Lessons

Lesson Info

Segment 21 - VCA Sends for Multiple Tracks: Part 2

So now we also have vocals if we end up doubling the vocal on using some of the double vocal parts for tone I'm gonna want to keep I'm gonna want to keep on imation's similar on both of those, so I'm gonna do the same thing for a visa for those I'm going to go ahead and call create a vocal automation bus. Um, add a new v c a master call that vocals sign that to the local bus, so now this controls my vocals now I might end up on lee using one of those tracks when I'm mixing because I might not decide to use the double vocal, but if I do so, then I'll just delete it, but it's set up just so I have it there on I'm going to keep for this one, I'm going to keep the, uh the vocals I'm not going to hide them in the track yet because I'm not necessarily sure that I'm gonna end up using the vcs I'll just keep them there for now, for the background vocals I'm gonna bust all the background vocals to their own bus so that I could do some bus compression on the background vocals, which is a pretty ...

common thing I usually do, somebody going to create a new stereo dogs and put again, I'm gonna call this bgs or g bbs exactly have a question what's the difference between a b, c and an ox that is gonna russian? Okay, I explain it a little bit before, but I'll do it again. So a new og sand or on a console it's called a bus, but oxen and pro tools actually sends the actual audio out of the track and then into the next track. So the audio is actually if you imagine the signal flow it's actually going out of the individual tracks and into the dog's track so that if I pulled up a plug in all of the audio would go through that plug in visa, on the other hand, is not actually sending outputs of the tracks to the cia it's just controlling the volume so I can't pull up any plug ins. I can't it's not actually bussing interchanging the level or it's not actually doubling the level at all as far as how it's being sent with gain, staging its just controlling the automation so it's mainly used for automation. When I go back there and I'm gonna write volume automation on that track, I don't necessarily want to group them together and be looking at four different lines as I'm drawing, I just want tio. Do the animation on one line and so in order to do that, I created the cia bus that just controls all the other ones and I don't have to look at that it keeps it a lot cleaner and easier to look at what I'm mixing awesome ok, we're getting close here the background vocals are all set I'm gonna go ahead and set the bus input on that to be gs, which I set up yesterday and then I'm going to select again all of these channels and then hit shift option and click well, I'm holding that mcclinton the output and go to be gps and now it's assigning all of those to the b g bus and then we have this pad, which I'm just gonna go and send that out since it's only one pad not worried about busting a bunch of kids together, okay, so we're getting close here now at the very end of the session, I have all of my dog since I have four og sins that are already set up for re verbs, so I'm gonna go ahead and send these to the output bus, so I'm really glad I just made this mistake because I can show you how annoying what I just did was I didn't hold downshift an option I just held down option because I wasn't paying attention and now if you look all of the tracks and the entire session or now, austin to the master output. So all of that bus thing that I did, I'm gonna have to go back and redo now likely it's, not too much so I can show you, but I've made this mistake before and there's no way to undo it, which is annoying. So I'm gonna go ahead and go back to the drums just really quick. We'll go through all of the drum tracks and I'm gonna hold shift option and assign those to the drums and then remember, I also want to send him to drums, crush a shift control option, send those two drums crush then I have the base we were just using by themselves the guitars all of the guitars were being sent to see even this were being sent to the guitar to bus, so I'm gonna go ahead and hit shift option send those to the guitar to bus, and then the background vocals right here will click on background vocals. We'll try this again, so I have all the background vocals here selected except for this shift option, not options like I just did and send those to the back on vocals. So not just the selected tracks get sent great, so I have all of the busing fixed keep in mind like I said, the shift option an option thing can get confusing if you're not paying attention, you could undo all the busing that she did, which is really annoying and just another reminder doing this all right now when I'm not even thinking about music or mixing is so important because once they get it set up that I never have to think about it again and I could just focus on mixing all the busing is done and it's easy if I did that in the middle of a mixed session, I was trying to think about what kind of kick trump sound they wanted accidentally un bust everything it would be super frustrating, so this is another reason why we do this all in advance so that we don't have to think about it later okay, so these air not labeled so I typically like to have at least four different types of river bs in in my session, and what I've learned to do specifically is toe adm or especially as you have more river bs available in more processing