, could be the thing that really makes that song unique. You know, it's that's, I think probably the best way to put it is it's the thing that makes the song unique. That really gives us the thing that we want to focus on. So, and it's also important to say it might be the lead vocalist that might be it. But I'm someone who leans more towards finding those things, like the groove or the rhythm or some kind of riff to be the main focus of the mix. So keep that in mind when you're working through your own tracks. When you're mixing anything, something has to be the focus. 28. Think Subtractive: okay, We're gonna get started with balance. Now, this is the thing that most people think of when they think about mixing right, they think about I have toe, you know, make the drums louder, make the since quieter, etcetera. Um, and it is a big part of it, but it's really only 1/6 of what we need to be doing, but it is the most obvious, so it's a great place to start, right? So what we're gonna do in this section is I'm gonna walk you through a couple of techniques on, and then I'm gonna just dive in and do it on this track, so you got to listen to me talk a little bit, but then we are actually gonna do it. So the first thing I want to point out is the mindset you should be in is one that is subtracted. Okay, So what that means is we're going to think about taking away rather than adding pulling things out. Um, most of the time, not always, but most of the time, when people make tracks and including myself in this, uh they add a lot of elements to beef things up and If you went back to the drawing board while you were making that track, you might find that you don't need all of those elements. It just needs to be mixed a little bit better. So some of the time what we're doing is pulling out some elements and then making the elements that are still there really prominent in the mix. That's kind of hard. Let me try to explain that one more time. So let's say you are a guitar player trying to make a big, huge wall of sound kind of sound, right? You might put in 10 guitar tracks, right just to get that big, big sound. So then when we come to mix, we might only use like four of those tracks because we get we can mix. It's to get that big wall of sound kind of sound, right? So you might not need all of those 10. It's cool that you put him in there because it gives us a lot of options to work with, but we might pull some out. We don't know yet. Um, now, obviously, if it it's a key musical element in the track, you can't pull that out. But when people double things in triple things, uh, it's you can pull it out. And like I said, I do that, too. I put a tonic stuff into tracks that when I get it back from someone mixing it, if someone else is mixing it, a lot of times they've pulled some of those things out, and the result is what I want it. So it works really well. So we're thinking about pulling things out. And when it comes to volume, we're thinking about pulling things down rather than pushing things up most of the time, that's what we're thinking about. Um, I'll explain that once we get into the setting levels section, but really, what we're gonna be doing is figuring out what is kind of our baseline level, and then we're gonna set everything to be relative to that. So we'll get to that in just a minute. But subtracted is the name of the game here, so removing things rather than adding things, pulling things down rather than pushing them up. So keep that in mind, uh, as we go through now. Next, let's talk about conflicting instruments, instruments that fight each other. Okay, let's go to a new video for that 29. Fighting Instruments: Okay, so one of the biggest things we have to keep an eye out for and this will come back to us when we talk about frequency. But we're gonna start to deal with it in balance also. And that's conflicting instrument. So we want to listen through our track and find things that are in the same frequency range and other are about the same volume and adjust them a little bit to stay out of the way. I think about it like this. Um, if you have two people standing on either side of you and they're both trying to have a conversation with you if they have similar voices in terms like they're both high voices or they're both low voices, uh, it's gonna be impossible to keep track of who's who. Right. But if one is a high voice and one is a low voice and maybe one is allowed and one is quiet , it's easier toe. Let the quieter one filter into the background and let you focus on the more dominant one. Right? So what we want to do is set things up so that people can. The listener can focus on an element and isn't just getting bombarded with two things at the same time. Now, there are other reasons that we want to keep things separate from each other. We don't want to things in the exact same frequency space that can create a muddy sound. But we'll deal with that in the frequency element for now. Let's just think about it. So I have an example here. Um and this isn't not an example of conflicting, actually, but this will show us kind of what I mean by it. So I have is a the spectrum here again. And so let's look at this synth track. Okay. Well, let me just solo this, okay? So we can see this. Doesn't have a lot of energy in the high end, right? The majority of its energy is kind of right in this range. Okay, Now, let's go to the track. Underneath it another cent. Okay. We see it's very different shape here, right? Not a lot of stuff down here. Most of its action is right up in the middle here also. Not a lot in the high end, but these two together, I can't show him both together at the moment but well, actually kind of could if I went to the master and just solo these two? No, we got him both happening here so way. Still don't have anything, Really? In the high end, that's OK. We don't have every instrument. Doesn't have to fill up the space. Really? What we have here is this instrument filling the low end. Let's look at just that again. This instrument having a lot of low energy, a lot happening down there and this instrument being much more mid range, right? So they're not getting in the way of each other too much. If we saw this instrument way down here, then we know we would know we have a problem. Those air both taking up the same space we need to deal with that, Um, and one quick way. The way that we would deal with right now while we're in the balance phase is we would make one lie louder or quieter. Now, later in the class, when we get into frequency, we're gonna deal with that same thing, but using an e que um but for now, we would just focus on what's the more important one, And we would balance accordingly. OK, so watch out for those kinds of instruments that are in the same frequency space that are both screaming for our attention. Uh, decide which one wins that fight. Okay, so and then give the one or take the one that is the lesser important one and pull that down just a little bit. Don't boost the one that's the most important. We probably don't need to do that. Um, because remember so attractive, so pulled down, the one that is less important. Okay. And that's how we fix kind of these fighting instruments. 30. Finding A Starting Point: Okay, The next time we didn't need to do is decide where we're going to start. No, what we mean by that is what I like to do is, uh just listen toe one element of the track, make sure that level is set where we want it to be, and then we balance everything to that, and that gets us a really good starting point. You can also use the white noise method, Um, which maybe I'll talk about it. I'll make a separate video walking through the white noise method. Um, so file that away for just a second. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start with the kick, because in this track, the kick is really present In this style of music. The kick is super important. Um, and it's just a really great place to start in this kind of music. Another good place to start is a vocal. Get the vocal just really right where you want it and then build everything up around it. Sometimes the guitar, although not so much um I'd say in a track with vocals, the vocals probably the best place to start, and something that's more dance music like this. The kick is a great place to start. But if you find in the particular track you're working on, there's a unique thing. Um, then I would start with that. So let's track down this big. So this There it is. Okay, okay. I labeled it correctly. Look at that. Her A I could have just wrote my labels. Um OK, so here's my kick. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna solo this and I'm gonna get this just where I want it. No. Where do I want it? That's a key question, right? Because remember, everything is relative here. We're gonna mix everything to the volume of this kick. So it's really important that I put this kick in a good spot so that there's a little bit of room to go above it in terms of volume, but not much. Ah, and a lot of room to go underneath it. So we have some standards for that. Let's go to a new video and let's do that 31. Setting Levels: Okay, So the volume I want my main level to be at. Yeah, there's a bunch of different theories on this, A bunch of different philosophies. You're welcome to experiment with it, but let me just tell you what I do. Um, negative. 10 is the target. Okay, so here's my kick. Okay. Now what I'm talking about here is where do I set this level? Right here. Now, this level is really hard to see a built in. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bounce over to arrangement or ah, session view with Tab Key where I can see that meter of the look better. I'm actually gonna make it, um, bigger. Very now I can really see where that's hit, right? And it's right around negative. Six decibels. Now, let's talk about how to read these real quick. So what we're looking at here is a digital digital, uh, meter. So that means that zero is almost at the top. And depending on the software that you use, this will be slightly different. But usually zero is the maximum that you want to hit. But the software gives you a little bit of extra head room and it lets you go up to six. If you go above that, you distort. But your goal should always be not to hit zero. Okay, so even though it doesn't really show it the same here, this is six. Everything under this zero is a negative number. So this is negative sex. Negative. 12 Negative. 18 negative. 24 etcetera. So we want this kick to be hitting around. Negative 10. So it's a little too loud. So what I'm going to do first is I'm gonna go over to my master channel, and I'm gonna push that up to zero. Okay? I want that to stay at zero, and I'm not going to touch that. That's going to stay right where it is. Because I don't want to mess with the Master Channel, cause if I mess with the Master Channel that I'm just kind of lying to myself about what I'm really hearing. So I'm gonna leave that right at zero. Okay, now it's gonna be a little bit louder because my master channels out. So let's pull this down until this is right about negative 10. Right about there. That's a negative. Oops. Okay, So you can. There's usually a way to tell where it's peaking and enable tenants of this right here. If I click it, it goes to zero, so I can see it's right at negative nine. Cook it again to clear it out. Negative. 10 10.1. Good enough. We're gonna keep it right there. Okay, so that's gonna be our baseline. Now, if you're thinking Well, that's just too quiet, man, that's too quiet. I need everything to be louder. We'll turn the volume of your computer up a little bit now. It's good. Loud. Okay, So, um, remember, we're mixing so that everything gets a smooth even level were not, uh, and there's a difference between what you're hearing and what is relative in the computer. If it's if you're hearing everything and you think, Well, it's too quiet, then turn your speakers up. You know, that's all you really have to do on that. It's not, um, that the mix isn't too quiet. In this case, the mixed might be too quiet if this is way low, right, But as long as we're hitting that right around negative 10 that is a good level. Okay, so, um, that's right where I want it. That gives me plenty of room to get up to that zero. If something needs to go louder, find Wanna push it at a later point? It should also keep my master channel far from the top as well. In fact, since that's the only thing playing, uh, it's gonna hit right at 10 01 10.1 as well. Okay, so now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna use my ear, and I'm gonna mix everything to fit this same, um, to fit around this kick. Okay, so this is going to get me in the ballpark. I'm gonna make sure that the kick is the relative volume that I want it. Okay, so let's go to a new video and do that. 32. The Noise Method: okay, Before we go into mixing, um, I want to jump back to this noise method that I mentioned a minute ago. What you do here is instead of using instead of picking something in the mix, too uses a reference point you use pink noise as a reference point. So let me show you how that would work. Um, if it is close, everything here I'm gonna make a new track, um, moves. Put it at the bottom just cause I'd like to label it noise, and then I'm just gonna pull in pink noise. You can use a sense to make pink noise if you want, but I just like to have a good, solid pink noise sample and just loop it all the way through the whole track. And this is gonna sound terrible. And I'll give you this sample in the next session. Um, so now all you're probably really gonna hear here is pink noise. If I play everything at once, let's just jump to the middle. We owe right super mess. Um, but I can use this as a reference point. So what you do is let's go to my kick. I was in this one Close that there it is, properly labeled. Okay, let's solo that and the noise. So what we want to do here is you want to pull the kick all the way down, and then we're gonna push it up until we can just barely hear it. Okay? Wait about there. So what that did is used that noise as a baseline. So I just pulled the sound down, bring it up until, like, just barely hear it. And that should be about Let's see how that relates to where we were. Eso I'm gonna turn off that noise for a second. Let's just hear that kick, okay? And yeah, that's sitting around 18. So it's a little bit quieter, uh, than it was before, but that's okay. That's a perfectly fine place for that. To be still gives us plenty of head room. Still plenty loud. So that's an okay place to start now. What you do in this pink noise method is you do that for every single track. You take every track and you solo it. So let's do it with a synthesizer. Solo that, and solo the noise and pull it all the way down until you can just barely hear right there for me. That significantly louder. So that's okay. Ah, that just means is a quieter sound. And what this is going to do is it's gonna set all your levels to sound, uh, right in about the same spot, and this could give you a good spot to start your mix from now. This isn't a technique that I use very often. Um, I think there's a little bit more musical ways to do this. It's kind of a brute forest way to get everything right in the ballpark. If you have a mix that's just totally out of control, this can be a good way to just kind of get you back into the ballpark of what's going on. Um, go through all of your tracks, pull them underneath the pink noise, slowly pull him up till you can just barely hear it. And then, um and then you should be at a good spot. Once you do that with all those tracks, you delete your pink noise and, um, your mix should be win a reasonably good starting point. It's not the end point, though. That's not going to get you to you. The perfect mix. That's just gonna kind of get you Teoh. A good starting point. So that's the pink noise method. So I'll give you that, um, white noise for that pink noise file, Um, in the next segment so you can have a way of file of pink noise if you need it to try that out on. And now we'll go into doing our mix. But I'm gonna go back to doing it the way that I talked about before. I'm going to use the kick as my starting point. 33. My Mix: Okay, so let's get down to the nitty gritty. So I'm gonna do this by group. So I have these Ellen groups that could get rid of this noise tracks Nothing. Is that Let's start with this beat group. Okay, so my kick is in here. So if I solo this group soloing all the instruments in the group and here's what I've got. Okay, so I hear the kick. Actually, in the lowest part of that, it should be at the highest part. I'm going to pick a section where kind of everything is happening. Except for this. I'll deal with that in a minute on just gonna loop. Kind of a random section, but something where everything's going. Eso Let's just take this thing. I've label Big Rumble. So let's solo Big rumble and the kick. Okay? Actually, I want to bring my kick back up a little bit, okay? No, back to where we were. Okay. I'm gonna make sure that at the top of that sound goes room. Ah, that that loud is part of it. It's still a little under the okay. It feels a little bit better to go here. This one's all the way up here, but let's, um Okay, this track has some automation on it, so I can't just pull the fader down. I have to rewrite the automation a little bit. Okay, that's pretty good. Let's try here. Okay. Now we get to the nitty gritty. So we go here and here. This is very loud. So here. I think I've got the frequency problem that we'll deal with later. But I've got this really low synth, right? Just really chugging along. And it's in the same general range as this kick, and it's both of them have a lot of power, so I'm gonna let the focus be on the okay. I'm gonna put that there for now. I might bring that up a little bit more later than do Samy que stuff to keep out of the way . Let's hear this one. Okay, pretty good. Now, let's deal with this swoosh. Okay, cool. So now I have all the elements balanced against the kick. So let's now hear just the whole beat section. Um, and let's go to this, and yeah, way more clarity. Now, Right now, you really get that kick. Just really feeling it. You could go straight into a club with this now, when it will feel like, um, it'll just blow the doors open. Great. Okay, so now I'm gonna do that for the rest of this. I might, um, fast forward through the video and then chime back in when something really interesting happened. So you don't have to see me kind of tediously do that for everything. Um, I need to keep this open, so I need to have my kick going all of the time. Uh, okay. So here we go, Okay. 34. The Mix So Far: Okay, So I finished mixing everything to the kick drum, using the kick as a reference. So just getting the volumes in the right ballpark to get started on the mix. Some of these swoosh sounds were a little tricky because we want them that kind of env elop the music a little bit. So I let them go a little above the kick. Um, just on my first pass here. So let's hear what we've got. Um, I haven't listen to this yet, so hopefully I got everything, and it should be You know, this isn't gonna be the most amazing sounding mix, but remember, this is just to get us in the ballpark. It's all we're trying to do here. Here we go. Do you do you? 35. The Stereo Field: okay up next, we're gonna talk about panning. Um, so we use panting in a lot of different ways. Ultimately, what panning lets us do is place. The sound in the stereo field on the stereo field means where we are listening. So let's go back to this diagram of kind of redrawn it for us. And so if we're sitting here and we're listening to two speakers, so two speakers means stereo when we hear that term stereo, we're talking about two speakers. So the stereo field is these two speakers and everything in between. Okay, so let's say this is our sound. Just ah, humor me and say our sound is here, Okay? So we can make the sound feel like it's coming from right here out of this speaker by panning it all the way to the left right? That's gonna make the sound feel like it's over here. We can pan it all the way, right, and it's gonna feel like it's coming from here, right? Or we can pan it all the way center and make it feel like it's coming from here. Now this is called the Phantom Center, which will talk about in a minute. But the way we do that is if we put an equal amount of a sound in the left and the right speaker, our brain is gonna make it feel like it's coming from right here. Okay, so what that means is that we can place something anywhere we want. We can make it feel like it's coming from right here by panning it a little bit to the left . Okay, so that's the stereo field. Now there are some tricks you can do also to get even wider than the serial field and make it feel like it's coming from over here, right? Or over here. But without doing those tricks. We'll talk about those tricks a little bit in just a minute. But without doing those tricks, you're pretty much limited to the left and right speaker and everything in between. That's what panning is now. We can do a lot with panic. We can add movement to music, right? We can make the guitarist feel like he's over here and then moving over here right? We can make a synthesizer feel like it's moving back and forth quickly. We don't want to do too much of that because it could make you a little nauseous, but we can add movement. We can also deal with that problem that we just talked about about things piling up, right, like instruments, conflicting with each other pan and can help us deal with that. Like, let's say, we've got two of the same kind of sound, right? Let's say we've got two singers, right? So let's say we've got three singers because that's not uncommon. You've got a lead singer into background singers, right? So let's say this is our lead singer. Let's make that one red. Okay, this is our lead singer and these air background singers. Okay, Now the stereo field can work a lot like the visual field, right? If you're sitting here and you're listening, we've got these pans center, you might say. Well, I can't see these other two because they're behind this 1st 1 right? If we were just looking straight forward and the stereo fieldworks really similar to that, So we're not gonna want these to be all center, because just like we can't see them, we wouldn't be able to hear them with the perfect amount of clarity, because they'd all be bundled up in the center. So what we might do is this pan one of them a little bit, right? One of them a little bit left and keep the lead vocal in the center. Okay, that's going to clarify this mix a lot. Ah, we might even get a little weirder and put one all the way over there and put one all the way over there. Right? That again will help clarify the mix so we can use panning toe. Help us with our, um, with the what? That conflicting instrument problem. Okay, generally speaking, when you have really similar instruments, keeping one left and one right can be a good idea. I'm gonna walk through some kind of rules of thumb for panning in just a minute. But that's what the stereo field is. Let's just work in the left to right space, left and right space. It lets us add motion, and it lets us separate sounds in the stereo field, which can help clean up a mix. Quite a lot 36. Phantom Center: Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about this phantom senator business. So the way the center channel works, I shouldn't say center channel because it's not a channel. We have a left channel in a right channel. When you're working in your software, you'll see a panning. Now, this has left, right and center. Um, it might just say left and right. Let's look it able to hear So, in a Bolton, if I look at any track, this is my panning C means center, and then I can go up to what is it? 50 Right and down to 50 left. Okay, um, if I go over to session view, this is my panning. Okay, so this is all the way left. This is all the way, right? And this is center now. This image shows you more accurately what's really happening. I can send the music all the way to left. I consider it all the way to the right. But if I put it in the center, what that really means is that there's an equal amount in the left and the right. That's what makes this phantom center business. So what we really do is we think about it like that are three speakers. Um, there's left, right and center. Even though there's not a center, we don't put a a speaker in the center of the stereo field cereal only has two speakers, but there is 1/3 1 But you don't have to worry about creating this phantom center. It just happens automatically. For example, the way you're listening to my voice right now is probably in the center. Now I'm gonna experiment with panning it left and right a little bit right now so you can hear me moving around so you should hear me walking around left and right. However you might not. And the reason you might not is that I've found that when I upload videos, sometimes the panning gets lost so you might not hear it. Me left, right and centre moving around. Um, because that can get lost in this particular video system. I'm not sure why, but in some of my production classes, I've seen that happen. Um, it could also be that I'm there, but you're not listening in stereo. If you're listening and headphones, you're probably listening in stereo because you have to headphones there, two speakers, one on each ear, right? So that means that if I put an equal amount in both speakers, you'll hear me right in the center. So if you close your eyes, you can imagine that I'm putting I'm right in the middle. But if you're just listening on like a laptop speaker, even though that stereo, because there are two little speakers in there, usually you might not be getting a sense of left and right because those speakers were really close together. So panting gets really kind of lost on those the same thing. If you're listening to this on a phone or something without headphones, just through the speaker in the phone, we really lose the stereo effects when we do that. Which is why sometimes we check our mix in mono and make sure it still sounds good when you're just listening to it through one speaker like that. Okay, so let's go on. And let's talk about some quick and dirty rules for panning 37. Rules For Panning: Okay, So when it comes Teoh how you should pan things, Here's what I like to do. Now remember this just like everything is an art. So you can do things however you want. But in the Center Channel, I would. I like to put a lead vocal. Let me do this hoops. So lead vocals right in the Centre Party Normal your kick right in the center. Um, if there's a base guitar or bass synth, Maybe so. If there's a bass guitar, we generally like to put that right in the center. If it's a bass synth, you may or may not want it to be in the center. We have toe think about that a little bit more, Um, most of because if there's a bass synth, it's gonna have a lot of high stuff with it, too. And we need to decide if that's our primary base sip. If there's a lot of low since happening, then you might not want that to be in the center. But if it's functioning like a bass guitar functions, it's basically functioning toe hold down the groove, then put that in the center along with the kick and last snare drum. Maybe, um, I'll save probably probably the snare drum in the center. Unless you're doing something strange. Okay, um, hard left. Okay, that means all the way over here. Hard left. Okay, so this would be left over here, but hard left means 100% to the left on our mixer. It would be that all the way to the left. Hard left. Nothing hard, right? Nothing. I don't like putting anything hard left or right Is my point here. So everything else I'm gonna put in the stereo field somewhere, I might put it. Ah, lot left or a lot. Right. But I don't like putting