Lessons

Lesson Info

Transferring Your Mix

Let's say that ah you are cool with your mix all right meaning your first song's done um or however however you go that there's a few different schools of thought about how to go about it most guys I know like to get the first song done and uh then start transferring that to the rest of the album and it's a it's a good way to do it because you don't wantto you want makes a whole album and then find out that the band hates it you know it takes a long time to transfer settings to everything to print samples for everything ramp a whole album and all these different things you have to do it will take a long time so you want to make sure that you're on the same page is the band before you start moving on and uh also uh you want to be super organized about this whole process the same way that you be organized about prep so let's talk about your, uh your documenting your settings first of all, um if you're using any outboard gear settings uh just don't think you're going to remember them beca...

use you're definitely not all right, so anyways, don't you definitely don't worry so anyways, don't you definitely don't think that you're going to remember outboard gear settings there's there's no way because things change and especially if uh, you are jumping if you're doing a lot of recalls and you're jumping from from mixed to mix and use a bunch of outboard stuff. Uh, how are you going to expect to remember to get back to where you were? And so you need to keep a database of all this stuff? Uh, I would go to give you a link right there. Uh, and, uh, this is first for people who are who don't want to go new school. I'll tell you the new school way to go about it, but copy down that link. Www dot very rudolph dot com slash pages slash recall directory dot html it's, a database of templates and, uh, key folder settings for each project. Do not slack on this, because if you use hardware, uh, what will happen is you finish a mix one day and handed in and maybe not get mixed notes for a few weeks and have to work on something else, and then you'll have to recall a mix. And, uh, guess what, you don't remember how how you had it, and you'll never get it, get it back and kind of like we talked about with dropping markers and all that stuff in mix prep all the comments that you leave need to be briefing clear, so that and not just you but other people understand it because maybe you have an engineer working for you. Maybe your tact in the mix, maybe somebody else's coming into your room. Teo work on their own stuff. And the agreement is that they're going to reset your room back to the way you had it before. So, uh, keep it clear. Um, and then ah, which version of the analog gears super super important? Because, you know, different versions of different mods, different everything. Uh, I don't know how many different eleven. Seventy six is there are it is. Keep it. Keep track of what version of what? And, uh, you know, average gain reduction because, uh, makes a big difference. Now you want to step into the future? Uh, you can ah, you stuff like ever note and dropbox, which I don't know anyone here has ever used ever note but that's the way to go. In my opinion, um, because it's a it's an online way, tio organized projects it's especially good for if you had to take lots of photos of things. So, um and, you know, as opposed to drop boxes there's, just a bunch of folders evernote is actually designed for remembering projects so you can organize it that way and s o just take good pictures of everything and write yourself notes like, you know say you have a distress sir, that you use take a picture of the setting and write down the notes this is, you know, used on base average gan reduction and I would write down as many of the settings as possible to just because sometimes, you know, sometimes small lines on photos get blurred we're not all or no great photographers some of us are producers, so it didn't work. So all right, let's talk about a mixed template um once you finish, uh, mixing your first song, you wantto be able to transfer those settings to the other songs but there's a lot of things you don't want to transfer along with it. So remember when we talked about the importance of save as right here, save, as is your best friend, I've talked about a lot of best friends about this class save as a super important once you haven't improved mix put uh, name of the song and then transfer session or something like that so that you know, this is the version you're going to use to transfer settings from you don't want to actually transfer settings from your finished mix and looks explain you why finish mix has all kinds of automation in it it's got tempo maps has got alternate playlists, maybe you know like if you have tuned in on tuned vocals it's just got all this stuff that if uh you pull it into another song uh you know pull it try pulling a tempo map into the wrong song and see what happens to your song so you don't want to be doing that so you want to clear everything out uh in uh in pro tools there's a very, very uh nice command here of nice under edit here I'm gonna you need to select something so zoom out real far recall I think I show you guys this before but surely again you do not really far click all select that edit clear special automation gone and he has understand what we're doing here what we're doing is we're taking this this approved mix and we're making a transferrable session so you don't want to be bringing this automation into another song that's going to be super confusing and you don't want to go through and just like start the league automation by sight because what have you have heading lanes of automation like weird pants stuff in his head and like uh like, for instance, you guys saw all the different bypass automation I do on kick drums um I don't always have that stuff on hidden uh you know it's something I have to go back and look and remember what I