Transcript for:
Mixing GGD P5 Drum Library and Periphery 5 Album Mix

hey and welcome in this video I'm going to be showing you how I like to mix the ggd P5 matte help and signature drum library and I'm going to be doing that by mixing that Library into an actual mix session from the periphery 5 album mix I'm going to be working on the song Wildfire which is the first song on the record the first single I think for many people one of the most memorable tracks on the record too now something pretty cool is we're also going to be making the actual drum midi and the producer pack stems from this song so those are kind of Bounce Down mix stems of the rest of the session so that you can have a go mixing along and hopefully get results that sound really close to the record too so check Below in the video description to get your link to access those files so I think a key place to start would be to look at the actual Library itself so I'm using the second preset on the menu here it's called Wildfire because it's the exact kit setup that we used on Wildfire so it's the symbol selection and the rack Tom selection and the snare tuning if you want to get more information about all of the different options which are available within this Library we've got a good walkthrough video on that that you can watch as well which will get linked um but for now I'll just leave it there apart from to say that I'm using the turbo off preset so there's not going to be turbo active on any of the channels again if you want an explanation of that check out the walkthrough video in the mixer tabs I have for the most part flattened out the faders so on the symbol page you can see everything's at Unity on the Tom page everything's at Unity on the snare I've left the snare bottom trimmed back a little bit and you also see I've given the snare just a little bit of a boost in the far room mic so rooms one and two and on the kick I've done kind of the opposite so yes I've trimmed back the kick out kind of left it at the default position but I've also brought back the level of the kick drum a little bit in those room mics so this is just to make things a little bit more hyper real a bit easier to work with the kick drum can sometimes get a little bit too boomy sounding in room tracks and you can have to figure out other ways of dealing with that and likewise um it's helpful to have the snare cut through just a little bit more I've left the panning exactly as it would be if you were to load up this preset and then as far as the outputs go I have got coming down into logic I've got kick routed out so that's the kick in and kick out going to one channel then I have independent channels for the snare top and bottom independent channels for each Tom then when it comes to the symbols I've got the hi-hat on its own channel and then I've put all the rest of Splash rise crash ride stack uh sent to a spot like a spot mic Channel followed by the overheads and mono tracks each going to their own outputs but then I've put both room one and two to a single fader for stereo room sound I think next it would be good to take a bit of a zoomed out look at what's going on on the master bus and on the instrumental bus because for those of you that followed my mixing tutorials in the past you might be aware that I like to do something which I and many other people refer to as top-down mixing although more recently I've kind of stopped thinking of it quite so much of that not least because I've changed certain aspects of my signal chain which we'll talk about but also because maybe to me the purest form of top-down mixing would be to level all the faders as you want in the mix listening to it with nothing on the master chain and on the instrumental battle Yeah yeah no no plugins no processing active at all and then start messing with the EQ of everything together listening to it and making decisions on the EQ points and frequency boosts and cuts that you use I don't do that I have a really specific set of processing that I like to do it gets thrown on every mix I do so yeah I'm just making a slightly critical difference there between me getting you know starting to twiddle knobs and you know choose frequencies at that point before looking at any of the individual channels as opposed to kind of having like an almost like a filter like a preset that I'm putting on everything and then working from there subtle difference I know um and you can call it whatever you like but with no further Ado um let's take a look first at the instrumental bus so unlike in the past where I had some EQ added on the instrumental bus I now just have compression And to clarify the instrumental bus is receiving everything apart from vocals the only other thing that sometimes ends up outside the instrumental bus is if I've got a transition track you know like a stereo file that contains some sound effects or a little transition piece of music that's intended to bridge the gap between this song and the next and that's already been fully mixed and everything and it's just a question of you know kind of dovetailing it in in the session maybe that's not going to go through my instrumental bus kind of depends what's going on but in this session everything barring vocals is going through these two processes so the first one is um the Slate vbc FG gray again if you've seen my previous mix tutorials this is not going to be shocking at all I've been using this for the best part of 10 years now with the same settings so fast attack that's a 0.3 millisecond attack super fast fastest release point one millisecond release No 0.1 SEC good question I think that's a 0.3 millisecond and this is 100 millisecond release and then threshold dialed in to taste I'll talk about that in a sec and ratio of four to one and then crucially one of the things that first turned me onto this compressor was the side chain high pass filter at 60 hertz which means that low end beneath 60 hertz is being rolled off in what the compressor is seeing it's not taking it out of the mix but it just prevents the kick from pumping the mix too hard which is something that I always baffled with before using this the main thing I'm using this compressor for is to duck the snare drum when it hits that's not to say other things don't trigger it as well but the reason why I put this here is that fast attack is gonna knock down the snare in volume and because it's on a bus with everything else going through it it's going to knock down everything else at the same time so the effect is the snare is going to maintain a lot of Headroom above the mix but the whole mix gets turned down at that instant at that instant and the result is you get the effect of the snare drum cutting through as though it was really loud but it's not really jumping out and kind of harshly aggressively attacking your ears now it does actually have like a certain cool envelope character to it because obviously you could just use a limiter or something to achieve that effect there is a certain something to the way this does that that's more than just a transparent knocking down to the snare level but that's the main goal and I'm usually aiming for about three or four DBS of gain reduction on the snare drum if I didn't have the side chain um knocking off below 60 hertz then you would probably be seeing the kick triggering perhaps even more compression than the snare and that's not what I want at all you get that really dizzy and kind of pumping character to the compression and then I've got this FG gray followed up by FG red this is based on the focusrite red compressor and this was in tender this is something I brought in for the periphery formic so I probably went over it in the previous mix tutorial as well where basically I wanted to blend a very aggressively pumpy Distortion sound Distortion compression sound onto the mix to give it a little bit of kind of pumping life and energy but I didn't want to have that on a full mix so I've dialed it into to do some pretty aggressive um pumping you know the needles are going to be moving quite aggressively and then I'm blending in the mix so that it's just quite a quiet little effect in the mix okay so having waffled about that for a second uh I'm gonna now hit play and you'll be able to see the meter's moving on these compressors and you'll get an idea of what they're doing cool so as you can see hitting three maybe occasionally four DBS of compression on the first one the second one is doing quite a lot more I'll show you what happens if I increase the mix up to full so you can just hear that compression effect then I'll turn it back I'll turn it off entirely turn it back on again and bring the mix down it's subtle yet it's definitely there it's kind of sucking sucking the guitars down on the you know on the chugs and kind of making the whole mix interact in a certain way when I turn it off things arguably sound a bit more kind of pristine but I like the energy which is which that is giving and and I've been using this kind of chain of compressors on my uh on my instrumental bus now for many years with great happiness so that's what's on my instrumental bus I'm mixing into that I'm just making sure that my gain levels are right so that you know I'm getting about One DB of reduction on the kick on the FG gray three or four DBS of reduction on the snare and that's how I know that my gain staging is pretty much right let's look now at the master bus so let's start with the easiest to explain I've got a fan filter Pro L2 in modern mode this is on there to give level to my mix this is the last thing on my chain I'm boosting it 9 DB um we'll have a look a look at a second at how many DBS of reduction are going on there but I'm not aiming to squeeze my mix to any huge extent I'm typically getting around -10 lufts and this is something which is only there for mixing I love to mix into a limiter because it means I can judge how my transient should sound so that once this gets sent to a professional mastering engineer they still sound right you know after they've done their thing making the track sound loud um so this is the one thing that gets bypassed when I send my mix to mastering everything else remains in place um just before that in the chain is this slate virtual tape machines this is another thing I've been doing for the best part of 10 years um I just love what this does to the sound of my mixes again it gives it just a little bit of glue a little bit of an extra low bump it does depend on where you set the various um switches and knobs on this as you can see I've got it just set at Unity normal bias I've got it on the half inch two track tape so that would be your kind of master style tape and that one in particular gives a little bit of a low bump which is nice the tape type I like the fg456 that to me sounds a little bit more mid-range forwards than the fg9 which adds quite a lot of Sparkle on the top it's not a subtle difference um that other mode I've used occasionally on mixes that need to sound a bit more Hi-Fi but um almost all the time it stays in the 456 tape type and at 30 amps you can do 15 nips if you want again that's going to kind of reinforce the mid-range roll off a bit of top end and sometimes give it more of a low end bump as well but these are the general settings that I aim for and then before that so I've gone in reverse