anything hard left and hard, right? That just feels really kind of crass to me, and some people do. So you might like putting something hard left or right, But I don't, um but that's something you want to play around with. See what you like. See what feels good to you to me. Um, it's just too jarring. I don't have a good word to describe it. Other than it's just not a sound I like. Um, the only time I would do something hard left or right, is if I'm doing it for a specific effect, right? Like if If there's a singer and we want to make them sound like they're talking through a telephone for just a second, maybe I'll put that all the way left or all the way right just to make some kind of silly effect. But for musical purposes, I don't like putting anything hard left or hard, right? Everything else goes in the stereo field somewhere cool. So somewhere in here, So those are my rules of thumb. Okay, Start off with these things in the center and then place everything else proportional. The other thing I'll add here is similar sounds opposite sides. So if you have two guitars to distorted guitars, you know, and you decide one of them you want here, put the other one opposite of it. Right. Um, if you have to background vocals, put him opposite of each other if you have to. Since that are similar, put them opposite of each other. Things like that. Okay, So similar sounds opposite sides 38. Phasing Tricks: Okay, let's talk quickly about phasing tricks. I don't want to get too in the weeds with this because it's something that most people won't use its. Ah, this is the effect that you could make something feel like it's coming from larger than the stereo image, so we go hard left. But if you do some phasing tricks, you can actually make the sound feel like it's coming from over here beyond the speaker. And what you do basically is, you take the sound and do some things with the phase case with the phase. So we basically we invert the phase, and what that means is you would have sound like this. So let's say this is your wave form. Looks like that you would put this sound in the left speaker, for example, and then you would invert the phase and inverting the phase. There's usually an effect in your software that says invert phase invert phase would basically be that kind of, maybe not. Let's see, if I could kind of that would be the same. But when it goes up, it goes down. When it goes down, it goes up, etcetera. Um, so you would invert the phase and put that in hoops and the right speaker. That creates a weird little thing in your brain, and it kind of makes the sound feel like it's wider than it is. It can be a little off putting to some people. It's It's an effect that, um can feel kind of strange. So I mean, you can try it and see what you think, but it's not something we use a lot, Um, but if you want to play around with it, you're you're welcome to do so. So that's how that kind of outside using panning to get outside of the speakers, who is phasing tricks, works. Uh, I just find that much time on it, cause it's really rare that you'd want to use it, but you can look up. Um, invert phase panning effects, too. Find some of those kinds of tricks 39. Surround Sound Mixing: Okay, One more thing before we get back to our track and start working on the panning For that, I want to talk a little bit about surround sound mixing. So in surround sound, what we have is a situation where there are more speakers. Okay, so we have stereo here because there are two speakers, but you can have three speakers. You can have as many speakers as you want. So if you see a system set up for 3.0, it means there are three speakers, okay. And the third ones probably behind you. Um, it might also be that 1/3 1 is a center channel. That's less common. Okay, but that's a 3.0 system. If you see a 4.0 system, it means there are four speakers, and in that case, they're going to be in a box around you this way. Hoops. So this would be a 4.0 system. So when you mix for a 4.0 system, you have to deal with a lot more, right? Because you have not only the stereo field, but you have a second stereo field behind you, and then you kind of have another serial field here and another Syria field here. So what you tend to get is and you can set up using some plug ins you can set up really any dog to mix. And 4.0 sound. You get kind of a joystick that lets you move the sound all the way around, and you can automate it so that it spins. You can do it if you want, but you would use some special plug ins to do that. But it can be done, um, fairly easily. If you have five channel sound, you definitely have a center speaker. So in 5.0, that's the set up that you're dealing with. And so if you're mixing in 5.0, then you have five channels to deal with and you can put sound in each channel so that it feels like the music is all around and you really want to think about what sounds go where , you know, Maybe you want to put the drums here, but you know, some of the guitars back here and some of the guitars back here can create a really cool, really immersive environment toe. Listen to music, and but it's super rare because most people don't have a five 0.0 set up, right? Um, a lot of people do, however, when they're watching movies. So when you're watching movies, you might have a 5.0 set up or more likely, ah, 5.1 set up. That's maybe a term you've heard more often. And when a 5.0 set up happens, here's what that means. Five point. Oh, means that there are, Ah, oops. It means there are five speakers and the 0.1 is a subwoofer. And the subwoofer can go wherever you want because these really low frequencies don't happen in the stereo field. Really, subwoofers make low frequencies, and you can put a subwoofer kind of anywhere. Um, it's gonna feel like it's coming from all around you because that's just how the low frequencies work. It doesn't matter where they are. That's why we call it a 0.1. It's not really its own speaker, because you wouldn't put like a ton of sound and make it feel like it's coming from over there. Everything you put in the sub, which is Onley low frequencies, are gonna feel like they're coming from all around you. That's a 5.1 system. So when you're in a movie theater, you might have a 7.1 system. You might have a 9.1 system, maybe a 10.1 system. And in that kind of setting, what you're gonna have is a whole bunch of these, right, cause there's gonna be a lot of people sitting there and there's gonna be a lot of different speakers like that sort of heavy or 6789 So we have a 9.1 set up here. So this is designed for people to be sitting, you know, all over the place like that. So, do you need to worry about mixing in 9.1 and how that works? No, Um, the only real reason you would need to deal with this is if you're mixing the soundtrack to a movie that's going to be played in like a high quality movie theater. Until you get to that point, you don't need to worry about it. And when you do get to that point, you have special tools designed just for ah mixing in 9.1 sound or however many speakers they have. Ah, lot of those movie theaters now have a lot more than nine speakers in them 9.1, So don't worry about that. For now. Stick to stereo mix in stereo. And because most music is mixed in stereo, there's some special cases where you do 5.1 mixes, but really rare. So stick to stereo for now, but at least now you know what these different configurations look like. 40. Panning On My Mix: Okay. Back to my track. Let's implement what we've learned so far. Okay? So here's my kick. I want that right in the center as it is. Cool. What else do I want in the center? Um, the lead vocal, Which I don't have the bass guitar or whatever is the main based synth. That's maybe this right. I'm gonna keep that in the center. The snare drum, maybe. Let's see if we confined our snare drum. More drums. Here's a snare. Yeah, let's keep that in the center and then similar stuff. We want to be on the outsides. So let's just go through and find a good place for stuff. Now, where am I gonna put things like like this weird little rumble, right? Uh, that I might leave center because I really kind of want that to feel like it's coming from the middle. No, but there's some extra stuff in there. I kind of heard that when we did the play through that there were these webs in here like that. Um, and I want to pull those down because I was worried a little hot, so I'm gonna leave those in the center because they're kind of a main element. It's here What? This one is. Okay, we'll leave that in the center. Um, I take that back. These two are similar. So I'm gonna let this one go a little bit left. So maybe 20 left. Remember this maxes out at 50? So let's go. Maybe 20 left and hearing you go 20. Right? We'll see how we like that. Don't remember. I'm just kind of starting out here. I'm just kind of deciding where to put stuff a little bit arbitrarily. And then I'm gonna listen to it and decide what I like and what I don't like. Okay, let's hear what this is. Okay, that's another buzz sounds. Let's leave that center for now. And this was a swoosh. Kind of. Oh, that was a big sub base. Things I believe that center. Okay, more drums. Let's hear this. Okay, now, this is a stereo track. You can tell a story. Attracted. You see two way forms. You see one here and one here. It's already got panning built into it, but you can hear it bouncing around. Okay, so this is already got a lot of panning, So that means I should really leave it center for it to do the panning that it's already built into it. I could move it left, and then it wouldn't pan to the right. You know, those things that are built into the track wouldn't go to the right. So let's leave that center for now knowing that it's not actually center. It's all over the place. That's who we've got here. Same deal with this one. It's got a lot of panning built into it already. So let's leave that where it is. There is some panning to this, but I'm gonna push it just a little bit. Right. Okay. Now I want to see what's here. Okay, That's my snare. We're gonna leave that guy center, see what's here. Okay, I'm gonna push this a little bit left. Not a lot like a tiny, tiny bit just to create some kind of width and everything. Okay, now all of these things, these we might want to move. Let me show you what I mean. Okay, let's move this. So I'm gonna automate my panning. Okay, So here's my panning parameter by automating it, that means I'm just gonna just it over time so I'm gonna start it all the way left. Maybe not all the way left, and I'm gonna move it all the way, right or sorry. Opposite. And it started all the way, right? Just shy of all the way. Right? So it's going to start 39 right? And it's gonna end right there. About 28 left. Okay, so now it's going across the field through the same thing here. But maybe let's do this one opposite. All right? I want to go too hard. I don't want to do anything at extremes, okay? And let's move these other ones around a little bit. This one, that's maybe leave center. And this one happens right after it. So let's make it kind of line up with that one. Right? So I want this spot. This is 28 left where that starts. So on this one, too. And about 28 left so that it feels like these to hand off to each other through the same thing with this one. This is that about 39. All right. And then this one will take back almost to the center. Okay. Maybe this one will leave right in them. Well, let's do a little bit of motion on it. Just toe. Give it a little bit of action hoops. Except I moved volume set of the panning. Gotta make sure you're moving the right parameter game's gonna give it a little bit emotion on all of these little swooshes. So let's go left right back to center. Left. One more. Again, we might not like the way this sounds, but I think we will. So I'm just gonna start it off there. Okay? Now these Since let's hear what we've got. Okay? This one has a lot of panning built in already, so I'm not gonna mess with it. That one also has a lot of panting built in. You'll find this a lot with sense. That one really feels like there's a lot of panting also, but I'm gonna push it hair, right. And then this one gonna go back, Teoh. No, I'm gonna leave that one center, but I am gonna push this one just a tiny bit, right. Okay. This has a lot of panning built into it, too. I'd like to push this left or right, but I don't have something that contrasts it So if I go left, it's gonna feel like empty on the right. If I had something that I could contrast this with, I would push it pretty far to one side. But I don't unless this is, well, kind of. But this has a lot of planning built into it already. We're gonna leave that pull us a little bit left, will use this to contrast this, which is a little bit right, and this is a little bit left. And what we have here thing doesn't have much panting in it. So let's pull this a little bit left. Actually, let's move this. Let's move this one around a little bit. So I'm just going to kind of do some random moving around. You can do this with a plug in. If you want things to just kind of randomly be jumping around. I just want to give it a little bit of motion. Okay. God, I think that'll feel good having not just kind of wobbling around a little bit. Okay, uh, let's not play this whole thing again, But let me just play a little segment and let's hear what we've got. Its turn that solo off. Let's okay, pretty good. Um, I think we've We've kind of made it feel a lot wider just by doing those couple things we did to it, right? So now it feels like, um, the track is starting to come to life a little bit, right? It's not just on the screen, but it's kind of all around us a little bit, so it's got a lot of energy to it now, Um, is high energy track before, But now it kind of really kind of feels like it's grabbing you a little bit more. Okay, so that's panic. All right, so experiment with panning. Play around with it. Remember, there's a There's a lot of artistry here, so there's a lot of things you can do to make it feel the way you want it to feel. It's not just a formula, but, um, I've given you kind of my tricks here. Okay, let's move on 41. Working With Frequencies: Okay, now we get to the frequency element. Now, this is probably the most tedious of all of them and also debated Lee. The most important. Um, what we're gonna be doing here is working with e cues. The e que is kind of our scalpel when it comes to fixing a mix. This is the most important tool that we have at our disposal to make things uh, both sound better and sound cleaner. And that's probably the most important thing that I want to get across right away Is that when we're doing this kind of work, we have two goals. So when were you Whenever you're using an e que. You're trying to do really one of two things, and it's important to know which one that you're focusing on at any given moment because you're not trying to do the same both things at the same time. So thing number one that you could be doing is trying to make a sound cleaner is trying to improve a sound, make something make a particular element sound brighter, darker, just different than it was recorded. And we could do that with the cues. Okay, we can make it sound brighter, We could make it sound darker. Ah, we can get rid of some muddiness if it if it's in there. But we're talking about a single sound. We can make it sound different. Another thing that we can do with an e que is make elements fit together. So multiple sounds that are clashing fit together better. I think I mentioned this earlier that when we get to the frequency element, we're going to be looking at kind of how to carve out space for each element if we need to do that. So we do that with an e que, um, and you do that by adjusting different frequencies. So in this section, we're gonna be working with Nick you a lot. We're gonna talk about how to use an e que You might already know how to use any queue. But I want to go over it anyway and make sure that, um, we're all on the same page with some terminology. The way that I like to use the accuse, um, and kind of what's happening under the hood. So we're going to do that. We're gonna talk about frequency bands and then we're gonna talk about how to craft the sound using and e Q. And secondly, how to make room in the mix using the e Q. And then, of course, as we've been doing throughout this class in the last section are the last lecture in this section. We will be applying all these techniques to the mix that we have going now off this track. So burst. Let's take a look at an e que So this is one I have here. This is a totally flat CQ. I have done anything to it. Now it's not flat e que, No, I've done something to it. I just want to talk about how to read this frequency spectrum first, cause we haven't talked about that yet. So let's go to a new video and talk about how we read this this big area here with all these vertical lines 42. Reading A Frequency Spectrum: Okay, So we're looking at in each you here. But you saw the same kind of thing earlier when we looked at a spectrum like, Here's the spectrum. Okay, so if I place a music through it, Okay, it looks like that you see these lines going, uh, in any queue. It works really similar. It's kind of a different looking thing, but you're seeing the same information, actually. So I want to talk about not necessarily this line. Ah, this blue line in the yellow dots here, which is the actual eq you. But I want to talk about these vertical lines, um, which are the same in the spectrum and in the acute. This is just the frequency. The frequency spectrum we call it is what we're looking at here, and these vertical lines are important to know what you're looking at. So let's go through it first with the EQ you and then I'll jump over to the spectrum and show you how it's the same. And this, by the way, is the same. No matter what software you're working in, no matter what you Q, you're working in. If you're working in a old hardware e que you're working in anything. These lines should be the same, uh, or work the same as the way I'm going to explain them right here. Okay, So what we're looking at here is low stuff over here and high stuff over here. Okay, So high frequencies, low frequencies, okay. And then about the higher end of it, we're seeing loud stuff and quiet stuff. Okay, so if you see something right here, you would know That means it's relatively low because it's on this side and it's relatively loud. If you saw something right here, you would say that's very high and very quiet up here would be very high and very loud. Okay, so that's how you read the main things. Now, these lines What these lines tell you this is a little weird. It's a little Matthey, but the way our ears work is kind of on a log arrhythmic scale. So that's why each line gets closer and closer. I think it's farther apart again, is what it looks like, but it's actually multiplying each time it gets closer. So imagine over here right here. Or actually, I guess right here. This is zero. Okay. This is zero hertz K zero hertz is nothing. It's so it's, you know, in an impossible sound. So this first line is gonna be 10 hertz. Okay, so 10 hertz and then it multiplies going up from the earth. Doubles going up from there are not doubles. It goes up by 10. So 10 2030 40 50 60 70 8100. Okay, so this is 100 hertz, and you can see right down there. It says 100. Okay, so each one of these lines is 10 now, why did they get closer together? It's because of that. Kind of. It's just the way we hear stuff. It's a log arrhythmic scale. Think of it like a guitar fretboard. As you get higher there, frets get closer together. It's the same exact concept. So things get closer together. But so we kind of space things like this so that we can see them correctly across the whole spectrum. Okay, so once we get to this 100 point, then we start going by 100. Okay, so now the next line is 200. This line is 304 105 106 107 108 109 100. 1000. You see here, one k. All right, now we're going by 1000. 9000. 5000. 6000. 7000. 8000. 9000. 10,000. Here you see 10-K in here, we get to 20,000 because now we're going by 10,000. So that's 20,000. Now, this shows you everything that we can really possibly here. Humans here, from about 20 hertz to about 20,000 hertz or 22,000 hertz to be, uh, that's kind of the technical correct way we say it. So we're starting at zero. So this is 20 Hertz, right? So anything below here, we can't really here. But it could still cause problems for us. So it's important to be able to see that here's 20 hertz and gives us a little bit more. So 22 hertz is where it really goes up to. So this is everything we can really here. Okay. And you can actually look down here and you could see where my mouse is pointed. So right here is 101 hurts. Um, it also gives us the pitch. Do you want not all excuse will give us the pitch, but this one does. Let's go over and look at the spectrum. Here's the spectrum Works the same way. 10 2030 40 50 60 70 80 100. There's 100 203 104 105 100 etcetera. 1000. 2000. 3000 4000 etcetera to 10,000. 20,000. 22,000. So, um, that shows us the entire range that we can hear when we look at See here a lot of low energy around. Ah, there's a good bump right here around 8082. Maybe, um, 8200 Hertz. We're sorry. 800 because this is 100 this is 1000. So this would be 900. This would be 800. Just be about 820 hertz or so. Not energy right there. Then kind of a flat amount of energy from one K to 10-K Okay, So important to remember that down here, we can't actually hear this. This is our kind of sub base area. We can hear this when it's low and rumbly. Then we get to the main area of our hearing, which is the middle of the frequency diagram. So that's how that works When we look at it, e que What we're gonna do is we're gonna shape it. We're going to say I don't want to hear anything underneath 20 hertz. We just cut it off. We don't let any frequencies through down there. That's gonna be something called a low pass filter that we're gonna talk about later in this section. For now, I just wanted to outline kind of what we're seeing here when we look at all of our frequencies so that you know, when I say Let's cut that off around 2000 hurts, you know, that I'm talking about right there. If I was gonna cut something off a 2000 hertz to be just about like we'll hear everything will be out by 2000 Hertz Or I could say, start a cut off at 2000 hertz, which would be like that. The cut off starts right there and then goes down because this is 2000 Hertz. And we know that because this is 1000 hertz and the next one up must be 2000 cool. So now that we know how to read that, let's talk about frequency bands 43. The 7 Common Frequency Bands: Okay, so when we talk about frequency bands we're really talking about is an area. So an area would be like if I did this. Okay, so here I would say I have an eq You on the base. Right? So this is showing a base band. So a band is just kind of ah, in an area of the frequency spectrum that we commonly refer to. So all it really means is this is kind of ah, shorthand way of saying what something is. You've seen bands before If I did this. Oops. If we look at this down here you've seen before, um, like, on your car stereo, where it says Turn up the lows, the mids and the highs. That's just three bands, right? So what they've done when they say low mids and highs is they've taken the entire frequency spectrum and they've chopped it into three sections. Right, low stuff, mid stuff and high stuff, right? That's a three band EQ You. That's what that means. A four band EQ. You is gonna chop stuff into four chunks, right? And it might be base low mids, high mids and highs. Maybe they could label them a couple different ways so that so that would be a four band EQ . You. There are five band accuse. Six bandy cues, typically when we're talking about mixing, were working in many more bands than then that. But there is kind of a set standard of seven. Ah, that are handy to use, and I've late label them here. So sub base is gonna be 20 hertz to 60 hertz, approximately. So that's the lowest end of what we can hear. And then what we refer to as the base frequencies are general 60 to 250 hertz low mids, 250 to 500 hertz, the mid range 500 to 2000 hertz upper mids, 2000 to 4000 member kilohertz. The K means 1000. So two kilohertz is 2000 hertz, four kilohertz, 4000 hertz presence, four kilohertz to six kilohertz and brilliance is six kilohertz all the way to the top to 20 kilohertz. So if you've ever had, like, a affect pedal or something that set or an AMP that said Turn up the presence. What you're really doing is turning up sick 4 to 6000 hertz. Um, which adds a little bit of, you know, sparkle to your sound boosts those upper frequencies. So what good is knowing this? Um, again, it's really just short and way to say, You know, I think you need a little bit more in the mid range, you can say OK by mid range. He means 500 to 2000 killers. You can go to your EQ. You boost that. Or I could say, I think you've got too much happening in the low mids, so you could go to 250 to 500 hertz, turn that down a little bit with an e. Que Right is how you would do that. So just kind of common Norman creature for, um, How we talk about different frequency ranges. A sub base based, low mids, mid range upper mids presence. Brilliant sub base maybe deserves a little bit of extra explanation. These are frequencies that sometimes we can barely hear. And if you don't have a subwoofer attached to your system, you might not be able to hear them at all. If they're down in 20 hertz, you might not be able to hear that, But you can sure feel these. These are things that you can feel sometimes more than you can hear them. They give you a rumble. Um, if you've ever been in a movie theater and there's, like, maybe you can't really hear anything, but there's this well, vibrating, uh, they're using some sub base to make you feel that fi bre shin in the room. So those are sub bass frequencies. Cool. Okay, so, um, that's just something about how we talk about frequencies moving out. Let's talk about using an e que? 44. Working With The EQ: okay. Like I said before, the most important tool that we have at our disposal is the e que. When it comes to this kind of mixing. So I want to go over how to use this thing. Now, everything I say here should work no matter what software you're using, no matter what plug ins, air using, no matter what you're using. Okay, so what I have here and what you should have in just about any professional e que is actually ah, whole bunch of eq use here. I have eight of them, actually. Okay, you can see here one through eight. Okay. In my case, I have the 1st 5 turned down. The other three are turned off and go down and just make it so only one of them is turned on. Okay, so I have one turned out and just I'm gonna explain this in just a second, but I'm just gonna do this, okay? So now I have kind of a really simple leak. You here? I only have one band on. Okay, so I'm calling this a band, even though I can move it around. I still like to use the bird band here. Or you could call it its own e que So I have one point. Ah. And every time I turn one of these on, I get another point right on the EQ you. But it's gonna turn one on for now to have one on. Now, what I'm doing here is remember this line right in the middle here is zero. That means I'm not affecting the frequencies at all. The frequencies are just the way they are in the audio. Okay? So, not doing anything to these frequencies. If that line is on zero right here, I'm boosting the frequencies by this much. Okay? From this middle line up, I'm boosting the frequencies by that much. Okay? And that much is about six decibels. Okay, is what I'm boosting it by. If I do this, I'm cutting those frequencies right here in the mid range by about six decibels. Case, I'm taking those six decibels out. I'm lowering the volume of these frequencies. Okay. And here I'm boosting