did sometimes s o if you do the the clear special automation you could make sure it's all gone now the only thing that's super super important that you do is that you go out far enough to where you're definitely going to get all the automation because I mean look if if I didn't zoom out far this little dot right here would transfer into the next song and immediately that guitar repeated different level in that song so no automation from from one song to the next now there is one other thing though that I think is very important for you to take note of and this you should write down like untold school human being uh don't don't screen shot this stuff or are maybe screenshot but I would write it down um check it out uh there's times where you'll have a general level you know you general base level for a track like whatever that is minus three but say that at the beginning of the song like on say stuff you know you have kicked reminded downbeat to begin a song and you want to bump that and sometimes when you clear the automation it will it will jump up to that you need to make perfect you me to make sure that when you're clearing it the automation is resetting itself the volumes a resetting of themselves to your your basic level so what I mean is like you see howthe reid jumped up right here tio c minus two point seven er you need to make sure that that when you clear automation the volume isn't suddenly two point seven so the way to do that is to just know what your volumes are your basic baseline volume is you're starting levels are for everything and make sure that when you cover the automation it goes to that and look you only had to do this once once you do it once on your mixed transfer session you're good for the rest of the album you don't need to do this for every song so just do it once and do it right and uh and you're good no um yeah I said that okay um you should be able to open the template import the audio of the middie from the tracking session uh print on the samples and plug ins they were printed in the saw in the first songs mix that's all normal stuff I'm sure you guys understand that um but I feel like there's so much like info in this stuff that you guys should be screened shotting that these cliffs or just by the by the course because this is all pretty technical stuff this is a lot like the first day where lots of checklists so when reporting audio enmity into a mixed template you are hit match tracks all right? No what does that even mean? Ok file import session data all right say that this is the file right here that I want to import the mixed template into let's just assume so import session data and let's just say that I want to import trees. Okay? So because of the resolution of this martyr you can't see the bottom of this dialogue which kind of sucks but uh just trust me that there is uh ok button down there um hit match tracks okay, what? This is let's see what matches okay, no picket let me pick a different one will be better to do this from ok, so let's just say that I'm importing session data from the template match tracks and you see right here the guys to go blue basically it's saying that lake reflection snare settings on ah, the template are being imported too the reflection snare track in then you've in the current session you know you guys all understand what that means like uh this is matching to whatever track I'm telling it to so like, if I have this royer hat track right here I could tell it to import the settings tio my parallel snare compression track I don't know why I would do that but you could um but the reason the reason that they have that option there's because when you hit match tracks it might get things wrong if there's miss labeling and also sometimes you just in a sometimes you ah on lee want to import a few things you know you don't want to import everything so all right, so you're going through here and uh if you're just importing uh if you're just importing settings which is all you're importing make sure you go here to some and check off clips and media just make sure that alternate playlists crips and media in clip gain are not checked again they are not checked because what will happen if you have these checked is that the audio from the other song will be important so basically you'll be importing the everything from the other song all the audio into the into your new song and you just ruin your whole life all you want to be importing are the settings ok, so and then right here you see attracted to import some and ah down here I wish I could show it was down there you want this third option selected for that it's uh do not import okay uh if it's ever on import that means is importing audio don't do that um also do not import the tempo map all that makes sense chat rooms all good. All right, cool feel free to ask me questions guys because uh make sure you get this stuff unless there's some definite stuff uh that you want like when you're importing alternate playlists and things like that too you should probably select them as new tracks also uh there's a way to do that s say say that like theirs tracks in one song that don't exist in another song for instance like like say there's an orchestra in one song and there isn't in another that's you know things like that you'll have the option for new track and that's that's what that's for um okay also when if you are in a situation where you I do have to copy files over from a song to another song for whatever reason there's always a real like maybe it's the stuff you're a being too like for whatever reason uh or if you're importing from your tracking session into the mix session uh more importantly like when you are importing audio copy and don't link because like I said, their hard drives there chief and what will happen when it links files is that it basically it's looking for the files on another drive so if you're set up ever changes uh if you know you come to creative live to open up some