order here the first thing that my mix is hitting on the master bus is this instance of golf which to me is it's a game changer but it's also kind of subtle and so it's one of those things that once you have it on you're not going to want to turn it off but it doesn't make my mix fall apart when I bypass it so what golfos is is one of these kind of new generations of plugins that seeks to maintain a certain frequency balance in your music um so it's kind of dynamically eq'ing both sides independently I believe in such a way as to try and kind of reduce any area from becoming too overbearing and it has the effect of enhancing the clarity of your mix by I think just keeping certain frequency bands in check and it also has This brilliant effect which I particularly love on um really diverse music or tracks that have a big kind of scene changes like in Wildfire where it goes to a jazz break if you know the song you know what I mean because what this does is it kind of Smooths out the global EQ differences between those tracks it could be something as simple as you know a song distorted guitars in the intro and then they drop out classic loud quiet loud quiet kind of structure to a song um I find that golfos just really helps smooth over those changes in instrumentation in such a way that your mix sounds a bit more like you went to town automating stuff when all you did was have this on there I by default I don't know why that's set to 19. by default have this set to have both recover and tame set to 20 maybe a little bit of extra brightness that just tilts it towards the the brightness a little bit and then I tend to bracket off above about 12K because it can have a habit of introducing a certain kind of glossy top end that sounds nice but isn't necessarily what I intended and perhaps sometimes can kind of change a more dark or traditional symbol sound into something that's a bit more Hi-Fi I just don't see the need for it to kind of determine that stuff that's way up there on some material I will bracket off low end as well but for the most part I very gratefully enjoy its feedback and and it's uh you know whatever it does on my mix in terms of keeping the low end hitting in a certain way and as I say smoothing out differences between sections so it's a really cool plug-in uh one which I've been using for a few years now since it came well maybe not since it came out but soon after it came out and to me uh it's something I I wouldn't I wouldn't say I wouldn't mix with without it but I really really appreciate having it so let's bypass both golf force and um the tape machine I don't see the point in bypassing the limiter and just making things quiet and Loud for you so um I'll leave that on you'll be able to see on the meters how much it's doing as I hit play so um first thing I'll do is bring in um golfos actually and remember the tape machine comes after that so it is kind of getting instead of it counteracting the coloration of the tape machine it's kind of being colored by it so first thing I'll bring in is girl force and then tape machine and you'll hear the difference thank you yeah I should have said by the way that golf was kind of looks crazy when there's no music playing but it's definitely not doing that uh to the mix when it's playing as you can see it's a lot more close I mean what's this the first line on either side of the midpoint is 3 DB um so a lot of the moves are happening within kind of plus or minus 2 DB but I think it is quite transparent you guys tell me if you think that I'm I'm a fraud in that girl forces mixing for me um I don't think that's quite the case but I do love it and then the tape machine again I just absolutely love what that setting does there's a reason I've used it for all this time it just makes the kick sound that much more kind of thick it pushes the mids forwards it does make it a little bit louder you know I'm not not going to pretend I don't notice that um but you know that there is a slight level change as you process and bypass it but um yeah I just really love what that does and then the master a limiter would seem to be doing about a 60 BF gain reduction kind of thing so that's what's going on on a top level on my mixes let's start looking at drums so drum bus [Music] at the moment by the way I do have plugins on so this is the kind of mixed sound that I'm going to be aiming for and showing you how to achieve I'm doing that just because it seems to make more more sense to show you these kind of higher stage things the mix um bus compression uh now the drum compression I'm going to show you on a sound that's already sounding pretty good but later on I'm going to get rid of all of those and we'll talk about how to get from raw to these sounds so let's talk about drum bus processing you may well have seen me using these plugins before if you watch the P4 Mix Master Class or recently my snare processing video I think I showed you these things there however in the interest of showing people what I'm doing they haven't seen any of the other videos I'm going to run through it but I'm also not going to go into crazy amounts of detail so look out for some of those older videos If you want to get more information but importantly my parallel drum compression is happening directly on the bus now in the past when I've done mixed walkthroughs such as on nail the mix or creative live I was using the soft tube fat compressor on a parallel bus and I was sending different amounts of each Channel and loads of snare drum to that I'm now no longer doing that I now have this on my drum bus setting the record straight because I've seen a few people telling people that I do what I used to do when it's now this all the time so I use the distressor plug-in model by slate digital with some settings which I pretty much robbed from Eric Valentine in his video and he went through how he makes his drums he has his Hardware pair next to him if I remember correctly and I probably should have checked this first he actually has the attack as slow as it can go and the release as fast as it can go but for whatever reason I've ended up with these settings where the attack is at eight and the release is at about two and a half I've got apart from that the settings the same as him so it's the 20 to 1 ratio it's a pretty extreme limiting and in the detector chain to the side chain there's a high pass filter and this kind of mid bump or a bandpass I don't really know what those but basically the signal is not being treated you know the compressor is not seeing the full frequency range of my drum mix and that I think is crucial to why it sounds so good because the reason why most people do their compression on a separate bus and send different amounts of each drum is to be able to not get the kick making making the bus compress too hard or to be able to get the snare drum to trigger more of that compression and this just does it wonderfully as is I'm using the mix set quite low I think here it's 32 I'm usually between 25 and 40 I try and get it level matched so that when I turn the plugin on and off the level doesn't change too much or the perceived level doesn't change too much just as a note I don't know how true this is but when I've tried to match these settings with a generic compressor I found that at 20 to 1 I need to make the knee quite soft to match this so something's telling me that although it's a high ratio it's not a super hard knee kind of limiting Style might be wrong about that that's just what's you know it's very difficult to really replicate the sound of one compressor with complicated Behavior with another because the way that it kicks in the way that it accelerates in and out can be so unique so that's why I kind of always come back to using this one and it should be said I don't I don't really know how close this sounds to Eric Valentine's Hardware compressor set the way he does them but I've really gotten into how this sounds and I use it all the time as I say and it seems that when other people try this as well on my recommendation they seem to really like it as well the other thing I'd say is that although the attack sounds like it's pretty slow at 8 out of ten again if I try and mimic this with a generic compressor I find my attack time has to be pretty fast somewhere between well somewhere under 10 milliseconds put it that way may closer to like three or four it seems that as you open it up to 10 there's quite a big change so I don't know if that knob kind of increases exponentially towards the end in terms of attack time I don't know but that is very much a part of my my drum mix sound these days following that is a couple of instance of EQ so the easiest to live on my instrumental chain I used to EQ some 12K and some five and a half k and a bit of a 100-ish kind of bump into my whole mix apart from vocals and over time I've moved away from doing that I just found that it's most it's mostly my drums that benefit from those moves so now I just do that to my drums only and nothing else is getting eq'd apart from the kind of natural EQ characteristics going through golfos and the tape machine on the master chain so drums are going through these the Neve style EQ here in particular has a very uh colorful aggressive Brash I think sound to it especially on this mid-range band these two are clones of each other but that five and a half K boost which I moved it which says it's under 2db to me sounds more like a you know you're cranking something I'm exaggerating but it feels like quite a heavy-handed move that one um and then I really like the sound of the 12K band on this custom series equalizer it's like a weird shelf if I remember correctly it's not just an average shelf it's kind of somewhere between a bell and a shelf if I remember correctly and I just really like how that sounds on some mixes I find it necessary to add a bit of 60 hertz on this low frequency um section here but on this one I didn't seem to find that necessary so that's the processing that's going on on my drum mix bus so I'll bypass it hit hit play and then stick it back on again and then I'll also bypass the compressor on its own [Music] thank you cool let's move on then so let's get rid of that and let's take a listen to The Raw Kick Drum so when I say raw from now on you're always still going to be hearing it with these things on so it's not truly truly raw but if you make these settings and you have the library then this will be the sound that you have as well when you're working on it as well let's listen to the kick as it is coming out of contact and I'm just going to reiterate something that I say in every video which is don't program everything super super hard hitting the kicks here are programmed at 99 102 100 around about a hundred on the velocity scale here and that's going to give us the kind of sound we want and there's here's a little tip even drummers that hit really hard with their hands that doesn't necessarily mean they're kicking with all their strength either some drummers really work on that they kick incredibly hard I don't even know if that necessarily sounds good I really like how Matt plays Kick Drum he's not hitting it super super hard and in fact he's you know he's the strength he's able to get hitting the rest of the kit comes out of the size of his body the length of his arms and this kind of whip