it. Right? So it's all relative to this line, which is zero. If I do this, I'm not doing anything. The sound is just playing right through this EQ. You and nothing is being done to it now. Boosting Cool. Okay, so let's go down here and let me show you the controls. Now, how this works is I can get access to any of these controls I can actually do with the graphic up here. But I'm going to do it with this just to make the point. So, frequency. If I could move the frequency, you can see what happens. That's what frequency I'm looking at, right? So now it's really high. Now it's really low. Okay, so I can adjust the frequency. You can do that in any queue. You can ingest their frequency. The gain is what am I doing to that frequency? I'm turning it up. I'm doing nothing. I'm turning it down. So frequency. And what am I doing to it now? The queue is how wide is that dot So let me dio this and show you what the Q does. It's easiest just to see the cute rather than explain it. If I make the Q bigger, that happens. If I make it smaller, that happens, right? So we think of this as the width. How wide is the area that I'm affecting. Okay, so here, really narrow. I'm just gonna focus right in on this frequency right here is about 400 Hertz, right? I'm just gonna zoom in right on that, or I want to kind of broadly hit the other frequencies around it. So that's what you do with the Q. Okay, Now, all of these work the same. If I turn more on, everything works the same. Except they affect each other a little bit, right? So if I move over here, that's this one's gonna affect that one gets a little more complicated. We'll leave that one off for just a minute, because there's one more thing to look at, which is the shape of the e que. Right. So there are a number of different shapes that you can use. So I'm gonna switch this one over to ah, high pass, which is this shape. Okay. What this does is on the left side, goes down to zero on the right side. It eventually flattens out. I could still boost if I want to, or cut if I want to, but it's gonna flatten out over on the left side and is gonna go to zero We're sorry. Go to zero in the left side, flatten out on the right side because a high pass filter, which is what we're looking at here. What that does is it cuts out all the low stuff, all of it, and let's high stuff through. So it lets highs pass through. That's a high pass filter. Okay? And I can still adjusted. I could move it way down, move it way up. Things like that. There are controls I have with it. So I could just say I want everything sub base out of this and I can adjust the queue a little bit. This is what we would call residence. We'll talk more about high pass filters later, cause high passes air kind of a special case, but move it up a little bit. I can also do the opposite. Just called a low pass filter. So I'm gonna let low stuff through and chop off all the high stuff. Okay? This is something that you might want to use in a particular case. The other common thing is here, like I was using before this, we would just call a band pass filter. Okay, so I'm gonna let certain bands through. I'm gonna boost them or cut them. Might also sometimes called this a notch filter. Um, band passed notch. There's 1/3 thing that some software calls it, I can remember, but this is our most commonly used one when it comes to mixing other than low pass filter, which we use for a kind of a separate purpose that will talk about shortly for now. Ah, and you can experiment with some of these other ones too. But those are the most common low pass, high pass and band pass. Okay, so with these, we might design and e que That looks something like this. So what's happening here? Let's make it even a little bit more complicated in Turn it through. Going on. Let's dio that. Okay, So what is this eq you doing? Well, where cutting were reducing or cutting frequencies around 53 hurts just here. So there's a little pocket that we're pulling out, and then we're still pulling some out here because it's not going all the way back to zero , which is there. We're really pulling out around 53 hertz or what did I say 50 53 hurts. We're pulling out again around 250 hertz. So we're kind of getting a bubble around that, and then we're killing everything above 1000 Hertz. Um, that's what's happening here. Okay, So you might be thinking, What is this guy out here doing? This is not really doing anything. In this case, I could probably turn it off. Yeah. So what we really care about here is what is this line doing, Right. Cool. So that is how an e que works. Okay, now, there might be some cases where we really need to go in, you know, just really tight and say I want something that is I want the whole track that's just sub base, and I want it just cooking. And that's what you'd have right there. I could probably been turned that one off. This, however, is gonna be a terrible sound because you probably get a lot of distortion from this. More likely you'd want something like that when you're working with an e que? Remember that. And this is true of what I've said before too. In almost all cases, you want to cut, you want a pull sound away rather than boost sound. Right, This is boosting this cutting. So you you want to try to avoid boosting um, that being said, if boosting sounds good, go with it. You can boost if you want to, but for mixing purposes, we tend to want to cut. Um also remember that all you're doing is boosting what's in the sound. If you say wow, I really wish this had a whole bunch of extra sound way up around 11 or 12,000 hertz. If there's no sound if that sound you're working on doesn't have any frequencies in 12,000 hertz, you're gonna be boosting nothing, right? It has to be in the sound for you to be able to boost it. Um, so this is going to result in if that didn't have these hurts is going to result in perhaps adding a little bit of noise, too. The sound which you don't really want to do depending on how it was recorded. So you could only boost what's in the sound. And you can only cut what's in the sound also, but always remember, you want to cut more than you want. A boost boosting adds volume can result in clipping, distorting clipping is another word for distorting. So we have to be a little careful with that. But sometimes we boost stuff, and it sounds good. So you go with it. Okay? Moving on to creating definition in the sound. 45. Creating Definition: Method 1: OK, but we're going to do next is we're gonna use an e que To try to craft the sound a little bit. So I'm gonna pick a sound in this track. To use is to use as an example to show you what I mean, Something to use this sound focus right in on this one. Because to me, this is a cool sound. It's kind of got this duck sent thing that I talked about a second ago s o. What I want to do is see if I can give it a little more clarity. Now, this isn't something you have to do when you're mixing. This is a little bit outside of mixing, but not really. Um, I just want to make these sounds shine a little bit more and just kind of changed the way they feel. So I'm gonna walk you through two different techniques that I use to, um kind of see what's in this sound and bring forward something maybe a little different than what's already in the track. So both of these techniques are going to use an e que So I'm gonna throw in CQ on this track. I'm gonna open it up here to make it nice and big way could see Inarritu here that most of the energy is right here, kind of hovering around one k. There is some low stuff here. Um, there's some low energy here, the majority of it. It's hard to tell because it's kind of bouncing all over the place up here. It's really kind of bouncing between 200 let's say 5000 K It's pretty big Wings fans, but that doesn't really matter right now. Here's what I'm gonna do. What I like to do is a little bit of the opposite of what? Of 20 to do with any Q two start. So bear with me for a second Here I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take one band. I'm gonna crank it now. I told you, don't You don't want to boost if you can avoid it. So what I'm looking for here is I'm gonna move this around until I find something that really sticks out. Okay, so I'm just listening to find something that just goes Whoa to me. Okay, so that frequency is where I'm getting a lot of that duck sound. I think is right there. So I'm gonna try to tighten that up a little bit with the Q. Okay? And I think there's another one here, so I'm gonna try to grab another low one. And again, I'm just listening for that kind. Something to really stick out. Okay, I found another one. So what that tells me I should do is just kind of open up these cues a little bit more. OK, so now what we have here is terribly cute. So what I did is I found the most offending frequencies by just cranking them. So now what? I'm gonna dio going to go down to the gain for both of those two points. I'm going to reverse it. I'm gonna pull those frequencies out. S So now I have a lot less of that duck sound. So what I did there is I boosted the frequencies, and then I kind of swept around the frequency spectrum until I found something that really stuck out to me. Ah, as an undesirable sound. I basically boosted the sound I didn't want to hear so that I could really isolate it. Then I pulled it out. Okay, so now I think we have a little bit of a less of a duck sounding thing, actually, Pull out quite a bit more. Now, What I've done here is I really could just use a low pass, uh, on this one and just cut out everything underneath three. Um, are underneath. What, are we out here? About 500. I wasn't when I was planning on doing, but let's do it anyway, so I switched this to a low pass. Now, these other two don't matter because they're underneath it moving up a little bit. That's even better. So I'm gonna isolate just this kind of higher mid range upper mids here around maybe 1800 to 2000 hertz and up. That's the only thing I'm gonna let through it because I really like that. So that's technique that I like to use Crank up those frequencies to find the ones you don't want and then pull him out 46. Creating Definition: Method 2: Okay, so option two kind of another way to achieve a similar kind of thing. So I'm gonna go back. Teoh Um a flat e que are mostly flat. You queue here. There we go. Okay, mostly. OK, So I will start with flight Acute. I'm working on the same sound. So this is another method that you can use to really kind of sculpt a sound a little bit. So, uh, three steps we're going to kind of focus on the low, the mid and then the high. So imagine a big three band EQ you with a lot of control. OK, so first, let's go to the low and let's just cut off the bottom, okay? And I'm gonna make this fairly sharp. So what I'm gonna actually do is a different kind of low pass filter. We'll talk about those low pass filters in a minute. I said that a lot, but I promise it's coming. Do right. We're sorry. High pass filter. So what I'm gonna do is just kind of slowly move this up until I really hear it. Taking a felt so right there. I can start to hear this doing something. There's not a lot of low energy in this particular sound. Okay, The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna find something in the mid range, um, that I like. And I'm just going to kind of fish around to life, feel a good sound right in the middle here. I think I can kind of look at the spectrum that's happening here. If you have that in your software to kind of see where there's a bunch of frequencies, think right around there is kind of good. So I'm really just using my ear, trying to find something that I think sounds good. Ah, and I'm just going to kind of pull a little bit out in that range. So what I'm trying to do is reduce some area of the mid range that results in something that I like. And then the last thing I'm going to do is go to the upper range and just boost a little bit toe add a little bit of presence, Dio Okay. I'm gonna boost a lot to find the frequency I'm looking for. And then I'm going to scale it back right there. That's interesting, but I don't want to go that high, but I'm gonna do a little bit of that. Okay, so I have a little bit more definition in that sound now. It's not drastic. It's subtle, but it's a little got a little bit more clarity to it. Let's ah, test it. So I'm gonna turn this e que off. So we're hearing it with no e que. And I'll turn it back on. So here's nothing years with the so it's subtle, but we do get a little bit more clarity in that sound. This might work better on a fuller sounding since, like like this one right just above it. That's pretty all over the place also. But, uh, thank you. You've seen the concept here, so focus on the low focus on the mids and then focus on adding a little bit of presence. So both of these two techniques something you can do to just add a little bit of clarity to the sound. Next, let's look at creating more definition in the mix. So the other thing that I talked about that we do with the e que. This is going to be about carving out space for this particular instrument or whatever instrument we're looking at. Ah, and for this one, I'm definitely gonna focus on this problem that we have in this track in the low and 47. Cleaning Up The Mud: Okay, so let me explain a little bit more detail about what we're trying to achieve here. So this is kind of like if you've ever played on a piano and played a couple of notes really low, that should sound good together. And you're like, Why does that sound all muddy? That's the same problem that we're going to deal with here, For example, I've added a piano here just so I can demonstrate this. I'll delete this panel truck in a second. Right? Here are two notes. These sound really good, actually. Let's play a full chord. Okay, The's sound nice together. This is a nice chord. If I played these same three knows the same chord, but really low. It starts to get a little muddy right? There's like grit coming to that. Let's go even lower right now. Listen to that. These are the same notes, but now it just sounds like junk, right? It's just so something that sounds really good up high. When we put too much of those frequencies together down really low, it just turns into mud, right? So this can happen anywhere in your mix when frequencies are too close and all bunching up together. Then it creates that mud. That is that sound. Right now, it's most common on the low end, but it can happen in the upper end as well. If you've got too many frequencies in the same zone, it can cause problems. Now, this isn't something that we think about very much when we're writing the track, You might be like, I want this killer baseline and I want this killer kick, right. So you put that together, and that's kind of what's happening here. I think it's this and this. Listen to these two together. Oops, Let's go back to you right here. Right in the same neighborhood, right? And that's gonna create a buildup of those frequencies. Let's look at it on the spectrum. Actually, I don't even need to do that. I need to look at the master while I'm doing that. You look at all of those frequencies down here that's gonna be really muddy. Now, this is set up to be just perfect at the moment to where it doesn't create a lot of mud because it goes kick notes, notes, kick notes, notes, kick notes, notes, and they don't actually happen to the exact same time. But I think later they do. It's still creating a little bit of a mess. There might be another simp that's even creating more of a mess. Maybe even find it. That one is in the same ballpark, but it's not offending too much. It's tried this one. That's not the one I'm hearing. I think it is these two. Okay, so let's focus on these two. So one way to avoid this muddiness is to do what this track is doing. Pretty smart, right? Which is making them not happen the same time exactly. At the same time, I'm gonna make them happen at the same time. Uh, just to show you what would happen, Okay, Just by shifting them a little bit here, they should be moving now. They should be hitting the same time. Oops. Okay, let's hear. Just just that. Let's actually focusing on just one kick. Okay? So now we have this hitting and this hitting at the same time. Let's look at what our spectrum tells us, right? It's all assuming so much stuff right there, right? It's at the very top of what we can do to many frequencies right at that spot, which is 2030 hertz. Right? 10 2030. Look down. 40. Sorry. 40 hertz. So we need to make sure these things don't pile up at 40 Hertz for the sake of argument. I'm gonna leave these just as is because I want to demonstrate what happens in your track when and how to solve this in your track. Now, once we're done doing this, I will shift it back normal because it will help the mix having these be separated. So what we really need to do is carve out space for each of these, make sure that they're not piling up in those same frequencies and get that that 40 hertz spike out of there. So let's go to new video, and we'll dive into how we do that. 48. Making Room In The Mix: Okay, So how actually didn't do this is with our new best friend and eat you someone put in a queue on both of these, the kick and that base since, and it's gonna carve out a little space, that's all we're going to do. So let's go appear. And now I'm gonna go down to our master X. I want to see the spectrum of what they are together. That's why I'm going down to the master. So we've got our offending frequencies here, right around 40 hertz. So let's say what's gonna win. You know what? We can leave one of them in that little pocket. So let's leave the kick in that pocket cause we want our kicked a punch. Right? So what we need to Dio is take this and just cut it at 40 hertz so that it doesn't have much going on there now we don't have to cut it all the way out through. So here is our 40 hertz, So I'm just gonna dip a little bit right there. Now I could replace it with a little bit of a punch just above that, to give a little more room to kind of make up for it and a little bit higher range. Right? So you don't hear much difference. But it definitely has a difference when it comes to, uh, how muddy the mix is gonna be. Let's go down and look at our spectrum way less of a build up right here, but still kind of a lot. What happens if we just see that kick? Yeah. That kick is just really pushing 40 hertz on its own. Okay, so let's go back here and pull a little bit more out right there. Let's hear our synth by itself. Okay, here's what we pulled out. You know that That low sub base, right? Let's send this out a little bit more. Okay, let's hear him together. Okay, so now that kick has plenty of room. And it's not creating that that lows like, weird piano thing that I was doing before. This thing it's not making that grumbly sound, but it's nice and clean. Let's hear everything to guess. Okay, maybe make a little bit. See? Now this base is totally out of the way. Okay, So one more thing when it comes to doing this, whenever you're doing this and we're working with trying to create space. It's best to actually not solo instruments. I was soloing instruments here because I was soloing to so that I could hear the difference between these two instruments. But when you're really trying to solve something, um, you really want to be able to listen? Listen, toe everything all at once. Gonna move this back to make it just right. And then let's find another spot here. Okay? Let's see if this is getting in the way of that kick at all. Um, and let's just make because we still have this kick going and we have this going way have really similar things here. So with this one. So between this and this, these two, I hear really similar stuff. So let's carve out separate space, right? That's muddy. That's a kind of a muddy sound. So let's come about separate space for the So let's put in equal on both of these And in this one, I hear a little bit more high end in this one. So I'm gonna pull out the low stuff in this one, and I'm just gonna let this have ah a little higher even let this have five k and up. Okay, so right about here. Okay, so now this one, there's not much happening. Let's give a little bit of presence. Okay, Now, this one. And let's let's make sure that's still something. Okay? That this one we're gonna let have the low stuff. Right? Because these were similar. So I want to be sure that they stay out of the way of each other. So this one we're gonna get rid of around five K together feels a lot cleaner. So this is what we mean when we talk about carving out space, finding stuff that's taking up the same frequency space. Uh, that is similar. Sounds similar volume and kind of making room for everything. Okay, now you don't have to go through every sound and say, Okay, this one is going to be at this frequency. This one's gonna be at this frequency, etcetera. You just have to find things that are causing a conflict. And and you don't want to do too much, right? You don't want toe pull out a whole bunch of frequencies if you don't have to. So you have to really listen close for things that are creating any kind of muddy mushi sound you know a good way to do it. That I think about is if I'm looking at something like, if I'm listening to this track right here on, I think Can I look at this and hear it? Right? Can I imagine this sound? Okay, let's solo it. Okay? It's that quickie thing. You hear that? Yeah, I can, actually. So that means it's clear in the mix if there's something that you can look at and then figure out solo it to see what it actually sounds like And then here in the whole mix, but like, it's kind of lost in the mix. You can't really hear it when everything is playing at the same time, then going with an e que and carve out some space for that thing cause it probably doesn't have its own space. Okay, Super important. Okay. No, I was promised. Let's talk about some special high pass filters 49. Adding A High Pass Filter: okay. A really common problem toe have happened is that you've got a lot of low frequencies and kind of building up and e queuing in the way we just did to carve out space Isn't really cleaning it up. Ah, it worked for us here. But if you're finding that that is happening to you where no matter how much of just like kind of carving out space like that, um, you do, it's not solving the problem here is probably a solution that will work. Um, let's go to this. Sounds great example here. So we have a sense that's really full spectrum, right? There's a whole bunch of stuff happening all over the place. I'm gonna throw a high pass filter on this, and it might not even be audible. We might not even be able to hear it. So what? I'm gonna dio So I'm gonna turn all of these off, so we just have one. I'm gonna set it. Teoh. Ah, high pass filter. Now there are too high pass filters we can use in your software. You might have one. You might have three, but typically we have to. This one rolls off those low frequencies. We call this roll off. Um, at this slope. Okay. The other one I have makes it a more extreme slope. Okay, I use the more extreme slope here. So, uh, what I'm gonna do is it's gonna go to about 100 hurts somewhere in that ballpark that said exactly at 100 and just gonna roll off the low stuff here doesn't make all that much different. But look at what's happening. Nothing down here. Right. If I turn this off well, if I open this up, there's a ton of energy down here, right, Tana stuff down here that we can't even hear right? We can't hear it, but it can still cause us problems. So if you've got a bunch of since or any sound that has a lot of low energy down here just to use a high pass filter roll off that stuff. Um, you probably won't hear it, but if you went through and did this on all of your low sounding tracks, it's gonna kind of instantly sound better if you're having a serious low problem. Let's hear this one. See this one? No real low energy and don't need to worry about it. Um, let's check out this one. Nothing really down here that I need to worry about, okay? Nothing much else here. But if you have a whole bunch of instruments, um, roll off those low frequencies and using a high pass filter even though you might not be able to hear the results, It can clean up that muddiness because even though you can't hear those low frequencies, they can still cause problems because they can interfere with other sounds that are a little bit higher and create that mud. So if you're feeling that there's a whole bunch of low end and carving out space isn't working, try adding some high pass filters, toe anything with low energy, roll it off it about 100 hertz. So you're getting rid of everything under 100 hertz, and it can instantly be a miracle worker. So remember that little trick 50. Frequencies To Watch Out For: okay. I want to talk about a couple frequencies that you should keep an eye out for. If you look around online, you confined instrument frequency charts that will tell you the generally speaking main frequencies of a lot of different instruments. This is when I found from Sweetwater. I'll give you this link. This is one that they've put out for free sweet waters on instrument company they earn and not an instrument or retailer. They make they sell stuff. Um, but this is a free little chart, and this is super cool, So check it out. So what? The bottom we have hurts 30 50 100 203 104 100 all the way up to 20 k And what they're telling you here is for these instruments. Here's where you can get typically on this isn't an exact science, but typically or you can get some of these sounds. So bass guitar, if you really want to make it sound big and fat boost right here, which is, you know, right around 65 70 hurts, right? If you make it, want to sound growly boost around 607 100 hertz. If you're you've got someone doing, like a slap and pop technique and you want to get this really crisp snap boost around. I don't know, 2200 hertz. And she didn't really sure what they mean by Sheen, but kick drum, if you want to get a really punchy boost right here around 50 hertz around 300 for a more boxy sound, if you want to get a kind of a snap, click to it around five K etcetera. So ah, this shows a bunch of different instruments and kind of where their sweet spots are right in terms of the the sound of the instrument. So acoustic guitar, high hat like the sizzle of the hi hats right around 5500 K maybe six K. But again, it depends on the particular high hat you're using, so you're gonna have to find it. But this will definitely get you in the ballpark. Okay, so I'll give you this link, um, in the next segment, and then we'll go from there. Cool. So get yourself one of these charts. There's 100 of them out on the Internet, millions of them out online, but they're really useful 51. Creating Space In My Mix: Okay, The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through my track, and I'm gonna listen for any spots that have that kind of muddiness that don't have the definition that I'm really looking for. