Let's actually deal with vocals before we deal with strings,
because strings are going to be quick to deal with,
but they're also not part of the band.
The Lead Vocal, very, very straight-ahead.
And if you have seen any of my other mixing videos
or you have seen the video talking about my template,
you'll know that I set the vocal up
so it's going through two Auxes.
So this is a parallel set of Auxes
that get the lead vocal track.
One of them is very lightly processed.
There is some EQ,
there is a little bit of harmonic distortion,
there is a touch of compression.
This is the RVox compressor.
It's not doing much,
but it's just a little bit of glue.
And then there's an L2,
and some of this is leftover
from when I was building things
that were then going out of D/As to the console,
and I just left it in.
There's no reason for this to be in here in a floating-point environment.
It's almost never doing any limiting,
but I suppose if I had 20 lead vocal tracks
and in some places they were all going at the same time,
this L2 would just keep stuff
from getting too clipped on its way through the rest of the mix bus.
The Lead Vocal Pultec is a parallel chain
that I'm going to go through very, very briefly,
but basically it's three plug-ins that all do one thing:
they combine to make...
...the equivalent of a 3-band compressor
with the high and low bands bypassed.
So the first Pultec
is pulling out 100 Hz,
quite a bit of it.
It is boosting a lot of 8 k.
Then we go into a compressor,
so we've just taken our vocal
and made it mostly about 8 k,
which is presence and getting into the top end,
but it's really where
the kind of crazy harsh
'getting into air' part of the vocal is.
It's also where it's very intelligible.
Sort of 3 k and up is where the intelligibility comes from.
And this boost is pretty wide,
so we are reaching down
probably to at least 4 k when you are boosting this much.
Then we go into a compressor
which has the high pass filter
on the detector circuit cranked all the way up.
So, this was something on an LA-2A
where this knob was on the back
and it allowed you to use the LA-2A as a de-esser
so it wouldn't react to the low frequencies;
it would only react to the high frequencies.
So we are cranking up the high mids,
then we're only having the compressor deal with those high mids and above.
We are compressing the hell out of it.
Then we are going into a second EQ
adding the low end back in.
And in some cases I would actually have this taking away some 8 k,
but in this particular case I don't.
And what this sounds like
is a very poppy hyper-compressed version of the vocal.
So, now that I've said all of that,
forget about the fact that there are a bunch of other sends
on things like that. We're going to deal with that in a second.
What I'm going to do, though,
is go to a part of the track where I am using this Pultec
ad we will listen to just the Lead Vocal track,
then just the Pultec,
and then back again.
Because I've got mute automation,
I don't want to stop and start each time.
So just watch the screen, you will see exactly what's playing.
So you can hear with that Pultec chain in,
which is actually more about the LA-2A than the Pultec,
it's just a much more compressed compartmentalized vocal.
There's a lot of upper mids going on,
but what that does in context is it allows you to hear the vocal.
And you can see is, we're looking at the mute automation right now for the Pultec,
it comes in when the drums come in,
and then it comes back out for the breakdown/bridge
and breakdown/verse,
and then comes back in as the track starts to build.
Now, I don't have a very definite point at which the track gets loud again,
so I basically left it out of this section,
this build-up verse,
until I felt like I started losing the vocal.
And then rather than riding the vocal
it's like, 'Well, after that line, let's try bringing in the Pultec.'
So what I'm going to do now is unsolo the vocal
and just play...
Let's see.
I will get rid of the mute automation so the Pultec doesn't come in,
and then I'm going to play past the point of this build where I brought it in,
then I'll go back, reautomate,
and you'll hear how the Pultec helps the vocal just keep up with the track.
You won't hear as drastic a difference in the vocal sound
because we've got guitars and cymbals and lots of other stuff sort of around it,
but what hopefully you'll hear without the Pultec
is the vocal starts to get lost.
With the Pultec, it keeps up.
All right, here's that same spot with the Pultec coming in:
Et voilà! Just saved myself a vocal ride.
And the other thing is it's not just about volume,
it really is about the sound.
If I turn the vocal up
but leave it sounding
the more intimate version
that I have in the quieter spots of the song,
I would actually have to turn it up even more than I do
by bringing the Pultec in before you could hear it.
