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Lesson Info

Match EQ Trick & Finishing Touches

So right now I just mentioned him and I think he's watching so this is something my assistant justin has really push down me and he thinks it's the coolest thing in the world and I wanted to cover it because it is it's pretty sweet and the computer can we pull up pro tools on that computer behind me there we go so what I'm doing now is I've analyzed the fact that this base could be better I have this track right here it's okay it's not fantastic when I'm going to do is I'm going to show you guys away to take if you have if you're working on a record and you get a bass track like this and the riffs easy enough for you to figure out but the tone is not all there there's a way using certain mastering accuse tio capture the curve in the field of a completely different tone and apply it to the tone that you have to clone the tone so to speak I haven't tried it with this exact track but we're going to do and we're going to see how close we can get I have a base set appear to let me of around...

the microphone tio it um with a tone that I like in a base that I like and we will uh it's coming in so I think everybody agrees that's better than what I'm dealing with right now I hope um so what I'm going to do is I'm going to find a rift that's easy to play the whole song is easy to play but exceptionally easy to play I find that slow part right wait riff starts with with volume in the rift starts with bombing so the riff some like I think that's it at someone give it a go and hope that that is indeed what the riff is playing so record myself pointing to the part we already have and generally this should be enough for what I'm trying to dio um you can do this in logic it's really easy the woman to do it in pro tools is a little to me I find it to be slightly more difficult but it's still not that bad the's right here as you can see, I have these accused by past so all we're dealing with right now is the raw the riot track that we were sent so I'm gonna open the plug in ozone by isotope get him blind so there we go to demo going to the q section right here and select match in. So now what I dio is I have these snapshots so I'm going to capture a snapshot right no snapshot on the weekdays too because I don't need him right now started capture of the guide track, which is what I just made stop the capture and what you guys can see on this purple is that's the way form that it developed of the base exactly so figured out what how the amp in the base responded to those notes that I was playing someone to save this as a warwick r b I ue eighty seven so that I know what I'm matching no money opened the same plugging on my less than stellar track right here again I'm blind down there only I cannot focus I'm really happy that you have better eyes than may perceive help me it is a million times so now same thing I'm going tio start a capture of this part and here is we'll call this crap base are replace going here eventually they saved this to my desktop so yes, I can just say we're right here were like snapshot going to my original base file in the equaliser so I'm going to go into matching right here gonna select that I want tio apply to my replace track which obviously is the one I just selected and toward my snapshot when I match I'm applying to like I just had applying to the replace and I'm referencing from the warwick when applying one hundred percent and here it's showing where it corrected and changed the town wait just got at the low end that's without smoothing out so it gets a lot harsher and I end up smoothing it as much as I can there's original there's on mass way got a lot of the warmth out of you got some of the harshness cut out of what the track we had, which was just a really dry and sound, and then we got it to sound closer to a real lamp with the rial microphone. So the audio dis runs through that like a plug in your actually rendering can render that track out like that you could print the confront the effect on it, or bounce it out and then bring it back in and treated as if it was always like that. But to me like that's, a lot of it, you can really tweak it quite a bit, decide how much of that effect you want, and you can obviously like here the difference, and it works well, it's never going to be the solution, tio tracking correctly and having dies and ramping, but it can really, really save you when it's yeah, it's, a quick fix and it's relatively easy and that's works great on guitar tones, works great on bass tones. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on drums and vocals because it would be great to be able to instantly improve a bad vocalist, but now we'll listen to it, really. Real strongly about with stuff like this is now one before we were kind of working more on compensating for the base now were able to really if we're mixing and rethinking this, we can start thank for stuff up and now let's turn on everything else that we turned off keep doing it, we're gonna un bypass all our plug ins and kind of here where we're at now where we went really out of our way to boost low and at the beginning we no longer need that because we've just adapted the bass tones I'm gonna pull this down quite a bit and now with that our basis sitting a lot more naturally with a lot less work and that's really that is my as far as saving stuff that mixed with melody line you khun do a lot to just save a mix that was going nowhere was I don't want to say doomed but didn't have is much going for it. So now what I'm going to do is ah really kind of go through I'm going to go as quickly as I can through these mixes and kind of just look at what I would do to finish him because I think we've really focused on getting the base to sit with the drums, getting the base to sit with the guitars and we have some mixes that just need a little bit of tweaking so this has less to do with base, but really kind of focusing on how you can quickly take a song of a certain genre and wrap it up once you have your base working to show that the base was a pretty essential part of just making the mix easy to come to after that no one thing somebody earlier asked about using