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Inside a Rock Mix and Q&A

This next song is a really great bound out of and one of my favorite mixes I've gotten to do and they used to be been called bear colony and now or one of the members was another a bad cold patterns ways so this was cool as they were like we want a real nineties vibe on this record I did not track this the cool thing with this is thiss record is all just easy drummer on the drums so it's a total different approach than I do because I never do a record that's just easy drummer and what was interesting with this? What is I had to do obviously do a little bit of repairing work I had to do some things that are different because I didn't track it. So let me show you a technique or two that I used in this song that's a little bit deferred that I just showed in this so you could get some other ideas for ways to handle material as it comes your way looks like we got a minute for the store open up. If there's a question I could maybe answer it wall goes all right, you guys have any questions on...

the studio audience? You guys are doing good, I see you over there smiling, always talking thing this is good stuff. I thought there was an interesting question which is about what are your thoughts from mark zero what are your thoughts on automating the master fader maybe changing bpm or volume of sections to make it move and not feel static? So instead of automating the master fader what I do a lot of the time is I will make just like we made that head room fader in the mixed yesterday and I talked about how I use vcs vader's google the fighters thinks we went over that yesterday if you don't know what I'm talking about that's a really interesting concept of your dog has it it's really cool to use um I instead of automating the master faith because the bastard traitor approach rules also is pre plug in where is all the other fighters are post will make the volume move in weird ways I like to make a group and push parts up and down and as faras varying temples yes, some bads need to very tempos. I will vary the click and program the click in with countless taboos in pre production with sauce, but I also find a lot of groups don't need that in a lot of groups, especially if there's a dancy element to it you know I live in brooklyn there's a lot of groups with a dancy element you want that steady tempo because you want people to be able to remix the song easily varying tempos does not make that happen. Now, if you don't care about that and you want a real natural live in the room, bob, I might not use a click I might very speed the click, I think that's all great, but I will say this that I don't find varying the ah tempo uh, or I'm sorry, I don't find moving the master fader as much as because also just messed with your head room, make a group and make those moves so that the song kicks it harder. I think it's a farm or effective way of ah doing the same process, so we're now in that patterns and waves song, they also just put this song up if you go to patterns, waves, dot com they put this song up, so if you like what you hear, you got so let's give a little snippet of the songs we know what we're gonna get, teo so what was that? They're called patterns of ways, patterns, waves, dot com if you want to check it out. Well, we're talking about goals of a bix. What I love about the span of man, I like, I just love the cpi and I'm so excited about this, is that one the vocalist just annihilated there's. So many good harmonies throughout the song and you could see I have a million effects and all sorts of stuff going on this I wanted the vocal to shine, but I also loved the guitars but he's singing really high and the guitars are really high to try to find a balance of how I met. Let this insanely good guitar work could save the good vocal work. Oh, but the other thing about it is the drugs or fake so we had to make sure that was didn't get in the way of your listing experience of being like a great fake trump's I think they did a pretty damn good job of it programming those drums and making it so it's. Not a bad fake drum vibe, but my biggest thing was I want to make sure the cool guitar work shine through in the cool vocal work shine through. So when plotting this out, one of the things I had that was like an interesting thing is there's two kicks. Now with this song, I printed out a slate kick because if you listen to the strobe intro kick, really, you know, it's got a solid foundation, but listen to it without the smooth one of the things I really found is that like the kick drum was a little too high that they made me so I want to put a picture with a little bit more punished so I could get some volume not have to ride the volume of that high kick drum that was getting in the way of the vocal while the time you have to make decisions in a song of going in the two elements I really like have another thing that's fighting if you could see how can I give her that so by option was as I had to get this sleigh kick trump in to get some of the volume where the value of the picture would be less focused in the range of the vocal and more focused down by the base so I also like the base told these guys tracked a really good story based on so there's also a way of how do we find and carve everything out of that? So a lot of this was really extreme multi bending so on these guitars that I really like let's get to the guitars I'm basically just multi banding these guitars where the vocal is going to fight against it because I wanted that vocal to just never have any competition but I wanted to make sure that that got up fraud like in those guitars could really be focused on it's also why these guitars on foot I had a really hard out the vocals earl really centered on this song the other thing I wanted towards us we talked a bunch about stereo yesterday so there's this cool ambience they haven't here that I think a cool