And what would be coming up with it are all the low mids
because he's not singing that loudly,
so it's still got more of the proximity effect because he is up on the mic.
And these vocals were recorded with an SM7,
so it's a hypercardioid mic, there's a lot of proximity effect,
it would just get boomy,
and it wouldn't necessarily be easier to hear,
but it would be too loud.
Whereas the Pultec really lets it help poke through the mix
in a really great way.
You can do this with any sort of parallel compressor,
but I built this because it models a '90s vocal technique.
It's very 'poppy' sounding.
I would never use it on its own.
That would scare the hell out of me if a vocal sounded like that on its own,
but, blending a little bit of it in is genius.
Going back a little bit,
on the vocal track itself just so you can see,
I've got another Phoenix to add a little bit of color.
And then I've got another RVox.
So, I'm doing a little bit of compression overall,
and we can hear with and without that.
I'll go back to the first verse,
which is the most exposed the vocal ever is.
It's the quietest he is singing.
Just helping to even the vocal out,
it's not sounding compressed really,
but it's saving me vocal rides.
So like I said, the vocal track,
and then there's one other here:
So this is just a delayed version of the vocal,
and all this is is a vocal effect
that we only wanted on a couple of lines
in the ending of the song.
And rather than automate a send
where I either have to be showing an extra automation lane
to know when this effect is being used,
or I don't know when it's being used and it can come and go,
I make a quick copy of the vocal track
and just unmute the audio that I want to go to this effect.
So, what this is is...
The way Anthony is singing that line:
It's a lot less
of the character of the rest of the vocal of the song
and it's more of like a carnival barker kind of thing.
We just decided, 'Let's have a special moment for it.'
And on a lot of these songs with Josh
as we were finishing them up for the 7" collection,
we were running vocals through the modular synth
— check out the other video —
doing a lot of processing to vocals, and we just decided on this one.
It was a pretty straight-ahead vocal.
Delay effects, so we will go ahead and do it here.
So, let me play the vocal from a line before
and you'll hear this delay come and go:
All right, now let me play you that in the track.
You're definitely not going to hear that delay,
but it will change the character of the vocal there.
So it just makes the vocal a little bit bigger
and it pushes it a little bit further back in the track.
And we don't have the background vocals in, or the strings,
so, in context, you don't hear it a lot.
Something we wanted to do,
and then, as we were mixing,
we didn't need a whole lot of it,
so, maybe it's not even audible in the final mix,
but that's what that track is doing.
Now, you may have noticed that, first of all,
I have two very light compressors on the vocal,
but that it also sounds really compressed,
and that could be from one of two things:
it either could have been recorded very compressed,
which in this case it was not.
The entire vocal chain was the SM7 into a Neve 1073,
the high-pass would be at 50,
the high shelf might have been touched a little bit,
that's it for EQ.
Then into an 1176 at 4:1,
and if there was more than 2 or 3 dB of compression
I would be very surprised.
While tracking the vocals,
especially with Anthony when he is being dynamic,
which he is on this song quite a bit,
I'll be riding the Input knob on the 1176;
that's my fader.
Because what that lets me do
is as I ride up the Input I'm getting more compression,
and I can pull it back when we get to the chorus,
and sort of maintain the level of compression.
So he is singing louder,
I still get a bit more level through,
but I'm actually hitting the compressor less hard.
So, it helps kind of even out the vocal
by keeping the same amount of compression
regardless of the amount of level that's coming out of the microphone.
So, it sounds a little counter-intuitive,
but I use the Input control on the 1176 as my fader while I'm recording.
But then, where is all the compression coming from?
Well, if you follow the audio from this vocal,
we come out of these two parallel chains:
one is the clean one, one is the crazy Pultec one,
and those get combined into the Lead Combiner.
And that's just another Aux,
it has no more plug-ins on it,
it just has another L2.
Again, just for shaving off the top
when I was coming out of D/As going straight to the console.
But then, this is where all of the vocal sends happen.
Now, there are three on the end here which are for effects:
one is 'Slap,' which is a delay,
and on this particular song
the slap is a Space Echo.
No big deal, it's just a little bit of slap.
I can play that for you:
Very straight-ahead,
makes all the difference to me
in terms of it sounding like a rough mix or sounding like a record.
That's the part that sounds like a record.