available when it comes time to bouncing stems it's really important to keep your reverb separate what I used to do a long time ago is that would create just sort of like a generic plate and a generic room reverb and the mission eric delay and I would put those on the end of the session and then use it for drums, guitars, vocals, whatever as you start to bounce stems that becomes a challenge because if you want to bounce, just the guitar stems you have to go through and mute. All of the individual bus sends that are being sent to the guitar bus are that are being sent to the river bus that aren't from the guitars. If I'm bussing making a stem of just the drums, I have to go back and knew all of the bus sends that are being sent to the same river bas the drums that aren't on the drums, so I'm gonna save time down the road with stems and pro tools. Eleven allows you to bounce stem separately, so I'm going to create separate reverb sends for each of my stand mixes that I could bounce those equally or at the same time in pro tools and not have to think about it later. So that's just kind of a pro tip of when you're planning for your mix think about having to bounce stems at the very end of your session by setting up river bs for each specific instrument, so I'm actually gonna add two more dogs ends at the end here. So here's and this could be totally different for everybody everybody has their own styles I usually do a drum plate that I used for snare um a drum room that I use for like overhead sometimes and tom's and depending on the style of music I usually do a guitar plate a um guitar room I mean and there's a room a lot of room makes in here so I might not even use a guitar room maybe I'll just call me I'll just do a vocal plate um vocal room and then I usually have an ambient sound that adds that I might end up not using but I'll just have it set up for now I guess I have now six separate see one, two, three, four, five, six og sends that I'm gonna be using for for buses for re a verbs I'm going to sign those so this will be drum plate, drum room, guitar reverb, local reverb um and actually instead of vocal room, I'm gonna do echo zach another question of zac's in species are only available in hd do you have a workaround for regular? Yeah, absolutely. That is a good question. So visa are only used in hd, which is always kind of baffled me because it's such an easy staying in such a common thing on consoles tohave vcs if you you can still do all the same things you do with the cia, you just can't do it with one fator so if you saw in order to use the cia for example, back to the drum the cake visa so if you remember I had that created group and then I had to automate or had add the kick drum mikes to its own group and then a sign of the cia theater to that group. The only thing is you can't do in non pro tools hd whatever it's called now just normal portugal's is just add that later so you can still group all those kick mike's together and you can still tie the automation together it's just that instead of being able to do it um so like this is the kick drum vee see a favorite here instead of being able just to draw the automation itself like on its own track what I'm gonna have to do what I would have to do is, um switch automation on each of the individual tracks and then draw the automation together so I can still do the same thing with groups it's just not as convenient is having as a vc affair instead of having its own fate and then hiding these tracks I have to just do it individually, which is how I used to do it before having bcs so cool so we're getting pretty close to set up here we've got all of the buses set up now that they're all bust, I'm gonna go and start hiding some of these tracks that I've used the cia is four and actually I want to double check and make sure that the rides and overheads were bused because those were hidden before I bust anything. Oh, it looks like that they weren't ok that's good to know, hide the rides and overheads I'll keep the high hat for now on ben with these guitars, I'm going to go and hide again. I'm doing this on hiding this to show you what it ends up looking like I would actually go through and be mixing with the tracks and not until I was happy with the blend of the individual tracks what I go ahead and hide them and receives the dcf later, but let's see everything gets our second high, the rhythm guitars to can hide gets our chorus guitars see you keep that up and especially background vocals once they get those pan and set up like I'm not even going to think about them individually. Um, yeah, keep the doubles up for now just so we can use those okay, so now I've got everything kind of cleaned up if you look at my session now it looks so much cleaner um only women or sign will do the master bus to the next section, so I've got my kicks miss this one kicks there. My tom it's high hat overheads. I've got my drum buses here, I've got bass rhythm guitar, guitar course gets our bridge. Um, my guitar bus got the solo, I've got my lead vocals and the background vocals, the pad and my plates so everything is in order it's so much easier now for me looking at this now this looks like a session I would mix like I'm ready to go ahead and start mixing one of the last things I do that I just want to make sure we're going over to the edit window and look at these look at these tracks, especially with tom's this is something that I always do. I've heard of people doing a