Wrap Up Q&A & Final Thoughts
Lesson 39 from: Studio Pass: PeripheryAdam "Nolly" Getgood, Matt Halpern
Wrap Up Q&A & Final Thoughts
Lesson 39 from: Studio Pass: PeripheryAdam "Nolly" Getgood, Matt Halpern
Lesson Info
39. Wrap Up Q&A & Final Thoughts
Summary (Generated from Transcript)
The lesson wraps up with a Q&A session where the instructors answer questions about automation in mixing, things to remember before sending a mix to be mastered, preferred volume levels in mixing, and creating consistency in mixing multiple songs on an album. The instructors emphasize the importance of letting the composition dictate automation, having a trusted person to give feedback on mixes before sending them to mastering, mixing at a moderate volume, and allowing each song on an album to have its own identity. The lesson concludes with the instructors expressing their hope that the knowledge shared in the class will be useful to the audience and make the process of mixing more enjoyable.
Lessons
Class Introduction
02:08 2Learning Drum Tone
08:10 3Drum Head and Shell Selection
10:07 4Matt's Signature Snare
04:37 5Tuning a Snare Drum
31:44 6Tuning Toms
18:56 7Tuning Drums Q&A
13:00 8Drum Feel and Cymbal Selection
06:58Micing intro & Kick Mic Techniques
11:58 10Snare Micing Techniques
07:10 11Shell Micing Q&A
09:43 12Tom Micing Techniques
07:51 13Microphone Placement - Overheads and Room Mics
19:55 14Soundchecking the Drum Tones
33:45 15Drum Micing Q&A
11:55 16Working With Tempo
17:42 17How Drum Parts Evolve
09:48 18Preparing for Recording as a Drummer
12:49 19Writing Drum Parts
17:02 20Recording Drum Samples
13:53 21Tracking Drum Takes
19:31 22Comping Takes and Q&A
16:37 23Mix Session Intro
06:56 24Mix Session Organization
06:35 25Top Down Mixing Approach
28:51 26Mix Bus Compression & Saturation
21:11 27Mix Bus Q&A
14:32 28Mixing Drums Intro
06:59 29Mixing Kick Drum
35:00 30Mixing Snare Drum
20:53 31Mixing Toms
09:14 32Mixing Cymbal & Overhead Mics
15:39 33Mixing Room Mics
25:22 34Mixing Bass Guitar
35:57 35Mixing Rhythm Guitars
13:33 36Mixing Lead Guitars
22:57 37Mixing Synths, Pads & Samples
06:30 38Mixing Vocals
31:56 39Wrap Up Q&A & Final Thoughts
10:13 40BONUS VIDEO: Micing Guitar Cab
06:20Lesson Info
Wrap Up Q&A & Final Thoughts
We have some wrap-up questions, do you find yourself doing a lot of automation? Example volume automation to make the mix move or do you rely mostly on composition and performance to do that? I think my preference is to let the composition dictate that but I'm certain not adverse to it. Some of the sessions I've been doing recently have had a huge amount of automation going into them. It can be really fun but I find that sometimes by the time I'm done automating I kind of don't, like it can be such an involved process sometimes that you can really lose focus on what actually the good level for things to be at is and it can just mean that the mix it take so much longer to come together and there's so much more uncertainty on my end. When I'm doing automation it's more in creative effects, vocals of course get a lot of automation treatment, that's kind of par for the course but, when it comes to other things I really try to let the composition do that work for me. If it's something ver...