Then next to that is 'Spread,'
which actually never gets turned on,
but that's like a micropitch slap.
But, because I'm not using it, you don't get to see it.
Then a vocal reverb.
These are all in my template.
That never gets turned on,
so, again, we're not even going to bother looking at it.
So the only 'effect' effect that I am using
is the slap.
Then, next to that is a send off to an Aphex,
which is exactly that.
It's just solo'ed on the Aphex,
there's none of the original signal coming through.
And I am sending a little bit of the vocal,
so, what that sounds like is this:
It's not like EQ
because you are actually creating something
from other frequencies within the sound.
So, it's more like harmonic distortion
than it is EQ,
but it's actually harmonic synthesis
and that's just what Aphexes do.
So that's helping the vocal just be a little more present and bite through.
Then, these first two here
are parallel compressors, these sends.
So one of them is the Rear Bus,
this gets sent into the Rear Bus so that it will interact with the guitars,
interact with everything except the drums in that way,
so it's basically: all instruments that sustain
and the vocal go together into the Rear Bus,
and then, whatever is loudest
is what triggers the Rear Bus compression
and comes out on top.
So it's like doing a hundred mini-rides between all of the instruments.
So, every single time Anthony sings,
I've turned down all the other instruments coming out of the Rear Bus.
Now I don't have to ride them out of the way of the vocal.
And just to show you what that sounds like,
let me take just the vocal going into the Rear Bus in and out
while I play the whole track.
The level is going to change,
but also the vocal will just disappear because that's what's going to happen
when it's no longer interacting inside the Rear Bus.
You can still hear him fine,
but there is something flat about it.
He is not interacting.
And this way the guitars and the vocal
all sound like they are moving together, and it's just...
That's what shared parallel compression does.
Now, here is a not shared parallel compressor,
which is the Vocal Crush,
which, if you've watched any of mixes,
I use all the time.
It's an 'all buttons in' 1176,
slowest attack, fastest release,
obviously, the ratio means nothing in this mode.
You've got a resistor value that is completely out of spec for the circuit.
Even the attack and release times are out of spec,
it's basically spitty distortion.
But mixed in, it just makes the vocal more present.
Now, in this particular mix,
let me see if he is on the whole time.
No.
It's out at the beginning, and then comes in when the drums come in.
So, just like the Pultec,
this is a way of having the vocal keep up with the rest of the mix.
So now I'm going to play the vocal as we go past that transition,
but I'll leave the Pultec out so you'll hear just the Vocal Crush coming in.
So a big step up in level, and also it's more aggressive,
and in the context of the track it sounds like this:
And obviously we are not hearing the Pultec, but if I get rid of that
now the vocal is really going to start to get left behind.
So again, you can hear him,
but he is not part of the mix anymore.
I'll turn these back on.
Having heard it the other way twice,
now I feel like, 'Oh, maybe it's too loud in that spot,'
but in the context of the song he is keeping up
and that's what needs to happen
because the last thing I want to do is leave the vocal behind.
Because that is the point of the song:
whenever he is singing, he is the most important thing going on
and we've got to make sure that that's always in front.
Second to last, but not least,
we have our background vocals.
So this is all Josh
and the only thing that is really
somewhat interesting about these
is that rather than spreading background vocals,
what we decided to do on this particular song
was to have certain parts be on the left, certain parts be on the right.
Like in the first verse,
Josh is singing,
and I'm not going to talk too much about the processing on these vocals
because it's almost exactly the same on every vocal.
I've got a Phoenix for a little harmonic distortion,
to make it sound better,
and just a high-pass
just because he was right up on the mic and there was a lot of low end.
I don't remember what mic we used on this,
it was either a C37A
which wouldn't have had too much low end on it,
or it was a Mojave 200 because I wanted it to be very present.
Those have tons of low end
and I just decided to put a high-pass filter.
So that EQ is copied
basically to every single background track
with the frequency set slightly differently.
It's just to get rid of rumble.
Then, there's Phoenix...
...on these two vocal tracks,
and then I've got compressors on these too.
So I'll play you all of these things,
but I just want you to know there's not a huge amount going on right here.
The main background vocals are these:
Very straight harmony vocals doubled in the verses.
You'll hear there's quite a bit of effects on these.