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna listen through. I'm not gonna solo listen through. I'm gonna say, Can I hear these? When I look at them, let me, um we find out, let's use that as an example. Can I hear whatever this audio file is? What was that? Actually Oh, I can't hear that. Okay, so when I look at this, I don't really hear anything. They're So that means I'm gonna want toe, give it a little more definition or carve out space for it. Um, right. Don't want to boost If I can avoid it. I'm gonna cut the bottom of that off just really quick. And I'm actually going to boost that a little bit in the high end. There's just nothing in the high end of that. So this is something that it's interesting that I just grabbed that, but this is something that is gonna be really tough to make work. I just can't get anything out of that? Yeah, There's just nothing there. Maybe if I just really crank the high end. No, I got it. It's getting even more frog like. Well, now I can hear it in the mix. So I'm gonna work on that a little bit more, but I'm gonna go through this whole track, and I'm gonna make sure that everything is clearly defined. I can hear what I see. And, uh, I'm not feeling any of that muddiness anywhere. Okay? Something's gonna kind of tediously go through it and look for all those spots and try to eke you them out. This is actually a really clean track because of all these, since they work really well together. So I don't suspect I'll find a whole lot more of them, but I'm gonna do it. So I'm not gonna make you watch me do everything. I think you know, I think you understand what I'm gonna do. So I'm going to stop the video there and then do it and then we'll come back in the next section. Off we go 52. A Few More Of My Tricks: okay in this section, I want to focus in a little bit on this, uh, kick and base problem. We looked a lot at it in the last section. And what I want to do here is just focus in on some of the tricks that I use that might help you. I'm not sure that we really need these tricks in this particular track, but I wanted to definitely get him in here because the baseline and the kick conflicting is one of those common things that slows down the mix. That's something that you might spend Ah, week just slaving over how to get a clean kick sound because of the base and these other things. So let's talk about a couple tricks that I like to use that I haven't covered yet. They all hover around e que Okay, So first of all one, not e que thing that we can think about, I guess, is figure out if the base needs to be that low now. We don't really want to make musical choices when we're working on mixing like we don't want to change the music. Obviously, that's not our job. When were mixing but if it's your track that you're mixing, uh, and there's an option to move the baseline up and Akayev, that can really help now. There's good and bad to that. Once the good is that, it'll clean up your mix. The bad is that it's no longer going to be a low, punchy baseline right, which is probably why you put it down really loaded. Begin with. But if you're willing to do that, that can definitely clean some things up. Now What we've already looked at is how to kind of eq you out a little pocket for your kick and your baseline, and that's good. That can get you out of a lot of trouble. And that could really clean up to mix a lot. But there are a couple other e que techniques that I like to use that helped the sound of the kick and a base, and this is true on a bass synth bass guitar. Anything in the same frequency range as the kick, and it also cleans up to mix. So let's go to a new video and let's talk about the sounds that are actually in our kick to begin with, and what we can do to really sculpt that kick a little bit better 53. What Is In A Good Kick?: Okay, so it's important to remember that a kick is actually in most cases to sounds. Okay, so let's look here. It's so some of this. Okay, so a kick really has to sound in it. Or there two elements that we really look forward to get a good kick. One is the sump, right? So let's imagine a actual kick drum in a drum kit. Okay, Now, whether you're doing an electronic one or an acoustic want doesn't matter. Let's just imagine that everything's acoustic for a minute. So we have. You know, when we hit the head of the drum, we get the big thump and the big thump is right around 62 1 20 hertz. Okay, so see, here's 60. And here's 1 20 right about there. Okay, so that main thump is really in this area, and then the second thing is we have the beater. The beater is the sound of the mallet that you're hitting the drum with or the foot pedal. In most cases, the foot pedal like hitting against the head. OK? It's like a crack that we get, and that's usually up around one K to four k. It is right about where we were. So it's right up in this range. It's really high sound, actually. Okay, so in a kick drum, you don't have a whole lot happening right here. This is a good spot for your base since upper frequencies toe live. Okay, so what we could dio and let's take this point and let's just do ah, high pass. We still want some of this low stuff. So let's do that. And I don't want to do ah, high pass here and just cut everything else off because I still want this up here. So what we're gonna do instead, take this? I'm going to dip out right there and then let's make this Q nice and wide. Okay, that's pretty good. And then let's put that's boost right up in here to give us some of that extra crack. Okay, Now, this is gonna change the sound of our kick a little bit. Okay? But it's nice and thumb p, and it's got that high for those high frequencies from the beater that we call it. And that makes a really nice kick sound. Okay, so we've made a cool kick sound and we've carved out a lot of space for our synth to live. So we've got let's call the center of that red around 300 hertz. So that means up here we could trail this off, widen that Q a little bit. And then if we wanted to, we could boost it just a bit right there. And now it's got plenty of room to breathe. Let's hear that. Get a little bit more here. I have a widen that out a little bit for it. Here we go. Okay. Now, these two together. See, now I feel like they're they're night and day from where we started. So they've really become separated just because we know what we want to do with the kick, which is make room in the middle section. Okay, so keep that in mind when you're working with a kick 54. Is Anything Else Causing Problems?: Okay, next tip. And this is maybe an obvious one, and I kind of already said it. But I just want to make sure that you stick this in your mind that you still feel when you're listening to the whole mix. Not just these two things. So load you still feel like there's a low end issue. Let's take a listen really quick, Okay? I don't think there is. But if you still feel like there's a low end issue, try muting the kick and the base on. Listen to everything without those two elements and make sure there's not something else in the low end that is causing problems right? It can very well be. There's another cent that's dipping down in that low area or has some low frequencies that we didn't realize were happening that we we might want to trim out. Okay, so try muting both your kick and the base and just make sure there's nothing else down there causing much problems for us. 55. Rebalancing: Okay. Last thing on this really quick is if you feel like after you've done all of this, some between these back on that, there's just not enough kick left. Because remember, we did take out a lot of frequencies here, so we might feel like we've reduced the volume of the kick. And so part of your instincts might be let me boost what's still here to give it a nice big thump, that is, Ah, common instinct and not a great thing to do If, in the process of e queuing this who feel like we've lost a lot too much of the volume of the kick Don't use your e que to boost what's already there. Just go back to your volume and boost it there. Okay, so you might need to do another pass of your volume after you do all the sea queuing. Because taking out all these frequencies will have an effect on the volume, so you might have to go through and re balance things after you do that. Cool. Okay, Next, let's go in and talk about adding effects 56. Using Effects In The Mix: Okay, so the next thing we're going to do is focus on creating space and depth. So why would we do this? And what is what exactly? Does that mean that they're both kind of nebulous terms? The easiest way to think about space and depth is to think about, um, let's say you recorded ah band in a recording studio, but you want to make it feel live right? So you might want Teoh play around with the sound and make it feel a little bit bigger. Make it feel like it's in a club, right? That's the general idea that's adding space. Um, so we can make it feel like they recorded it in a club. We can make it feel like they recorded it in a big ah airplane hangar. If we wanted Teoh, um, or we could make it feel like they recorded it in, you know, your living room. Um, so depth is kind of the same thing, but looked at in a different way. We can think of depth as we sort of talked about this the beginning. But it's kind of like if you imagine, imagine you're in the front row of a concert, right and the lead singer runs right up to the edge of the stage, so he's like four feet from you. OK, so you're listening to the lead singer, but the drums air all the way in the back, right? Enders? Ah, good. 20 feet in between the singer and the drummer, right? So there's this three dimensional space, right? There's things on the left and right. There's also things in the front and back, and in that case it's not really gonna sound like there's things in the front and back because everything is going to be coming out of the p A. But when we mix, we can make things feel like they're in the front in the back, and it's generally a sound that we like, so we want to kind of fill the space with as much as we can. So that's creating depth, which is kind of part of this space. Which is why, um, I like to lump these two things together. Now the main tool we're gonna be using to create space and depth is effects and in particular delay and reverb effects. So I thought we get started by just diving into a little bit of a refresher. Kind of On what delay and reverb actually does. You might already know this if this is review, um, that's okay. Feel free to skip it if you want, but I would, uh, encourage you to check it out because there might be some, you know, weird parameters in that reverb that you never really knew what they did. So, um, let's take this opportunity to really understand what a reverb does and what a delay does s so that we can really use it correctly. Uh, when we started playing it to our mix cancer, which is going to do a little bit on that and then we'll talk about busting effects, which is an important element. We've done a little bit of it already, but ah, I want Teoh go into the Why why we do that. And then we're gonna go into working on adding delay, effects and reverb effects and some other effects to create space and our mix. So here we go 57. What Actually Is A Delay?: Okay, let's talk a little bit about a delay. So I'm gonna use the simple delay plug in here and let me use it on this sound. So here's the sound without any delay on it. Okay. I want something that's just really simple rhythm just to point out some, uh, things here, So I'm gonna put this delay right on the track. Now, that's something that I'm going to tell you later not to do, but I'm going to do it right now just to create a simple example. Okay, so this is a simple delay, and you can use any delay that you want. Whatever's in your software. I just want to look at some of the parameters we have here. So what we're seeing here is a stereo delay. Okay, so there's left and there's right. Okay. You may or may not have a stereo Delay. Depends on what you're doing is totally fine. If you don't want a stereo delay and you have a stereo delay. Just set these to be the same. Um, now it's amano delay. Um, so what these numbers air are these air? Really? 16th notes case. A 1/16 note delay to 16th. Notes. 3/16 notes for £16. 568 and 16. Why does it jump to eight and 16? Because these air the 1st 4/16 notes in a beat, which is common to use five and six, would be the next to. So that would be a beat and 1/2 right there. This would be to full beats, and this would be four full beats. So it's very unlikely that you'd want seven because that would be a beat in a dotted eighth note. But there are ways to create it. If you really wanted to, um, so we can set this to be, let's say, 3/16 notes. Okay, I said, I'm both to be 3/16 notes. That's going right. It's gonna give us a little hobble. Ah, if I just said it toe 1/16 note, it's gonna be the note. And then 1/16 note later, right away. Rights going. Did it right to was going to create an eighth notes. It's gonna be that three we just heard is going debt that that that that that that because it's 3/16 notes away and four is gonna be completely on the next beat. So it's gonna be so you're really just gonna here you're going to hear any delay because it's gonna fold over on to the next beat. And it's the same notes they're not really even gonna here five is gonna be a beat. And then in eighth six is gonna feel like straight, kind of like, but a little murkier because it's gonna have a whole other beat in there. Eight is gonna be, like, four. You're not really gonna feel it because it's gonna be too for 16 is gonna be the same. Okay, so that's basically what's happening there. Now, if we don't want it to be attached to the beat, we can turn the sink off, and then all of these great out and we just get a number of milliseconds And now we can just dial in exactly how long we want it to be, regardless of what the beat is. Oh, and we're hearing too, by the way, because I haven't been setting this one on the same thing. So if I set this to be the same will only hear one, so we can just you straight up time or we can use a beaten under are very good reasons why we'd want to use one or the other that we're gonna talk about later. Sometimes you just want to use a number of milliseconds, and sometimes you want to use the beat. Um, I'll talk about that in ah, two or three videos when we talk about a few basic rules. So there are a number different kinds of delays that we use in general. We talked about delays in terms of short, medium and long. That would be short, would be somewhere around 40 milliseconds. Medium would be somewhere around 100 50 milliseconds, and long would be somewhere on 400 milliseconds. So let's hear that, um so short is going to be somewhere around 40 milliseconds. So here's a short delay, right? Like really shorts doesn't thing doing. It's almost one no, right. And then a medium is generally around 150 milliseconds, and these air just like really broad terms. No long delay generally are on 400 milliseconds, which, actually this one taps out at 300. We can't go up to 400 so we want to use a different kind of delay if we wanted that longer delay with this particular device. But let's hear 300 so it's a little bit longer. Okay, then. Another kind of delay is a stereo delay, which is what we're looking at here. Let me take advantage of the Syria delay here. If I said 3/16 notes here and to 16th notes here, you'll hear a different delay in the left and right. It's kind of a fun of. Okay, so that's a stereo delay. Ah, Ping Pong DeLay is a different kind of delay, and that's one that actually does the same thing that we're doing now with the stereo effect. Except it throws the sound back and forth, weaken, use a ping Pong delay and turn this one off. You have a separate ping pong delayed here. This is a ping pong delay, so I can say 3/16 notes and use that, and now you'll hear it moving back and forth. Okay, that's a Ping pong delay. And then last, there's a thing called a tape delay. You see tape delays every now and then in some software, you might have one in your in your program that you're working on I don't think able to has a tape delay built in, but a tape delay. It kind of is an emulator back from when we used actual tape machines, and you could create a delay effect by kind of moving the play head around. Ultimately, what you've got is this thing called wow and flutter, which is something that happened with, uh, take machines. It's basically the kind of the warbling of the motors of that moved the tape along. So in a tape delay, what they're trying to recreate is a little bit of that randomness from the speed of the delay moving just a tiny bit. There's also kind of, ah, high frequency roll off. So a low pass filter Ah, and a tiny bit of distortion that all gets created in when you use an actual tape delay. So when you have a tape delay in a software that's basically what it's trying to recreate, um, we don't use them too often. I don't think I've ever really used him on a track. Um, it's just not my not my taste, but okay, let's talk about a couple other things in a delight. So back to our simple delay. Let's set this up to be do it notes and will make it the same to $16. I mean, make it same. Um, And by the way, speaking of the same, we can actually hit this link button here, and it just makes the both of them the same. So this effectively turns off the stereo effect if we hit Link, Um, there's probably some way to do that and whatever software you're working with, Okay, now let's talk about these two things down here. Let's do dry, wet. First, you'll see dry wet on almost well, almost all effects. Um, what that means is how much of the delay you're gonna hear? So if we go all the way down to the this means all the way dry, Okay, so we're not going to hear any of the effect dry means without effect. Wet means with effect. So if it's all the way dry, we're not gonna hear the delay. It all right? It's not there. If we go all the way wet, we're gonna hear nothing but the delay. We're not going to hear the original sound at all. Okay, which on a delay is kind of useless. It's going to sound the same, right? Because you're only hearing the delayed. You're not hearing it against the original, which is what gives a delay, its unique sound. So if you want to hear both the same amount, we would go 50% right here, right now. You had same amount, but maybe you want the delayed sound to be a little quieter, right? You're gonna pull that down so we get more of the dry, less of the wet, okay? And then feedback is how many times the delay happens. So right now we have the feedback all the way down. So when we tell it to delay by 1/16 note it plays the original sound and then 1/16 note later, and then it stops. But if we tell it, feed back a little bit, then it's gonna play the 16th note, and then it's gonna do that again a little quieter again. A little quieter again, a little quieter. So let me turn this up quite a bit, and I'm just going to try to play one note here. I'm gonna start and stop it really fast. You hear that? Dende Intendant intended and it gets quieter each time. That's the feedback. Okay, let me hear a lot of wet. Okay, let's crank feedback up all the way. So it's gonna go on for a long time. So the more feedback the longer it goes on. Okay, So you've got to be careful about this when you're mixing, because too much feedback can just get out of control. Um, so we typically don't have a lot of feedback. And where you set the dry, wet will matter. Ah, lot when we bust effects like we're gonna be doing down here. We always want that went to be all the way up, and we'll talk about that more later. So those are the basics of your typical delay. 58. Wha tActually Is Reverb?: Okay, Next, let's go over a basic reverb. So I'm gonna throw our reverb on that same track. Okay, So reverb looks a little bit more complicated, right? But it's actually not. So here's what a reverb is actually doing when you play music in a room. Um, let's say you're in the room that you're in right now, okay? And you're playing music. Well, actually, uh, no electricity is involved in this example. Your in the room you're in right now, and you have a snare drum in your hands and a stick. Okay. And you was whack that snare drum. Hit it really hard, right? What? What are you gonna here? You're going to hear the sound, right? You're going to hear the snare drum sound. Okay, That's going to be the first thing that you hear because it's right in front of you. Right? But then you're going to hear that sound bounce off the walls all around you. Okay, so it's going to hit the wall right in front of you. The wall that's closest to you. It's gonna hit that first, and then it's gonna bounce back, and you're gonna hear it. It's gonna hear that hit the wall behind you Eventually, if that's farther away and it's gonna bounce back and then you're gonna hear it, it's gonna hit the wall on the sides, the floor and the ceiling at different speeds. And eventually they're going to make their way back to you. And your brain is gonna hear all of these different reflections coming back off all of the walls and it's gonna put together the size of the room, right? Your brain is gonna be able to say, OK, I heard that sound that I heard it five milliseconds later than 10 milliseconds later and then 12 milliseconds later. So that must mean the size of the room is like this, right? It's going to put together kind of a map of the room. That's how our brains work. It's fascinating stuff. So, um, we can fake it. We can fake it with a river. Plug it. We could make it feel like the room is of a certain size. So here's how we do it in a river. Plug in. You might in my river plug in here. I've got a lot of parameters. You might have a more simple river plug in its OK, The main things we're going to look for are first, the decay time. How big is the decay? That's going to tell us? The room size K. It's How long is that sound gonna take to die away? If you want it to be Super big room, then you're going to set this to be super big. Okay, so, typically, we might want this to be between one and three seconds. Okay, so at least for mixing after that, you get into, like, kind of weird effects. So let's just hear it. Okay, let's crank it up. Way. Okay. Imagine this sound is getting closer to you. It's really close to you. And now it's moving backwards. It's moving farther away, right? That's effectively, what we're doing here. So I will leave this around 1 1.5 Okay, so that's a key thing that we need to look at here. The second thing. I want to look at that. All re verbs will have is pre delay. Where is my pre delay? Right there. Okay. The pre delay. It's the time between the end of the initial sound and them moment when the first reflections become audible, so it's an amount of time before we start to actually hear those first bounce backs from the wall. So by messing with the pre delay, you can make a space feel bigger without cranking up the decay time. Because once you crank up the decay time, you start to feel like you're in a cave, right. But we can keep a short delay time and crank up the pre delay, and it just kind of postpones the decay time from kicking in that will make it feel bigger without creating a ton of sound. So this is a really subtle thing, but let's try it. So here it is really short, so I can go all the way up to 250 milliseconds. That's 1/4 of a second. That's not very long, but it does add some elements to the river so it can be important. It will be even more important after we add in the early reflections, which is right here, and that's the next thing we need to focus on. The early reflections are the first things you here after kind of the first bounces off the nearest walls, and these are the things that your brain really uses to figure out the size of the room. So you're trying to simulate a room? Um, this is a really important aspect of it. So what we're really doing here is we've got something that looks kind of like a filter, so we can set it at a certain speed and then a certain volume. Okay, so it's decided to be really extreme, right? So it really kind of colors the room we're in. Now, if we take this and make it really extreme and then push up our pre delay way, get a really big room, right? So it's Turner pre Delay, man. I know back down about three milliseconds to turn this down right about there, and then we've got some good early reflections. Now, we can also adjust the volume of the reflections over here. Right? So in this particular effect, what we're really doing with this is modulating the reflections and kind of wobbly like that. But I don't really want to do in this case, So I could do that if it is nice and subtle. Okay. So last thing is the diffusion. The diffusion is kind of the space in between the reflections. Okay, so we can adjust different amounts of diffusion, weaken, turn up the diffusion and kind of space him out. So let's do this. So this is going to give us a little bit of a reverb so that er not a river a filter so that we can cut off some of the high frequencies of the reverb, which is something usually want to do at least a little bit. And then here you've got the density of the diffusion. So how many of those reflections are piling up? The scale here kind of colors the diffusion. It's not a scale in musical sense. If you crank it up, it gets kind of a darker sound. It's gonna be hard to tell in this example, but you can play around with it, and then we have our diffusion amount volume amount over here. Hey, And then, of course, are dry wet. So all the way dry. No reverb all the way wet. Nothing but reverb. Okay, way. Want to hear both way? Go down and adjust it. Okay. So when you're working with reverb, what you really have is the decay pre delay, early reflections and diffusion. All of those together make up this kind of brain mapping that your head does of the space that you're in. So we'll look at tuning those parameters a little bit more as we start to create our own re verbs for our track. 59. A Few Basic Guidelines: okay, A few basic rules. When you're looking at delays in rivers when you're starting to die a women couple things to keep in mind. Remember that if you want to make a sound, if you want to make something sound bigger, use really small amount of reverb or a short delay that will make it sound like not so much that it's farther back but that it's just kind of bigger will play around with that a little bit once we get into the weeds with this. But something to keep in mind. Another delay things. If the delay is time to the tempo of the track, it'll add, um, more depth and won't be very noticeable case. So if you're using a delay and you have it sent to the tempo, then you can, um, use a little bit more of it. And it doesn't really get in your way because all the feedback of it stays on the beat. If you're not in the tempo, you have to use a little bit less of it because things can turn muddy really fast, so you can create a lot of depth by singing it to the tempo on that same note. Ah, delays that are not tempo sync really do stick out quite a bit. Okay, so they're going to really stick out, which can be good. That can be what you want. But if it's not what you want, you want it to sink to the tempo. Okay, If you just want something that sounds bigger and fatter, you want to sink the delay to the tempo. If you want it to sound like it's got this big delay on it, then don't sing into the tempo so longer. Delays bigger reverb. Ah, Long River Pre delay. Those will make things sound farther away. Generally speaking, what we've talked about already the last thing on reverb reverb also will sound smoother when it's time to the tempo of the track. We don't really think about that with river because it's usually doesn't bring the rhythm of the effect or of the sound source with it. But it actually does in very subtle ways. And so timing the reverb to the tempo of the track can make it less obvious and be a more subtle effect, but still give you that that width to the sound that you might be looking for if you don't time it to the temple of the track. Ah, it can get a little washy, which can be good in the right situation. It all depends on the type of sound you're looking for. Now, if your effect doesn't let you time it to the tempo, um, I'm gonna give you a little math thing that will let you figure out what the tempo is. What the 16th note is s o If your device doesn't let you do that, don't worry. I'll walk you through how to figure that out. Ah, when we get into, um, that section of the delays which we're going to do in just a few minutes. So ah, next let's talk about bus effects and then we'll get into that stuff working with delays. 