y straight up like rock with just you know guitars, bass, drums, and vocals there might be some cool stuff you can do there. I really like the Andy Wallace approach of automating into the master bus compressor so that you get like, you can really adjust the intensity of the overall sound, by pushing that compressor hard or bring it back and make it lighter, I'll do some of that often by kind of pulling back some instruments but not the whole mix. I also really like automating things like reverb sines, delay sines. I don't generally have to do very much work to drums which is which is fine, this approach to mixing tends to be very kind of self-regulating and it still kind of relies on the dynamics of the drummer. What I do like doing for effect stuff perhaps is automating extreme compression effects onto the drums or automating width enhancement is something which we did actually a little bit on on juggernaut, there's a few points I can think of where the drums go extremely narrow sounding for one session then kind of really widen out into another. Another fun thing involving drums would be automating the level of the room effects, you know sometimes with an exposed fill can really benefit from more room sound just to make it sound really explosive. You can also automate the level of the parallel compression bus, that can be a really fun way to make some fills really kind of pump out and maybe you actually want to create some extreme pumping effects by doing that sometimes. I'd say my mixes, I've certainly know of many people that do a hell of a lot more automation than I do but you know it's all about, yeah it's all about what the track needs really, what the what the music needs. Tyler wants to know what are the main things you, main things you can think of to remember before sending a mix to be mastered. To remember, I mean, it's a tough one I mean, I would, something I would really recommend actually is starting up some kind of friendship with somebody that maybe is not a full-time mastering engineer but somebody that has a working experience of mastering that you trust to give you good feedback on what you do. For many years now I've had a circle of friends, fellow producers, and people that taught me a lot of stuff as I was learning that I was send mixes to and get their feedback on, you know, a lot of professional mastering engineers will not give you much feedback, they'll kind of just work on whatever you send them and sometimes it just takes doing a few times to really figure out what the, what you're gonna get back from a mastering engineer. I'm trying to think of like specifically what you would, yeah, what could you possibly forget, I mean I guess to make sure that the mix is exactly what you want it to be, definitely that would be one point I guess, is make sure that you're not sending a mix to a mastering engineer with the intention of them making it sound good because really the mix needs to sound good as is. If I was to take the limiter off this mix and send that to a mastering engineer I would not expect to hear very much changing when it came back and that would be appointed, that would mean that things are working well. A mastering engineer is kind of a second opinion on your mix and if there having to change a lot of stuff that generally means that you've done something that maybe isn't that great or it could mean that, I have had it happen a couple of times, sending it to maybe not completely professional mastering engineers, people that want to get into mastering the field, like they really have to impart a sound on what you send them and I think actually the highest echelon of mastering engineers that I've sent stuff to have almost always sent things back that are extremely close to what the original mix was and in many ways that's just a pat on the back really to the person that mixed it. At no point should you really be sending something to a mastering engineer and expecting them to fix issues with the mix. Yeah that would be the only advice I could give. Okay, Brandon wants to know how loud do you like to mix, is there a certain decibel range or even just a general loud versus quiet? It changes, I think, I start out quiet when I'm working on a session just through natural restraint and then the volume will tend to creep up as things start to sound good. It's really tempting to crank the volume but these days I always remind myself to pull the volume back after a little while because it can be so easy to, especially like the power of the drums becomes so much greater than perhaps it really is when you're listening at high volume and you can trick yourself into thinking that that things are way more energetic and powerful than they really are. Some people talk about mixing extremely quietly and I don't think that's necessarily the way to go either, personally, I find that I tend to mix extremely bright if it's very quiet because yeah extremely bright when it's quiet. You just don't perceive the top-end information in the same way, likewise, if you mix really loud you tend to mix really dark because those high frequencies can be piercing. So I try to spend most of my time mixing at a moderate level especially when it comes to something like leveling vocals in a mix I will sometimes dip the volume down a little bit but unless you are working in a room that has really bad internal reflections like a completely untreated room, at that point I'd say going really quiet is probably a good idea to minimize that reflections but unless that's the case for you, I wouldn't shy away of listening you know anywhere between a medium to medium loud volume, basically whatever you're comfortable listening to, whatever you've been listening to most of the things that you listen to. That just if it's extreme volume, you know if you walk