What we've got going on
is all of the backgrounds come down to this 'BG 1' Aux,
and then that Aux, very much like the Lead Combiner,
that's what sends off to all of the effects.
So, we have a couple of effects that are exactly the same:
there is a send to the Aphex
and there is a send to the Rear Bus.
So this gets the background vocals to interact with everybody else,
and it gets a little bit of that synthesized top end.
On their own, without the Aphex and the Rear Bus:
Okay, here's with the Aphex,
and you'll hear that really nice, present, crispy top end come back:
And then, the Rear Bus on its own
is just going to be a parallel compressor for the vocal:
It's hard to tell what that's going to do with the Rear Bus out of context again,
but, again, what it does is everybody is interacting
and the difference when you've got everything in the track
is it's just a little bit easier to hear the harmony vocal.
Let me drop them in the track real quick.
Without the Rear Bus:
And what's really, really important to kind of get about the Rear Bus
or any shared compression;
obviously, the background vocals are louder there,
but to my ears, at least the way I am hearing this mix,
they don't step on anybody.
They've gotten a lot louder,
but because the lead vocal pushes them down
as the lead vocal gets louder
and the guitar strums individually push that compressor down,
they're there whenever there's room for them to be there,
but they're out of the way whenever anybody else
is doing something that has some motion to it.
And that's what happens a million times
between the beginning of the song and the end of the song.
That's the Rear Bus.
So, that's panned off to the left.
Later on in the song
we've got a couple of vocals that are panned more to the right:
Some more paddy stuff,
and let me just bring in these last few tracks.
They're spread out a little bit,
but this is basically the background arrangement
minus the main harmony tracks:
All right, then we add these guys up here:
And then, if we add our main harmony guys back in:
A lot of moving parts, but it's basically three parts.
You've got your low drone,
you've got your real harmony,
and then you've got your sort of backgroundy harmony parts.
And the fact that the panning is different on all of them
I think is what helps those parts stay separate,
but they're...
It's all reinforcement, this isn't about listening to the background vocals.
So another thing that is on all of these background vocals
is quite a bit of effects.
So the first thing is we've got a send
off of some of the individual tracks
to a reverb.
Not that big a deal, but it just gives us some reverb.
Here's without it:
It's just reverb doing what reverb does,
but the main effects that you've heard across all of these tracks:
a little bit of vocal reverb, which now we can talk about
because I am actually using it, though, not too much.
Very straight-ahead.
Just a filter so that the 'esses' and the low boom don't catch the reverb,
and then into a plate emulation.
Very short. Very, very, short.
I'll take that in and out,
and I don't even know that you're going to hear much of a difference there.
Let me go back to just the verse.
It's actually making quite a big difference,
you really hear them sound like a record.
Vocals tend to get effects that make them sound mixed,
other stuff I tend to do to try to make them sound natural.
But, vocal effects are all about it sounding like a record
and not like a rough mix.
The main effect on these background vocals, though,
is this send here that is off to the 'Spread,'
which is that micropitch slap I was talking about before.
So down here, it's Dual H910s.
Not that big a deal, one is pitching up, one is pitching down.
What is a big deal, though,
is that normally on a micropitch slap
the way they're set up you have like 10 and 20 ms,
that sort of thing, very short delays.
10 milliseconds is technically right at the threshold
of a human being able to differentiate the original from the delayed signal,
so it just sounds longer as opposed to two discrete signals.
Once you are in this 37 and 58 millisecond range,
you absolutely have discrete delays
on every 't' and every consonant
that has any kind of hard vowel to it.
You really start to hear the actual delays as it ping-pongs left to right:
So there you have your backgrounds.
And again, in context, all of this makes more sense.
The other thing to keep in mind about
all effects, really, but certainly reverbs, short delays,
little pitch-shifting effects, all that kind of stuff:
it gets eaten up by the other stuff in the mix.
So, this sounds pretty wet,
and Josh loves his vocals to be wet
and I love how much personality he leaves in each individual track,
so then, when you bury it, stuff will start to stick out.
He does a lot with the shape of his mouth,
when he is singing 'oohs' or 'aahs'
it's never just 'ooh,' 'aah.'
It's got a lot of movement to it,
almost vocoder-ish in that sense.
But also, spreading it out with these delays
makes it sound like more voices,
sounds like four tracks instead of two, that kind of thing.