reverb, right? That was someone asked about using reverb on base online and I'm going to show actually what I would do as faras reverb, which is use a mastering plugging like ozone for a song like this, I feel like there's not a whole lot of mix going on it's just really basic there's drums, there's, two guitars, there's base and that's it so it's something like this, I would like to put it in a fake room if I have it. Well, I don't think at this point that we're all the way done with very little processing we were able to just once we really thought about the base we took a song from what was just rock tracks and we got it to a part where you could put it up and it's with some decent mastering on it you have a song and I really like that's kind of for this song and then I'll do the same on the other side what really shows it testimony for me about how much base really effects and how much is really paying attention to what you do with the base can really get your song done because I know people that which week on their drums for days and days and people that will tweak on their guitars on days and days and you don't realize how for an advanced class how easy it is to just really think about the base and where everything can fit around that and you find a good central point in your song with the base the kick in the snare and you can build your mix very very quickly say it has done question from alec no star why did you max out those smooth fader when you were working earlier? I believe in the magic you just I feel that it sounds natural that way I developed that habit because the logic the way the logic magic you is if you don't smooth it out quite a bit it starts to sound very phasing and there's a lot of just peaks and valleys and I say mentioned it but you definitely got to play with that tear but when you boosted this moving this to me that's when it sounds most like an ant because you have your least amount of different frequencies that air getting adapted it's more just smooth the way a natural weak you would treat it and so you khun play with that tear I'm not going to say the best way to do that is to smooth it out one hundred percent because obviously the most the closest you're going to get to cloning is going to be the most as many frequencies that is it will map but it's eventually going to sound you're going to hear artifacts the less smooth that you have it and that's why I did it that way so I have actually never used that particular feature in I was on myself low I'm excited to try it now so I'm wondering this as well adrian asked do you need to make a snapshot depending on oct of the baseline is in jeans you use one in other words like if you have a song where you know maybe one party's playing really high up in the neck another part really low like do you need to take different snapping an ideal world? I would play as much of this song as I could and I would be I guess at that point if you're playing in really well you could just re track it but I would give myself a cz much sonic information as I can and if it was a full length say I would try and just do one whole song and apply it to the rest of the record assuming they used the same based on the whole record but give it somewhere that you're working all over the neck. I just didn't want to play an entire song because at that point, I can just say what we're working with the single let's just re record, but I give it a cz much information as I can no go to the pop song kind of I'm going to treat this the same way I'm gonna just kind of put a room on it, listen to anything and definitely get everybody's opinion on what we think it needs to move from here. Finding in the mix that all I have to do is a little bit of tweaking on the two bus, and after I paid all the attention to the base and really getting that and making that the central point of my mix that I'm finding an area where I'm a lot happier with how everything is going together. In the whole time I was mixing into aa on this track, at least mixing into an ssl bus compressor, which definitely helped with going a mixed together on I haven't ssl compressor is well going on, just boosting and cutting the tiniest bits, and it really smooth that the rest of the mix, and obviously nothing is going to work as well as sending your tracks to a good master, an engineer, but getting you can really get your mix once you've dialed then you could get very far without having to overthink and stress out about everything that's not like one I think with this I'm just applying the limiter kind of preview what mastering would do for me on a mix like this is there a reason you're using that one rather than the multi band limiter? I just prefer l three normal overall three multi trying to handle all of the different frequency spectrum is how I want stuff controlled on the mix and on my ox it ox is more so than on the master bus although I have sometimes you would do the multi or even use something like c four as a multi band and then a limiter but this is just right now I'm just thinking if I was to send it to the most basic of mastering engineers what's the first thing they're going to thank the rough preview yeah tossem limiter on it so I can kind of see where I have buildup and where I don't which is a little bit of limiting e found I had a little too much time id so I pulled some of that down and then I would turn this off and my mix would be ready to go to mastering or it would be ready to be tweaked for years and years to come but as faras in the studio making decisions I notice that I end up doing the best work when I just work with a method in mind and just get stuff done and work and commit, and I end up having better luck and sleeping better at night is and that's where I would take that one. Um, I think the one that I will obviously have the most fun with there's going to be the heavy son analyzed one more time I'm gonna listen through the song and see what kind of final touches that I've thought after I have rested my ears on this song and see what I want to do to tweet the bass guitar, but I was pretty happy with myself at lunchtime, so I'm that's what I'm going to go back into ozone and look at it as just ozone worshipped a lot, just