60. Bus Effects: Okay. Remember back when we started, we created these settings right here. Short reverb, long reverb, short delay and a long delay. Now, I also made a reverb on this track when we were doing it right. I'm gonna get rid of that, because as often as possible, I want to use thes bus effects rather than putting in effect right on my track. This is true with time based effects. Any effects that alter the time we want to try to put them on a bus if we can. There are some situations where we might not want to do it, but almost all situations. We wanted to use them on a bus like this. So reverb and delay is both a time based effect. Okay, So why Why do we want to do that? Well, now that we understand a little bit more how this works, let's look at Let's look at this short delay. Okay? So I have this on bus C. Okay, so I'm gonna go here to the third bus and crank it up. Okay? Let me solo this so effectively, I'm doing the same thing, right? I'm just sending a whole bunch of it to the delay. Okay, but let's do a little experiment. Let me take this. Same delay. Same setting, same everything and put it on the track. Okay, Now I have I've copied the delay. Same exact settings. So I'm doing this all the way down and let's hear it, OK, now I'm gonna go back to the bus version. Everything was the same. Why did it sound different? There's a good reason why it sounded different. This is why we like to use bus effects. Sounded crisper, right? Sounded cleaner when we were using the bus version of sound a little bit more money when we were putting it right on the track. This is why, when we put it on a bus, what we get is the actual signal uninterrupted on this channel, right? Like if I play this on, then if I mute the bus way, get all the rhythm and the crispness of the track, it's not muddied up by the effect. All the effect is coming down here, right? And I can turn this effect up or down, just with the volume, volume effectively becomes the dry, wet amount. Right? But what happens here is we still get the crispness of the original rhythm and then all the effect down here. So it just makes a crisper, cleaner sound. Whenever you're adding time and stuff like that to the effect, if you're adding like a distortion, you might not want that you might not want the crisp original right. But with time based effects, we tend to want it. Okay, now, that's also why when we put effects down on a bus channel, we make sure the dry wet is all the way up so that this bus is getting nothing but wet watch when I play this through here. If I sold this thistles now we're hearing nothing but wet of it right, which is hard to tell in this case. Let's do it with the river. Let's crank up a reverb. Solo it. Okay, now we hear on Lee the river. This is actually really cool effect sometimes, right? Nothing but reverb. But we add in the original way get a nice crisp with them on it, right way. Pull this down and we still get that nice, crisp rhythm. So that's why having the bus effects is a really good way to go In fact, the best way to go when you're adding these kinds of effects. So we're gonna be doing that as we add rhythm effects delays and re verbs to our session to our mix session. I should especially say Cool. Okay, so please get in the habit of doing that. And this is actually a good habit to do when you're producing a track as well. Put any time based effects down here on a bus. It's a great way to I am. It's a great way to keep your session nice and clean. Cool. Okay, let's get into creating space with delay effects. 61. Math! Calculating Delay Times: Okay, So what we talked about earlier in the last section was that in most cases, we probably want our delays when we use them to be connected to the tempo of the song. So I want to go through how you could figure that out if your delay ah, doesn't have that setting. And a lot of them don't. If you're using an external plug in as a delay or a hardware delay or anything like that, then it doesn't know what the software is doing. So it doesn't know what the temple of the song is or anything like that. So you might have to figure it out on your own. So here's how you can do it. First thing you need to do is figure out the tempo of the song in beats per minute. Now, the easiest way to do that is with some kind of Metrodome. Okay, you can get a little app on your phone that will let you just, uh, play the beat. Kasey would hit, play on your track and press this button on every quarter note or every pulse, and then it will spit out what the BPM is, and I would usually round round to the nearest whole number. Hardly anyone programs at, like 128.5 B. PM's right, So that's probably 128. Um, so you can do it with glue thick with an app. I can do it. My software. If I just click on this little tap button up here, it'll listen to the speed at which I'm tapping and set my tempo that way. Um, if it's written into your session like here, it's written into my session 1 45 BPM. If that's accurate, which it usually is in a session, then that is absolutely going to be correct. So find the BPM, either within with the Metrodome, using some kind of app, or if it's in your session or something like that. Okay, once you find the BPM, we need to find ah, the number of milliseconds in a beat. Okay, so each beat, um, has a certain number of milliseconds, so let's figure it out for this tune. So this is at 145 bpm. Okay, So the math that you're going to do is 1/4 note is going to equal 60,000 divided by BPM. Okay, which in our case equals, Let's figure it out. So 60,000 divided by 145 bpm equals 413. Okay, something around that down, actually going around it up, I guess. 414 414 milliseconds is 1/4 note. Okay, that seems about right, because if it was at 120 bpm, Ah, quarter note would be 500 milliseconds, and it's a little bit faster than that. So this is gonna be a little bit lower number. Makes sense. Okay, let's get in my quarter note. Now, From there, we can figure out everything else, so Ah, an eighth note is going to be quarter note milliseconds divided by two, which in our case is going to equal. Let's get this to an even number. 207 case of 207 milliseconds is gonna be an eighth note, and then you can divide that in half. 16th note equals eighth note, divided by two. So if I divide that in half, I'm going to get 103.5. We'll use the 0.5 in this case. That's okay. And I could go down to a 30 cent. Let's do 32nd now that's sometimes useful on. That's obviously going to be 16th note divided by two, which equals 51.75 Let's say 52. Okay, And for this one, I guess, let's say one off for okay now there's a rare occasion where you might want to use a more complex one like a dotted quarter note. Um, a dotted quarter note. If you don't know what that means, then you can look it up in music. There you basically means a beat and 1/2. That 1/4 note is going to be the quarter note times 1.5, and that's gonna equal. In our case. I have to go back up to the quarter note for 14 times. 1.5. Was he right? That's right. 6 21 16 21 milliseconds. And then, if you want to get a triplet so like a triplet eighth note would be probably the weirdest one. Triplet eighth note would be eighth note milliseconds. Times 0.667 It's just a number, so eighth note milliseconds is 207 times. You're a 0.667 1 38.6 Let's say 1 38 Cool. Yes. Let's be consistent here. Okay, so there are all your delay times, right? That's everything you should need. Um, so you should be able to plug that in now. Remember the rule that we talked about him in ago? The reason we care about this is because if we set our delay times to be in sync with the beat, then it just makes the music feel a little bit bigger and doesn't feel like it's got just like a ton of delay on it. Right? If you want it to feel like it's this really delayed kind of washed out sound, then don't sink it to the beat. Okay? There are reasons for both, and it's worth experimenting with both, but in general, I like using stuff sinks to the beat. Um, it makes it feel less silly, I think, in my opinion, So hopefully you have plug ins that just connect to the beat like minded when I was showing you the delay effects I was using earlier. But if you don't, this is how you would figure that out. Go OK. On we go to feedback settings. 62. Feedback Settings: Okay. I'm gonna go to this track right here. Feels a little dry to me. There might be something we can do to liven this up, so I'm gonna put a delay on it. I mean, simple delay right out of the box. Okay, here we go. So, um, actually, what I should do is move this over to use my bus, so let's actually do that. Let's go over to our bus. I'm gonna go to my short delay. Oops. That's my reverb. Short delay. Okay. And I'm going to set this to be rule what I want. Well, I have a ping pong delay here. I don't really want a ping pong delay. Now, you have to be careful when you're changing one of these bus delays, right? Because you're going to change this delay everything that's using this delay but haven't really used it very much at all yet. So I'm gonna change it. I'm just gonna go to a more standard delay. That's okay. So I'm gonna try, and I want something a pretty short here, so I'm going to try 1/4 note, which is the two here. Okay, So this air sorry. In a snow. Just the two here. Okay. And for feedback, Generally, I don't want this to go on forever, but I want to hear it more than once. So remember, if you just leave this at zero, you're gonna hear it once. I want to hear it. Maybe like, two or three times, but it decay away. So a good starting point is like, 20%. So I would aim for 20% as a starting point and then adjust it later. Okay? No amount of bus track, so I have to crank my wet all the way up. Okay, so let's go to this now. I'm not gonna hear it, right, because I got to send some there. So this is my third delay, which is right here. Okay, so it's send a whole bunch to it. Oh, hear that character that that added in that quick little run. So I can't tell if that's making it messy or if it's adding a little bit of with to it. Let's try just 1/16 note on both sides. That's adding like, kind of a flan defect, which I kind of like, Um, so I'm going to stick with that. Okay? so you can feel how just adding that delay made that sound really different, right? And I've only added, Ah, little bit. You know, I haven't added a ton of delay to it. I could go more right, and then it gets to be nonsense. But right around 17 doesn't make it feel like there's a delay there because it's it's in time. It just makes it feel like there's it's ah, little bit of a bigger sound. So I like that. Let's hear that in the whole mix. Yeah, that's cool. It doesn't stand out as much, so I like that. So I'm going to keep that feedback a 20% a great starting point for the feedback parameter , um, adjusted as you see fit. What we're really looking for here is something that kind of creates that with, without creating a lot of long kind of tale to it, we go to the very end of this. When this stops, you'll hear the tale. Let's just check it out. That's so it. Well, it fades out, so we're not really gonna hear it, But usually if you get to the end of something, well, let's do this I'm just gonna force it to have an abrupt ending. Okay, So when this truck stops, you'll hear the tale, right? Riel Short, like practically nothing. But it really adds a lot to it. I'm gonna add that back in so we don't want something in, Especially in the short delay. We don't want something that adds a lot of that tale where it goes. Ticket ticket, ticket, ticket ticket for a long time after, Um, it's just there. It's nice and subtle, but it adds a lot of character to the sound. Okay, great. Let's move on. 63. Delay Techniques For Vocals: Okay, so let's talk about some delay techniques to use on vocals. Now, we don't have a vocal in this track, so I just added one. Ah, I just downloaded a ah vocal sample from free sound. That's the free sound dot org website that has royalty free samples. Uh, and I just dropped it in here, so let's listen to what it sounds like without doing anything. Okay, So really dry vocal, right? It feels like I like this track was made with, and there's a lot of energy in the track, and then this person just, ah, is basically singing on top of it, right As not part of it. So we want to make it feel like this person is in the track and not just singing on top of it like a karaoke singer. Nothing against karaoke. So let's try a couple things. So the first thing I'd like to try is, um, a stereo delay with slightly different amounts on each side and maybe a triplet on one side , Um, to see what that sounds like. Now, I don't have a stereo delay set up here, and I don't know if I'm gonna want to use a stereo delay, Um, all through it. So I'm gonna put a delay right on this track just for experimenting. Okay, so let's see. So here's my half note. Let's do a dotted quarter on one side and 1/4 on the other side. It's to our feedback up to 20%. Pretty wet, but not all the way because we're directly on the track here. Um, and let's just hear what we've got. Okay, Pull the drive way. All right. A little bit better. Okay. It's starting to feel like it's fitting in a little bit. So what I did, there was a stereo. Delay was slightly different settings. Just 1/16 note off on each side. Um, feedback about 20% and dry wet about 28%. Let's try this, um, doubled vocal technique, which we can do with a really short delay. So that's that feeling of when it you hear this a lot, especially in hip hop, where it sounds like someone recorded the track and recorded themselves doing it again. Um, that might actually be what they did, but we can kind of think it by just using ah, short delight. So let's use my see delay here that I've already used. Let's try adding that to the delay we already have. Right, So we're now we're kind of going to lay crazy. Okay, so that was too much. Let's try taking our initial delay off and just Teoh. Okay? Not bad. I think I like leaving this off and this on for now and then we'll use a little bit of reverb later to really make that feel like it's in the mix. So I'm gonna leave that right there, because this Okay? Yeah. So we're in the ballpark, and then we'll use a little bit of reverb later, so I want to hold on to that. I'm gonna leave that in the in the session for now. Um, maybe we'll just mute it, and then we'll come back to it when we get to talking about river. But a couple of techniques to use on vocal stuff 64. Delay Techniques For Drums: okay. Delay techniques for drums. Um, typically, don't put delays on your drums. Um, it's It tends to just make things out of control. Like we definitely don't want to do it on the kick. Right. If we do it on the kick, here's what's gonna happen. Um uh, no. Let's do you think this was our short tonight? Right there. Long delay. Right. Things just get out of control. So we don't want to do that on our kick. The rest of our drums, um, it tends to kind of muddy up the beat. So even when they're in tempo like, let's added toe all of our drums here Oops. Okay. Here's all of our girls and the baseline. See, it's just kind of creates too much mud. So my drum trick for you, when it comes to delays, is avoid putting delays on your drums. Um, maybe a little bit on your snare drum Onley. Um, that can have a nice ish effect, but it also kind of makes it sound big, like it's like from the eighties, which is generally not a very desirable effect. So I would avoid, uh, using delay effects on your drums. 65. Delay Techniques For Guitars: Okay, I'm going to talk about, um, some guitar techniques here. Now, we don't have a guitar here, but ah, this is a technique that works well on since also. So let's go to maybe the this track, do something little more aggressive. How about this one? There we go. This is a guitar trick that we use with delays. But, um, it works well on a lot of other stuff, too. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna add a delay to it, but I'm gonna pan the delay. All the one side are mostly to one side and the dry signal to the other side. So the dry on one side in the wet on the other side. Now, in order to do this, I'm gonna need a whole another bus because I can't pan my delay separately. I don't think I might be able to do with a Ping Pong delay. No, I can't. So let's use this long delay for it, just for now. Okay, so here's my long delay all the way went feedbacks. We're gonna make this kind of big. I want a lot of feedback, but we don't want it very long. One in quite short 100 milliseconds or so. So let's say 16th note. Well, actually, the ballpark is 100 milliseconds, so that's so. I'm gonna look at our tempo and see where that is. It's about 1/16 note. Okay, let's do 1/16 now. Okay. Now, with this pan on our long delay, I'm gonna push this all the way, right? And I'm gonna pull this guitar all the way left. Now, I told you before, I don't like hard lefts and rights, So I'm gonna soften that up a little bit because I don't like the way it feels when you're all the way there. Okay, so that's at least make these match, though. It's got down to 35. Okay, so this should make this feel quite big, so I'm gonna crank that up, and that's what we got. Make sure I'm soloing. Both here. Okay, that sounds pretty cool. It's That's a much kind of wider sound. Nice fat sound. Now, why are we hearing some synth in there? There's some other, like, longer synth in there, right? The reason is something else is using eyes sending to this long delay. Um but that one. That's okay, that it's doing it. Here it is. No, that's the one we were just doing, um, somewhere. I thought it was one of those sense, but yeah, it's got something at the bottom somewhere. Something is also sending to that long delay. But that's OK. That's pretty cool. So let's hear without that DeLay groups. Okay, here it is without and here it is. So that adds a. It really kind of widens the sound like a ton and just makes it way bigger, especially good on big, distorted guitars. That's a great trick to do with delays. 66. Does Our Track Need Any Delays?: Okay, so next I'm going to go through and see if there's anything else I can add delays to. Now remember that adding these delays is a taste thing. It's not a formula that certain things need tohave this delay technique put on it and other things don't, um it's really just a matter of what do you want to kind of fatten up in this way? Because we have so many synthesizers here, There's not a lot that I think we need more delays on. Um, I'm gonna keep it on the things I've added to it added it to I think that's what I meant to say, but I'm not gonna add probably much more. But I'm gonna listen through the track and see if there's anything else that requires it. But I don't think so. I think we're in pretty good shape with delays, but I'm gonna listen to one more time and just make sure otherwise, um, let's move on and talk about implementing some of these reverb effects 67. Timing The Reverb Decay: okay on to re verbs. Now, the first thing we want to do is talk about timing, the reverb decay. Now, this is something that's not so obvious. Let me go down to one of these bus reverb that we already set up. I'm gonna go to the long reverb right here. Okay, so we've already dialed in a little bit of these parameters, but I want to focus on the decay time first, and I want to get that. So that's right here. And I want to get that in time with the track. Now, this doesn't give me any parameters to do that like the delay did. Right? It doesn't. There's no option here for, like 16th note, um, or eighth note or BPM or anything like that. It's just in milliseconds, so I'm gonna have to figure it out now. Ah, easily. I could go to the list that we wrote down a minute ago and find the right number of milliseconds, and I'll probably have to do that once we go to our pre delay. But there's another technique we can use here, too. One is just to go to our something consistent, like our snare drum. I don't know if we have, like, a really solid snare. We need something that's like on a two and four. Here's what I called snare. Let's check this out. OK, kind of this is on the quarter note. So it's gonna be kind of tricky to do what I'm thinking about doing, but let's try anyway, um, So what I want to do here is just to get my timing right. I'm gonna crank up reverb to this delay. Er this reverb. Sorry. So let's be It's that one. Okay? I'm gonna just crank it up so it's gonna have a ton of river about it. Cool. So now what I want to dio is I'm going Teoh, listen and try to get the reverb to be out by the next snare hit case. I wanted there to be reverb. And then when the next snare hits, I want that first reverb to be out. So I need to pull this all the way back. So we hear almost no decay time, and I'm going into up until it fills up. Basically, I want the river to fill up the whole space in between those snare hits. It was gonna be kind of hard because of snare. Heads are fast. It gets right around there. I'm hearing it right around 1.7 seconds. No, that can't be right. Right, Because we know that Ah, beat at this tempo is let me pull up our calculator again. 60,000 divided by 1 45 bpm. A beat is 4.13 milliseconds. And if we're at 1.7 seconds, we are at 1000. Ah, and 70 milliseconds. So we're almost twice as high. But the decay has a has a slope to it. So we're hearing it fade out and I'm hearing the majority of it be out by that second snare . If we wanted to set it exactly right to be 1/4 note, we could 413.79 k around it. It's up to 414 Let's see what that sounds like. It's really barely audible here. So it's so what I really want to do is make it the audible amount. So maybe something best would be to dio um Ah, half notes. Let's try that. So our quarter note times two is 827 milliseconds. All right, 28. I guess if we're rounding a little bit better, let's try a whole note, since this is our long delay. So 16. 55 would be a whole note that contest about where we wanted. Okay, so that gets us in the ball park. So what's happening here is we want this to be sort of timed as much as we can to the beat so that it cuts out before the next full beat. Now, this is our long delay, so we could are long reverb so we could let it hang out a little bit longer than normal. Um, but just like with delays, the reason we're doing this is that if these effects, the delay and the reverb are in time, they're likely to get less muddied up and just add kind of depth to the track and not, um, make it sound like the track is, you know, in a cathedral or underwater or whatever, Right? So that's why we want to do this usually. Okay, so let's do the same thing with pre delay, although this one's gonna be slightly different. So let's go to a new video for that 68. Timing The PreDelay: Okay, So before we get into the pre delay, it's gonna look at my short reverb, and I'm going to set the decay time here to be a 28. So that's half of our, Ah, long delay, right? And that's a perfect half note. So two beats cool. OK, now let's look at pre delight. Let's go back to the Long River for this one. Okay, So our pre delays here now remember, pre delay is really the ah short pause in between the sound and when the reverb kicks in, really is what it is. So we use it to give a little more definition to the initial sound by making sure it doesn't get muddied up with some of that initial reverb. So we do want a time, this one, but we want a time in a lot shorter. This little paws we want in there is really short, but we do want it to be connected to the BPM in some way. So we really wanted to be less than 100 milliseconds. And let's see my pre delay here. Let's me go up to a maximum of 250 milliseconds, but really, for practical purposes. We want it less than 100. Um, so let's find a division of the B. That is less than 100 right? So if we go back to let me get my calculator here, Sadly, I closed the text file I made with all of those in it. But that's okay. We can figure it out again. Um, 1 45 So 1/4 note is 413 2 big. Let's go to an eighth note by dividing that by two, 2 16 2 big. Let's go to 1/16 note by dividing that by 2103 Not bad. This is our long delay. So let's try 103 0.4. Okay, No, for our short delay, let's get that down even more so for a short delay. Let's go. We're at 1/16 note. Let's go to a 32nd note. 51. I could even go to a 64th note, which at this tempo might be too much. Let's try 51 51.7 on our short delay. So read delay. Okay. Now, thes air so fast that you're gonna be it's gonna be hard to hear these. Let's stick to it with our snare drum is gonna are long reverb. Yeah. So I'm at 103 here. I pull the stuff. Zero. You do hear a change. You hear that delay that's happening now. The delay actually doesn't kick on until a moment. And that moment that pause has a time to it, right? And so if we're not careful about that pause, that's right there. Um, it adds a kind of implied rhythm to our track, which can create a lot of muddiness. So let's go back to where we were, which have already forgotten. Was it 103? For some reason, it was 1/16 note. So it would be this times two one of 3.4. Okay, right. So now if you listen really close, you can hear like a that you can hear something in between those notes, and that's OK, so it's. But it's it's perfectly in time, that little turning on of the river. So that's a pretty good sounding river, because our decay time and our pre delay perfectly tight, um, with the beat of the track. So let's go to our short reverb. We've already set that cool. Let's hear our short reverb on that snare drum. So there's a short river of take out the Long River. Okay? Really short. Really subtle. If I take it out completely right, it's noticeable. And what does it do? It makes that syndrome feel bigger, Not necessarily farther away or anything like that. Just bigger, right? That's a pretty big snare drum. That's not okay. In fact, I'm gonna leave that up because I kind of like that. Sound cool. Okay, so those are two super important settings for mixing with reverb. Now, remember, when you're using reverb when you're writing the track, you go crazy and make all kinds of weird effects if you want. We're talking about master mixing here where we need to be extremely delicate with all of this stuff, so milliseconds matter 69. Bus Reverb Setups: Okay, so we've already gone through and set up are re verbs on buses here, so we don't need to add reverb so anything. But this is another good example to explain again, in a slightly different way, why we would use a bus. So keep in mind that I have a short reverb in a long reverb here, and they're set up to be within milliseconds of the beat, right with the delay, time and the pre delay. So I want that. So the reason I've set those up to be that close to the beat is so that I don't create a lot of chaos and mud from all these re verbs, right? So if I was using a whole bunch of different river units on a bunch of different tracks, I've got the same problem again. I've got a lot of river building up. I've got these milliseconds that are off here and there that creates problems, subtle problems. But they all add up. So by using a bus, I've got one reverb and it's got the same time, right? I've got it while I've got two. I've got a short one and a long one. But they've got the exact same timings when I send anything to them. Like if I send all of the drums to the reverb, they're all gonna go through the exact same number of milliseconds of pre delay, right? It's not gonna cause any added rhythmic nonsense. So just keeps everything really clean and tight. So it's another great reason to use the bus channels. Four things like this. Okay, so now I have to re verbs to delays Set up. Um, my 1st 2 buses on any track are re verbs. Shorten long second to our delays short and long, So I am good to go with my set up. So next let's talk about, ah, a handful of techniques for applying reverb. So we'll do reverb two vocals, drums and guitars. Who and that means we get to go back to our crazy vocal sample. Try to blend that in a little bit more 70. Reverb Techniques For Vocals: Okay, So one technique we use on vocals a lot might be to automate their reverb. And the reason for that is we might want different amounts of reverb in the vocal depending on what's going on so we can automate it by, like, let's go to our long reverb here. So when I click on it, you see this pink line you see these pink lines all over the place? Um, here's kind of no reverb And here's all the reverb. So this is going to slowly turn out over time. Let's solve this. Yeah. Oh, the theme. So reverb slowly turns on Now, this is you wouldn't want to do what I just did here. But you might want to do something like this where you've got reverb. And then maybe in this little loud spot right here, maybe down a little bit, you know, is very subtle when you're automating the river. Now, I don't think we need to do that here. Um, but I want to talk to you about, um, automating the reverb. So remember, that's something that could be done. You could automate both the short and long so that it basically changes the size of the reverb. Depending on what's happening in the song, you might want to go to that long reverb when we're at the chorus and it's a big, loud sound. Um, if that's what you want. But maybe the shorter one when we're in the verse and it's little more intimate sounding, that could be a good effect. Really. What we want to try to do is imagine this performer what kind of space this performer is in . Okay, so let's just give it from reverb and let's listen to it with a good amount of our long reverb and see if we could figure out what space this puts them in. So it's just listen for a second. Yeah. Oh, 00 yeah, yeah, Okay. So that to me, that sounds like a pretty big space. That's Ah, a concert hall of some kind. I mean, it's not like a stadium, but it's a good it's a good sized room. Um, this is a banger of a track. So maybe we want something that size that could work. I could pull it down a little bit. Let's hit with this short reverb. Yeah, Oh, yeah, that one. I think is a little more, that's It's definitely a smaller room. It's like a smaller concert hall, but still a reasonably sized room. I kind of want to go to the Big River just cause I want this to be kind of epic sounding. So next step is I'm gonna listen to it in the whole mix. Could I really got to get a feel for where it's sitting? - Okay , I think that's a pretty good sound right around 10 um, on our reverb now. The problem is, this isn't blending very well because it's a little ridiculous, right? Like I randomly through in this vocal sample, Um, but I think we have a blending into the song. Musically, it's not the best choice. It's not very interesting, but I think it's blending into the mix pretty well. It's not getting in the way of anything else. It feels like it's part of the mix. It feels pretty good. It's just kind of silly, but I think we got it in the mix pretty well. Um, when we took out our delay, I thought we had a little delay on this. When we go, let me go back to our short delay. Put a little of that in there. - Oh , okay. I think that's more okay. I think that's pretty good. I like that DeLay in there. I think it it thickens it up a little bit more. So let's go with that. So, a couple of techniques there, um, for blending those with vocals, the delay and the reverb. Um, okay, let's move on to talk about some drums. 