technique with his hands he's not really kind of tensed up hitting really hard it's this flowing motion that's just got a lot of acceleration on it so he's not someone that kicks super hard and I think he sounds better for that than a lot of other drummers so let's look at some processing [Music] that's the raw Kick Drum one of the things which I wanted to make a note of here was that obviously I had a gate on the natural kick track um and on something like a kick drum that has quite a big effect on the envelope like the how long the low end blooms for so I thought it was important to keep a gate on this sample even though I'm not trying to gate out any bleed um because that would just help us get a bit closer to the kind of sound on the record so with the gate on [Music] this is by the way a preset that I use most of the time on Kick Drum it's not got any hold time any knee any attack time it's got a release time about 350 milliseconds and a little bit of overhead so I've had a little bit of a look ahead the range is set to 50 DB and the ratios are ten to one um so it's mostly just trimming some of the kind of to stay in the head flap off the kick drum I love how this kicks Sounds by the way this one is within Evans UV emad head on it and as we'll get into when we talk about eq'ing that head versus some of the other types of heads that don't have a kind of foam damping ring on them um this one that does has a kind of flatter response in the presence region it's not as immediately clicky or Slappy sounding but it gives you a beautiful blank canvas to sculpt a kick drum sound out of so that's what we're going to get into next by looking at some EQ moves that's where I ended up but let's go to a blank bit here so that I can talk you through in real time so let's just look at how this is looking on the graph I mean I know that this is sounding a bit dull just hearing it you know it doesn't sound like a a really powerful aggressive kick drum sound here um so I'm expecting to see that the low end at the top end are quite out of balance just visually on this and my usual thing is to try and get them to look similar in terms of the Peaks at the top and the bottom but there's so much more to it than that our ear can hear so much detail within all of the nooks and crannies of the EQ Spectrum so it's going to come down to shaping it to give the sound that we want [Music] I can see firstly there's quite a lot of energy above 100 Hertz kind of between 100 and 200. and that's going to give it this kind of slightly tubby character which isn't really what you want once you try and start fitting other other aspects of the mix around it so um you know getting the bass to sit in there well so if we can trim back a little bit of that it's going to give the kick drum this kind of deeper and clearer sound just by not having those kind of Muddy frequencies a bit above the fundamental of the drum which is something that we're going to come back to by the way once we get to talking about floor toms so keep that in mind but um the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to just make a cut somewhere in that 100 to 200 range [Music] by doing that it's like we've uncovered fundamental like the low punch of the kick so that's a really important move the next thing something I really like to do if I want to just rebalance this kick drum sound a little bit so bring up the important kind of frequencies that are you know part of the presence aspects of the kick drum is just to use a big old Shelf at around about 1K that tends to be the kind of dividing line between unpleasant meds and kind of important myths in terms of the kick drums representation in the mix so let's do that I'm going to make a Shelf at 1K it's sounding pretty good but the attack's a little bit kind of papery for me I just want to try rebalancing it and I will say I wanted the kick drum on P5 to be kind of meaty sounding not too clicky something which other people seem to have noticed about it as well and seem to like so what I found was that in order to get that I wanted to focus the energy so the kind of the main thrust of the attack felt around that kind of 3K area not the kind of five six seven K Arrow which is what I'm currently Hearing in this Kick Drum and seeing on the graph so let's see if we can redress that balance a little bit that's the stuff I'm not really going for you see what that's done it's like we've taken some click out but we've given it more of this kind of wider slappier kind of character to it with that 3K kind of thing there's a kind of note somewhere that came up when I brought that that high Shelf um so I'm just going to try and track that down because I'm not finding it very pleasant it kind of sounds like a weird kind of head resonance or something [Music] so that's sounding quite a lot better and then something which I noticed I made a note about I guess I don't know if this was because of a note from someone in the band or if it was just something that occurred to me but in order to kind of add to this meaty kind of slap I found it was quite useful to pick out somewhere you know I might usually give a boost around kind of 1K or something but this is a bit lower than that it was about 800. and in fact I think I do kind of remember where it came from and I think it was based around a couple of One-Shot samples that I had in my library made by somebody else that I like the sound of and it just seemed to have more in that area than I had so maybe just a different mic or different treatment so that was kind of the EQ vibe that I found myself going to in the mix so let's see what that's like if I bypass it [Music] so the moment it's sounding a bit weird I think and the reason for that is because we haven't got any kind of compression on there when I say weird and the reason why what I mean is if you compare that to the album it doesn't sound right yet because that without some compression on it just doesn't have the right kind of attack character um so one more thing I'm just going to show you bypassing just the stuff which I've been doing kind of in the upper end of the the kick drum sound so you can hear so you can hear that basically while maintaining this low end bump and um low mid kind of upper base cut [Music] so it's so much more Slappy sounding all right so I've already given the game away is the three plugins that come next but first of all I really like to use this revival plugin um this Shimmer band is really high up there in the EQ spectrum and it's one of those things that once you hear it you hear it in other people's mixes all the time there's like a certain quality to Top End especially if you put it on something like a vocal or symbols or a whole mix that yeah there's certain mixers out there that I'm pretty sure are using this um quite a lot because it's just such a specific sound but it can be very cool on drum shells that maybe don't have it's not a symbol or something that's got crazy harmonics up in the top end it can be a really nice way of bringing it's not even it's not even click it's something higher than that um that can just sound really lovely without adding to like the pointiness of the sound so that's why I quite like it here um again this is something which I did on the album yeah a little goes a long way with that um the next thing was to saturate the kick and I chose to distort it quite a lot again I want a meaty texture to it by saturating it we're creating lots of harmonics based on the frequency content of the sound so that low end if we add these kind of dense harmonics to them it can just make it sound just thick in a cool way without having just lots of frequencies up around that yeah kind of 200 Hertz ish range um that make things sound boxes at the same time and it can also have this cool way of kind of splatting the attack a little bit so the attack of the kick drum just sounds a bit more pleasing a little bit less Pokey and then that into compression can be really cool so let's check out what this is doing to um to saturate the kick sound [Music] I really like that and I love this this Hollywood model in particular um I've spoken about this recently in you know eq'ing snare drum I think I use this uh in that video and I've used it on lots of mixes recently and I just really like how that sounds and then I'm following that up with the custom opto compressor so I yeah I don't know why but I just love the sound of optical compressors on kick drums they seem to do a really cool thing to the attack and this one um it's kind of replaced what I was using before which was the clang Helm mguc again a great plug-in it's just kind of easy Once you have this environment like the mix rack it just kind of makes sense to keep all of your plugins in there so it doesn't take very much I'm basically aiming for kind of Maximum three DB reduction maybe a tiny bit more uh High ratio kind of setting the speed to taste and this tone knob can be really cool for dialing in how much aggression you want on a Kick Drum in this case Lots so let's see what it sounds like without and then with [Music] and that is you know the piece in the puzzle that makes the kick EQ work really well because it just has a way of all of that attack that we dialed in in those kind of knocky areas and Slappy areas of the kick drum and now being focused into a really short little impulse at the front of the kick drum sound and it's just so satisfying on the ear in a way that kind of sounded a bit hard-edged and weird before so let's listen to how that kick drum sounds um in the context of the rest of the mix [Music] thank you alright so that's Kick Drum done um let's look at the snare drum so we're using the mid-tune drum in this one and it doesn't take much work to get the snare to sound really good and I kind of put that down to you know it's the whole chain really from the drummer the drum it's Matt's signature drum which I think sounds fantastic um we had the Evans heavyweight dry head on it which I think sounds really good was miked with the Neumann KMS 105 on top which for me is just yeah a god-like snare top mic thankfully that was shown to me by Pete miles from middle farm and I'm eternally grateful um that he discovered how great that sounds on snare and passed the info on because yeah what you're hearing is a raw snare top signal that I didn't do any processing to it on the way in that's just how great it sounds awesome is a sure beta 87a it's a handheld condenser a bit like that Neumann is supposed to be sounds really good on snow bottom it's what periphery sound guy um Alex Marquis used on snare bottom when I was playing live in the band and we always thought that sounded great so knowing that real world had one of those I thought it would be pretty cool to use that um so yeah I mean the raw snare again remember this is going through the EQ and parallel compression on the drum bus but raw as far as I'm concerned snare sounds like this [Music] and to me it's just it's got such a lovely weight to the attack without being muddy the snare wires sound crisp there's some overtones in life to it but not something which is gonna you know No One's Gonna complain about Saint Angus now at the same time the attack doesn't have you know if you see my snare eqing video it doesn't really have any of the problem areas sticking out to a huge extent like there's