But once you drop it back into the track,
it just doesn't sound bone dry.
So, what I'll do is I'm going to play that same verse
and I'm going to play it without the reverb and without the slap
and without this reverb, up here.
And then I'm going to put all three of those back in
and you'll just hear them kind of spread out and go deep,
and that's what's supposed to happen with these vocals
as opposed to being dry and off to the left.
Again, that's what starts to make a mix sound finished to me,
when the background vocals are working in that way.
Sometimes the background vocal is supposed to sound
like the other dude in the band singing,
in which case it would be much drier, treated much more like the lead vocal,
and panned a little bit,
whereas this is supposed to be just another element in the song.
It's a musical element.
It could be a keyboard, it could be a guitar,
it happens to be a vocal because we wanted to harmonize the lyrics,
but the 'oohs' later on,
those could be anything.
It's great to do it with voices,
but treat them like an instrument, not like a vocal.
And also, don't be afraid to put a bunch of stuff on them sometimes.
Sometimes a really fast tremolo on a vocal is great
and it will sound like an organ,
but maybe an organ would be a really cool thing to have on the song
but do it with a vocal instead.
So, I'm fine with having very effecty-sounding effects on vocals.
I kind of stay away from everywhere else, as it turns out.
We now have the Chili Peppers
playing the song.
But wait!
There's more! There's strings.
Very quickly, let me solo up the strings sort of in the body of the song
and you can hear what they're doing.
It's a really nice arrangement.
What I like about the string arrangement is it's not pads,
it's not playing like somebody playing a keyboard.
This is very much a string quartet arrangement,
and it was actually written by one of the members of the string quartet.
So, she knew exactly who she was writing for,
there was a lot of input from Josh
about wanting to follow that bass riff, things like that,
but really wanting the strings to be their own thing.
They're not here just to support,
they're as important as any of the other instruments in the song.
In that verse, for instance, here's what they're doing.
This will be a little bit more paddy.
So it's taking...
...all of the sort of musical...
...motifs, but that's not necessarily the right word
because I don't even necessarily mean just melodies
or strings of notes or things like that,
but all of the elements of the song both rhythmically and melodically,
and weaving them into a quartet version of the song,
but that all works with the other instruments.
You'll see there are quite a few tracks here,
basically what's going on is
I tracked the quartet
twice.
So these tops of the tracks is one take,
the bottoms of the tracks is another take, they are identical.
I've got close mics on the four players
only because we were working on the arrangement as we go.
I would normally try and just use a stereo pair to capture them,
but because we were working on the arrangement,
I wasn't positive I wasn't going to have to rebalance as we went,
or possibly, even try and lose a player, which...
They would be bleeding, but I would still have a lot more control,
so these mics are relatively close.
So I'm just going to solo up the four close mics
and play a little bit of that.
Nothing special going on there.
And then,
down here we've got
two sets of room mics:
Close and Far.
So, the Room Close
is actually more of just a stereo pair picking up the quartet,
and that sounds like this:
And then, what you would traditionally call a room mic, which,
these are much further away,
these are probably M49s or M50s.
Something large, omni,
just trying to capture the whole room.
And together, just the two rooms:
And again, here's the whole quartet
with the rooms:
Very natural, not terribly wet,
nothing like that.
How did I not have phase problems
putting eight microphones on four players in one room?
I got lucky.
I may have moved something at one point.
The close mics are pretty close,
so there won't really be much bleed between the four close mics.
Those are really spot mics.
Yeah, and I just got lucky, I turned up the rooms and they worked,
and if they hadn't, I would have tried flipping the polarity,
and if that didn't work I would go out and move the mics.
I mean, that's all you can do when you're multi-miking that way.
Same thing you would do with drum room mics...
Whatever, they either add up in a good way or they add up in a bad way.
And these happened to add up in a good way.
Now, the second set of tracks
is just for two things.
One is for doubling.
I'll mute them first,
and I've got this one section in the breakdown:
Which sounds fine, but,
in this part of the song, all we have is the arpeggiating guitar,
the high guitar kind of reverby pitch-shifty thing
as a pad, and strings.
And bass. That's all you've got.
There are no drums, there are no background vocals,
so the strings are going to be a major feature here
and it just sounded like too few players, basically.
We wanted this to be more of a section.
