Lessons

Lesson Info

Critique Session: Pig Snout

Now here's the fun part well kind of um we're going tio open up a couple different sessions that um bans have distract themselves um and I'm just going to kind of go over it and give cem honest critique um and I think the main thing to be thinking about like as you're watching or looking at this um it's not so much about the type of music that it is but more like the general principles of like if something is distorting or is is the tone right for the part type of thing or or does it fit with the overall vibe of the song um and the songs that we're comparing or the word kind of critiquing are pretty drastically different so I think it's kind of a cool you should be able to find something you can relate to in these you know we're like, oh man my tracks to that and maybe that's why this is happening so I guess we'll just jump right into it um critique number one pig snout so this is a band um it's pretty cool actually so it's a dad and his two kids and I think that's really cool um but i...

t also makes it very difficult to critique in the sense of if you're critiquing just like a regular like a regular band that's trying to be um you know it's like a competitive like twenty year old males band you know and they're trying to compete you know they're trying to be on the same level as like fighters or something you know it's like ok, well that's what you're going for and you're gonna have comments saying like, oh, you hit like a girl you like you're drumming you have to like really step it up not your drums and consistent isn't that but what's cool about this band to me is the fact that it is a family and then it's kids um so in listening to these tracks, I think that the majority of everything that's going on here is it's not the best recording by any means, but I think everything is right if that makes sense, so I'll just kind of start going through well, first off let me play you what I did to it and then we'll kind of go through and solo all the tracks and then we'll kind of like really inspect everything but here's kind of a vibe of the of the track itself wait ok, cool. So that's I mean I said what's cool about that like there's kind of like a stick about that song you know and like or I guess the ban in general the fact that it's there's kids in the band you know I mean and like even hearing it like you wouldn't really expect that like it's a six year old in a four year old, right six and nine yeah, it's like you wouldn't I wouldn't expect that, so I thought it was really cool, so I kind of have to look at it, get a different way than I would normally attack that same bandits trying to compare themselves to, like from fighters or something like that. Um I so I was kind of open up the tracks and kind of show things that I did and talk a little bit about it, but my biggest, uh I would say the biggest limitations with this, um, would be like, on just kind of doing that could really fast down and dirty mix like this the biggest things that I struggled with was, um, like the plane of, you know, the instruments, obviously, because it's, like, you know, you're not having like, that veteran, you know, like twenty seven year old drummer just like just laid it down super solid dino leg. Yeah, but I mean, even the timing I felt was kind of cool, you know what I mean? And like, I was tempted to kind of to fix it, but I was like, no, and I think you were right to in leaving it raw because in I don't know if you guys have had this experience, but as soon as you start kind of like grating things or really fixing things it makes everything else sound that much worse, you know, because like everything that's not grated now sounds totally out of time but when you have something that's just kind of like a cool feel to it you can easily like play around it and it's just kind of now has a vibe so I think that was really cool like I didn't mind the looseness at all and I think it kind of adds to the charm of the fact that it is kind of just like dude, we're just like totally have fun this is awesome and then and then you're kind of taken by it is actually kind of a cool song when it comes to that like chorus partner they do that are like the bridge part you know I do this is awesome. So um I said the biggest struggles for me were like the the playing of the symbols you know, because you've got like, the but somehow it kick is usually a little bit off from yeah, little like I had to my own cd with right, but I mean that I mean, that doesn't it's like I yeah it's like it's like did you know, nine years old you know, they're kicking ass um so I think that was great I mean I'm just purely trying to attack it from like a technical standpoint you know like as far as like having maybe like maybe you could experiment a little more with some different mike techniques you know like maybe as they're practicing you know just like moving things around it is recording them playing like trying to figure out ways of maybe and that's where another fan thing of like maybe not so much worried about like the fidelity of the kit but like maybe making the kit sound like mohr ahs a unit overall you know I mean like I think it sounds I want to say it sounded like the overheads were like a space to pair right sounds like it's like way off to the side but then the hat feels like it's kind of the middle um but I mean a lot of that could be I mean I don't know what kind of room you're working in you know like that could be just reflections coming off everything you know a lot of the times high hat has a tendency to kind of bounce off of all and get everywhere but I think that I think that by messing around with different miking positions you can totally get it like it would almost like remember when we were selling through like the like the one mike type of thing and it was kind of like a pie yeah, it was kind of like everything kind of like jelled together more really want to try that, especially with this little tiny junior kit totally and I think that will be really cool um so I mean I'd say that was like my biggest limitation is just that you know and but even that you can get around just having to go through and automate every single crash it but you can get around it, you know, so it's nothing that was like super critical to making it sound bad. Thie kick trump is a little bit of a struggle to be honest, I just sample replaced the kicking