Hello children!
Welcome to Monnow Valley Studios in Wales,
which is a studio I've partnered with,
and you can see a bunch of gear in the background
that we're not going to use in this particular video.
Today we are here to mix a song called 'Pink As Floyd'
by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
And very briefly, I'll just give you the story behind this song.
For the album 'I'm With You,'
Rick Rubin produced,
Greg Fidelman did all of the basic tracks,
and then he and I did a lot of the overdub recording,
and then I mixed the bulk of the album
while Greg was still recording,
and then he mixed a couple of songs, etc., etc.
While working on the album, the band cut 50 songs,
and not just basic tracks of 50 songs;
actually, almost finished recording 50 songs,
including final lead vocals.
So, all we left off
were some of the guitar overdubs and keyboards and things like that,
and then background vocals.
They then went through the songs,
decided what they wanted to go on the album,
those songs got finished and mixed, etc., etc.
But there were so many great songs that didn't make the album,
just because there were so many,
that we then did a series of 7" releases afterwards
where we had 17 of the songs that didn't make it.
And you might be saying to yourself, '17 is an odd number, Andrew,
and you said it was 7". Those have an A-side and a B-side.'
Well,
part of the release was one very long jam
that was actually Side A and Side B of the 7".
And not to go off into the weeds too much,
but, because we were cutting vinyl and all of these,
we tried lots of little tricks,
and on that particular 7",
Side A plays from the outside to the inside,
then you flip it over, drop the needle on the inside, and it plays to the outside.
Quite cool!
Anyway, this is one of those songs,
'Pink As Floyd,'
and all of the B-sides were collected into a Record Store Day release
called 'I'm Beside You.' Get it?
But, in a lot of ways,
the band never really looked at these as B-sides.
It's not that these were sort of songs
not good enough to make the record,
it was just there were too many songs.
And I think, after 'Stadium Arcadium'
they just figured another double album wasn't really the way to go.
What was cool about this, though,
is it meant that we had this very sort of relaxed
schedule to releasing because we were releasing only 2 songs at a time
and they wanted at least a month in between.
The band was on tour, so,
whenever Josh — who was the one who had the most recording
to do on these songs after the fact anyway —
whenever he was in town and we had time,
we would just do as much as we could get done
and then he would leave town and I would mix stuff and I would send it.
So it was a really fun low pressure process
compared to actually making a Red Hot Chili Peppers record,
which is a lot of fun,
but there's a lot to it and you're finishing a lot of songs at once,
you're always up against the deadline, etc., etc.
So, anyway,
this particular song,
slightly odd song structure,
which we'll get into in a minute.
It has a string quartet on it,
which is, I believe,
the only song on the entire set
that we actually added strings to,
so, that was a lot of fun.
Otherwise, it's pretty straight- ahead instrumentally,
so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to play you the entire song.
So for 5 minutes you're going to listen to the Chili Peppers
and I'm going to sit uncomfortably.
There you go! Pretty straight-ahead.
Before I actually get into the mixing, though,
I want to walk through the arrangement
because it's actually kind of clever.
The good thing is, in terms of trying to build the song
you have a very natural build in the beginning
going from strings to a very minimal band,
you save the drums for quite a while, things like that.
And then it breaks down again in the middle,
but then you actually build the track up much, much faster.
So, I just want to go through sort of what elements are in each section,
and you'll see — once we get into the way
the end of the song, especially, is mixed —
there's a lot of kind of getting things out of the way of other things
so that everybody can have a little tiny moment,
but then, hopefully,
you don't actually notice any of that is going on,
you don't realize the strings have disappeared for a second
and then they come back, but when they come back,
all of a sudden the track is bigger but then they disappear
so you can hear the bass run, etc.
So, that kind of stuff,
and some of that is just in the musical arrangement alone,
some of that is me doing rides,
it's changing some of the string arrangement.
Actually, ditching some of the stuff
that we recorded and things like that.
We start off with just strings,
and interestingly,
when we worked on the song during the album, there weren't any strings.
This was all cut as part of finishing up for the 7".
So, without the strings,
the song just started with the guitar.
Single acoustic guitar.
Very quickly, this drum kit,
all the drums up top,
this was from the original tracking, obviously.
The bass is from the original tracking,
this guitar here,
this electric guitar which has the 'close' and the 'combo' amp,
that's from the original tracking.
Then there would've been a scratch vocal
and I don't think there's anything kept from the scratch vocal on this song,
so that's the actual basic track.
And then, very quickly,
they put on a couple of these other guitars.
Like the guitar in the breakdown,
it was re-cut almost immediately because,
just sonically, there wasn't one tone
that was going to work for the body of the song as well as the bridge,
so Josh re-cut that.
The wah guitar was put on not too long after,
and then this acoustic guitar was cut.