All I did in that section
was to use the other take of the song
and use it as a double.
Let me unmute.
There you go! Octet.
Two for the price of one! Well, that's not true.
It's a union gig. It's all paid properly, don't worry about it.
Then the other thing that we did at the end of the song
was to reinforce where the strings are doubling the bass.
So, you might remember from the bass track...
...those triplet runs.
And what we did is on the second take...
...it's just those runs.
So we got those clean so that I could reinforce those
and try and make them come out.
Because obviously, it's about the bass there,
but we've heard the bass do it on its own, earlier in the song,
and we thought, 'Well, let's point out the fact
that this is part of the string arrangement.'
And while we were recording the strings we just weren't getting enough of it,
so it's a double there.
The only other thing we're doing with the strings
is the intro of the song became about the strings.
And what we did was basically tell them where to end
and have them play this cloud,
and as I talked earlier, we just recorded it with no click.
And then I took two passes of it,
layered them, so this is just one take up here,
one take down here,
of them doing exactly the same thing.
And if you listen individually, this one sounds like this:
Right? And then, this top one
is the same idea but a totally different performance:
So, put them together and you just have double the chaos.
And we'll get to why it sounds the way it sounds, in a second.
I just want to stop very briefly
and say that everybody should have a ridiculous amount of respect
for composers like Penderecki, off the top of my head,
who would actually notate things that sound like that.
Getting complete chaos out of a string section,
but actually have it be repeatable chaos
is
amazing!
Anyway,
what we decided to do was to build this intro,
and we loved the idea of it,
but as I was mixing I was having real trouble with it.
It just felt too long, so I'm going to get rid of the reverb for a second
and I'll let you just listen to the strings doing this:
Which musically was really cool and it fit the idea we wanted,
but it just felt too long, and so, I started chopping the front,
just fading in, and it just felt a little short, and it just...
It started to feel gimmicky,
and then, I don't know where the idea came from
but I'm very happy I thought of it,
was, 'Well, let's have it start further away and get closer and closer,
so as it resolves harmonically, it will also sort of resolve sonically.'
Trusty old D-Verb,
and all I'm doing is I'm automating the Wet/Dry control,
so this is the way the intro sounds on the record:
Et voilà!
And what that does is,
just by changing the sound field that's in it,
it just lets it be as long as it needs to be.
I don't think that there is anything
that is specific to doing it with reverb.
I'm sure there are other ways you could think of to do it,
but it's just about
trying to make something feel right.
So, sometimes doing something very unnatural
can actually be the way to make something work in a mix.
And I'm just glad I thought of it,
because otherwise we probably
would have either ditched the intro,
or let it play shorter,
or it would have felt too long or whatever,
whereas I love the effect
of starting in this murk,
and then everything coming into focus.
And now, at the end of that intro,
you get the incredibly dry clean acoustic guitar
and we are off:
So that is all of the musical elements in the mix,
you've seen exactly what I'm doing to them.
The strings themselves have nothing on them,
there's just an L2,
I don't know why, for no good reason.
This is a reverb that is used in the body of the song
just as a room for the strings,
and then, they hit the Rear Bus.
That's it, so there is no EQ, nothing.
I probably EQ'ed a little bit as I was recording them.
Also, there are some bypassed plug-ins here which are Z-Noise,
so there was some hum on a few of the microphones
which I cleaned up using some noise reduction plug-ins.
The last thing that I did
on this particular mix is automation,
and there's automation on the strings,
there's automation on a couple of the guitars, I think.
Let's look at that. Yeah.
In the middle eight I am automating a little bit,
but it's really just to keep things
interesting more than anything else
until we get to the end of the song.
Because the end of the song, which I'll play a little bit of,
if you remember, there was that one spot
where I had to drop in
the Pultec on the vocal to have the vocal keep up,
and then we start adding background vocals,
and then, by the end, we've got the three cascading bits of background vocals.
We've got a full string section going, plus reinforcement,
we've got the pianos,
everybody is playing at the end,
but, again, you've got to follow the vocal all the way through,
so all of the automation is to do that.
The automation on the drums are just to push drum fills,
the automation on the guitars at the end
is pretty minimal.
I'm just riding the 'fx' guitars, basically.