thing to discuss for rock we're gonna get way more into the sundance tomorrow um or idiom I forget my terms wherever the guitars playing there's also this cool ambience back here that they did they did tons of cool stuff like this in this record so what I'm doing with that is since that sound ended up being mano even though they gave me it's stereo, it wasn't a true stereo file I'm doing a stereo with a situation where I go ad with tamano signal so that's outside of the guitars and outside the stereo spectrum so if the speaker's air here I'm going outside of them. So I have a space for this and then I'm putting it into a ton of reverb as well and as you could see adding a ton of e q to kind of get this up in kind of away from those meds and more open the highs and then pulling it down in volume a lot because I didn't want to mess with that vocal and those guitars that were in that range I'm really trying to get everything away from that and let that stuff shine and I think like the port I want to kind of illustrate with this mix and pulling it up is that when you get that mix of you, I'd never heard the song of rough mix that I said, you know, the's, vocals and guitars have to shine because they're so cool, and I love them so much. You then have to adapt your whole plan around that and figure out ways for that plan toe work so that your song works and you get the message of it, you let people focus on the cool parts of it, so that was where I want to say about that. Well, that was pretty cool. All right, I had a question that came in from mark zero who would ask on the battle of base versus kick drum? How do you decide which one wins on the battle for low end and what your approach? Every song is different, but I'm one of those guys who really likes the upper mid distortion on a base. I'm not so much a radio head guy like where I want that jamaican dub bass and two year old lows on nine songs that attend, so I'm usually leaving the kick drum beat punchy down there, but I think you make a decision you need to learn skill sets and kind of recipes for how to do that. One of my recipes is if just like in this song like when I played out that kick drum and the easy drummers a little higher pitched in the slate one I decided I wanted to kick to be the one that wins down well so I'm going to bring in a whole new kick and let that work down below on dh then you know this bass in the song we go to the screen you know, there's nothing below one hundred hertz because it's a really when a hit play on the source all the excitement of that base is up in those upper mids so I wanted to really let that be were the base does where is the exciting sound in the base where's the ex things on the kick that's what I think you decide like if you're in a death metal so it needs to be that typewriter like clicky kick you can't what the base also be the winner in those upper mids usually got to make a decision between the two of them I mean, you could but you're going to have a lot of work cut out for you. So one more question I know one of your favorite topics is distortion and harmonics from andrew a false key please tell maura about working with tape emulation in more detail uh yeah what's let's really get into that so I used to tape simulators for the most part, phoenix speed the star of the show here, out of vocal, this is a setting, particularly if you set it to this sapphire setting or the open one to play out how this the tape emulation could really get the harsh highs in digital to be able to control it. And they could also there's a saturation that could bring out some details. I really just like, I love the different settings of this pocket because I've got a master bus. I got some sorts of this sort might even be one of them that I put it on. I did so on this sog it's, the same type of thing that dark acids and the sapphire setting. Let me play this with it without you just tables the the transience is such a musical way and lets you bring up some more detail of the mix because they're mohr smooth out, it just lets you reach into that mix a little bit bored here. Your support details it's the same thing with at slate tape later and they're very different sightings. This is muchmore a like clean, crisp, audiophile thing was, I think the slate is really like rock and dancing russian like it's, very like I would not use it, unlike it. A ballot or like, I keep going back to elliot smith because he's one of my favorite not aggressive things, but I would never use it on elliott smith record or like a neutral bilk hotel record like you want, like the slates really, really aggressive where's this is really, really high five and I just the tape population to be, I think, like a lot of people like, oh, I want character and I think character you could get out of like that cramer waves tape and you could get it out of ob the j thirty seven and waves is much more character tape it like phoenix and slates tape is so much to be about, like let's get the harshness of the trouble to a little bit more under controlled let's bring out some depth and team the transients in a certain way. I just really sounds way better to be on a lot of things, it's just but you know, you notice I'm not using on the guitar about you think of the drugs that much with symbols or where you could get a lot of harsh trouble vocals, you get a lot of harsh trouble that the base is kind of about like the attack is that a while let's have the pic is just a little harsh cause the pickups are so cold it's just there's. A certain sound that I know that this tape is. I think you need to get to know that with each of your tape emulators, which what it does, whether it's the p, s, p water, whatever that it's. Just because I don't hear a lot of harmonics come off this one where, as I do with slate, this one sounds like the control of tape. Without all the harmonic solazyme where's, the slate is a lot about the harmonics ed to the control.