Lessons

Lesson Info

Gating the Guitar and Bass

Now I'm going to go into kind of using we're going toa do a little bit more on this, but I guess it's the first song or the thirds on this song we spent the most time in as far as getting that telling to kind of blend together with the guitars were not going to spend too much time on it because I think I've showed that technique and people understand how they're going to get that done and how they're going to boost and cut too may things fit together, but then we're going to talk about gating based off of guitar or getting based off of kick which I use a lot less but to really deliver just tightness of lohan without things sticking out or poking out and weird areas which often times like we're dealing with a noisy amp yesterday and today and this will kind of show how we can get rid of that extra noise without going in and meticulously making cuts and strip silencing every peace and noise. So let's, listen to this. So the first problem already hearing is my kicks fighting so we're goin...

g to take care of that really fast use the s s l q again because that was easy some of a stem in a poll out three tv at one hundred and then we're not even going to boost the cake at this point because I didn't feel like it was I felt like we were overbearing on the low end at that point I hopefully everybody agrees with me but there was just too much long so we don't need to boost the kick at that point we just needed to control the base we need even more control than that so we'll move up higher wait a bunch of tracks yesterday so now we're much more teams just curious how many guitar tracks air going on there? Um when when you right now it's a it's a stereo stem but if I remember correctly we quad tracked guitars and then we had on a part like this we have leads come in but for the most of the song it's a constant four tracks which by a lot of my tracking standards is pretty modest sometimes I'll do six of the whole song um very rarely do I just do to want to have your mix but because I want everything to just I want overbearing is what I'm looking for generally in a heavy son no, I'm actually feeling like we're a little to lean on the lowland because the extra track missing so there are a little bit happier with that um so now we like that kind of fit we did a little bit of cutting a little bit of boosting listen one more time and see where we can complement the guitar is a little bit more I think one thing that doing other layers for us really lets things blend a lot better and we use the similar guitar amp sound on the bases we did on the actual guitar it's a little grittier and a little less move of a distortion but it really helped fit everything without needing a ton of e q we'll listen through that and then we'll start from that will start gating and trying to get a tighter base tone by using some dynamic this right here not that extreme but I like really using that high mid we're kind of focusing that disgusting grid out which gives just um almost a less modern more just really bad eighties thrash field to the guitars in the best way possible to me oh and that's completely as faras I think that's like an unmodified thing to dio if you guys were like modern metal usually is really smooth top end but I'm going to go with that just because I think that that sounds weird in them so I'm pretty going to try not to cuss right now I think it's cool so I'm going to find I'm gonna pull my same behind its out of the guitars that I just boosted in that base and let it really kind of dominate that area you guys with me on that it sounds like the bells of hell and that's kind of where I would like this song to go as the mixer, which is and that's the cool thing about doing a lot of the weird layers of bases. When we tracked this on, like, all I heard was really polished and tight and that's what I wanted and then is even three days ago when I prepped this mix and then once we started revamping stuff, I started seeing a different song in the cool thing is I wrote this song so I don't have to answer to anybody but that's, what I would do, I would be like, you know, what sick guys is let's just go out of the box and do something really disgusting and try and feel how the band would react to that in some bands would be like, this is cool in some bands would tell me that I'm a moron, but that's, I like this tone for this song, and obviously we don't have tracks for the entire song, but we're gonna listen through one more time and then start getting it, okay? So now a lot of times, people you can go through and if you're really I want to, you could be going in and you're just kind of editing all of this stuff out and going everybody knows how to do that, I think, or at least has a grass from yesterday, when we were talking about editing and sliding stuff together and you can manually cut noise out and I know that in the guitar course andrew away talked about strip silence right? And any talk about strip silence yes he did quite wanted to quite a bit of detail on that in particular like how to get the nuances of preserving the pick attack and preserving sustainable so yes, I'm going encourage people to watch that because I don't have a the kind of time to really talk about doing silencing that way I'm going to show you the easy dirty way to do it so now I'm going to just go to the basic pro tools gate that I was trying to use before and I've said ascend if you look right