I could probably have not bothered to do that,
but what I decided to do was bring them out
when there was time to bring them out if nothing else was happening,
like, 'Oh! I can bring up the fx guitars!'
I also automated Anthony's vocal all the way to the end
just to make sure you could hear what he was saying,
but I didn't want to do it by making him louder and louder
because what can really help a loud song sound epic at the end
is having the vocal start to get lost,
because the track has gotten so big around it
and you get this emotional response of having to kind of lean in
to listen for the vocal,
and it just really helps the song sound even louder than it already is,
whereas if you push the vocal, now the track sounds small again.
So there's automation just on certain words to make sure you can hear it,
there's quite a bit of automation on the strings
to just have them pop out,
especially in those two spots where they're doubling the bass.
And that's kind of what lets the end of the song work,
so I'm going to play from where the build starts back up
until the end of the song, and I'm going to scroll around
so you can kind of see this automation working.
But I think if you really listen to individual elements,
you'll hear them sort of take over one after another,
but hopefully you never lose the vocal, which is the point.
You can hear that really the vocal stays there,
but every once in a while it starts to sound a little bit swallowed up,
which is exciting,
but, it only starts to sound swallowed up
on lyrics that are easy to understand and ones we've heard before.
So, more of the extended notes,
because that's where it's fine to let other stuff happen.
The other thing is I opened up the 33609,
which is the compressor on the mix bus as that was going,
and you could see
I'm almost hitting that 4 dB compression line,
and so that's where it sounds good.
Now, really quickly,
let me just use this Master on my Router,
and I'll turn it up a couple of dB,
and I'll turn it down a couple of dB.
And for me, what's going to happen is the end is going to sound crushed.
I'm going to do 2 dB up, and I can tell you right now
it's going to sound too compressed.
And when I pull it down 2 dB, the end might sound okay
but a quieter part of the song will probably just sound a little unglued.
So, let's go louder first.
-7.9, to be precise.
Oh, come on.
-8, to be precise,
because that's where I let go
and I'm too lazy to keep doing that.
Ugly! So, it starts to fall apart.
Now, this is not to say
that I get my mix done
and then I go looking for the sweet spot.
The way this happens is:
I work on the drums because you've got to work on the drums
and make them sound like an instrument
before you can really get the rest of your balance,
and I very quickly try and get everything else in.
Fixing problems, if I've got to suck midrange out of cymbals,
or if there is boom on a guitar that should go away,
get all that done, figure out some panning,
get a rough balance.
By that point,
my mix level is pretty much set
because I would have to move so many things for the mix level to change,
so that's right when I would go start listening to the mix.
If I don't notice anything,
I might never come down and turn this Master fader down.
Invariably,
by the time I get the vocals and I realize like, 'Wow! I'm just slamming this thing!
It sounds as though I'm sucking all the life out of it,'
and I'm starting to get depressed about the way my mix sounds,
it's not that I say, 'Oh, I think I am compressing too much,'
it's that I started getting my balance
and thought everything sounded really cool,
and now, all of a sudden, it sounds like a mess.
It just sounds smashed up, and terrible, and, 'What have I done wrong?
Did it ever sound good? I suck! I need a new job!'
And then I'd say, 'Wait a minute! It's probably just too loud!'
and I come down, turn down this Master fader,
and, 'Ahhh! There it is! It's back again!'
Most of the time I don't even look at the plug-in,
I never even bother opening it because it's so easy for me to hear it.
Now, to me, those 2 dB of difference were massive.
For you, maybe it was a little bit subtle,
you just train your ears.
I mean, anything that you do over and over,
you'll start to hear the process.
The easiest way to explain that is, think about Auto-Tune:
when it first came out, everybody just thought it was absolute magic,
and about 6 months later everybody started to hear the artifacts.
And it's only because they've managed to make the algorithms better
that we can all deal with the amount of vocal tuning that we do.
If you're not going for an effect, you can still tune a vocal
and have it be very natural-sounding.
But if you went back to the original version of Auto-Tune right now,
you would hear it a mile away.
I hear that bus compressor a mile away
and I know when it's in the sweet spot.
And if I can't find the sweet spot, then I know my drums are no good.
There's something wrong,
something about the kick is sustaining too much,
or something like that,
because it's not letting that compressor do what it does.
And every once in a while, on a very acoustic song,
it's the wrong compressor and I just get rid of it.