I think it's one of the last guitars that got cut,
and that was more because
they didn't want to start the song with the electric,
and they wanted the electric guitar when it came in
to be complimenting the acoustic guitars.
From the very beginning,
the acoustic guitar and main electric guitar arrangement
was sort of the idea.
Then once we started cutting strings to flesh out the arrangement,
we asked the string players to do something that most string players hate,
which is to play things that are not written out.
So what we basically told them is,
'We want the end of the intro to be...
...that chord.'
And we said, 'We want you guys to noddle around for a while
and then end up on that chord,
and we don't know how long, and don't worry about it.'
We just recorded them... free,
not to a click, not to the song,
and then I just lined these two takes up.
So, it took a while, but...
I unfortunately cannot remember the name of the string quartet at the moment,
but they are a contemporary string quartet in Los Angeles
and they are a little bit more used to the idea of improvising
than a lot of just strict classically trained players are.
But we ended up with these great clouds of strings.
Then, into what I talked about before,
which is the acoustic guitar leading into the electric guitar.
By the time you get to that first verse,
even though it's really just...
that's it, just electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and vocal,
it's a very Chili Peppers-sounding thing.
The sound of that electric guitar
obviously sounds like Josh,
but it sounds like the Chili Peppers all the way back to Hillel.
They've always had this kind of clean Strat or Tele Fender sound
that's a lot of their rhythm guitars,
so you get to the first verse...
And Anthony's voice on top of clean guitars,
Chili Peppers, easy!
Then you go halfway through the verse
and Flea comes in along with a shaker.
Get it? 'Shake it for me' and...
...get the shaker.
Well played!
And then, when you get to the end of that section
to what's being called the chorus...
This song was always nebulous as to what's the verse
and what's the chorus and things like that,
so we're calling this next section the chorus.
And this is where you actually get the drums:
And now you're actually at the core Chili Peppers quartet.
There's bass, drums, electric guitar, vocal,
that's it for the first half of that verse.
Then you just get a little...
I'm going to call it a verse
because it's actually treated lyrically like a verse.
Then halfway through that verse
you kind of get this signature guitar overdub for the song:
Those little wah fills become a feature,
they're a part of the verse/chorus section that comes next,
and they will keep coming in and out.
So that's really the basis of the song:
it's the electric rhythm guitar,
sometimes with an acoustic going with it,
drums, bass, vocal.
Aside from that,
you've got a couple of extra guitars that happen in the bridge.
When we get to the bridge and it breaks down,
the main guitar switches tones.
We get the strings back as sort of a feature there,
though they have come back in an earlier section.
We'll hear that.
And then, to climb out of this bridge,
we actually break down even more.
A lot of this is about resetting the dynamic,
but it's also the storytelling of the song.
But to be able to reset the dynamic
and go into this final verse,
as actually the quietest verses of all
because all of a sudden we barely have any strumming,
the guitar goes much simpler,
we have some very simple piano,
it's the first time the piano enters.
Listen to the end of the bridge,
just going into the beginning of the next verse:
Whole notes, half-time drums, all very simple,
and then it builds up over the next minute or so
to have absolutely everything,
so by the time we get to the end
you've got a doubled string quartet doubling the bass runs,
you've got much busier piano,
you've got every guitar that has ever played in the song is now playing,
plus the bass, plus the shaker,
and obviously, the full drum kit.
It's kind of this great
accordioned-out version of the build
in the first half of the song,
and really introducing the band.
Then you breakdown,
do the middle eight, which gives you a musical change,
then you get the exact same song form again but super condensed
and actually building up to a larger dynamic than you've ever had before,
you have more background vocals than you've had before, etc., etc., etc.
All right, now we've talked about the song as a whole.
I'm gonna go back up to the drums,
I'm going to bypass all of the kind of mixing stuff,
and show you what we've got for drum tracks.
There are quite a few tracks
because of the way the drums were being tracked
for 50 songs at once.
And I'm not using all of them,
but I'll play you what all of them are,
and if I can remember why I decided not to use a particular mic, I'll tell you,
but otherwise, just trust that it sounded better without it on this particular song.
But it's not that all of these microphones
were set up very specifically for this song.
These microphones were being recorded for all of the songs,
so it was always meant to be
a kind of decision-making process when we got further into the song.
Sometimes the microphones would have been turned off
as soon as we got into the overdub portion of working on the song,
sometimes we would have left them until it was time to actually mix.
I'm gonna go through, get rid of all the plug-ins
because that's fun, right?
And I'm actually going to
make things inactive that were bypassed.
I'll mute stuff that is...
...parallels.
I guess we'll leave that, that's on an Aux.
You see there's not a whole lot going on.
And then I'll come down here
and I'm gonna mute all of my parallel drum stuff,
which if you've watched my session setup video and template video,
you'll know exactly what this is.
Not all of this is being used,
but, we'll take it all out.
