Hello, I'm Andrew Scheps and I'm here at Rue Boyer,
and today I'm going to go through with you a mix I did
for the latest Smashing Pumpkins record.
It is "Atum," which is a triple album, a rock opera in three acts.
One of the songs I mix for it is, "That Which Animates The Spirit."
It's a very cool project, lots of songs, lots of different styles.
I mixed some songs, Ryan Hewitt mixed some songs, Dave Schiffman,
and Howard Willing, who also tracked everything.
And I have to say the tracks on this are pretty spectacular.
So I think the best thing for me to do first is play you the session.
So normally I would start with the drums and work my way down the session,
but because we have an intro that doesn't have the drums,
I'll go through that ery quickly.
There's not a lot going on.
There are two sort of... I call them keyboards, but church bells
and an intro sub, so those are pretty self-explanatory.
A church Bell sample reminiscent of the first Black Sabbath record.
And here is the intro sub.
So we just have those pads in the intro.
There are no drums at all and we've got just the acoustic guitars
and it's the only time the acoustic guitars are actually used.
And they're just very clean,
well-played acoustic guitars,
No processing at all on those.
I do have to say the tracks are fantastic.
So they're definitely some things I'm doing to help them fit in
and just sort of make them do more of what they're already doing.
But the band is very well-balanced.
And just as an aside, I believe this is the first project
for Smashing Pumpkins in quite a while that have both
James Iha, and Jimmy Chamberlain on the record, which is great.
Jimmy is such a fantastic drummer.
It's really fun to mix his drums.
And then there's a little double of the acoustic guitars
here at the end of the intro.
So little bit of the last chord flipped around and then off you go.
So that gets us into where the drums come in.
And I believe all I'm doing on the acoustics using Scheps Omni Channel,
which you're going to see over and over and over,
if you ever get a chance to design your own channel strip,
you will put almost everything you need in it.
So I do use it quite a bit.
In this case, I'm just adding a little bit of the heavy saturation,
which is basically a two-stage clipper.
I'm not using very much of it.
And then for the comp, I'm using the Opto version.
There are four versions, well, four types of compressor
on the compressor module.
There's a VCA, which is very clean.
There's the FET, which is fast, but a little bit dirtier.
There is the Opto, which is clean, but it's much slower
and it has a really nice sort of low mid, low end to it as you compress.
And then in Omni Channel 2, we added a soft mode, which is,
it's kind of like R-Vox where it's very, very transparent,
but the knee on it is very soft.
So you'll start to see the gain reduction meter go very quickly with it,
but it's not actually smashing things.
So that's all that's going on here.
I mean I can play the acoustics with and without.
One of the things I really love about the acoustics in the intro though
is that they're not really trying to double each other.
Their performances are very different and it almost works as a delay
between the two performances.
So there's a little bit of level there obviously, but it seems to emphasize
both the attack and the sustain.
So you get this little bit of pumping after the attack
and then the sustain blooms a little bit.
So it's just to help bring it out.
There is also a level difference.
So as we get to the drums, it does in fact get a little bigger
and we'll come back to the vocals much later.
But obviously, Billy comes in straight away after the drums.
But let's go through some drums.
So first I'll just play you the drum kit on its own
and you'll hear the magnificence that is Jimmy Chamberlain.
Fantastic. He's a great player.
And the toms sound great.
I love how those sound.
These came to me pre-chopped.
I would've done the same thing.
The floor toms are ringing a little bit more than rack toms as is usual,
but the kit has enough of the feel of the entire drum kit
that you don't really need the toms ringing inside of the drum sound.
We'll see why the kit feels that way, but that's definitely one thing
I'm always trying to get out of a drum recording is the feel of the drummer,
not the feel of the kick, the snare, the toms.
So it's important to me that there's glue that happens between
all of the drums and usually that's the rattle of other drums.
So you hit the kick and you hear the snare go a little bit
and sometimes the tom rattle is the key to making all that work,
but in this case didn't really need it.
So let's start with some toms just because...
So really great recording.
The other thing about toms is after every single tom fill,
there is a cymbal, and the cymbals are right over the toms.
So if you leave them up all the time, then you need to use them
as part of your overhead sound for the cymbals,
but you're EQing them to get the best sound out of the toms.
So it's not always that easy.