But 90% of the time it works,
but only when it's in the right spot.
Now, I probably have about a dB,
I can move it, and it will be fine for me.
So, it's not this crazy, precise, 'oh my god' thing,
it's also impossible to measure.
I can't tell you what level should be going into that compressor
because it depends on how thick is the mix,
how transient is the mix.
What are the kick and snare doing?
Are they very loud? Are they quiet?
How thick are the vocals?
Are there tons of double vocals, or is it a single lead vocal?
All of that stuff will affect how much of that compression you can get.
That said, I will bet you if you're hitting this 4 dB of compression line,
you've gone way too far.
If it's really not moving in the loud sections,
you're not getting the benefit, and you might as well not bother
or look for a different compressor.
So I suppose it's a little unfair for me to say,
'I can hear the difference, and maybe you can't,'
so what I'm going to do is go back to those 3 different levels
and I will try and describe where to listen.
So,
I'm going to play a little bit of it,
and then I'm going to say, 'Blah, blah, blah,'
and then I'm going to play it again,
and hopefully you'll be able to zone in on the couple of things that I mention.
It's...
...vaguer than that,
it's an emotional reaction to the way the mix feels,
but I'm going to try and actually come up with a couple of very specific things.
Here's our good level, I'll just play that for a bit:
To me, the obvious thing is it sounds a little distorted
because of how much it's compressing,
but what it's doing is it's driving the lead vocal
up to the forefront too much, which is weird.
'We're compressing the mix more, but I'm getting more vocal?'
Well, it's because of where that release time is, and things like that.
It's grabbing drums, the kick drum sounds completely blown up
as opposed to sounding kind of cool.
I mean, all I've done to the kick is try and blow it up, right?
I've added distortion, a bunch of low end,
parallel compressors, stuff on the mix bus,
two 'happy face' EQs,
partridge in a pear tree,
all of which are trying to blow up the kick,
but when it's too blown up,
it's starting to destroy the rhythm.
So I feel like the interaction between the kick,
the cymbals and the guitars is destroyed,
and I feel like all of a sudden the vocal is just sticking out like crazy.
So here it is again:
So this to me is almost just the opposite of that,
which would make sense.
It doesn't sound bad to me at all,
it's fine.
And if this is where it happened to be set,
I don't know that I would have gone looking to push it more.
I'm sure in the quieter parts of the song I probably would have,
but we're just going to stay in this part of the song.
But what I'm hearing in terms of it being the opposite
is that the transient material is now poking through too much.
The kick is too loud, the snare is too loud,
and it's actually kind of pumping the vocal,
whereas when you compress a little bit more than this,
it sort of hangs here.
Instead of bouncing between nothing and a little bit,
you're bouncing between a little bit and a little bit more,
and it just really helps kind of glue everything together,
so that's what I like about this level.
So I'll play it a little more,
I'll play a little bit of the level we left it at,
and then we'll leave it at that.
And listening between those two,
I might, if I were still mixing this song,
end up a tiny bit lower than I am now
because the kick has started to blow up the tiniest bit at -9.9,
so I would go to -10.5 and see how that would work,
but that's the general thing that I hear.
Now, this -9.9 is a completely arbitrary number.
Like I was saying before, I build my balance
and then I realize, 'Oh my god, my mix is too loud!'
In my template, that Master fader is at 0.
What the Master fader lets me do
is just take that waveform and pull it down
so that it fits through my 2-bus chain.
And...
remember it's not about the meter on the compressor,
it's just about what it feels like.
And the real difference on this song
is the feel of the vocal versus the transients of the drums,
but it could be anything.
And it really...
...is something where you've got to turn off the technical part of your brain
while you're doing one of the most technical parts of your mix,
which is setting the actual level through your 2-bus.
And you just have to listen and decide if it's cool.
And then you have to go back and listen
and make sure the quiet part of the song is good,
as well as the loud part, because you might have to automate something.
There is nothing more important
than what it sounds like and what it feels like at the end,
so, if you're going to have to do something really invasive
that's going to take you a long time to make it awesome, then that's fine.
And if you can get away without doing anything and it's awesome, even better.
So, speaking of awesome,
Chili Peppers!
There you go! 'Pink As Floyd.'
And, it's available on 7" vinyl.