71. Reverb Techniques For Drums: Okay, So, looking at the drums, remember what we talked about with delays and the drums that we really just kind of don't like him. Reverb is a little bit different. We've already put some reverb on our snare. Here. We're sneering. Go. This one? Yes. We've already put some reverb on our snare. Um, for the rest of it, we probably don't want to use very much of anything. Um, you can make this kind of huge drummer sound, but it's really kind of like eighties. Like if you listen to like, like eighties pop, you'll hear that the drummers, the drums have a lot of reverb. They sound huge. Um, they sound like they're playing in an arena because they were often playing an arena at the time. Um, especially the snare drums. The snare drums are like two minutes long with the reverb tail. It's just insane. That's kind of an exaggeration. But you'll hear that so and you could do that. And the easiest way to do it would be too Ah, put reverb on all the instruments of the drums and then kind of slowly bring it up. Or we could just put a reverb on the drum bus so we could just go like this. Like, here is the majority of our drums. Ah, but our Long River about all the all right, it's just kind of creates a mess, so we don't usually want to do that. Especially in this genre of music. We want everything we want all our drums really crisp and everything so generally staying away from reverb on the drums, with the exception of perhaps the snare drum just to create with, um, probably not the kick unless you want that kind of eighties sound. Um, probably not the hi hats unless you're going to do something on the bus if you're going to do something on the bus. Um, because you want the drums to sound far away or really far away is there is the reason to do it. You're not going to create a lot of whip by putting a big river about everything with the drums. It's just gonna sound like it's far away. So, in my opinion, stay clear of reverb on your drums unless you're trying to create a space. And if you're trying to create a space, put reverb on the drum bus. I probably should've been calling this bus. The drum group. It would be a better word here. All of the drums at once. Um, so that they all have the same amount of reverb and that will make it feel like it's, um, farther away. Cool. Okay, Uh, one more. Let's talk about guitars. And since and then we'll move on. 72. Reverb Techniques For Guitars And Synths: Okay. So for guitars and since we can do the same thing, we can use small amounts of reverb to create with, um, let's see what happens on groups on some of these tracks. Let's hear this one. Okay? It's kind of feeding in. All right, that's a quiet sound. Let's do something a little bit bigger. How about this one? Okay, so this already has delayed built into the sound, so I definitely don't want adding any delay, but let's see if we could make it sound a little bit wider with probably a small river right there and feel like Right, Right. When I hit nine, I hit, like, kind of a sweet spot with this. Pull it out. Okay. Here it is with nothing. Here it is with nine. They just got, like, a lot bigger. Just from that that little bit. Um I don't want to go all the way to 10. That's right on it. Yeah, that's cool. Um, I'm probably gonna add that Teoh a lot of these sense, actually, just to give it a little bit more life, they're quite subtle, but still feels makes it feel more live. It's gonna be a thing with electronic music. A lot of the time where we have all these since that are really tight on. And my tight. I mean, um, they don't have any real acoustic element to them at all. Adding some reverb just makes it gives little more life, makes it feel less robotic. Um, so even if you the reverb is barely noticeable if you add it to a couple instruments, it feels really nice. Um, other stuff specific to guitars with River weaken do that same effect. It's really nice affect the same one that we did with DeLay, which is put a river bonnet pan it left or right, and in the source the opposite. Right. So, uh, to do it, we would have to create another bus, right? Because, um, actually our long delay is still panned. I don't want to really want that pant. I want that too late in the center. Um, so if we wanted to create a one of these panning effects, we could do it by making another bus. Ah, and call it like guitar delay or since delay What? How are we were using it and then pan it all the way left and then pan the source the initial sound all the way right, And it would create that really wide, wide sound. You can do that with River. Um, I like to do it with reverb and delay a little bit, but but it could be a nice effect with just river. 73. Putting It All Together: Okay, So, uh, back to our track, I guess which we've been in this whole time. But I think what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go through it and add some of this subtle river kind of reverb for with kind of thing. Uh, where I see fit in the track. Eso I'm gonna pause the video. I'm gonna do that. Unpoliced it of something interesting comes up that I want to point out otherwise, um, I'll come back in just a second. Well, it'll be like no time to you, because I'm gonna positivity when I'm done with that. And then we'll listen to this truck again to see where we're at with it. Okay, so here we go. Ah, I want to point out a couple of things here. Um, there's noticed. So first is things like this shaker. The's air things are just really rhythmically precise. I don't want to muddy things up, so I'm not gonna add anything that's just really tight like that. Um, Plus, I don't think it's need to be a big sound. This is intentionally like a thin little clique. Um, so I don't want to add anything there. These swooshes like this Hoops. I think the intention here is for these to be big, right? So I'm going to really crank up the long reverb on kind of all of these. Um, maybe not this one, because this one comes to a point, and I'm really gonna lose that e missed that center. If I don't. If I have all that reverb on it, here it is without reverb. Well, doesn't really come to a point. Okay, Somebody crank that one up, crank up these ones. I'm pretty sure what we want. There is a lot of reverb on those, and then for the other stuff like this, this one we've already put a lot of delay on. So really, what I'm doing is if I feel like it needs some reverb, push it until I hear it. And I'm just gonna bring it back a little bit from there. But this one, I don't really feel like it needs it, cause it's already really thick. I think it might be kind of cool. Let's try a long reverb on this. So here's I'm gonna do so. My technique here is listen to it. Push it till I hear the reverb right there, here and pull it back a little bit, and then that's it. Okay, that I don't know what I want to do with that. Um, I don't think I want reverb in that. It's when I've already given some reverb two. So let's leave that already given some reverb to that. Okay, in our vocal cool. So I'm gonna mute are vocal for this play through. Um, and I've already done everything else in that pause. Um, a lot of this rhythmic stuff. I don't want things, But if you scroll through here and you just look at the riv herbs Ah, and the delays, you'll see there's some here. There's some there, you know, it's it's really a taste thing, deciding what needs it and what does it. Okay, so I'm gonna meet this vocal so that we don't have that and deal with it. And let's listen to the track again. So way do you 74. Modulation Effects: Okay, So another kind of effect we can use when were mixing Teoh add a little bit more Death to the mix is modulation effect. So this is kind of a family of effects. Um, there are a couple of different ones, and you're probably familiar with these effects, but we use them in small amounts. So what a modulation effect means is we're gonna change some parameter overtime, right? It's kind of like what we saw with automation, right when we automate something like right here, we're turning the volume up over time. But with modulation, Typically, what we're talking about is small amounts of change very quickly. Like like, um, like here, I'll do some kind of modulation effect on the volume of my voice just by waving my hand in front of it like then the right Like I'm modulating that kind of thing. Right now, modulation means a little bit different kind of a thing in synthesis, although it's related. Um, but we're talking about modulation parameters changing something kind of Watling a parameter around. The main effects we have for doing this are ah Flander, which is a really quick delay. Like really, really, really short delay. Um, and it kind of cancels out and add some, uh, frequencies. Ah, chorus, which is a slightly longer delay, but still really, really short delay. Um and it also adjusts some frequencies a tremolo, which is just like what I was doing with my voice. That's just ah, flickering the, um, volume, uh, up and down a little bit and vibrato, which changes the pitch a little bit. So vibrato goes, Ah, that's like an extreme vibrato. So there's a kind of the main ones that we use to do this all of these will when used subtly, we'll add a little bit of depth to the mix. So, um, let's talk a little bit about how these work. And, um, I'll show you now in my track that I'm working on here, not my track, but this track that I'm working on here. I don't hear any spots where I want to use any of these, mostly because we're at a really quick tempo, Um, and all of our sustained stuff like our since, and things have a lot of rhythm to him already. Stuff like this right, s. So there's nothing really that I think I'll use any of these techniques on, um, I would use these techniques on something that maybe longer sustained tones, vocals, um, guitars. Especially so low kind of stuff, like maybe even a guitar riff. Um, in sense, if it's kind of a thin sounding synth and it needs a little extra death to it, I might use it on that. But really nothing in this track warrants using any of these things. But I still want you to know about them because, um, you might have someone your track. So let's talk about it. Okay, so let's dive into talking about Flanders first. 75. Flangers: Okay, So if Linenger is an effect, that goes kind of all the way back to the sixties, um, and is actually connected. Teoh. John Lennon kind of didn't discover it, but helped to discover it. Supposedly. Let's put this on this void vocal track here. Okay, so let's look at a Flander. So the way this was done in the old days and, um this Well, I'm gonna tell you this story to help you understand what it's actually doing. So how they do this in the old days is they would record something on two different tape machines and then on one of the tape machines, they would kind of put their finger on the tape flans. It's called, um, but basically they put their finger on the tape and let it kind of wobble. Ah, little bit. And it would create this kind of doubling effect, so it sounds like they're two of it. So I just threw a Flander on here right out of the box. Let's hear what it does. Oh, so you feel how it has that that motion to it? It has that modulation. In this case, it's moving like about that speed now, I could speed that up. With the rate here, I can also sink it to the beat. So let's sink it to the beat. So that does it. Uh, half, so Ah, half note. That's gonna be twice per measure. Oh, right. So now it's It's really extreme, but I can pull back the amount of it with the amount right here. Oh, so it's still moving at that speed, but it's but we're using less of it now. I heard a little clipping right there. Clipping is when we get too loud in a track. So these delays piling up are adding volume, which will happen with delays. So I gotta pull the volume click? Yeah. Oh, I think we're clear there. So, um, flan is really we have You can pull back the dry wet a little bit if you want. We have, ah, high pass filter built into it. The 1,000,000 tools we want to use, though, are the amount and the rate. And it gets that sound. There's like a Flanders sound that I get in the whole mix. Um, it's not as obvious. Um, it's not a sound that I typically like, but let's hear it in the whole mix, so you don't hear that swooshing sound so much when it's in the full mix. But, um, and it kind of has a doubling effect. It's kind of a guy. Automatic doubler is what what they were actually trying to invent when they made ah Flander so good to add some depth if it's a sound that is agreeable to you. 76. Chorus: Okay, let's look at a chorus effect. No, a chorus is a lot like a Fline injure, except the delay in it is a little bit longer. So in a Flander, you have a small amount of delay. That happens because of that, Um, but kind of the two tape machines being out of six Sync. But it's like, you know, at most maybe five milliseconds, super super short delay. And that's what creates that flan Jing kind of sound. And then we modulate it to make it move around a little bit in a chorus. We have a little bit longer delays, still a crazy short delay, like maybe 20 milliseconds or so at the longest, So it's still a really short delay, but it creates a different kind of sound. And because that really is so short, there's some phase cancellation that happens, and that gives us the chorus sound. So let's hear it right out of the box. Oh, oh, Okay, so let's go all the way, went with it and hear it again. Oh, right. So it gives it like a kind of a metallic sound. To me, it feels a little bit like this person is singing while they're standing right in front of an aluminum wall. That's what I always think about when I hear a chorus, um, so you can add a little bit of feedback to it. You can increase the amount, the rate now the rate is gonna be the speed of the modulation. All right, so if you get really extreme, it's just gonna be wobbling it so much that it's just kind of turns into noise. Oh, can we have a second delay built into it that we can use as a modulator, which is what we're using now? And, ah, high pass filter. So again it creates a certain kind of a sound. Um, it can be useful in some cases if it's a sound you like in the whole mix. I would prefer the chorus over flans for my personal tastes, but in Elektronik track like this, I don't really have a need for either of them. But let's hear this in the whole track, and let's kind of crank it up. Yeah, not not my particular taste. So I'm gonna get rid of that. But it's cool. Effect creates a lot of depth, if that's the sound you're looking for 77. Tremolo And Vibrato: Okay, last on these. Let's talk about tremolo and vibrato. So remember, tremolo is kind of quickly changing the volume and vibrato is quickly changing the pitch. Now, I don't have an effect in my built in effects here for tremolo or vibrato, but I do have this one called frequency shifter. So if I look at the presets in there, there is a tremolo and a stereo of I brought up There it is. So let's look a tremolo really quick. So this one, we're really just gonna change the volume on some frequency. So frequency, in this case is 1.5 hertz. So let's just hear it. You feel it kind of pulsing. So let's speed it up. Right. So now you feel like going like, really fast? 00 OK. So it's just really kind of back and forth pushing the the volume. Let's look at a vibrato. She's gonna be doing the same thing, except we're really gonna be pushing the the changing the pitch. Oh, so I think this is a weird effect the way this particular one's doing it. But it's saying the spread is point. Oh, it hurts. So that's the the width that it's gonna go back and forth. And the speed is really strange here. Oh, so this is just letting it wobbled between those two, um, at a fairly slow rate. So this this is set up this frequency shifter set up a little confusing. But if you have a vibrato plug in, try experimenting with that. There are more simple ones. You could also get it as just any kind of plug in. There are a lot of vibrato, plug ins, and most synthesizers have vibrato, or sometimes called port aumento built into them as well. So you can play around with him there so tremolo and vibrato good effects if you want Adam in. 78. EQ Effects: Okay, e que effects. Now you're thinking we've already gone over the e que We spent so much time looking at the EQ You We don't need to look at the eq you again. Well, actually, we looked at using an e que in the earlier sections of this class to really finally craft the sound right and also to make room in the mix for different frequencies. But now let's look at using the eq you as an effect. This is a whole different approach to using an e que. So basically, what we're going to use we're gonna do is use the e que and kind of extreme ways, uh, to create some kind of sonic effect. The best example of this is like a telephone filter. So if you want it to sound like it's coming through a telephone, for example something to go back to my e que throw it on this vocal sample. So remember, let's go fools big here. Okay, so we remember that, um, this is basically the full range of hearing, but in a telephone. And this is an old school telephone, not your digital phone. That a lot of us we're using now and a telephone. Really? On Lee. Let's through about Ah, 100 Hertz to about 1000 hertz. Okay, in an old school analog telephone, those were the only early frequencies that go through it. So this makes the sound of a telephone. Okay, so this isn't something you'd use to, like, really fine. Tune your mix. This is something you do to make the mics sound kind of funny. Okay, so there we have it. That was a little muddy. So let's try. There's another kind of telephone filter that's 500 to about two K. Let's try that. Yeah, that sounds a little more telephone, like, in this case to be in the mix. I kind of like it. Ah, it's weird, but it it's so it's such a kind of extreme effects that it actually kind of makes this weird vocal fit in a little bit better. So I kind of like, um, another thing you might do is just things like dropping out all the low end and just doing , you know, something like this. So we're just here, like some really weird high end this kind of a thing. So using an e que as an effect can be, um, useful sometimes. So I'm gonna leave this telephone thing on here. Um, it's weird, but I kind of like it, so I'm roll with it. Okay, One more thing. 79. Resampling: Okay. I want to talk here about re sampling, and I'm gonna try kind of a crazy experiment in this video, so we'll see how it goes. So what re sampling is is taking attract that's already recorded. So let's say let's decide what we're gonna use it on. I want to use it on one of our sense here. That one legal thinner. Maybe that this is true. Let's try it on the intro. But maybe here, let's try it on this right here. Okay. So what we're gonna do is when we re sample something, what we do is we take a, um, something that's already recorded, and then we run it through another amp and we record it again, right? Like we sample it again, we re sample it. Now, there are effects that will simulate this s o. I could actually just go here. I could high like this, and I could go to a re sampling setting here. That'll basically just balances down to another track with the effects in it. I could do that, Um, or you could do this totally analog. And just for fun. I'm gonna try to do this totally analog So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this sent. I'm gonna route it out of my computer through a guitar, amp. And then I'm gonna put a mic in front of that guitar, amp. And I'm going to record it. What that's going to do is pick up the sounds of this room that I'm in the acoustics of the room, the particular frequencies of that guitar, amp. And then I'm gonna end the particular frequencies that the microphone I'm using is gonna influence. And then I'm gonna pull it back into the track as a new truck. Okay, so it's gonna be a re sampled track. This is gonna be super weird. Um, it's really gonna add life to this kind of, ah sample because this synth is totally Elektronik, right? So it was recorded inside the computer. It never entered the analog world. It never it doesn't have any acoustic space actually in it, and this is gonna put some in it, so it might be a sound we like. It might not be a sound we like, but, um, it seems like a good opportunity for me to kind of terror my studio apart and trying to figure out how I'm going to set this up. So what the heck, right? Okay, so let's try it. Okay? We're gonna go behind the curtain a little bit. So, um, I'm just gonna kind of walk you through what I did here. So here's my main audio interface and Iran that I did this in a little kind of not a very sophisticated way, but it works. So I'm running out of the headphones of my audio interface. So the headphone output from down across the floor over to the corner here, um, it's actually running through a tuner, foot pedal and a river pedal. Both of those air bypassed. They were just already set up for my giant guitar here. Um, then it's going into the guitar amp here, and I'm playing it through this guitar. And you can hear this is a good old noisy grumbly guitar. Amp. Let's just listen for a second. Cool. So we're going to get all of that mixed into the sound. Then I have the microphone, the microphone that I've been using to talk throughout all of this class. That microphone is right here set up to record that I am and is going into the audio interfaces. Well, so now I've made a new audio track here, and I'm just gonna solo that synth that I want. And I'm going to record it onto this track. Think I let it play all the way and get this to just for the heck of it. Okay, so here we go are gonna have to wait for this other part to show up. If I just cut it and jump forward, it's not gonna line up easily. So this weight and I'll talk right here, even though my voice is gonna come in on the recording. But I can top that out afterwards. So I've got a nice, strong signal here. That looks pretty good. Alright. And here comes the next part. Do you Do you all right, and there we have it. OK, so now we've got Teoh. Stop that and then throw that track in and see if we could make it work in the mix. So back to the computer. Okay, let's see what we've got here. Okay, so there it is. It's all perfectly lined out now. I was talking all in this bit, so I don't care about that. Um, okay, so it's given to that. Probably there. And let's just do Cem Quick. Little fades on that to make sure that because it's gonna be kind of a noisy little sound. Okay, let's hear it. Just so load. Let's hear what we've got. Oops. I turned my and I gotta put my whole studio back together, but I turn the volume by speakers downs. Okay, so they're a little off, right? Like if I solo this one when I solo that one, they're not perfectly in time, right? Why are they know perfectly in time? Because there's a little bit of late and see when I recorded this, so I'm gonna zoom way in. Just nudge that back. It's probably too much. Try that. Okay, They're still little off. But you know what? Watch this. Let's pan one of these. It's Pan this one, like super left. Not all the way, but ah, lot left and then this one. Let's go. Super. Right. Okay. I think this is gonna sound pretty wild because you're gonna have this acoustics of of the lower one on the left and this one on the right, and they're off by a little bit. I think that's actually really cool sound. Let's hear in the mix. Okay. I like it. But what I don't like you can hear that amp coming in. So I'm gonna take this all the way there, and then I'm gonna take this fade in really short. Cool. So I think that actually resulted in something really interesting. Um, we could also, when you re sample, you might get rid of the original and just keep the re sampled one. But in this case, I think kind of panning I'm a little bit opposite is a really cool effect, actually. So I'm gonna roll with it. I wasn't expecting that to work out. Ah, and for us, actually use it. I thought it would be too noisy, and it's super noisy. Ah, in this case, because I have that really noisy AMP. But, um, I like it. Eso Let's keep it. So that's recently 80. About Dynamics: up next. We're talking about dynamics. So with Dynamics, Dynamics is just a fancy word for volume. Okay, so we're talking about volume. We're not talking about balance, right? We've already talked about balance and balance. Is the relationship between each of the elements right? And what is the loudest thing in the mix? What is the quietest thing in the mix? Things like that dynamics are there. There's two ways to look at dynamics. One is the individual track and the volume envelope oven individual track. I'll talk more about just second, and in the second way is the overall volume of the whole mix. That's really more of a mastering thing when we think about is this a really loud mix or a really quiet mix? We might talk about that a little bit more at the end, but that's really something we reserve for the mastering process, and it's something that is a hotly debated topic in the mastering world at the moment. But let's talk a little bit about volume of each individual track. What we're really looking at is think about this. Remember how this little vocal track clipped a little bit when I had it loud. I turned it down so it wouldn't, but it clipped a little bit. It must have been right here. Or maybe it was right here. It's probably right here. Uh, it clipped a little bit right there, meaning it went too loud. And that means that distorted a little bit. Now, that's really hard to deal with, right? Because I might want this part of it to be good loud, but I can't have that part of it good and loud, because then it clips when it gets to hear, right. So what I can do is create a dynamic envelope of volume envelope that makes it loud here and get a little quieter here so that the whole thing is approximately at the same volume. That's what we're talking about with dynamics, right? So I get the volume nice and good in this beginning part, and then it gets to hear an eclipse. I can I can use some tools to make it so that the volume of this doesn't fluctuate very much. Now, what that means is that, um I'm going to wreck some of the nuances of that performance, right? This singer may have very carefully got louder at one point in quieter and another point. And what I'm gonna basically do is it is a just that Ah, and take some of that out. Not all of it. Maybe all of it, depending on what techniques I want to be using. But it's something where, like, if this was like a classical violin performance, right, I might not do anything. I'm, like, not adjusted dynamics at all, because that is really important to that performance and to adjust. It really kind of ruins the performance. So but in electronica music, we use a lot in pop music. We use it a lot in just about all kinds of music. We use a lot of dynamics, um, envelope shaping, Uh, except for probably classical and jazz a little bit. So it is a very popular tool. No, just like back when we were talking about frequency and how the e que was the scalpel of working on frequency, it was our number one tool. Our number one tool of working on the dynamics is the compressor. Okay, The compressor is the scalpel of dynamic adjustments. Okay, so we're gonna spend a little bit of time learning how a compressor works, a couple different kinds of compressors. And then we're going to talk about some other tools that we use, um, that are related to compressors like limiters. Ah, and Gates. So we're gonna do that, and then we'll talk about some techniques for applying them. So in this first bit, we're just gonna learn about the tools. Okay, so let's dive in and look at a compressor. 