snare to make them just for the sake of I'm just doing this real fast and get something going and, um the other biggest struggle for me, just as, you know, trying to if it were, if I were treating it like it was like an actual mix, the fact that we had zero communication is far like I had no idea what the direction was or what you guys wanted, you know, or or anything it's just like, all right, I was kind of going blind right now, there's no, maybe they like, I don't know, um, so let me just listen to the kick drum real quick and we can kind of talk about that isolation is good but there is something that's certainly something makes rattling or maybe it's like right up on the head or something or if you look at the picture yeah they put had them draw like the pigs now wear those eyes they're rattling I tried to cover them yeah I put tape on and apparently the tape was actually rattling that's awesome if I could burn victim away record right that's hilarious can you see that in the slide it all are ok because when they kick it they bound I mean that's exactly what it sounds like hey that was supposed to be holding the thing I was hitting I don't see it okay so that um um and it I mean it looks like her I mean the performance looks actually pretty solid you may have been hit in the preamble little a little hard I don't know if that's possible or not with your particular set up either that or she's really consistent um or maybe something was going on like with the head and drum interaction you know but it looks really consistent especially across these right here that mean that looks like something that would be you like what we were seeing more with the snare drum how you were saturating a little bit um yeah looks cool um unless you got there because you've got um I mean if this is the picture I mean you're working against a lot you know, because you've got it looks like almost like the high hat is like right on top of the snare so that's really tough bleed something you could do though is it looks like that kind of like the phones on your wall you could take a little chunk of that and maybe put it in between the snare and the hat to kind of like like, you know, same thing as when we were blocking the phone from getting in the mike you'd be surprised how much like a little piece of foam will do like around your snare mike blocking like the high hat out of it if they're like hi has real close to your mike or if she's like laying into it and and obviously like you know it's like you're not gonna have a total basher like on a toy kid you know? So but great job uh overheads check these out theo you like for for the sake of trying to make it sound you know and that's the hard part is easier a lot of kind of what I'm talking about is trying to make it like what's best for the song not necessarily what's best for each individual instrument to sound as high fidelity as possible, which is another reason why I think like having those overheads maybe a little farther back to kind of give everything a chance to breathe and become one a little bit more might be cool because this mean you can hear right when it switches with symbols they just get kind of like really loud um and that would be something that you would just have to automate a lot just dig into the ride right yeah because he has fun um I mean and that's just like you know you're uh uh I mean it's it's hard to say it's hard to give any sort of poor remarks teo a person of that age like ripping that hard you know so it's pretty it is pretty cool all the way around um you know I think well utilized everything else um I I don't think I received any tom mikes he didn't use them ok cool um let's see so and then so here is here is what all of the drums sound like together what I did after the after the fact so here is my kind of like trump bus extra slamming stuff like africa ssl outboard compressor that I slammed that bus with with original booth but I liked I liked how kind of like loose it wass you know and that kind of like added to the field and especially I think that if you were to tighten that up too much it would then it's like and even listening back now I probably should have used a slightly less ripping likes an air sample because it almost sounds too good and you don't want to take away from, like, the honesty of having, like, you know, kids playing music, in my opinion, you know, um and I think if you were to tighten that up at all, then it would get to a point where it was kind of unbelievable that this is kids I really think and I got like, you said, it's turned into a mess, so I started over and gave up and kind of for the integrity of them, looking back to when I started, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's wise that you, especially after talking to me about it you're like, well, yeah, that could totally see how they improved and that's pretty cool. Um, I wasn't sure what to do about the guitars. Uh, actually, yes or something. And I don't know if this is something that happens when you were switching between your d a w on pro tools, but the file names of the of the tracks. If you look here, it says, you know, guitar dealey, very ellen, but on the track it's a scratch guitar, um, and then same thing this one just says, hold your ground, but it says gibson neck pick up, so I wasn't really sure what? But then again it's like if you're doing these things yourself, you don't have to worry about that that's just if you're ever in the position you send it off to someone else it's always just kind of like a good idea, tio well as well as for file six so if you're if you're peter crashes and you you know, somehow lose these things or your session blows up but like you still have all the audio files it's really nice I mean, I may have messed up a little bit today, but like a big pet peeve of mine is like when I get a session and it's all like audio one audio to audio three um so I try to do as much labeling as possible and make sure that, like everything's labeled properly, um, before you record, it'll do, like hold your ground, it'll call it the session title on this was all a logics I probably forgot to label the one that says right, you're grown ok, ok, um yeah, everything school um vocals were cool. Uh, um I wasn't sure what to do with thea these kind of piano bits umm but it looked like when I've received files from like logic before, like sometimes it like, if you have