not a kind of placky or Ticky kind of attack like you might get from Dynamic mics and it's pretty clear as well that said it's not a final sound so let's look at what I thought would be good to do to the snare mites to get this to work while in the mix so the first thing just looking at the snare top was I chose to saturate it a little bit and I use this Neve style preamp emulation within the Slate virtual mix rack letting that go into the red on the hits and that's just going to trim a little bit of transient off this is something which I did on the mix and partly just to help control the levels a little bit to make sure that any variations in hit intensity are being smoothed out a little bit but also because I just like how that sounds and it doesn't take a huge amount on this microphone again if it was a dynamic mic you might find you want to be a bit more heavy-handed but without [Music] but with it [Music] and then let's see EQ wise let's let's just do the thing which I did in that video where I put uh transient designer on the snare bus and turn this the sustain all the way down so that we can just hear um just the attack portion and see how that might be getting affected um let's also find a section where there's quite a few snares being hit the support to do if this wasn't for metal like if this was or if this was like a drum video or something I might not see the need to do anything to that signal but in order to just make it sound a bit more like a contemporary metal thing I think it does make sense to kind of nip out of this kind of 550 Hertz area so I'll boost it so you can see really what I'm what I'm going for there but like I say I don't see the need to cut anything like higher up it's just such a balanced sound and look if anybody watching this works at Norman or knows somebody that does please make a short version of this microphone for use on snare top I will yell about it from mountaintops to get that to be a thing please make it a thing I'll certainly at least buy one anyway um yeah just that's all that really kind of sticks out is needing to be done let's check out the snare bottom and I'm just gonna bypass this transient designer and stick back on again so with nothing [Music] foreign there is a bit of a kind of it's just easier to show you but there's this kind of um it's like somewhere between like an o and a u sound like an orc or or or kind of sound foreign [Music] and then I feel like it could just have a little bit more brightness to it one of the things with the condenser is you get a nice Airy top but you don't get a presence bump in the same way that you get from using a dynamic mic so maybe just somewhere around five six K kind of thing that's interesting so that setting is what I had on the record and that's what's come to mind now so apparently my taste has shifted downwards but um I can't imagine that's going to make a huge difference [Music] [Music] again just sounds so good all right so that snap top and bottom with some kind of preliminary stuff done to them and that's feeding through to a snare bus um so a bit like with the kick drum I feel like putting a gate on there is going to help stay kind of true to the original the gate would have been there to control bleed but yeah um in this case it's just going to change the envelope for the drum a little bit this is a preset I've been using for wait for it four years since 2019 um no hold time no attack time look ahead on but no millisecond styled in that's weird but I'm not going to change it now and release time set to 184 milliseconds now importantly the range is only set to 13 DB and the ratio is pretty low 1.72 to 1. I've got the side chain cutting off a bit of top and bottom end this is really to help deal with crosstalk from other instruments so this is a setting I would use on a live drum kit but um it just seems to work really well here as well and then dialing in the ratio so that everything that's a heart hit is above the knee and then Ghost Notes will be falling below that and that's actually helpful because bring them down in volume means that once the kick goes through parallel compression you know that there is still some difference between the hard hits and the soft hits which especially the way I used to do it before if I didn't have the gate on this the parallel compression chain would make the hard hits and the ghost notes almost equal in volume so having the gate kind of exaggerate the difference helps here [Music] cool this you can just hear the gate kind of cutting off a bit of the tail of the drum there next up let's load up any Hue and I'm not going to look at it for too long it's gone it's gone I'm now going to EQ from scratch on the snare bus so let's use the transient designer thing again sustain on zero and let's evaluate the various ranges of the drum [Music] is that sounding pretty good to kind of suppress the mids in a way that's kind of making that sound a bit more Woody in a way I mean it's a metal drum I'm not saying it's making it sound like a wood drum but just kind of like it's got this kind of satisfying hollowness to it I guess um I'm thinking and I know that the low fundamental of this snare just kind of sticking out a little bit too much for me so I'm probably going to want to nip that back and it's clearly not quite bright enough yet so it's about finding a good spot on the uh in the high end to boost and lift up some some brightness [Music] I'm going to turn the transient designer off at this point cool I brought in the low-pass filter just to tame a little bit of the extreme high end um and then yeah just nipping back that that fundamental tone a little bit it's just allowing the low end to still be there but not have too much of like a naughty quality to it sounding about right um let's bring in some processing now you'll see me talking about these three plugins in that snare video if you saw it if you haven't check out the link below um very standard settings for me here just the default settings on the FG 401 compressor four to one ratio um second slowest attack second fastest release and I'm just pulling down the threshold until I'm getting a healthy amount of reduction around 10 DB on the hard hits and then I'm using the makeup game to compensate so that's what this sounds like I'll bypass these [Music] it's actually not quite hitting 10 DBS but still a healthy amount at around seven or eight DBS and then here we've got the brilliant custom series lift the present control there as I mentioned in the other video seems to be doing something around four and a half K an area which I typically don't tend to touch on other eqs and this just yeah I love doing it on this this really helps get the snare to sound right in the context of the mix and then finally some saturation which I'm using to trim transient off the drum and make it sound right in the mix without it being too pointy so um I'm going to first of all dial in the saturation and then maybe we're going to take a listen in the mix as I work that high lift band there [Music] so in contexts yeah that's sounding really good like that I should also just say that during the early revisions getting the drum sound in the mix I had quite a lot of back and forth with Matt the drummer who felt like he really wanted to hear that Rim shot sounded like Rim shots was what he was saying like he didn't want the snare drum to become something like what you hear on a lot of modern Productions which is kind of a very fat almost kind of pillowy attack um you know he wanted it to sound more like it sounds when you sit behind the kit and hit the drum and you've got like that kind of stick attack coming through so I think that's a little bit where this kind of presence lift thing came from and also maybe not scooping out too much of the mids on the snare drum either if you watch my other video you know I was talking about how you can scoop a lot of kind of 900 or 1K out of a snare drum and it sounds really kind of modern it sounds a lot like some really popular samples that you find out that have been around for a while um but it does tend to kind of scoop some character away like it kind of makes drums sound quite similar and also I think it has this effect if you kind of get rid of bit of that kind of normal organic real sound of a stick hitting a snare drum so you'll notice I didn't kind of go crazy with that and I think that you know this band here he ended up kind of way around there when we did the record I think maybe the queuing I've done now is slightly different anyway going into it but um there was quite a lot of it that was required to make that come through in the mix and I really do think that doing this in the mix is important because hearing that snare drum soloed before we move to this segment I was starting to feel like this wasn't very necessary at all I thought I had quite a bright snare drum sound um yet once Hearing in the mix I would turn this up much louder than I would have done if I hadn't so if we listen to the snare in isolation [Music] that's not as pleasant sounding to me as it was before it's got this kind of sandpaperiness to it that works really well in the context of the mix [Music] remember that this is just a close mic that we're dealing with here there's a lot of sound that's coming from the overheads and from the room and that's filling out a lot of the mid-range and the punch and the carry of the drum so in this mixed style at least the way that I mix This Record it makes sense that I can push those upper mid frequencies on the on the snare close my quite a lot and yeah the end result doesn't sound really fake because we're incorporating a lot of kind of natural sound from the other elements so there's only really one other thing which I did here which was to um put some Reverb on the snare top so I I tend to like to send Reverb now from the top only I don't really like to get the bottom mic involved in that and I'd like to do it if I can before I've brightened up the signal too much so actually what I've done on this album mix was I duplicated the snare top mic onto a new channel with no processing on it no gate no nothing so it's got all the symbol bleed in there um and I put a Reverb directly on that set completely wet so it's almost like a kind of another room Channel kind of sound um but because I haven't put lots of brightness into the snare before sending it to the Reverb it makes it sound just more yeah just better to me it doesn't have any kind of zingy fizziness to it so here I felt like since all are done on the top was this mid cut I thought maybe you know that's that's fine I'll send it from there but I didn't send it From The Snare bus itself so so this is what it sounds like if I were to hit play on that with the Reverb on and again this is a Reverb I've spoken about a couple of other places and people have asked it's based on a preset in chroma verb called 80s drums pretty sure I've modified it a little bit but I don't know you tell me you look at the the settings there it's a bit of um top end cut and this I think all of this kind of damping EQ is part of the preset and then I'm cutting low end so I'm using this kind of very broad lookup at about 200 Hertz plus an additional um kind of bell cut around 200 Hertz as well just to take any mod out of it sound it's not Airy but it's it's kind of tubular and