- I always print stem mixes of all the main
song elements through my console
and back into Pro Tools
when I'm working on a mix.
This is sort of a safety measure.
You know, a lot of artists will have just a slight
change later on with their mixes,
and then when I'm mixing in the analogue realm
and back into Pro Tools,
this allows me to re-visit the mixes,
as a lot of the work I'm doing
isn't really that easy to recall.
It's not a mix in the box type situation.
But these stems can be used in other ways.
You can see here we've got stems
from a song.
We have bass, drums, guitar,
two passes of horns,
korg, keyboard, organ,
piano, and vocals.
You can hear a little bit of it right here.
(jazz music)
So that's a really good approximation
of the, or that is the final mix
that we printed just broken down into stems.
Now obviously, a simple thing you can do
is just to simply mute the vocal
and bounce this all to disk.
You can run a mix where you've got
an instrumental version.
(jazz music)
And that's going to give you an option
to use that in film, or TV,
or advertising kind of work.
It's pretty common that comes around.
You can do quite a few more things
with this technique.
In this mix, you can see that we've chopped
up some of the elements.
One of the things you can do,
if you had just a full mix of the songs,
so you would not be able to just
chop and edit in certain ways.
One of the things we've done here
is duplicated the horn tracks,
you can see right here,
and we've layered them in over each other
to create some harmonies where
there weren't harmonies.
And we've also done little fades
where they come in at different times.
Check this out.
(jazz music)
So we've got elements.
We've got a longer intro.
We've doubled the length of the intro
in that section there, and we took out
the piano once the vocals came in.
So we've created essentially a slightly
different mix.
We've extended that section.
And we couldn't do that by simply chopping
up an existing two track stereo mix.
So this gives you options to change a song.
We could also make a song shorter
by cutting sections in tighter
if we wanted to do like a radio edit.
On this screen, you can see that we've muted
some of the elements, the horns,
the korg, and the organ are all taken out.
I've also applied some effects.
If we go over here to the mix window,
we've got a decapitator on the bass guitar track.
Let's hear a little bit of that.
(bass notes)
There's the regular sound.
(bass notes)
And there's the fuzzy sound.
All right, you can there's something going on there.
Here on the drums, we've also run the devil lock,
which is interesting, Soundtoys's
sort of distortion type creation unit.
(percussion music)
Without it, very soft.
With it on, crunchy.
I've also put in a DSer.
Now the DSer is taking out some of the sharp
transient high end peaks that are happening
because of the devil lock.
So I'll show you what I'm doing there.
(percussion music)
So that's just softening it up a little bit,
making it a little less harsh.
This track is pretty fun here on the guitar.
We've added in some EchoBoy, some echo,
and we've also put in the devil lock
after the echo.
So we're distorting the echo in guitar.
(guitar notes)
Without the distortion,
we don't have quite the same sustain.
The distortion kind of sustains it out
like it would even just simply on a guitar,
and the echo, of course, causing the repeat.
All these tracks are muted.
Like I said earlier, the piano now,
this is the fun one.
We've used little alterboy.
This is a little smorgasbord
of the Soundtoys Native Effects bundle here.
Some good effects, some fun things to play with.
Let's jump ahead to where that comes in.
(high pitched noises)
Notice, a completely different sound
when I turned that off.
Of course, we've got some echo on there.
And then on the lead vocal,
I'll just put some echoes and kind
of over the top echo.
(singing)
Like a ridiculous slap back.
Now when we hear all these together,
it's going to be quite a different mix
than the song we had going earlier.
(jazz music)
That's some fun stuff.
Now one of the things I really like about that
is by simplifying your mix down
to a handful of tracks, it allows you
just to slather these effects on
and try stuff in a really overt simple way,
whereas if you were dealing with, say,
a 30 or 40 track count mix,
all the individual tracks that haven't
been sub-mixed like this,
it would be a lot harder to sit there
and apply that to the tracks
and get the same results,
like especially the drums are coming
in on all these different mics,
and you'd have to figure out
how to bus them down
or which ones to put distortion on
and which ones not,
which can be really another
effective way of mixing.
But this makes it really quick.
You can come up with some crazy sounds.
And the creativity that this sort of situation
opens up is practically endless.