81. Compression: Okay, let's look at a compressor. So I'm gonna solo this track that I'm just gonna actually make a loop right here so that we can listen to this little vocal track over and over and over Not only throw a compressor on it. Now, there's a bunch of different kinds of compressors. The one here in a Bolton is fairly simple and has some good visual displays. So I like using it to show what a compressor is doing. So the compressor is going to do exactly what I just kind of outline. Let's look at the way form again. Real quick. Okay, So see how loud it is right here versus how loud it is right here. Okay. So if we say this is the quiet moment and this is the loud moment what a compressor conduce you is, it can either make everything as loud as this so it can just level off all the dynamics. So this becomes Justus allowed as this, or we can use it to quiet this down so that everything is as quiet as this one is right. Or still 1/3 thing. We can do some amount of compression. So that Maybe this is louder than this, but not by this much. Right? This is a little bit quieter, and maybe this is a little bit louder so that the difference between these two isn't so extreme. But you still have some variation in that. This is quieter than this. Okay, those were kind of examples of what we would do with a compressor. Okay, so let's just look at it right out of the box. If I just load one up, we have a number of settings here. We have ratio attack release dry, wet, and then threshold, gain reduction and output. You'll notice that gain reduction doesn't give us. Ah, there's nothing we can adjust here. Threshold we can. And output we can. Okay, so let's look at what our tools here are. First, let's talk about the gain reduction. Gain reduction is just how much of the compressor is being used. Okay, so if this is going nuts, you're then that means we're using a tone of the compressor. Okay, let's look at it. Okay. Right now, there's nothing in gain reduction, so the compressor is not doing anything, but if this amount of volume right here in the threshold goes above this, which is the threshold. If the volume goes above the threshold, that difference is going to get thrown over into the gain reduction. And that means it's gonna be squashed by that much. Or you could say compressed by that much, the volume will be compressed. You can imagine it as being, uh the threshold is kind of somebody's hand. Imagine someone's jumping on a trampoline, right? That's our volume. It's jumping on. A trampoline is going up and down and up and down, but we say you can jump three feet high. Okay, Well, what? You can jump three feet high on that trampoline, but I'm not gonna let you jump four feet high. And so we put a ceiling above the trampoline, saying you will not go above three feet. We put the ceiling right at three feet. That's our threshold. Is that ceiling? So we can say we're not gonna let it go above three feet, or we can say we're not gonna let it go about two feet. And now just everything that hits two feet is just going to get rolled off, and it's gonna be smoothed out. Okay, so right now, we're not doing anything because I threshold is hot. But if we lower our threshold Okay, way. See a lot going into gain reduction. Oh, Okay. So what that means is that everything is basically hitting this volume. Everything is the same volume now. Okay, if you listen close, the that that loud bit didn't get any louder than it was before, right? You didn't notice it, but it didn't. It was the same volume, because the game is being reduced. Its not letting it jump any higher, because that's where the threshold is. Okay, so that's the main thing about ah compressor. It's just not gonna let it go now. This is a fairly extreme use. Um, if we want to be a little more subtle where we're gonna let still there be some variation, but not but still, push down some we're gonna say, OK, you can jump six feet, but I'm not gonna let those really big jumps happen. Right, So I'm gonna go right around here. So they're perfect example on that loud bit right there. It didn't let it go too high. It push the volume down a little bit, but then it went back to normal because the rest of the signal was below the threshold. Okay, then real quick. What are output is is this is just a volume on the other end so we can turn the whole thing down or crank it up. Don't do that. Uh huh. The attack and release is basically the amount of time it takes for the compressor to kick in. Right. So if we want this to go in really fast, we would lower this. It's at two milliseconds now. So pretty fast. Um, and then the release is how long it stays compressed before it. Let's go. Okay. We typically want these settings about where they are to milliseconds 50 milliseconds. But we can, um, adjust them if you want. Okay, The ratio is a little more complicated, and ah, it might be easier to see if we jump over to a different view. So in my compressor here in Mableton, I can look at the same information in three different ways here. Okay, so let's go here. So now here's our threshold. Here's our gain reduction. Here's our output. This the little yellow ball is where volume is at the moment are sorry. The tiny yellow ball is where our volume is at the moment. The big yellow ball is our threshold, I believe. Yeah, the big yellow balls are threshold. The tiny yellow ball is our volume now. Way went above the threshold still above it or below it way above it. Okay, so we see the same information here. But let's look at the ratio. Um, because we can see the ratio here, the ratio does is kind of the steepness of what it's gonna do to the stuff above the threshold. So if it's 2 to 1, that means basically, for every two decibels of input above it, it's gonna pull it back to one. So for every two decibels above the threshold, it's going to reduce it by one decibel. It's gonna cut it in half. Basically, everything above the threshold is gonna get cut in half is what that means could make it more extreme by doing something like this. This means that everything above the threshold is just gonna get level off to be the exact same volume. Okay, And if I did this, lower the threshold. Flatten that out. Everything above the threshold. The same. The S O. That is extreme compression. Not usually what we want. We usually want something a little more elegant. So we're gonna pull back the ratio so that there's still some volume change happening above the threshold, but not as much. Right. This is the volume change leading up to the threshold. That's normal above it. We're gonna is gonna kind of squash it a little bit. Not all the way. Right? So here, 1 to 1, nothing's happening. This stuff above the threshold is not being adjusted at all. It's just going in and out. But if we raise the threshold means this stuff above. We're sorry. Raised the ratio. The stuff above the threshold gets pushed down a little bit. If we raise it all the way, everything above the threshold gets flattened. Cool. That's what a compressor is. All right, now let's go on and talk about some other tools, and then we'll talk in a little bit shortly about how we can actually use a compressor. 82. MultiBand Compressors: okay up next. I want to look at another kind of compression, and that's multi band compression. So let's get rid of this compressor for now. Still on the vocal track, and I'm going to go to a multi band compressor now unable to. There's one called Multi Band Dynamics. That's a multi band compressor. You might have another one. That's okay. Um, so this is kind of two things in one. This is any Q and A compressor. Ah, smashed into one device. So what that basically means is we have a low, mid and high frequency band. Okay, we have three frequency bands, so we're basically seeing volume stat hurt frequencies stacked up this way. So low mids and highs and in volume, uh, this way. So what were we have then is a different compressor for the lows. A different one for the mids and a different ones for the highest. Okay, so if we go through this and see where we are so we can compress things differently based on where we are, so I need to go into this edit mode, adjust the ratio, so let's make it no. 123 or so and I can do it differently for the different bans. I'll leave the low band alone. Yeah. Yeah. Now we're doing some compassion. Oh, okay. So we can compress the middle different than the highs and the lows. Right? Neat. Why would we want to do that? Does that make any sense? Not a whole lot in this vocal track, but where doesn't make a lot of sense. If you said drums, then you get a gold star. Ah, multi band dynamics. Really handy on drums. We might want to compress the kicks differently than the stairs differently than the hi hats. Um, especially now. Well, actually, we could do that. The way were set up in this track because we have those all on separate tracks. Right? We have the kick. Ah, we have the snare. We have high hat like things on separate tracks, so we could just use separate compressors. But if you were given an audio file, that was a drum loop and it had a drummer playing on it, then you've got all of those sounds in one, um, file. Then it's very difficult to compress the low stuff in the highest stuff differently. Um, the kick and the high hat if you got given a drum loop and the kick is crazy loud. Ah, what you gonna do? Um, you can barely hear the stair and the hi hats. A multi band compressor might be a good way to go. You could compressed the kick a whole bunch, and that should bring out the rest of it. You could also use any queue to pull down some of those frequencies, but you might have better luck with a multi band compressor. Okay, so basically multi band compressor, it's an E que a three band EQ you, in this case and a three compressors built into one. 83. Limiting: limiters. Let's talk about a limiter. A limiter is a kind of a compressor, but a very kind of rude one. Let's throw a limiter on here. So a limiter is really more like that analogy I used of the trampoline before. Ah, limiter says, um, I'm gonna tell you how high you can go. And as soon as you hit that height, we're done. Ah, no ratio, No nothing. Um, it says I will tell you the limit to the volume of this track, and there will be nothing above that. So we have typically a very fast release on very fast attack. In fact, the attack is Look ahead at this point, so it's actually reading it in front of the file. Um, and all we really have to do here is set the ceiling. We can say how loud it's gonna go. So let's look at it. Okay. Not doing much here. Let's lower. This there is Okay. You'll notice it's getting quieter, right? It's not boosting the way that a compressor waas were just saying Once it gets above this, this volume which is very quiet in this case I cranked it all the way down then everything . It's limited. So it's an extreme compressor is really all it is. Um, we can do some makeup gain here to boost the signal to make the whole thing louder. But this is less elegant than a compressor, right, because it's really brute force. We sometimes call this a brick wall compressor, meaning it. It hits the top ends a brick wall. You can go no further. There's no elegance to it. And this you can really kind of hear it right. You hear? When that loud note comes in, you feel like something's being pushed down. Let's see that again. Oh, you kind of feel that it's it's It's less elegant, but there are some uses for a limiter that we'll talk more about leader. So now you know there's a limiter 84. Gating: Okay. Last one of our dynamic tools is a gate. Now. A gate is really Ah, an upside down limiter. You can think of it as. So what happens in the gate is the volume hits a threshold. And once it gets, it gets to the threshold, it gets turned up. Its we hear on Lee, what's above the threshold. Whereas in the other ones, we heard only what's below the threshold, right? So nothing gets through the gate unless it has hit the threshold. Why would you want to do this noise? Uh, it could be a kind of crude but useful noise reduction. I used a gate to good effect once when I was recording a voice over. And, um so I just had somebody with the microphone talking like I am now. And, uh, I was in a studio that was not the soundproofing wasn't very good. And there was a band rehearsing or recording and the next room over. So you kind of quietly, faintly hear this band, But you could only really hear it in between the words of the person. So I used a gate eso that in between the words when they were talking. The volumes went to zero. It just shut that off. Um, they can be a delicate process. Because, remember, the problem with a gate is that when the person was talking and the volume was above the threshold, you would be able to hear the band, right? Because once that if the gates open, anything can get through That's happening at that moment. Um, so it can be tricky. In that case, I was able to make it work, but let's try it. Okay, so right now, none is getting through their guests, right? So ah, little bit got through the gate right there, and then that was it. So we have two lines here. The top one is the threshold. The bottom one is the return. I believe what's going on there is once it goes above the threshold, it's on and we hear it. Ah, and then it has to go below the return to shut off again. So it's got a little bit of wiggle room in there. I hope I lowered the Okay. Let's try that. Oh, Oh, yes. He right there. It was still on. Ah, well, it was in between the threshold and the return now. Like I said, you can hear that this is kind of crude, right? Like, well, it when it's under the threshold and the return, it's just off, right, Like we just don't get it. So you can make us a little bit more elegant by adjusting the attack and the release, like how long it takes for it to turn on how long it holds on to it. Um, there's a hold setting. There are some ways that will let it kind of smooth in and smooth out. But, um, that only goes so far, this is a fairly crude tool, and we don't use it a whole lot in mixing. Um, I have also used it. I can think of times where I've used it for, like, an effect, not necessarily a mixing effect. But if I did something like, um, bad example Yeah, this wouldn't give me a kind of fun effect if I through a gate on this. Right? That's kind of fun. Um, I kind of changed it by throwing out all of everything below a certain amount, because, um, so it got rid of all of that echo stuff and just got me kind of a fun rhythm. Um, but that's not really a mixing trick that's in effect. Gates could be useful for that kind of a thing, sometimes tricky to use them for fine mixing. But they can be useful in some situations, so keep them in mind. Keep it in your back pocket. You might find a use for it. Awesome. 85. Using Compression: Okay, So if you've heard a mix, if you hear like a professional track and you're like, Wow, that track sounds amazing, that mixes really good and then you hear your track and you think mine doesn't sound like that, Like, what's it? What's it missing? What's the big thing that they're doing in that mix that I'm not doing in my mix? The answer to that is often not always, but often most of the time. The answer to that is how, uh, they're using compression and how you're using compression. So using compression is a crucial element in getting a mixed to really pop to make a really sound professional. Okay, it's compression is the thing, So there's two main ways that we use. Compression. One is to control the volume, the others as in effect, we're not gonna talk about compression as an effect too much here. Um, if you want to play around with it, put some compression on something and crank it all the way up and you'll hear that it does some goofy things to the sound. If you really kind of use it incorrectly and that can be cool, you can make some cool effects by using compression at kind of the extremes, so you can play around with that as much as you like. There's nothing wrong with doing it. You could make some really cool stuff, but we're going to focus on using it for mixing. So in this next section, I'm going to go through a whole bunch of different ways that you can use compression, how I use compression, how you should set compression and some tricks for various instruments and techniques up. Okay, so let's dive in. And let's start with some broad things about acoustic instruments. 86. Variation Compensation: Okay, let's start with the big reason that we would want to use compression, and that is to smooth out inconsistencies. Okay, Now, we don't really have these kind of inconsistencies in Elektronik music because we when we're working with, like, a synthesizer, so like that because we can always just smooth it out in the the synthesizer, or it might be in the velocities or something like that. But if you're working on a recording of an acoustic instrument, then you will have inconsistencies because a human played that instrument and humans are not robots. So there is inconsistencies. For example, let's say, um, stair drum Okay, like drummer hits the snare drum every time the drummer hits the stand drum, it's going to be slightly different, right? In terms of the volume, it's gonna be maybe one time he catches the rim and it's really loud, and maybe another time. He hits it right on the edge, and it's really quiet. Um, we can use a compressor to smooth those out a little bit right now. You should think about that before you do it, though, because the inconsistencies of a human player are what make human players superior to, uh, computers in many ways, right? So you don't want to completely smooth that out, But you can do it so something like, um, a drummer hitting the snare drum. You might want to put a compressor on that. If there's a lot of variation and you wouldn't want to flatten it off, you might want to just, you know, use that ratio to roll it off so that some of the snare drums hits aren't crazy loud. Um, another case would be a singer, right? We've already looked at how that works with the singer, but, you know, uh, when a singer goes to a high note, high notes are louder than than low dotes on for just about every singer, because it takes more air to use it so we can use a compressor to smooth some of that out. Um, guitars and bass is again High notes tend to be louder than low notes. Not always. It depends on the style of music that you're playing techniques, the instrument, all kinds of stuff. But very often, if it's a big distorted sound, they can get really screaming high notes that are a bit louder than the low end, and again you can use a compressor to smooth that out. So when you're working with acoustic instruments, keep that in mind. You don't want to flatten off what they've done because you still want that variation in the recording. But you need to get it under control so a compressor can help smooth that out a little bit . Okay, so that's really like a huge part of using compressor is just getting rid of that variation element or smoothing out the variation element I should say so with that under our belt, Uh, let's move on and talk about, um, some some ways we set up a compressor and using a compressor with an e que? 87. Compression With EQ: Okay, let's talk about signal flow a little bit. So signal flow means if you haven't encountered this yet. I don't think I've talked about signal flow in this class yet. Um, but it matters now. Um, signal flow means, uh, the way our signal is traveling through our track. So for us, and this is true. And just about every sequencer the signal starts here. This is where our audio file is next. It goes over to this stuff. We do a volume adjustment and things like that. Then it goes down to our effects, and it flows from left to right through our effects. There's only one effect here, and then it gets to the end of the effects, which in this case is here, and then it goes to our master. The reason I'm pointing this out, it's because this part, it goes from left to right. So that means, is if I put a compressor here. Okay. What's happening now? I'm I've got an e que here. I'm ik Ewing out these low frequencies, and then I'm sending it to a compressor. That's not gonna be great, because every change that the e que does is going to affect the compressor, and that's going to make it harder to deal with. So better would be if we sent the full signal into the compressor and then acute it. Okay, so I want the compressor to come before the e que. Okay, that's important. In this case, it might not be something that we can readily here, but let's try it. Okay, let's crank this compressor up. Okay, Now let's move it to before we don't really hear different that we can see the compressors working a little harder over here than it was after the e que. Now, in cases where you're boosting the signal, you will hear it as a difference. But good practice. Put your compressor before the EQ. You on any track? If you're not using any Q, then you don't worry about it. If you're using an e que on a track, um, put the compressor first. If you're using any other effects on a track, I would generally err on the side of putting the compressor first, um, before the rest of your effects. Cool. Okay, uh, public service announcement. But your compressor first, that's it. 88. Compressor Settings: Okay, So here's a method for finding Ah, good compression setting for any sound. So it's stick to this track groups. Okay, so let's put compression on this track now. What's compression going to do on this track? It's really going to make those delays when it goes bump up. It's gonna make those extra little repeats of that echo, uh, the same volume. If we really flatten it out, we don't want to flatten it out, but I want to bring this up a little bit. Um, just cause I think it'll sound nice. So here's what I'm gonna do to find the perfect compression settings. Let's start with my attack time, okay? I'm just gonna crank this way up like an insanely high amount. Maybe all the way. What the heck? One second attack time. That's nuts. But hear me out, then we're gonna set our release time. Way, Lo. Okay. All the way down with that case, we're in a crank attack up. We're gonna pull release all the way down, and we're gonna have our threshold set too high. So it's not even turning out. Okay? Perfect. Okay, so consider this your default state. Next. I'm gonna pull my threshold down and until I'm getting a good bit of gain reduction. Okay. I should be getting some now. But I'm not because my attack is so slow. Okay, so now I'm going to be I'm gonna pull back my attack until I just start to feel it. Okay, That's pretty good. I'm just starting to see a kick in Just to touch in this case, I'm gonna just the release time until that Go still pretty fast. I mean, in this case, the release time is really inaudible. So I'm still going to leave the release time around 50 milliseconds. I usually don't, um, end up with the release time bigger than 50 milliseconds. Anyway, unless I'm working on the go really slowly evolving type of pad sound or something like that, then I might, But in this case, we just want a quick release time. Okay, so my ratio general rule is if I wanted to sound fairly smooth, I'm gonna leave it at 2 to 1, which is where it is. If I wanted to sound aggressive, I'm going to go up to three, maybe 4 to 1. Okay, so it's nice and smooth at 2 to 13 to one little more aggressive. 4 to 1. Even more aggressive. Can't remember. Let me show you the graphic of what we're actually doing here. If we look here, thing is 2 to 1. So not very aggressive. 