not muddy sounding foreign [Music] like how that sounds all right snare drum done okay let's look at Toms so three Toms on this kit they're all fairly low tuned coated heads Evans uv2s mic'd with my Josephson es-22 mics I will have an EQ on each Tom Plus on the bus all I have is a limiter so I'm using that to take any Peaks that are kind of overs when he's hitting the floor times particularly hard off and also to just kind of globally boost the level up after that so this is good old waves L1 one of the most basic limiters there is all right so let's find a spot where all three Toms are being hit let's take one of these uh fills in the intro riff so I think that's one there [Music] solo off the toms take the limiter off I've also got the Reverb sent by bus there as well so um let's look at the programming so levels wise again look I'm not programming the hardest hits ever that's 100 ish at the hardest second on each a bit softer so they sound kind of fluttery instead of really rigid as you hear those kind of fast fills there [Music] so let's check out the rack Tom and actually let's do that transient designer thing again I do use this on the kick as well on the toms as well to help figure out what's going on with the the sound during that initial impact I found it really useful and something else which you can do which I probably should have mentioned in that video is use it to help compare your sounds to others so if there's a processed One-Shot sample that you've got in your collection that you didn't make and you want to be able to capture a bit of that vibe in a snare track that you have or kick track whatever it is then I find it can be more useful to compare and dial in by ear without the sustain bothering you because it's unlikely you're going to have exactly the same sort of sound but the same you know tune the same with the same overtones so if you start chasing making that stuff sounding the same um you'll frequently miss the point which is if you can get the stuff in the attack portion to sound right you'll probably get a lot of that vibe um of that sample in in your own sound while it's still having its own kind of unique character in its overtones and sustain so anyway that's an aside let's use this it's probably not going to be super effective because of how much sustain is on a Tom versus a snare you're probably going to hear some sustain but all the same it's going to help us get our hearing on what's going on attack wise so I'm hearing this kind of like kind of Flappy character to the attack so I'm thinking there's probably yeah around kind of 1K plus or minus a bit an area that I could cut and then also there's this kind of wheezing character to the mid-range which are the overtones of the the Tom which for some styles of music are totally acceptable and probably on the record I left more of that in than I might otherwise again just kind of going for that organic drum sound but I think for this mix I'm going to try and scoop the Tom out a little bit more by the time I've done those two moves we're gonna see how how balanced the top and bottom end of the Tom sounds because we've got the the note of the Tom at the bottom and then we've got the the kind of the attack in the kind of higher up than the flappiness that I don't like you know the kind of more Airy um plastic kind of Slappy character of the of the Tom which I'm going to want to enhance a bit we'll see how that's balancing between those two and hopefully end up with the final EQ sound that sounds balanced so I like the character of the drum but that like the note is definitely sticking out a bit too much so first of all I'll see if I can just kind of use a high pass filter to detain that foreign unless I've kind of really cut all the low end out so I think it might be a case of kind of finding the area where the note is and then using a bit of a cut but also a bit of a dynamic cut just to keep that note in check as it were so it doesn't kind of have too much of like a bloom to it but it's still quite present that sounded pretty good to me let's check out floor tom Fulton one it's the same kind of thing I'll put the the transient designer on so do you remember what I was saying about the kick drum where I was talking about the area directly above the fundamental having this very muddying effect on the sound of the kick drum and wanting to cut that out I feel very similarly about floor toms and this is a clear example even on the graph you can see there's kind of a mound and where the note of the drum is and then there's another bit that's almost as big directly above it and that stuff is really cloudy in the clarity of the floor tom so let's get in there and cut that first so as you can see I'm playing with the Q value and the depth of that cut to try and get the kind of shape that I want um and then yeah again a bit of a flappy attack let's see if there's anything we can take out a bit higher but this is definitely way too dark and boogly sounding at the moment [Music] cool that's pretty good float on two foreign as you can see that first overtone There is almost louder than the fundamentals so by controlling that I think we're going to add a lot of clarity to the sound of this drum [Music] there's still a kind of Wheezy character and again slightly Flappy character to the attack as well maybe we don't need to worry too much about that if we can just bring out a better sounding attack actually I think it was better with a bit of a bit of cutting around there so let's listen to the three Toms together [Music] I feel like float on one perhaps could use a little bit more brightness or maybe it's maybe it's the upper mid range that's sticking out a bit too much on it cool I always think it's worth checking all the Thomas being played together just to make sure that the attack is kind of sound inconsistent between all of them and that seems to be I'd say that's pretty good I generally don't do any kind of compression on the on the toms usually that's a bleed thing like it's just going to bring up the bleed too much but I also just generally don't think it needs that um typically if you try and exaggerate the attack then they end up sounding really thin and if you use like a fast attack on a compressor then you just make them sound really kind of bloated sounding some styles of music that's great but yeah just leaving them raw like that tends to work for me most of the time but I am going to stick this limiter on that's going to make it a lot louder so actually let's go back to to zero and I'll just bring that in and then show you how I'm getting that level in the mix and we don't want to hear it distorting too much on those low notes a little bit's fine little bit's just a little bit of saturation but I wouldn't want to go much harder than that there [Music] and then that in context that's cool and then some verb on there same Reverb that I'm using for the snare [Music] just looking for kind of heavy Tom moments just to check that eq's working [Music] well that pre-delay on the Reverb sounds pretty crazy in isolation on that so um maybe if I were mixing and I noticed that then my thought would be to automate down the Reverb during that section um just because it's being played enough that you probably don't need the Reverb and yeah it's just kind of got a strange character to it um when it's being played like that [Music] [Applause] all right so that's uh kick snare and toms there's not too much more to do really um the rest of the mix is very basic so the symbols of bust the hats the spots and the overheads together to a bus and all I have going on is a high pass I'm cutting a bit of this kind of harsh upper mid-range lower treble area around 6K so I'll show you what that sounds like [Music] [Music] just find it softens the sound of the symbols a little bit in a pleasant way I don't really like when they're too Brash in that area plus that's going into that EQ that's on my drum bus with the five and a half K boost so um it makes sense this might actually be kind of compensating a little bit for that but um yeah that's pretty much all I feel like the overheads need really in terms of EQ um I'm doing some quite heavy compression so um the classic Mode on fabfilter Pro C2 with a very fast attack and kind of yeah fairly fast release ratio of around five I mean none of this is super specific but basically what I'm trying to do is really squash the overheads but then I'm only blending in this compression effect at about 40 mix so there's still a lot of the dry sound and that's just going to make sure that you can hear all the lower Dynamic stuff or the quieter symbols that are being played and it also adds to the excitement and makes the shells sound a little bit more lively as well which adds together with these close mic sounds that we've been getting to get um yeah just this kind of more organic picture of the kit foreign foreign which I like to use a lot this is followed up by soothe I actually have a preset if you have soothed 2 will be in in the menu as default called nollie symbol smooth I still use that all the time I think maybe the default preset has the depth knob turned up a bit higher but I tend to use it a bit a bit more conservatively now and what soothe does is it dynamically suppresses the overtones like harshness in the symbols whereas before it was pretty common for me and other people to go and like manually notch certain frequencies and the symbols that were ringing through really loudly with this it's just does all of that for you and you don't need to think about it so it makes the symbols just sound that bit more kind of final and Polished basically [Music] if I use the Delta button that'll show you what it's taking out it will show you the difference and you'll be able to hear what it's doing [Music] [Music] it's quite subtle but I just I just love it so much it's so good so that's the symbols bus um and then finally so I decided not to use the mono room I didn't use it on the record um and I decided not to use it here it's a cool sound I'll show you what it sounds like and you know if you saw the walkthrough video I explained that Mike's just in front of the kick drum it's mostly trying to get some sound off the resonant side of the kick but it's just not something which I find myself reaching for in this mix what I am all about is the sound of the room mics as I mentioned before what I've done is raise the level of the snare and cut a little bit of level of the kick in the room mics and this is a sum of both sets of stereo room lights which are in a very similar position up on the mezzanine behind the kit so we've got a stereo pair of c414s and a stereo aea ribbon mic in the middle and I love how both of these two sound together you've got the Splash and brightness off the condensers and then you have this really solid meaty kind of sounding Center picture of the kit and it's just so good at rejecting symbols I love these literally rejecting symbols but just the sound of that ribbon mic so naturally feels like the symbols have been brought down in level so um all I really needed to do to this was kind of mess with the transient designer to bring up some sustain and cut some attack I like using these instead of compressors Now by these I mean transient designers just because it's a bit more transparent you can preserve a bit more