mixes and it's linked to another hard drive on a computer guess what? Uh you're it's going to come up blank so right now what I'm talking about is uh when you're importing your audio from the audio session from your tracking session into your mixed session just to be clear so when you do that you do want to import your tempo a key signatures in your marker so let me remind you guys had to do that right now say I have ah, a mixed template open and uh and I want to pull in stuff thrown my tracking session okay, so this stuff right here is really important because you are how we cleared everything out of the mix session the mix session is now blankets got no temple map it's got gnocchi signatures got no markers you want that stuff to come with? You want that set to come with the audio from your tracking sessions? So make sure that you ah that you cook these then when you hit match tracks now you do the complete opposite first go to none. Okay, this is the order reducing the hit none then hit clips and media, then hit alternate playlists and import and then ok, so let me just explain. Just explain to you the two steps first you have your mixed template. Okay, so you transfer your mixed template or you can do save as or, you know, start open a blank file and import all the mixed template settings with no audio, no temp of nothing. Okay, so then you have you have a blank mixed template for another song. Then you've got to get the audio and the data into that mix template so that's step to this so when you do that that's when you get the tempo of the key signature the markers and you import and you hit some and all you're getting are the crips in the media the clip gain an auction playlists that's it you don't get any of this stuff because if you do get this stuff was going toe come over are the settings that you had during your tracking session you know so yeah, that right there I think is the most important stuff. So you guys clear on that step one you have your mix template step to you create a blank file step three you import the mixed template into the blank file a blank session step for you import the audio in the mini and the you know tempo data whatever into the mix session and step five you mix the next song should be accurate at that point um let's see here. So there's ah there's a few different ways to think about it. Um you know, one instrument at a time versus one song at a time and uh or you comparing in stages and develop a routine it's all up to you some people like to just go song by song this song, this song and you everything there's pros and cons to doing it that way um some people, once they have the mixed session wolf, for instance, import on lee all the drums for the next song into the mix into the next song and mix all that, and then next song makes all the drugs for that next song mix all the drugs for that do all that stuff because there's a theory that by the time you get ten songs deep and have the all those songs mixed, drum wise, your drum sound will have changed a little and be way better center initially wass and then you go back and you transfer it to the original song there's ah, and then there's another school of thought that says, when you transfer to another to a mixed session, too, you know mixed settings to another song, you mix the whole song at once, so no, I'm saying, step one, you mix the first song, you get your template, and then you choose a or b is, uh, you mix it in stages, which is drums for all the rest of the songs on the album that guitars for other us, the songs for the album vocals for all the rest of songs, the album or song at a time, and, uh, I don't know choose your own adventure, I don't think I don't think that I mean, I don't think either ways right? I think there's pros and cons teo teo each one so you just had to develop your own way and, uh good luck. Um only thing I will say though is that if you decide to do it in stages it's like uh do all the drums for the whole album uh they're probably more consistent because, uh you'll be focused just on drums to be tunnel visually tunnel vision in yourself um and you know, when you hyper focus on things like that, you probably don't them into a point where you didn't think they could get and, uh then you have some real bad ass drums and the on ly onley problem you have then is transferring those drums to the first song you know, for the first few songs and it's not a problem and have a better sounding mix, so uh just, uh, good luck with that. So, um I think that, uh I think that that's pretty much it there there's a few more little details, but I think that that's that's pretty much it. Good luck to you guys have any questions about this before we cut out and go party? I think that's good, I've been watching the questions before they only answer awesome, all right, well, first let's ah all thank john douglas. Thanks, john because, uh you worked with me on everything and is a ninja and help me put this class together and saved me so basically, uh u s can thank him, but if you want to hire him for anything he's probably a better editor than you it's probably better engineer than you, it's just probably better than you. Uh so he's probably faster than youtube. So say you have a mix and you don't want to deal with the whole prepping or any of that stuff. Like joey said, sometimes you just want to have a guy to do that stuff for you who's, bad ass uh, john's your man so special thanks to him and, uh, you can also sign up for my mailing list, which is, uh, u k and a big cartel dot com slash sign dash up and you will get bonus mixed training videos from me three of them. And if assad, if this wasn't enough, that sure will be so go sign up. And once again, this is where you can find me on the internet. Unstoppable killing machine on instagram. Facebook dot com slash unstoppable km if you want to do this stuff in person coming to one of my recording boot camps and I think that that just about wraps it up so thank you