out and come back in and kind of jump when you hit playback you've probably been mixing too loud. Awesome. How do you go about getting nearly the same mix for every song on an album or album, you did create a template with all your plugins loaded in individual tracks and just import the audio or do you have another approach? It really depends on the session, you know, not every project benefits from having exactly the same mix on every song but yeah if the idea is for for all the songs to have exactly the same mix or if the arrangement is extremely similar from one to the other, yeah, I'll create a template. I'll try, it's difficult to break the mindset when you're doing that but I try to let myself do things differently from one song to the other. I already like it when there's variation from one song to another and I think when you're working on something you can be kind of unduly scared about creating variation from one song to another. If I listen back to some of my favorite albums, you know, things like Deftones albums or Incubus or so many great albums, especially from like the 90s and early 2000s, those songs are all completely different sounding. Completely different drum sounds, completely different guitar sounds, everything about them is completely different yet they hang together as an album and as a listener until I really got into production I didn't even notice that. So a lot of the projects I'm working on, currently, I'm really trying to let every song have its own identity and not worry too much about creating a sense of cohesion but yes if you want to be extremely rigid about keeping things the same, try importing everything into one project. Just have the whole EP or album in one project if your hard drive and computer can handle that. That if you do that then absolutely everything is gonna be completely consistent assuming that it was tracked consistently. Any concluding thoughts? We got some love from the audience in the internet, thank you so much Nollie and Mat for all of the help these past few days. It answered a ton of questions for me. Cool, that's really good to know. Some people really, dug it. Yeah it's been really good. I'm getting pretty dazed. It's a lot of stuff to think about and hopefully, well everyone's gonna have the opportunity to listen back and kind of digest it but for me it's been an outpouring of knowledge that I've been kind of, I've shown some people some of these techniques before but it's been really nice to have a chance to go through methodically and break down what I do. I really hope that it's useful to some people. I really found that when I, especially got into like this mixing technique with the drums began to really enjoy mixing in a way that I haven't done before. I always enjoyed the end results when you got something to sound good but the process of getting there was always such a pain that it became something that I would dread and upon kind of doing things in this way I found that the there's a whole new world open to me and it became so much more fun to work in audio. So if that can pass on to anybody that watched this that would be the best thing in the world really.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Connor Smith
I haven't even finished the course and already my mixes have improved dramatically. Night and day difference. I haven't watched the portions with Matt as I'm using drum samples (GGD specifically), but I have no doubt it's great. Matt is always incredibly helpful and is a brilliant drummer. I thoroughly enjoy listening to Nolly, he's very articulate and his approach to audio engineering is flat out brilliant. I'm so happy I purchased this course. Before my mixes were good (balance and things of that nature) but lacked life and energy. I just wasn't getting the professional level sound I was searching for. Now, I am proud of my mixes and actually think they're getting to the point where they sound professional and don't sound like they were produced by a dude in his bedroom with about half of year of recording and audio engineering experience. The metal genre is difficult to mix as there's a lot going on and the "current metal sound" is very crisp and clear while still being very heavy and punchy. It isn't 80s dad metal where guitars are hissy and flubby. lol I am a huge Periphery fan and it's a privilege to watch Nolly share his knowledge. I really enjoy his approach as its very simple but very effective. He doesn't have insane mixing strategies, he just does what works and it's applicable to any DAW and is helpful for almost any genre of music. Brilliant course!
a Creativelive Student
This was an amazing course! I loved hearing from both Matt and Nolly on their thought process behind drums in general. I love the point they drove home about getting a great source tone. That seems to be forgotten in a lot of recordings and they try to fix it in the mix. Jolly did a fantastic job of making it look "easy" to take already great sounding source tones and making them really shine! Cant wait to put these concepts into practice in my own projects. What a great source of knowledge here. Thanks for this great class!
Adrian Gougov
Best course and overall learning experience I've had in a long long while. Nolly and Matt are superb. Nolly is an astonishing mixing and recording engineer and a great teacher. Not only does he explains his methods carefully and in detail, but also lays down key concepts in an understandable language. Definitely worth the investment if you wanna learn how to mix modern heavy music. Definitely worth the investment if you wanna learn how to track drums properly. Definitely worth the investment if you wanna see one of modern metal's best drummers track a whole song from start to finish. Props to Creative Live for bringing this material to us.