of the Natural Balance of the kit so you know the snare drum still cuts through in a way that once you start compressing it just completely disappears you know you've got you sound amazing and gloopy and cool and big and explosive but the symbols become as just as loud as the snare drum and that makes it a far less usable channel in the mix for me so um without it sounds like this [Music] something else which I like to do is send a bit of that to a Reverb as well just to make it sound a bit even bigger and kind of gloopier and more Lush so I've got a Reverb sand on there all right and then it's just a question of finding a good level of that in the mix so here's the drum mix without foreign [Music] that's basically it that's the drum mix very heavily modeled off the sound of the actual record and as you can see it's pretty light on processing I suppose the kick is probably the most sculpted and changed sound out of the kit but for the most part it's just about enhancing the good elements and just cutting a bit of unwanted overtone from the close mics and that's just about it really so yeah that's the drum mix I think probably the only bit of the drum mix which I had to keep from the original was Matt yelling two three four when doing the stick clicks it's just uh yeah they needed to remain in order to keep the song sounding right and that I did actually use the front of kick um so the mono room mic was the one that I I chose to use to that was an overdub obviously on the record um as you can hear there's no symbol overhanging it but um yeah that that was the mic that I chose to use for that so [Music] drums done all right let's take a look at some of the other elements so next down the list is Bass right so base there's a bit of an elephant in the room as far as I'm concerned with this so yeah I designed a signature pedal with dark glass called the atom which I think is awesome I recently used it to play on stage with Sith which was an amazing experience I just had playing with them on stage at the arc tangent Festival and I stand by I think it's an awesome product it would have only made sense for me to use it on this record that would have been the most sensible thing in the world and yeah I didn't as it happened I recorded the bass over quite a long period of time I was recording Direct um and I wanted just consistency and I thought I'd decide on the tone later in the process so I was monitoring using uh neural's Parallax plugin which many people will know in the production World um as being an incredible sounding uh all in one kind of solution for grindy bass tone and to be honest it just sounded so good and became such a part of the sound you know just sending my my bounces to the band of my bass tracks for them to um approve everyone commented on how great it sounded and it just became the thing which I used on the mix so yeah I've I kind of feel weird about the fact that I didn't use that dark glass pedal which I designed fairly close to working on this album really would have been the perfect outing for it but I just I was just so happy with the Parallax sound that that's what I stuck with so um yeah Parallax what you've got here is my base Di [Music] y you can hear all of my uh my raw takes here foreign [Music] so I should point out you know this is a really this is an uncompressed Raw base Di and I just want to make a point which is if you're tracking a bassist or if you are a bassist you should be aiming for the most consistency that you can possibly have for Your Bass track to sound Audible and consistent and cool in the mix um if you look at something like this if you look at the waveforms when I'm on one note they are really consistent in level and shape and that shape is showing the release of the the pick on the string obviously the first hit I must have hit a little bit emphatically to start with um but you can see that you know just the shape if you look at like a group like I don't know over here wherever you see like a slightly thicker kind of Arrow shape that's the pick attack and you can see that it just looks really nice and consistent and that's something which I really you know I love to be able to see the DI when I'm tracking because I'm looking for that consistency because it means that I'm not going to have to use compression to get consistency in the sound and I've said consistency a load of times in this sentence but it really is key that's like your role as a bassist is to support the low end of the mix and bind with the guitars in a way that makes more than a sum of the parts where both the guitars and the bass are enhanced by one another and together they create this huge wall of sound that dominates the mix without swamping everything and I just can't stress enough how much having a consistent performance so even sounding picking with a similar amount of low end content in every note In The Raw di just can't stress how much that does to make that part of your life easier so yeah that's just a little aside on on base production [Music] um let's look at what I did to it now as consistently as I tried to play different strings are going to have quite different volumes so if you're picking one strength on say the fourth string you move to the fifth it's quite normal to see a big change in amplitude so um compressor is going to help with that and it's also going to enhance the overtones so instead of having to use loads of distortion to character get that sound um to make the harmonic sound stable so that when you put that next to the guitars which are Super compressed um the bass stays audible all the time all the overtones and harmonics of the bass sound audible all the time instead of distorting doing some heavy compression on the DI will really help with that we're still going to distort as well but this just means we don't have to distort as much so Parallax I just think Parallax is so good I'm fully compressing the low band um below 170 Hertz here I'm not distorting like crazy um and I'm definitely controlling the mid-range so it's not super loud um but yeah this is just such a great sound and I'm using this with an IR which I made it's an IR which I can't share because I made it for the dark glass pedal um it's uh yeah it's a blend of a few different base cabs that and a guitar cap that I captured and yeah it's a big part of the sound of the pedal it's a big part of the sound of of um this particular tone but um you know if you find any good IR for bass you'll probably be able to get good results with this with the settings here next up and I'm just showing you what I did like I don't have the best memory of every move that I made or why but we can take a little look it looks like I'm boosting a little bit of 1.5 K which is funny considering that I cut it on one of the graphic use EQ Sliders in parallax just is what it is um and it also looks like I'm boosting oh and usually I'm boosting about 120 hertz there foreign I do find that range kind of 1K to one and a half K just so important for modern bass guitar just to get those really quite kind of to describe them I mean it is the Clank of the bass but specifically when they're stretched out and overtone like that he's just a it's this amazing sound that's I think is very much what Meshuggah were referring to when they said they wanted their bass guitar to sound like an oil tanker being dragged across Rubble or whatever it was that they said which I think is a very apt description for modern bass tone um so in addition to those EQ moves I am also compressing a little bit with this channel so there's also a little bit of compression going on and the expander is left on on this preset as well although the threshold is set pretty low three to six DBS of gain reduction there next up we've got two instances of fabfilter pro Q3 so let's see what I was doing so on the first one here I'm boosting some 900 that can be a cool move okay so good for that kind of honky character in the mix it looks like I brightened up a little bit with an extra bit of five and a bit K and then I'm kind of cutting where I was boosting on the SSL so that doesn't make much sense but I'm using a dynamic band there and also boosting a bit lower down so it looks like I'm kind of revoicing the low end a little bit here really subtle stuff though to be honest and then it looks like I'm doing a bit more of the same here for whatever reason and that I'm pretty sure should just be deleted it looks like I'm yeah kind of doing a dynamic cut and boost at the same time around 120 and um a shelving cut at about 285. now as I mentioned when doing the P4 mix walk through you know in in the real In the Heat of battle in mixing when you're dealing with um also client revisions and stuff sometimes it makes sense to be doing things in a way where they can easily be reversed like you know maybe if someone on the band said they wanted a little bit more like kind of thickness rather than low end on the base maybe that's why I brought in this second EQ here and boosted around there but wanted to control it with a dynamic band so it didn't get too out of control and then maybe I also felt like that was balancing things in general too far towards the low end so I introduced this low shelf cut I don't know if that's the reason but you know it's easy for things to end up looking quite complicated um when you come back and dissect them after the fact but instead of integrating all of these things into a single set of EQ moves um you can sometimes make sense to have them in separate stages so it's easy to to be able to go back through when you're in the middle of the process and bypass certain things to see if you think they're better or not rather than it being just a fraction of one particular EQ setting so that's my excuse anyway and then finally I had track spacer on sidechained to the kick drum but basically I'm using it to duck a little bit I've only got the ratio set to 11 and a half percent uh it's ducking below 80 Hertz down to 20 Hertz based on where the kick drum hits so let's see what that sounds like foreign I think depending on your monitoring system that could be quite hard to hear it is hard to hear it's kind of like it's just preventing the Bass from building up too much basically and especially you know going from a section like these big ringing out notes in the chorus where you want the low end to carry and be solid um straight into something where there's more of like a kind of heavy double kick presence where you don't want the low end of the mix to get really crazy I think it can be really useful to employ something like trackspacer or a multi-band compressor with a sidechain input something like that I think track spacer is brilliant though so that rounds out the bass processing foreign [Music] carried away though it's quite satisfying just to hear those tones together so let's look at the Rhythm guitars I'm using what I was sent by Misha and I don't know the full story behind these tracks I know that what he sent me were different guitar tracks for different songs um this bus is called neural guitars but that's actually just a hangover from a previous session where we had one set of guitars that were all live preamps and one that were all neural um DSP generated tones and um we went with the new all the SP tones on that one in this case it appears as a bit of a mix because