4 to 1, very aggressive. All right, so, um, 2 to 32 is a good starting point for is pretty aggressive. Um, I'd say four is very aggressive. Two is relatively soft. Um, so depending on what you want, somewhere between two and four is usually my go to. And that's usually where I stopped with the settings. Um, we'll talk more about this dry, wet mix in just a second fact. That's the subject of our next video. So let's go to the next video and talk about that right now. 89. Parallel Compression: Okay. Dry, wet mix on a compressor is kind of a weird thing, if you think about it. Because really, we want it all the way wet. So we're hearing just the signal going through the compressor. Right. Um, why would I ever want to do this? Where I'm hearing all the way dry. That would be the signal, essentially bypassing the compressor. Right. So why even use a compressor? That doesn't make any sense? Well, it does. Because what? We wouldn't want to do this. We might want to do this. I put that smack dab at 50 there. Uh, this is a technique called parallel compression. This was this has been popular for a long time, but has been tricky to do until recently. What we're doing here is we're we're going to hear about half of the signal being compressed and half the signal being un compressed. So it's compressing it in parallel. So if you imagine two parallel streams of audio, one is compressed in one is not compressed, and we're going here both. It's kind of a cool sound. That's the reason that that we like to do it. This for a while, was called New York compression. It was just a unnamed that people gave to it. Um, Now, you might not have a dry, wet mix on your compressor. If you're not working in a Bolton if you don't, this is actually really knew that they added this dry, wet mix to make it easy for us to, uh here it, um if you don't have a dry, wet mix, you can still set up parallel compression by Just make another effect bus, right? Like one of these effect buses make another one and then send 50% of your signal to that, Like this or so, um, and then set it all the way wet. Now you'll be hearing set the compressor to be all the way wet, which you don't have a dry, wet mix. So, um, it will be doing that anyway and then mix the two. Actually, no, I take that back. Probably better send 100% to the effect bus, but turn the effect bus the volume of it down by 50% so that you mixed thes two to sound the same. So the volume of this initial track and the effect bus is the same and then you can just balance the two out, and then you'll have, ah, effectively parallel compression. That's actually how we did it forever until we started getting dry, wet settings on the compressor, which is a new thing so you can do it. Either way is fine. Um, this way does the same thing, and it's way easier to set up. So So it is a cool sound toe. Have it both compressed and un compressed at same time. Way probably really hear it in this setting. Let's crank it up and see if we can really make it. I feel like it. So here's all the way wet. There's always dry. It's difficult to hear in this setting. It's kind of difficult to hear in any setting, but it can really help your mix really pop. So that's parallel compression. It's just mixing, um, the compressed signal with the UN compressed signal at about half, and you can adjust it to if you want to play with a little more, a little less. That's totally okay to experiment with. But it's a fun setting. It's a good mixing trick can really help things blend together 90. Compressing Drums: Okay, Now let's go into talking about compression techniques for some of the different groups of instruments that we have, starting with the drums. So, like I was saying before, with the drums, Ah, lot of what we want to do is use compression. Teoh kind of cancel out some of the variation. And when we're working on Elektronik track, we don't really need to do that very much. If we look, for example, at the kick, it's rock solid, right? It's the same every time. If we put a compressor on it, all we're really doing is turning it down. You know, we're just suggesting the volume with the compressor, so there's no need for a compressor there Compressor would deal with, ah, an adjustment in volume if one kick was louder than another kick, which in this case, they're just rock solid, so we don't need to worry about it there. Um, let's go to that snare track. We're gonna find the same thing, right? It's just rock solid because it's Elektronik. It's a sample, so we don't need to worry about it. But if I was working with an acoustic drummer, what I would do here is I might put a compressor on each individual microphone that we used when we were recording, and then I would adjust each one slightly, depending on what it needed. So if we recorded the drummer, we maybe have a mic on the snare. The kick the hi hats, Um, maybe the toms and some overhead Mike's okay, So I might adjust each of those independently and with the overhead mike's that one always said that it set the attack time so that it's super short so that we don't get, um, much of that transient sound from the drums. And we want the release time to be also really short, um, so that we don't get the added ambience and we're not boosting that from the room. That would be like in a room, Mike, that's a sound that you would get that we don't really want. So that could help Kind of eliminate that a little bit. But in an Elektronik track like this, the only compression I'm really going to do is probably gonna be on the group, which I think way back in the beginning of this class, we put a compressor. We did. We put a glue compressor on the group. Okay, so we're gonna come back to that in just a minute. I want to talk about vocals, and then we're going to come back to talk about putting compression on groups. So let's go to vocals and then we'll come back to group compression. 91. Compressing Vocals: Okay. Back to our vocal track. I took the compressor we were working with earlier off. So let's put it here. Now, remember, what's wrong with this set up? We don't like that. We want a compressor to come before that. He cube. So when working with vocals, um, I'm gonna actually start with with a pretty hard compression. You know, I'm gonna jump all the way up to 4 4.5 and I'm just going to kind of pull it back from there. I like to compress vocals fairly hard. Especially if they're in a mixed where there's a lot going on. Um, I just feel like if I'm for some reason, if I'm compressing them hard, I can get them to blend a little bit easier. Now, another thing I might look at in this case is this makeup gain button. You might have a makeup gain knob. You might have some things similar. Um, what this makeup gain means is that basically what's happening here is the compressor is squashing the sound that's making it quieter. Okay, so everything's being quieted by the compressor. Makeup means after it quiets everything to be the same level then it boosts it to get back to the original level. So it makes up the amount that it squashed by adding that amount of volume to everything so that it's a consistent volume. But it's just louder. So let's take a listen. Okay, so let's set this oh, way Go and we're clipping a little bit. But let's turn makeup off. Seems a bit quieter. I know we're not clipping. So with makeup on in this case, we're gonna Cleo right there. You see everything turned red on my master. No good. You don't want that to happen. Let's turn makeup off. So now we're just compressing it, turning it down. Quiet. Let's hear it in the in context. Give it a little more volume. Pretty good. It sounds pretty good. So watch out. That's what that makeup gain. Um, does. So if you want the compressor toe, actually be pushing the volume down, Turn makeup gain off if you want it. Teoh largely stay at the same volume by boosting it. You can turn that on cool. That's why I like to do on vocals. 92. Compression On Groups: okay. Back to compressing young groups. Now, you conduce this in anything that you have groups together. So remember, if we go back to mind groups, I've got all these air. The weird things have added, but my groups are really beat drums, clicks and stuff since and then these extra things have added. So I could if I want these clicks to all be a similar volume, I could put a compressor on the group that will compress them all together, right, So that they're gonna be one volume. That might be cool. Um, in this case, I don't think I want to do that, but I often want to do this on drums. So let's actually just solo this drums group. I've already put this compressor on it. Let's go to somewhere. Okay, now, interesting. My I'm kind of separated between beat and drums. All of this is real. From what I got that synth in their I really wish I didn't have that synth in there, but that's OK. Let's compress all of that. Okay, so I have these in two different groups. So the easiest way to do this is I could actually put these two groups within a group like that. Now this group contains both of those two groups. Let's do that with the heck. It'll be fun and we'll call this compressed drums group. And I was going to use compressor now, in this case because I'm working with drums, I'm going to use this glue compressor. Now this is unable to thing, and what this is is it's a kind of compressor that's kind of specialized in making things kind of blend together. Glue them together, if you will. Um, it's a little bit of a mystery how it works. It works just the same as a normal compressor, right. But it's got some extra things in the algorithm that help it feel good. I really like using it on drums. If you don't have a good compressor because you're not enable turn, then, um, just use a normal compressor. That's fine. So I'm gonna set this toe kick in a little bit. I feel that. Let me do that again. You can feel right when it turns out right. So I'm gonna pull it down to write, just barely feeling right there. Okay, Now I've got a makeup gain amount way know what that is. Now push that. See, now I've got a really punchy sound. Feel that snare drum, right? It's, like way more punchy. I can even use this soft clip, which will add a tiny bit of distort. Right now, this is set to four as a ratio by default. That's pretty aggressive, but let's get it even hotter. Actually, it's on Lee. This lets me go to four in 10. 10. Must be totally flat. Don't leave it at four. That's about as aggressive as I want to get. But I like this sound push a little harder. It's cool. I can use parallel compression. I'm gonna use parallel compression. If I'm gonna let some of that wet in. I can actually drive this a little harder. It's cool. Now, I got a nice, punchy sound, so you can do that on any group you can you know, we could do it on our clicks. We could do it on the sense I don't really want to, though, because I like the variation that's happening here. I don't really want to take away from that. Um, so I'm gonna leave those alone, But I do like to do a group compression on the drums. I think it sounds pretty nice. And this glue compressor is good for it. But if you don't have the glue compressor, you can do exactly what I did just with the normal compressor. Um, the differences, something but a normal compressor will be just fine for that. 93. Compress On The Master: Now, there's still another thing you can do with compression if you want to. You can put a little bit of compression on the master. We go all the way down here. I've already put a spectrum on the master, and that's fine. You can put a compressor on your master. Um, if you do decide to do this, be very delicate with it. Um, give it just a little bit, right. We're going to make a pretty soft ratio. So 2 to 1 is good. We're gonna pull it the threshold down. So it's just kicking out a little bit. This king kind of smooth out your mix a little bit, make it sound a little bit nicer. Um, don't get very aggressive with it on the master, though. You want to be really chill on the master, because, um, when you go to mastering, um, they might do some compression on the master, and you want to leave a little bit of room to work with there. Um, also, if you're just super aggressive, then you're just going on the master track here. Here's gonna flatten out your mix, and it's gonna sound bad. Um, but if you use just to touch it can help pull everything together. Ah, and make it feel pretty good. Okay, so let's unsold. Oh, this and to see what we've got with everything. Let's go right to our sounded pretty good. We're getting there a little bit more work to do yet, though. 94. What Is Focus?: Okay. So at this point, we've looked at a ton of different ways that we can pick through the track. A bunch of different things weaken due to the track. Um, a lot of tools for making the mix better. But now, in this last step, this is our opportunity to sit back and say, OK, I'm not clipping my frequencies air, not conflicting. Everything's doing what it's supposed to be doing, However, Is it good? Does it sound good? Right. You could use all these tools correctly and still end up with something that sounds kind of boring. Right. So we want to make sure there's life in this mix yet. So this is kind of where the art comes back in and less of the the scalpel kind of tool, right. So what we want to do here is we want to listen to the track, and we want to think about Does it really have something that makes it special? And if it does, which hopefully it does. If it does, are we bringing that out? You know, are we really focusing on that, or have we just buried it into the back? So we're gonna focus on two key elements. We're going to focus on the groove like the groove of the track. Does it groove? Hey, now, some tracks are not intended to groove, and that's okay. Um, but if it does have a groove to it, we want to be sure that we really got that locked in. It feels really tight, Feels totally in the pocket. Um And then the second thing we want to look at is doesn't have an element that we can focus on that we can kind of. Ah ah, imagine all these instruments are on the stage, right? And we've got a spotlight. What are we gonna point our spotlight at while this thing is being performed? That's what we're really kind of thinking about here. What's the thing to really focus it? So let's start off talking about the groove. Let's go to a new video and we'll dive into the groove. 95. The Groove: Okay, So when we talk about the groove or usually we're talking about the drums and the bass. Ah, and maybe another element that's contributing to the groove. We're really talking about the pulse. Ah, the way the whole thing feels together. So, um, not so much of this clicks and stuff. It's really going to be here. So I'm just gonna isolate the groove kind of stuff. Let's see, is that this might be probably not. I'm not gonna worry about that too much. Um, definitely that this buzz. Not so much. This kick definitely. Like that's the majority of the groove. Right? But let's check out some other elements. Probably that I definitely want that high head in there. Um, this probably, um that shaker is that they're all the time. Okay, That's probably all the elements primary elements of the group, so Okay, so does it feel good? Does that feel like a groove to me when I was just building it up right there, which is which was intentional the way I did that. So I want to add kind of each element of the groove to it and then figure out when I turned one thing on did anything did it take away from the groove? It all if it did that, I want to look at that element. And to me, the snare drum kind of took away from the group. I was feeling it pretty good till we added that. Oops. I can't just unsold a one thing here so that we got to go back and do the whole thing again . We had that that Okay, that feels like a better groove than it did with the snare. So what I'm going to do about that snare, um, deal with stare a little bit? Um, now talking about a groove in this track is a little strange because it's so straight ahead . You know, this kind of music just like boom, boom, bump, bump, bump, bump, thumb It's not like there's a swing to it. It's not like there's, ah, anything free to it. It's so metric and pulsed that a za long as I keep that groove just really solid, it will be fine. But I do think this snare is diminishing the groove a little bit. Why is that? Do we think? See, this is why we do this last step because this is something I didn't really notice until I really focused in on it. Here it is without it might be that there's a ton of low end in that snare. Um, so let me try to pull out some of that low end and see if that helps the groove at all. That feels a little bit better to me. I think the low end of that scenario is making it feel like a second kick. Um, and it was just kind of distracting a little bit, I think. Also the rhythm of the snare takes away from the groove a little bit the way it's on the quarter note. Um, but in a buildup, that could be okay. And that's a compositional thing. I don't want to dive into that. So let's take this near out. Okay? Group. Not bad. You know, it also really helps a groove. Is that back beat? High hat. Where is that? Yeah, this high hat is really helping push it along, cause it's since since, right? It's on the the offbeat. So actually pushed that. Just a hair. Now, I'm gonna kind of contradict my mixing earlier, but oh, actually, this, Uh, this is tricky because this track changes this something else. But at least right here. Yeah, like that. That's a really cool group. So that I like that backbeat. I always like a backbeat, Innotrac. So I'm gonna push that just a little bit. Okay? So really, what you want to do when you're focusing on the groove is kind of put all the elements of the group together, the stuff that's really driving the pulse of the track and then just build it up one by one , see what is taking away. You could almost think of it like what makes you want to dance, and then you turn one thing on and does that make you want to dance a little bit less work on that thing? Um, see if you can figure out what's going on with it. But I think now, if I un solo, everything will have a pretty solid. I still don't like this Focal. I'm gonna take that. Yeah. Cool. I think we got it. Great. Okay. Um, so that's how I like to work on the group. All right, let's go to this focus element. 96. The Featured Element: okay, Back to all the way at the beginning of this class, we talked about this idea of the most important element in a particular section of the song um, focusing in on, Ah, some element that gives it some character. Now that we know all the tools, I want to talk a little bit about how we can emphasize that element using the tools that we no no and techniques that we No, no. So in our case in this track here, and this is not uncommon, especially in this kind of electronica music. Um, the most important element, kind of all the way through, I think, is the group. Okay, so and we've done a good job of emphasizing that already. So let me talk outside of this track a little bit and talk about what you might find if it's not the groove, So it might be the vocal. It might be the lead vocal. That's if there is a lead vocal on your track. That's commonly what might be the thing that you really want to bring to the front. It would be the vocal might be a guitar solo might be a cool rift might be, Ah, weird sin thing that's happening. It could be anything, but whatever it is, there's a couple things you can do to bring it forward. The most obvious is boost the volume a little bit. And if you decide to do that, uh, just a touch, you know, you don't need to crank that thing up because that's gonna throw your whole mix out of kilter just at a tiny, tiny little bit of volume, the most smallest amount you can on. Listen again and see if that brought it forward a little bit. If not, bring it just a tiny bit more forward. OK, we don't want to just, like crank it up. You just want to add very, very, very small amount of volume. Um, you could also consider using compression to bring it forward. If you compress it a little bit, not a lot, just a little bit and then bring it forward from that, um, using that makeup gain, that's another way to bring it forward. That's also boosting the volume, really, but it's a separate way. It's a way to keep the mix. All the work that we've done so far in the mix kind of Ah, still in control, right? Another thing you can do is use an e Cute. Ah, you know, perhaps maybe even boosting some of the higher frequencies, boosting it in places where there's not much happening in the mix. And I know I said try not to use any queue to boost, but, um, for an effect that's going to kind of bring forward this element, it might be OK, you might be able to get away with it. Um, but an e que can really be used to boost things forward just a little bit. And then the last thing that you can do to help kind of boost this special thing is consider adding some effects to it with That'll help give it a little bit of focus if you want to add a little bit of delay to it, not so much that it totally changes the track just a little bit. That might kind of help us zoom in on it, you know, imagine every Ah, imagine the band on the stage and you've got the spotlight, right. Um, maybe the person who's jumping around the most is the one that's going to get our attention , right? We're gonna put the spotlight on him. So in that same way, it's kind of a weird analogy. But in that same way, if there's a sound that has, you know, some, some delay on it, a little bit of echo, something like that, it might grab our attention a little bit more. And it's different than just turning the volume up a little bit right? It's just something that kind of will grab us and pull us into it a little bit. So a couple tricks for using those techniques and tools that we know Teoh bring out some featured element in the mix. 97. Further Reading: Okay, if you want to do a little further reading on some of this, there's a good book I recommend. Called a Mix Engineers Handbook by Bobby House. Inky. Um, he's well known engineer, Um, and in his book, he has this section called 15 Steps to a Better Mix. That's a great little checklist that, um, you can use now. He has published this 15 steps to a better mix, um, on his website as just ah, free block post that he did. So I want to link you to that so you can check it out. But I also encourage you to check out his book. It's got some good tips to it are in it also. So in the next segment, I'm gonna link you to ah, that block post of his So you can just kind of read his 15 steps to a better mix. Um, you should be really familiar with all of the technical jargon he's talking about in there now. So, um, nothing should be too alarming. Um, and you could kind Just use this as a checklist like, does my mix do this? Doesn't mix, do that doesn't mix, do this other thing. So read that it's a great little list. Um, and then we'll be back with one more tip 98. The Most Important Rule In Mixing: okay, Last, but definitely, definitely not least, Um, one thing I want to leave you with is the biggest and most important rule to all of mixing . And that is your ear always wins. Okay, So if you're mixing and you think I really shouldn't do this Because, like, maybe you're working a compressor and you want to just turn it all the way up And you think I really shouldn't do this because that's pretty crude, but, uh, it sounds great. Then do that, do that, Break the rules, do the thing that sounds good. Even if it goes against what you're supposed to do, right? So if you're working any Q and you just want toe, boost the crap out of, you know, some frequency because it just sounds rad. Ah, we would generally tell you, don't boost the crap out of some frequency on your EQ. You that would be weird. But again, your ear wins. So if you think Yeah, but that sounds so cool. Then do that thing. Um, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is make something that sounds great. So always listen, listen 100 times, take a break from it. Listen again. Give your ears arrest. Um, and make sure you do what you believe. Sounds the best. And like I said, at the very beginning, the more you do this Ah, the better your mixes will get so mixed for your friends. Do everything you can, um, and get some experience because it's a practice and you will get better at it, the more you do it. 99. One More Time....: okay. Ah, one last thing. I thought, you know, I actually finished this class, and I was just about to wrap it up. And then I realized I never played you the final track. So let's give it a listen, shall we, Um I want to point out one quick thing that I haven't gone back to at the very beginning, I created this version of of the track and we called it Mix of the one and I never changed that. I stuck with the mixed view one all the way through. And the reason is, if I would have got to any point in this mix where I thought I could do this thing or I could do that thing And they're very different things than I may have said, Okay, I'm going to do this thing, but saved it as a new version and then kept going forward knowing that if that didn't work out, I could go back to mix version one and then go the other way, right? So any time I had hit like a big crossroads, I would save it as a new version. Now, with this mix, it's a pretty conservative mix so I never really hit any of those big points where I needed to save a new version. To make sure that I could kind of rewind eso. I stuck with mixed V one all the way through. And that's totally okay. But it's not uncommon to when you're working on a more complicated mix tohave. 5678 versions of it, uh, going along. Um OK, so let's take a listen. Now, this mix, this track that we got from this student was in really good shape beforehand. It's a lot of sense, relatively easy to mix, So, uh, it might not sound radically different. We really just got some stuff under control. Um, did a lot of you, Q. Lot of frequency stuff, a lot of compression. Um, but it was in pretty good shape. So, again, this is a conservative mix, but it sounds pretty tight. I'm really happy with how punchy the drums are. Um, and the overall sound of everything I think we got it really jamming. This is kind of club ready now, so let's take a listen. - Okay . All right. There we have it. Now. E guess I forgot to fade out that re sampling thing I did there could go through and feed it out. But I kind of liked the way that works. A little talking and the fade out. I'm gonna leave it happy accidents. 100. What Next?: All right, we are in approaching the finish line to what is officially the biggest class I've ever made. This has been a long class. Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end. Um, a couple more things. Um, I want to talk about real quick. First is what comes next. Is this the end? Is this the end of mixing? Have I told you every single thing you need to know about mixing? No, Um, there are some more. There are some more things. There's some advanced techniques, um, that we haven't really dove into. Although, um, I did give you 90% of actually, I did give you 100% of what you'll need to know to do. Really great mixes. There's some goofy stuff that you can dio. Um, I would encourage you to look around online, read other articles, um, and keep your eyes out for new techniques all the time. I may make an advanced version of this class. I don't know. Um, sooner or later, I probably will make an advanced mixing class where we talk about some some weird or techniques. Ah, maybe some mixing styles. Um, but you don't need that class. You have everything you need in order to do great mixes. So, uh, rewatch everything you want. Okay, so you've got this class for life now, so go back to the beginning. Watch it all. Remember each little section and use it as a reference for when you're mixing. Think how did he do the EQ? You go back there. How did he set up his compressors? Go back to that section. Watch it again. I will not cost you anything extra to rewatch. Um, so keep that in mind. Cool. OK, one more thing. 101. Thats all for now!: All right, We have reached the end of this class. I just want to say really quick. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for being a part of this class. I've had a crazy good time making this class. It's always really fun to really kind of put what you do under a microscope in a way that, um, arranges your thoughts so that you could explain them well to other people. Um ah. And I think it always makes me better at what I do. So thanks for that opportunity. Thanks for being a part of this class. Um, I got a little bit of extra goodies for you if you want to stick around. Um, there's a little pdf and all kinds of good stuff in there. And, um, yeah, thanks for being a part of it. I hope you had fun. I certainly did, uh, remember to rewatch the class many times as you want and check out some my other classes and other good stuff. I've got a ton of classes online. It's kind of ridiculous, but I just really love making him. So check him out. Ask questions in the student community and we'll see you in the next last by 102. SkillshareFinalLecture: Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out some of my courses on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.