like a priest at mastering, I can start to hear how I would be affected and how different things come out, and I definitely felt like I ended up with too much snare and too much symbols going on, so I'm gonna pull that down a little bit. Not that that's a much a base issue is a myth e one I'm really finding that I'm pretty happy with how it turned out so that's a cz faras delivering using the base and to deliver everything that's kind of what I I don't want to review all the things that I went over in the whole class, but I think that I showed myself and really tried to show how you can take base from the start and really make it the difference between a song that you wrote an idea and something that's ready to be a finished product, and I think that's something that is absolutely impossible without good bass guitar tracks. So basically what I said, my thesis at the beginning of everything was that a bases really kind of the defining factor in the mix and determines how your guitar tone is going to be delivered? That was a really big deal for me, and I know that a lot of people, a lot of engineers and musicians never really regard anything like that, so base as we've shown, like most my guitar tracks and all these songs, once we consider everything without the base, they're pretty thin they're not taking up a whole lot of room there hi passed very far, and I used the base to make my mix without my base, I have absolutely nothing I have very thin elements in the base is something that's able to take my stuff from a bunch of tracks, too, just a song, and I'm really big on that, and I know that. People don't consider that as much that's usually like how can I get a cool guitar telling how can I get brutal sounding vocals and what snare drum does x produce or use that sounds like a gunshot or a bomb or whatever and really that's not going to get you a good mix you can have the best students guitar tone, the best dudes drums a guy with really cool vocals and without a good bass stone, you're gonna have a shape makes um definitely wanted to show off that bearing the base in the mix is never the way to go about it it's you got to attack it head on and treat it really think about it think with some tactics how you're going to deliver it, how you're going to make it work out because bearing it in the mix you might provide lohan, but you're never going to get the glue that the base really provides between all of the instruments. This song I feel like especially showcased that with giving the heaviness to the guitar and having that really gross high end layer that really pulled it everything in the guitar room together and made it sound like guitar players playing in a band where, whether you realize that the base is there or not it's completely loud and up there and in your face um and that's really it it gets overlooked, but it's crucial it's one of the most important things um can't really drive home the point of what we opened with yesterday that tuning and playing is the only thing that's going to get you there, though, so if you don't know how to tune your base, you should watch over and over until you understand intonation, you need to know how to pick a base, whether you're a guitar player or a bass player or an engineer, I think having a grasp on a strong right hand is totally critical for any engineer in every great engineer I know knows how to play the shit out of a base and to me that's it's ah, in ten oral part of all recording, and I hope that I, uh, open some minds and didn't bore anybody to death and that people now see the importance of base or understand it more clearly, I think we understand not only the importance of base, but the importance of you make everybody walked away from this going, you know, where would the world be without andrew glover it's not just it's, not just base that, uh, you know, glues the mixed together, it's, andrew he's getting you back for michael? Did michael say that no, no, I feel bad for michael that I've been tweeting michael I told him he was the best engineer and he's really I'm on camera right? He's really a fantastic human being and he's a hard worker I love to give him a hard okay he's very resilient to I don't think that yes so you won't break him and you know he's like a bouncy ball he gets right back up it's like a it's like a dog you push a dog over just falls over it's like ok, you sure can we should pull up a picture of them if we could how we just ask the question yeah, just some questions so you know you're a little unusual in uh you know, sort of heavy music these days in that you are not so much on the ridiculously down tuned program but through I'm sure that you've come across that being so close to pomona. So you have a question from patata on which I'm interested into how would you handle ah really low tuned band like the case of strain or someone else that tunes to a g or something else ridiculous like that with a you know, eight string guitars and a lot of what this song I've been playing is in dropping so usually down within reason I would always do the octave lower base and drop a like we had a five string bass and that's what we did this on eight strings I've gone both ways. I have tracked base in the same octave and I would just I would really treat the base the same way because frequency was a e standard base if we're talking and eight string drop tune to drop, what is it? Drop drop e dropping and active down whatever, um, a force traing base in that range still provides a lot of lowland when you treat it properly. So in that kind of thing, I would still I would end up high passing the guitars, letting if the guitar player wanted to play in a tsering let it live in that range, you know, try if we had a six string bass, seven string bass, try doing the lower tuning, but at that point I would hope that the ban came with instruments and were responsible and had their stuff set up, I would attempt it, but I'm kind of a fan of they e standard based behind the eight string guitar, I think that it helps provide a lot of clarity when you're working with guitars that air that low tuned at that point was based, you have to start thinking about frequencies are inaudible, yeah, you really do it, yeah.