So by chopping them this way where the fade out starts right at the attack
of the crash cymbal, you get a little bit of extra top end,
but you're not going to notice that because the decay of the cymbal itself
will come from the overhead tracks and the tom can just get out of the way
and it doesn't make the kit messy.
There is not a whole lot going on here.
We've got a compressor on each one of them.
I believe Howard sent this to me like that, but there's not a lot going on.
So there is a 2 to 1 ratio, which this is the only 1176 plug-in that has a 2 to 1.
Every other one has 4 to 1 as the bottom ratio,
but I actually use this exact same plug-in on the rear bus,
which we'll get to in a bit.
One of the things about it is it's got this kind of mid-range grunge about it
is the best way I can describe it.
It's a little bit grainy in the mid-range in a way that
none of the other 1176 plug-ins I've used are.
So if we hear let's just floor toms are always fun.
So let's hear the floor tom with and without this.
Quite a bit of gain, but you can hear how
it lets the attack through because we've got sort of a medium attack
and then it immediately lets go and lets the sustain come up.
So it's just a little more powerful.
That's the same on every tom.
And then there is Ascend and this would be from their session,
which is going to a drum parallel that they sent me.
I'll show you the entire drum kit routing in a minute
because what's going on is that they had done some routing through some processing
for the entire drum kit.
And then I've taken that and put it inside of what's in my template.
So I'll show you what came to me
and then what I'm doing inside the template.
So their drum crush, I will use the Select Assignments
and we can see that basically all of the kick snare and tom tracks
are going to that drum crush and their drum parallel is down here
and it's a 33609.
It's not actually doing a huge amount but the threshold is pulled down.
So it is absolutely doing some compression.
And interestingly, or maybe it's not interesting
it's the exact same recovery time that I used when I used to use this
on my mix bus all the time.
There's a very definite character to the 33609
with a 100-millisecond release, that changes the kind of feel
of the drums in a really cool way, and that's why I used to have it
on my mix bus. I really liked that.
Everything has side effects and I kind of got sick of the side effects
and that's why I stopped using it.
But it is a great drum crush.
And they're working at 3 to 1, which is a relatively low ratio.
If I had this on the mix bus, I would usually be at 1.5 to 1.
So very, very gentle compression.
So let's hear the entire drum kit without that and then with it,
and you'll sort of hear the sounds that they were setting up.
Here's that same spot without,
The meters aren't even moving, so it's a little bit of extra gain.
It's also turned down quite a bit.
Could probably have gotten away with getting rid of it
because I have so many parallel things on the drum kit,
but there is no reason to get rid of it.
The kit sounded good so I'm keeping it.
So just to look at kick and snare
because that's the way we do things here.
Ignore the thing with all the automation right below it,
there's a kick-in and a kick-out.
Very traditional recording.
Here's kick in,
Nice and aggressive, probably up pretty close to the beater head
which is different from how I record kick drums,
but they wanted the attack on this and the attack is fantastic.
Here's the kick out.
So it's just about that mid-range poke to go with it.
So together...
And without the kick out, it's a little bit thin.
So I'll show you what's on these, but this is not the entire picture for the kick.
And then the snare has some extra stuff as well,
which I'll get to in a minute.
But I'll just take you through the acoustic kit first.
So on the kit and these, again, the SSLs would've come from Howard.
There's not a huge amount going on, but let's check out what it's doing.
So the kick in.
So you can see here he's sucking out a little bit of the low mids,
which is never a bad thing.
It's nice to scoop the kick a little bit when you've got a track like this
where you really want the attack, you want the low end,
but it doesn't need to be big in the lower mids
because the bass is gigantic, which we'll get to later on.
And then that is followed by an API doing a pretty extensive EQ.
So it's got highs, mids and lows, but again the low mids are actually
being sucked out a little bit and it's all about that point at 8K.
So this is probably doing quite a bit on its own.
So you can hear it. It feels like a scoop, but we are getting some extra mid range.
So the attack actually has two points that they're EQing,
the 2K... 1 and 2K here and then the 8K up here.
And there is some hi-hat bleed and things like that, but it absolutely
doesn't matter that we're bringing that up a little bit.
And then the next thing is the limiter here just to get some gain
or actually it's just some limiting because they've got the threshold
and the out ceiling together.
I'm not positive this is really doing a whole lot.
It's just shaving off a little bit of the transient,
which will make it more consistent.
So when the transient's up above the threshold, it's going to turn it down
a little bit, which will match the ones below the threshold a little bit more.