here just a send ten nothing and that's where I'm going to side chain my base off of and this is my rhythm guitar bus turn that on and then I set this to my son is my side chain input which is twenty seven twenty eight enable beside chain right now which was another one of my issues way so now when I mute guitars or when guitars aren't delivering signal we have them cutting on the breakdowns together on any stop points together which is for me I find most effective on based room are on breakdowns part of me you keep my leads muted so that I can show what's going on I mean my rhythm track if you guys remember before the way that part sounded before we get it, it was like this lots of white noise going on in the back and it doesn't sound tightened, finished? It just sounds like noise go back to me. This is the final kind of touching point on once you get your guitars in your base living together if that's what you want, you can get them together and you have them controlled almost as one separate entity. At that point you would. However, if you had a basal lower apart where guitars dropout and the bass keeps going, you would have to start to automate that. And you could do that by bypassing the gate automatic with automation. Or you could pull new tracks and have your lead based, so to speak continue on but this is to me and one of the best ways to control everything and have a very tight, cohesive image and that's really that's what I had to talk about. So if we have questions at all, there was a couple questions that came up kind of a recap because we have talked about this, but ok, I think maybe we need to touch on it again. So samson said regarding issues with the drums, this song doesn't really have any have a good example, but does base ever interfere with tom's in a mix and then ah, scallop had said outside of the base and kick would you also prevent frequency spectrum overlap with the other sonic elements in the track? They kind of are a little bit related. Yeah, I would do that this as faras the sonic elements overlapping I would do the same thing where I kind of started fitting in the kick as well as the guitar to interact with the base you'll find other areas mainly I find a lot of like male clean singing locals will start to overlap in similar frequencies and you'll do I think that techniques that covered as faras boosting and cutting e q to make stuff that is really for me that's the essential way to take care of situations like that in any sort of overlapping frequency wise um with tom's you could have an overlap but generally tom's air a lot smaller elements of a song. Then the bass guitar is so there's a part like a bridge that's very tom centric you can start to low passing high past your base or do some dynamic control with it same kind of the opposite of what we did with the gate but side chaining off the drums to make them duck with the tom's have the base duck in accordance to the times or you could also just kind of e q the base out of the way in that section but it would I would consider that situation very rare, and most music toe where the tom's air really something that's interfering with what you're doing in comparison to what the guitars and the kick in the base there that's, the relation I'm most concerned with. All right? All right, well, does anyone have any final questions? I noticed you're talking about getting the base and the guitars together. Let's, say, it's a really, really choppy breakdown. Do you have do the same with the kick and the guitars? It's kind of a I have done it before, usually what I'll do if we're talking guitars, they usually have a d I track to the guitar and that's going completely away from base at all, but I'll side chain my d I of my guitar to the guitar track to the amp, and I'll get the same kind of tightness and a lot more control, because it oftentimes you're not playing exactly what the kicks playing on guitar, so you could do that, but I usually ends up being too tight by the time I get the gate of the kick useful on the guitar ends up too tight, so you used the d I for the same thing, and I'm able to accomplish quite a bit with that, because they in the real world that would end it might be I prior to revamping so would have a very tight d I sound and I think you could definitely use that same technique for getting really choppy percussive guitar sounds by side chaining two year d I is that I think that's what you're talking about yeah, I think finn has a final question you just one last question from feynman who wants who asks I do we've used ax effects nam tweaks to get a dirty sound but can you re m through distortion pedal or something else to get that dirty son assuming that's all you have access to so obviously not everybody has an expect what else can they use to get the gritty, grainy part of the base tone? I would say that worst sounding distortion pedal you confined in your closet or whatever would probably get pretty close to that sound that we're going forward this because so much of that dirty sound that I want is just high end I'll bet with like a medal zone pedal or a uh digit tech metal master just something really just something very junior high sounding would really deliver I've never done it but I'll probably try it when I get home go to the apple valley high battle the bands and take some deal show up to about a man steal kids distortion pedal and I'll bet that would really help get you that disgusting! Ready high end!