different ways in the old days on analog taped actually would use gate some things like tom's and kicks and stairs, because you don't want to have to go through and chop these up, but with with editing it's so much easier just to edit the tom, so usually the first thing that I do. Before I start mixing drums is I actually edit out all of the dead space when the times aren't playing that way I can really compress them and get a big tom sound and not have to try to get the gates to work so I'm gonna go ahead and use slip mode and delete this and you can kind of scan through a track pretty quickly and see when the times were being hit I'm also really quick everything that I do so all these buses that I set up I want to latch solo each of those so that when I go to seoul of individual stuff like I just tried to do it's not being hidden so I've got my drums I'm gonna hold down command and click on latch solo for each of these buses that I created and I do the same thing it looks like already set up but I did the same thing with my reverb so that I can hear the river bs in the solo as well so what I typically do and I'm not going to go through the whole tracking save time but so here's the tom phil right the tom's work playing anything before that I'm gonna go ahead and edit out all of this audio around that and I can also now kind of like custom create fades on each of these and control the transients a little better when I'm mixing so I'm gonna go ahead and beatty to these men would try and focus is off here we go and you can kind of play with it and adjust it so this might sound and this is there's a lot of techniques on drum mikey drum mixing and we've got some awesome classes on creative either go into more detail but there's a lot of different techniques on how you edit tom's I typically try to get rid of as much as the decay as possible while still making them sound really natural and then use river toe sort of adding some of that cake especially for a style like this where the toms they're going to be bigger than life I'm going to create that punch in the transient using a compressor and q on the toms and then I'm going to use a river tale to be able to get that sort of like dr so there's some kind of dead right now but once I start to mix them and use the river but I have a lot more um pull and what I don't want is that the end of a tom phil which almost always happens you can hear in this last one a little bit where you hear the next hit in the tail I don't want any of that so I want to pull it out before the snare hit so I would go through the hole session, you can see there's a tonic here, here on dry wood, before I even start mixing, just manually edit out all the silence of the toms. Now, there's also another way to do this using strip silence, I'm going to click on this! This is actually a faster way, at least just to get started, I'm gonna go out and sit, strip silence, and I'll set no minimum duration and then turn up the threshold until they see those tom hits. Now you can see it sees all the time had selected granite strip and just delete all the time, and then I could go back and manually due to phase that saves time to be able, just to kind of like, manually, quick out all that empty space and then fade each of those, and what that saves is that when mixing that, I don't have to use the gate instead of getting it and trying to get the gate to threshold, every single hit accurately, I'm just manually cutting out all the tempo space. Um, and then before I start mixing, I'm also just going to kind of go through each of the sections and make sure that all the audio is cleaned up that there's not any, just like random stuff sitting anywhere like the end of tracks, I also usually listen to the end of the the last hits of each of the sections to make sure that there's no bleed on to make sure that everything's been uh edited properly that I'm not mixing anything and once I kind of get this set I mean I think I'm pretty close to getting to go on back now I can actually start start mixing I mean I like I said I would still have all the tracks if I wouldn't have hid them yet so that I could pull up you know, inserts on each of those and start mixing but this is basically this is how we haven't set up so is any questions drew on that section just one question about color coding do you color code stuff when you're mixing to make it easier for yourself the mixer you know a lot of people do I usually don't because I try to manually get the session down too right can see it and I don't need color coding is much reading and at one time pretty much yeah I kind of do that in the mix prep but I mean you can I know a lot of people call it but I think it just looks silly personally to me but I mean you can go through and pull up the where is it the color palette and then change each of these to be whatever color you want on garment changes to tracks like making green or blue um you know, maybe I wanted some people do that with, like drums, like we'll do all the drums, one color and all the guitars. One color. Some people do it where they take the types of the tracks that you can see better. So maybe, like, instead of, they'll do all the bcs as one color, and all the buses is one color, and all the tracks is a separate color. Whatever makes sense for you, I mean, just think about it and whatever, whatever you wanted to use. I mean, I don't typically do that. But like I said, it's, totally just a preference thing.