So it's a tiny bit of leveling.
It's exactly the same thing over here on the kick-out,
but the EQ is very different and that's why we're just getting that low end here.
So I'm going to bypass this EQ and I would imagine what we're going to get
is a lot of bleed from other things because the out mic
doesn't have the shell of the kick drum protecting it.
You can always build a little tunnel with blankets and stuff,
but let's hear what this is doing.
I'd say that they built a tunnel, there is very little bleed,
but obviously, they didn't want the attack.
So if I put these together, I would imagine
we've got a little timing discrepancy as you would.
You can hear it's phasing in the mid-range right away.
So the mid-range tightens up as soon as you get rid of
all of the mids and top from that.
And then just use the meat of it.
So this 63 and 125 is the fundamental of the kick drum
and then the first harmonic, because usually a kick drum's
going to be somewhere between 30 and 80.
So we're down around 60 and that gives us
those first two harmonics of the kick drum.
And then we've got our send to the drum crush,
their drum parallel, which we've already seen.
And then there is a side chain into bus 9.
I believe that what it is triggering is actually disabled at this point,
but we'll come across it as we go.
Snare, very similar setup.
We got a top and a bottom, very traditional.
And this has some gating right at the beginning.
So we'll see how much this is doing.
It's not that heavy, so you can see that it's pretty straight ahead.
It has a slightly slower attack.
So what this means is as we go down below, it's not going to pump.
So it takes one millisecond to get down there and then the release
is a little slower, which is good because what we're really trying to do
is to get the snare, but we don't want the hi-hat in between to be pumping.
So it's a little bit slower doing that, and then our range is at 9.43,
which is a very technical number.
That is the number to use when you're gating a snare.
Obviously, this was just done by ear just to get rid of a little bit of the hi-hat,
the hi-hat bleed into the snare mic doesn't sound bad,
but again this is about controlling the sources.
If you want to change something about the hi-hat, you don't want to be
chasing it through all of the microphones it's bleeding into
just like the crash cymbals into the tom mics.
So it's about containing it a little bit, so you can deal with the hat on its own.
Snare bottom, oh, hold on, just show you this again.
So adding some top, which is good after gating that hi-hat down
and adding a little bit of... wow, a little bit of 200 down here.
That's body, I keep forgetting how low that is on an SSL EQ,
that's almost exactly the frequency I would always use on Neve EQs
when I was still mixing on the console.
So 220 was the mid-range frequency that I would use quite a bit for the body.
They're only using a tiny bit, but there you go.
And let me play you with and without this,
because there's also a high-pass filtered around 70.
So listen to the kick bleed in here because it's doing exactly what I thought.
It's lessening the low end in the kick bleed.
It's fine to have a bit of the attack in there, but just like with the kick out,
having the top end taken off so that it's only one microphone
doing the attack, this is taking that low end out of the snare
so you can do anything you want with the snare level
and it won't affect the kick drum.
This is all about compartmentalizing the sound of each drum.
And that is followed by once again, a little bit of limiting
just to even out the attack.
I mean, he's a ridiculously consistent drummer.
One of the things is that with any drummer, there's going to be
some inconsistency in how hard they hit the drum, but the biggest thing
you're looking for is that they hit the same part of the drum.
And if they're hitting the rim at the same time that they always
hit the rim, because a little bit of inconsistency in the level
usually doesn't matter or it can be dealt with with some very light limiting.
But when the tone of the drum is inconsistent,
that's when you're going to end up either triggering your sample
to fill it in so that it's a little bit more consistent tonally,
or you're going to actually fly individual snare hits in
to replace the ones where they miss the rim.
Again, excellent drummer.
Very, very consistent.
Snare bottom, it's a snare bottom.
You can imagine there's a gate with a much bigger range.
We're gating 33 dB when it's not happening.
And then again, little bit of limiting.
More likely than not with snare bottom,
this is copied over, bring the threshold down.
Okay, that's it.
But snare top with and without the snare bottom.
Not a huge part of the snare sound, but it does give a little more length.
And you'll see I'm doing something to the snare as well, which we'll wait
until we've got the whole kit in to show you again to add length.
And this is part of gluing the snare drum to the rest of the kit.
It doesn't need to last all the way up to the next kick drum,
but it wants to have a decay instead of just being a transient.
So that's kick and snare.
We've already looked at the toms
and then we've got a bunch of other mics because you can.