something panned, sometimes it like printed like pandas a stereo thing but it looked like these were models I wasn't sure what to do so I just kind of spread them wide okay and then you had to freeze him and then yeah um ok it's been one of the vocal so he was gonna get real bombs right now so here is thea lead vocal and same thing I wasn't really sure what to do I just kind of went with my gut on it because there was too too vocal tracks um and this one kind of has like the distortion on it sounded like I remember right chance the pardons lock snow fled glistening ah break up really just over just going for yeah, ok, cool. Uh yeah so I heard that and I was like, oh, cool, maybe they're going back please the stone age kind of I've just dyson trashy vocals so I trashed him out even more theo unfortunately, the plug ins don't show up on this rig um but all it was was just a little bit of like tape slap delay and then some some reverb and um did have two d s the vocal a lot before I sent it to I kind of like I used the alley to which is kind of like the harmonic it's got like a harmonic exciter kind of like distortion thing inside of it and that's the distortion in eastport um and then I doubled it with a little bit of sands amp and q on your other vocal toe with this the pardons lock snow flat ah, that was really cool and then the kids that those were pretty awesome and I love how you kind of like double them quadrant of and like it made him sound like a cool kids choir almost um especially towards the end there's like a ton of them um and those were just kind of just used compression on a lot of them because you know, like an experienced singers though kind of just like their volume fluctuates a lot you know? And if you don't have a compressor going in to tracking then you end up you know, kind of how how was you kind of have to control of a little bit more so just compressed the crap out of him and then added some reberg to it and then they kind of ended up like theo here's how it'll sound track has published that any other I want that makes yeah, um questions on did they explain everything properly? I don't really do a lot to it you know, just a lot of what was there and tried to keep hopefully what the correct or what the original intention wass we just did it so that they would get the recording experience sort it was actually planning on doing it again yeah I'm like having them to click track local player click track yeah but yeah no problem that being redone anyway right cool um you guys yeah yeah let me go over the guitars and you know I didn't really do much with the guitars something that I did dio yeah just on these because they were kind of like fuzzed out guitars something that I like to pay attention teo on these types of guitars when they're these kind of like you know I don't want to call him forty but I feel like that cool kind of stone ary like blitzed out guitars um something I like to pay attention to something on the top end of them when you'll notice like when you're digging into the notes they kind of get like that yeah that click top end and then when you're not hitting those goes away and in the context of the mix your ears get drawn to that attack you know and it kind of almost makes it sound like the guitar is a clean guitar rather than this blown out guitar and so something that I did is it's not popping up on here but I used the brain work saturated plug in to kind of distort that top end even mohr so that it's kind of more evened out okay um and that way I I did not print a guitar bus but that way it's not quite as you know on those attacks it's not like grabbing your ear and especially since everything is not like super tight and it's not like a metal production you know, you you want that kind of like cool feel you know and that helps everything else kind of just I kind of have israel floaty kind of vibe um so you know, this is what we get ours were kind of like scratchy or ready top end and that's something that like, I don't know if you had the problem as you were mixing it's like that's really hard to make those guitars like sit right innotrac another one to try to see if I could get really yeah, which I think was a great idea because then the more you layer on the more kind of, like, blends everything together so yeah, perfect perfect thinking and I mean, that is a great idea of why should taken die, you know? Because then when it comes time you're like, oh, man already played this cool like, let me just like rehab and you can sit there with your drums like already kind of makes waiting to kind of let that top into the guitar sit right with the symbols and let it just sit right? You know, I'm looking forward to trying that yeah that's pretty cool hours of just noting out, um ok, I think that is pretty much is there any questions online? Anything you're not specifically about the way you have some questions yeah do you ever use vocal guitar scratches a guide to keep the field when tracking when multi track in the other parts individually oh yeah you know, I'm time um like if it's me personally I want tohave vocal like from the time we start tracking um like was that you raise your sword on purpose? Yeah, I mean, I want to have that vocal because, um especially for me that I love drums so I followed kind of like my recording projects I have a tendency of making drummers overplay a lot and like do too much crazy stuff just cause I love drugs, but I think that it's really important to be ableto play really cool stuff but also have that reference there like what the vocal is doing to make sure that you're not doing like, you know, if the singer is like during the course and hand this really cool kind of like quarter note ascending line that he's doing in an office on the drummer starts playing like triplets over it, you know, just like all right, kate come on like that doesn't really work can we change that to eight quarters or something that kind of helps the vocal a little bit more just being able to pay attention to those types of things. Um, so having a vocal to me is, like, really important. And if you're you know, any sort of guitar leads, I always have to double check with what the vocal is doing. Because it's, really easy to, you know, like I said, it's, really easy to just focus on the one part that you're working on at the time and lose track of the song. Um, and I think the song is just the most important part.