these top two are labeled guitar one and L and 2R invective so those would have been reamped through his PV invective amp um this one here Omega Gojira my guess is that's going to be the neural Omega app with the octava from kajira thank you [Music] so that seems right to me [Music] you know going into this record really high up my priority list philosophy wise was to lean heavily into the tones that the band members liked and created and I think these are cool guitar tones and I I mean they're not necessarily toads that I would have dialed in myself or could have dialed in myself but the most important thing to me was that it's what Misha loved when he was playing these Rhythm tracks and the rest of the band too when they were there um and then in the mix I'm just trying to lean into those positive qualities of the tones that they liked rather than trying to construct something from scratch and you know kind of control freak everyone to death with creating every tone and kind of taking that stuff out of that out of their hands so that goes also for making sure the snare Rim shots sound like Rim shots like I mentioned before with the drums or you know that being Matt's preference or when we get to the vocals that the vocals have the qualities that Spencer looks for in his own voice or the lead guitars sound like the lead guitarist wanted them to sound so um bear that in mind with this you know I think it's a really healthy perspective to carry into any creative work actually where you're collaborating with with other people is to allow their voice to come through as much as possible and just lean into the positive qualities of it because that way you'll get something unique for you and unique to them and that's something which I think both you as a mixer will come back and cherish in the in the future and that the artist for sure is really going to appreciate when they listen back across their music and don't feel like it sounds differently to how they would have wanted it to sound or that they don't hear their own unique character in there or something like that so yeah a bit of a bit of a side track there but I do think it's important to to think about these things even if you're only coming in as a mixer it can be really nice to talk to the band get a Vibe for how things were recorded and how they got the tones that they wanted and to think about maintaining those in the mix so yeah we've got the first uh pair of guitars which have reamped to the invective as kind of the core Rhythm sound we've got some octave guitar sounds which are really just there to thicken the main tone and then down here we've got Omega tracks again that could well have been reamped because Misha has an actual Omega granifier amp so that might not be the neural it might be his actual amp I don't know but the whole record was like this a big mix of different amps and different plugins and every song is different and different sections might lean more on one than another and that's something I had nothing to do with but I was very happy to just work with in the context of the mix you'll also notice a few points where there's automated moves on what I've been sent volume moves um which again I'm totally up for embracing and not trying to say I have to recreate all of that myself so for example before the really Genty section when the intro riff comes back you can see that that one guitar there gets bumped up hugely in volume that's both because we're going from a section that has six guitars playing two or six tracks to two uh but it's also to give it that effect of like there's a really heavy bus compressor that's just releasing at that point which is something it's a character that you hear for example in the old bulb demos he used to mix into really heavy um Master compression I'm talking really early days kind of stuff and it always gave a Cool vibe to what he was doing even if it was a little bit over the top so now for me that's like a little nod to the sound of periphery and bold music as it first came out so I really like that and that's something which I carry forward into other mixes as well is like when you have those moments don't be afraid to make the guitar really jump up in volume so it sounds like heavy compression lifting and then slamming back in again on the next impact [Music] yeah and that is that is gent guys that is gent that sound where you're really hearing the fifth in the power chord kind of more than the root almost that's that's for me what gent is and it was clear that Misha was really going for that on that section like that sorry this I'm going on such a diatribe here but that the fifth yeah that's gent okay cool um let's uh let's get into what I actually did to these guitars so they're all just at Unity left with the levels that he sent me um I'm using a gain plug-in yeah just to trim back because these are all pretty hot tracks um before any processing then I'm using our ggdzilla software this is the setting that Misha used when he was tracking and seems to be a sound that he really likes so again instead of me coming in and you know changing everything up I thought it's cool to work with his sound I did try and we tried we tried using Cali and some other impulses Cali being a gtt plugin um massive Boogie cab Tim um and we in the end decided although there were good sounding options that it was better just to run with the one that sounded like Misha and how he intended it to so um you can see the settings there you could copy them if you want I've got the master EQ on if I were to take off any of the pricing that comes afterwards the guitars still sound very much in the same vein [Music] foreign [Music] look at what comes afterwards so next up is an EQ this is also something which I got from Misha this is the EQ curve that he liked when he was mixing so I would just kept that in place [Music] kind of brightening and taming a couple of resonant frequencies in the mids that's a cool sounding EQ next up we've got fabfilter Pro MB which I'm using as a multi-band compressor to compress the Palm mutes actually it looks like it's doing more than just the Palm views but keeping the low ends very flat then [Music] you can see it's kicking in just on the on the chugs and we've got a little bit of stereo widening it's a tiny bit finally a little bit of eqs and I've got the feeling that this was also something which Misha had maybe I've tweaked these and maybe I tweaked the pro Q3 a little bit but again I just very much wanted to roll with what he was comfortable with because it wouldn't necessarily occur to me to boost 200 on guitar um but seemed to be what he wanted and it sounds cool [Music] so that's guitar tone and if I were to put that with the bass let me just go back to the base for a second to show you how much that 900 Hertz is doing on the bass I mean 901k it's all kind of in that area just does so much to bring the base forwards and make it sound so just hard I don't know how to describe it it's so like so clangy and an amazing sounding cool let's look at some of the guitar layers so all of these tracks up here didn't have any cab models printed into them we did that deliberately or Misha did that deliberately so that if we did want to mess with the cab sound we could however for the layers I told them just to go ahead and print in the cab sounds he was using and by layers I mean lower gain stuff ambient effective stuff leads um so that's what we've got here [Music] [Applause] [Music] nope that's also got Ambience printed into it that's not something I'm adding I'm literally just got an EQ on there and I'm trimming the gain and I like that again I like to work with that kind of thing where you know the artist has decided How It Should sound and it's just my job to mix it I'm not trying to engineer something fresh so that was the solo I happened to click on but I think we'll find the same is going on on everything yeah it's just eqs if anything actually a bunch of these don't have anything on them ambient guitars one washy lead jazz guitar no EQ on any of them it's literally just level [Applause] all right since it's in this group of guitars let's just talk briefly about the Jazz break this is very much in that list of things which I did very little to the Jazz drums came from Misha with some pretty crazy kind of glitching effects on them he created this I'm pretty sure with the ggd Benny greb Library [Music] those are those glitch effects so it looks like I treated it with the good old corniff TalkBack limiter hmm [Music] which it seems I'm using more for the tone than for the compression because the compression's off but it does have quite a specific sound to it so yeah that's on there and that's it as far as the bass goes he sent me some programmed bass I think [Music] just controlling the low end with a bit of dynamic EQ and compressing with some fairly light very new style compression here from mjuc [Music] [Music] I'd have to ask him but I'm fairly sure that's got some room impulse on it either from the Zilla program or from the ggd gold stack um cloud plugin those are the two we've done that have Ambience and that sounds like a like an actual Cab in a room Ambience rather than a Reverb [Music] so we've got guitar bass uh drums there's the piano got a limiter on there I think just when it gets a bit louder in the solo it's not doing anything currently cutting some mids and trimming some gain [Music] it's a great name to these files actually that I got sent from Misha piano totally played by Misha no doubt about that then and then the sax solar which came from Jurgen monkebe from Shining and Emperor and Yayo yasis Etc it just sounds amazing I'll show you the raw sax sound we got sent [Music] he's a really good engineer so I'm sure he put loads of stuff on there you can see from the you know the way it kicks in at the start there's some just looking at the waveform I mean you can see there's some pretty heavy compression on there which I found maybe a little bit distracting so I decided to use spiff which I just love I love this plugin so much for cutting transient stuff in a way that sounds really smooth and natural so this is just smoothing out those impacts if I show you without [Music] well that's with this is without [Music] I love that plug-in and then I added a bit more Reverb [Music] [Applause] I really love this Reverb too I love how simple it is I find myself reaching for this quite a lot if I just want a nice ambient enveloping sounding Reverb the sound toys a little plate and that's all of the elements no it's not it's not all of the elements of the Jazz the Jazz break but nearly there's some break beat drum [Music] I see him analog synth I'm not entirely sure and the breakbeat stuff has some EQ on it all right that's an aside for the Jazz break we are into the synth tracks let's check out what's going on there so for the most part their impacts during this track so record things like foreign track name very catchy Melody so that's something you know cool programming that we've just done to support the guitar lick that's in the Rhythm guitars [Music] kind of sounds like a string meets organ kind of vibe [Music] I don't know how he made that sound but it's in there and a lot of this stuff is just a question of finding a cool level for it where it sits into the mix well and yeah where it just does its job of reinforcing what's there without really sticking its neck out too far here I'm doing this move that I really love to do where I'm cutting some some mids on the mid Channel only and that's just what I call like Clarity in the mid-range for the rest of the mix because it's taking away from this kind of Muddy area 300 Hertz ish down the center of the mix where you've got the kick the bass the snare drum the vocal um so anything which you can do to kind of alleviate a bit of pressure in the Lomas there still allow it to remain on the sides where it's not fighting so much with those kind of lead instruments but just kind of you know give a bit of clarity to the center channel and I find to be a huge win so that's just on that bus and then beyond that the impact sample has nothing on at the piano we went through sub drop has nothing on it the end chords nothing nothing a bit of EQ on the break beat drums as we spoke about and nothing on the choir and nothing on the glitch break so apart from that it's all just as provided again not trying to do stuff that the band didn't want to know they like how they sound and unless there's something wrong with it I'm just gonna keep it as is and find a level that works in the mix alright so that brings us up to vocals let's have a look so I'm doing more processing on this but Spencer has provided me with quite heavily processed tracks here again he's a great vocalist he's a great engineer he didn't need to work from his raw sounds and I didn't need to do that either you know I could just take what he gave me and work with it a bit more to get it to work in my mix initially I tried not to compress it more because as you can see it's already a pretty compressed waveform but I found that there was a bit of extra compression necessary to make it sound right let's check out the raw vocal sound here on the main screens so there's a bit of like a kind of howling frequency in his voice like wait what is that this is the new me and what I found is I wanted to cut that with a dynamic cut kind of thing but at the same time it then made the voice sound a bit too kind of weirdly scooped so I came up with this move that I quite liked and I've used a lot since which is to do a kind of narrow cut sometimes Dynamic and then do a wide boost in a similar area so that the between the two things stay I don't know stay really musical sounding if I bypass those moves and then show you what it sounds like with them on this is the new man so many people because I find with vocals in particular once you try and over correct things like if you try and just completely wipe out stuff that you don't like it can quickly end up not sounding like a voice anymore or just sounding weirdly scooped when you put it into the mix so that was a move that worked really well for me on this and elsewhere in the record as well as I mean that is so subtle I can't imagine it's even really audible but that's boosting a tiny bit of air into the voice with um a bit of a dynamic cut happening at the same time so that's there and then using a vocal compression preset that I really like to use which is you know it's boosting the 10 DB of 8K in the side chain so it's kind of acting as a bit of a de-esser as well as a compressor so we've already got very compressed vocals doing this this way means that the assets don't get completely out of control it's like never wanted that next that plug-in spiff that I mentioned before again it's just really nice at rounding over some hard edges compression artifact artifacts and plosives hard consonants just makes things sound really nice and smooth just if I show you the Delta see you hear what's being removed everyone I just really like what that's doing to the vocal and then on the bus we've got some more EQ kind of doing similar things cutting a bit of mids um there's a narrow cut followed by a wide boost Dynamic cut and boost pairs another thing which I like doing like boosting an area but using a dynamic um band to also kind of cut when it's in action you kind of get back to Flat again but in this way that sounds more controlled as well as cutting a little bit of 2K a lot of this stuff I mean I couldn't replicate it exactly um you know for a second time it's just stuff which happened during the mix reacting I had a lot of back and forth with Spencer during this mixed process making sure that he was happy with his voice and getting it to sit in the mix just right so you know a lot of these things were specific to his feedback as well so this is what it sounds like with the EQ on the bus yeah this is the new man again not trying to completely change his voice but just make it sound a little bit smoother a little bit less kind of full of overtones and um but still sound very much like Spencer next we've got some stereo compression here I'm using I love this plug-in the purple audio mc77 is such a great sounding 1176 style compressor just got this really kind of goopy quality to it how to describe it it's really um great on anything you put it on it just makes everything sound really kind of congealed in a good way Japan and I've got this in Ms mode as well mid side and it probably makes more sense to hear it with the other vocals in place as well because the idea is that as backing vocals and doubles come in and out the overall volume doesn't change quite as much because of the fact that they're all going through a compressor together [Applause] now we'll see after the purple audio compressor we've got soothe which is so good at knocking out kind of unpleasant overtones and harshness in the voice very similarly to the kind of stuff which I like to do on symbols um I find it really cool to do that on one voice as well so far if I put the Delta on the time left for me get all the imperfection station when all the bad Chopstick and I don't know what to do with it I am I'm burning like wildfire so some of those examples there of on that word Wildfire for example having that compressor on the vocal burst is just controlling the whole thing ducking the main vocal a little bit as the size happen um it's just yeah for me it's good practice to have a compressor on the bus as well even if it's not doing a huge amount but I will say with the vocals something that Spencer felt really strongly about and that I thought was cool as he wanted when extra vocals came in for them to really jump out of the speakers um and I feel like you can hear that really nicely on several points on the record for example first verse in zagreus there's some very cool syncopated um words like on that line now pay for it I think it is where suddenly all of these extra voices come in really bumped up in volume because it's so tight and percussive it's just like really impressive rather than kind of taking you out of the moment same kind of thing going on here as well also he's called this main screens but obviously it's got clean vocals on it as well in the choruses this [Applause] um as you can hear there's definitely a bit of a sibilant quality to the voice so I found that it was necessary to use a de-esser as well I don't often use the s's but especially if I'm using spiff and that compression setting that's boosting a lot of hide in the side chain but it seemed like a good idea here I'm burning [Applause] yes so here I am using a little bit of that Revival plugin that I mentioned earlier um on The Voice just giving him a little bit more air up top [Applause] it's just a nice little bit of extra polish and that probably came from feedback from him or someone in the band for wanting just a little bit more air on top of his voice that's all of the vocal treatment there are these Ambience channels which he sent me so we've got you know just pure 100 wet Reverb and delays which do change throughout the track every song's got different treatment as well um and then so there's one of those for the for the main voice and one for the backings as well and I just sent it all through the same bus here with the compressor on it and everything so all the vocals together sound like well I'll show you in a second but what I will say is having the com the the reverbs and everything going through the compressor does give you a little bit of a ducking kind of sound where as the vocals are loud it's ducking the ambience and as they go quiet or cut out the ambience comes up in volume and that kind of interplay can be quite cool on vocals sometimes it's not suitable sometimes it's better to completely separate those things but here it didn't seem to be an issue Busters so I think that's it really there's just a couple of other things in this session which I haven't shown so there's a tiny little blob of Ambience here at the end that should probably be up here with the you know with the additional production because it's clearly some kind of reverse synth sound [Music] which leads into this um kind of blast beat outro thing that I think is just designed to be a bit of a shock to the system I do remember there was some kind of back and forth about the timing like when it should kick in there's no Tempo change in the song This is programmed at like 16th note triplets and it comes in at a really weird spot it's like not on a bar line um so all the Channel all the tracks are kind of shifted over and bless Joe Hamilton from ggd socks when he recreated um the drums for most of this he had to take that into account and shift it all so that it matched up with the uh the drums which yeah just not not on the uh on the grid at all where they start for this outro foreign okay I think that's it this has been pretty epic to go through uh it feels like this has been pretty long um but hopefully you guys have stayed interested especially for the first section where we're mainly talking about the drum sounds and you know I hope there's some stuff which might be applicable to your own mixes and Productions and I also hope they might give you some confidence to work with the sounds within the P5 Library without using the turbo functions although I'm really proud of the pre-processing that that does you know the turbo function within the plugin is using inbuilt processing inside contacts so it's a bit like a stock plug-in mix with quite limited number of plug-in inserts and frequency bands so there's only so much I can do with it but I felt like I got it to a pretty cool place however it's definitely more detail that you can go into if you route it out and do some mixing in them in your door as we did here especially for elements like the kick drum which had that quite complicated revoicing EQ thing going on um and yeah beyond that what can I say thanks very much for all the support if you've seen previous mixed tutorials of mine I hope that you still found some new stuff in there of of Interest I will say for me personally whenever I do show my work you know my workflow and my my mixed tips and my ideas for processing pretty much instantly that then means that the next thing I do I kind of want to try and find something new just so I've got something new to share and also to not be just reusing the same tricks every time so hopefully this is something that's gonna you know kick me into gear to find some new and interesting ways to to mix as well um but I think that's it thanks very much for staying with me through all of this I hope you've enjoyed and yeah until next time