Soloing up the drums.
This is what the drum kit sounds like completely dry,
though my 2-bus processing is still on.
When we talk about that you'll see what that does to the whole mix,
but I don't think it does us a whole lot of good to get rid of it completely.
Pretty natural-sounding kit.
This was actually recorded in EastWest Studio 2,
which is a room that the Chili Peppers have used quite a bit.
I believe 'Blood Sugar Sex Magik' was actually cut in that room as well.
And now I'm just gonna go through the drum microphones one by one
so you can kind of hear what they are.
So here's Kick In:
Then normally with hi-hat,
I call it the mic voted least likely to ever get used in a mix.
With Chad Smith, that is a very different story.
The way he uses his left foot on the hi-hat
is a huge part of the way he plays drums,
the way you kind of hear it sizzling and opening a tiny bit,
and the sort of rhythmic change, even in a closed hi-hat sound.
So, on this particular song, it's in there.
I'm not making a big deal out of it,
but if you're not getting enough out of the overheads
of that particular sound with Chad,
I will always go looking for the hi-hat mic to add it in,
because to me,
that's almost the most defining part
of the way he plays drums.
His tone and his groove are just ridiculously good,
but that's the thing that nobody else does that I've ever heard.
Here are the overheads:
Ride mic.
Barely hear it. I think it was just on
because no one ever bothered to turn it off.
I don't think we need it on there.
The toms,
I'll go ahead and solo them up
in a spot where he hits them.
Pretty straight-ahead.
Again, great sounding toms,
and he...
...is somebody who makes toms sound great.
So now we get to the Close Room,
this is the one that I bounced through a couple of extra compressors.
So here's the Close Room as it was recorded:
Just a fantastic sounding room,
I love this drum room.
It doesn't sound reverby at all,
but it sounds super dense and it's like a room.
It really, really sounds like a room
but you don't feel as though the drums have moved
20 feet away when you bring it up.
And as part of the overdub process in all of these songs,
the 17 that we put out after the 'I'm With You' record,
I was at Joe Barresi's studio doing some overdubs
and he said, 'Dude, you gotta check this out!'
as he always does,
and he had a Vocal Stressor set up and a pair of LA500s,
these 500 Series compressors from JLM
which are basically LA-3As with a high-pass on the detector circuit.
And they sounded so good I just decided to bounce
all 17 songs worth of overheads through these compressors,
and then just have them available on the different songs.
What I'm going to do while it's playing
is I'm going to switch from the dry overheads
to each of the two compressors.
If you watch the screen,
these blue ones that are solo'ed right now
are the microphones as recorded.
The red track down is the Vocal Stressor,
and then the green track is the LA500s.
So, really different character.
On some of the heavier songs I made much bigger use of these,
but what I'll do now
is I'm going to solo up the mics
and I'll add these to it.
And you should hear how it just gets thicker,
and this is something that I do with parallel compressors,
usually live, just leaving them on inserts
all the time,
where I bring parallel compressors in and out on the drum kit
to help grow the kit.
In this case I just decided to bounce a couple,
and that way they're done.
Just sounds like he's playing harder
and this is what I love about parallel compressors on drums.
You'll see in the arrangement
that I actually use region mutes
to make the Vocal Stressor part of just the loudest sections,
so this big sort of second verse,
which is actually the second chorus lyrically,
and then the end section.
Whereas the LA500
I'm using to be kind of part of the sound of the drum kit,
but in that breakdown verse after the bridge,
which I played you earlier, which is the quietest part of the whole song,
I actually take that out and then fade it in
as we build out of that verse into the next chorus.
I could have done this with an Aux, but I didn't.
I bounced some gear and then did some fades, later on.
Now we'll get down to the more random mics,
and not all of these are used on this mix,
but there is a far room,
which I guess I'll turn on for you so you can hear it,
but we're not using it on this mix.
This is a much bigger room.
It's a little further away, it wasn't appropriate.
This song needed to be a little bit more intimate.
I'll actually make those guys inactive because I'm not using it.
Then there was a 251 on the drum kit:
Nice mono representation of the kit.
This was always meant to be crushed
and I've got some plug-ins on it which crush it,
some of which maybe were put on during the overdub process.
Then there was an SM57 room mic,
which we didn't use.
I believe what this was set up for
was in case Chad had a second snare drum,
if he was using a timbale snare or something like that,
it was in place, but if it's set up, why not record it anyway?
So point it away from the kit, you got yourself an extra room mic.
Didn't use it on this song, I'll make it inactive.
Mono overhead, to differentiate itself from the mono kit.
That '251 kit' mic is most likely down low,
either behind the kit or in front of the kit on the floor tom side.
I'm saying that because I know the way Greg records.
If it didn't sound good there, it would have been moved,
but I'm guessing that's where it was.
Whereas this mono overhead would be a mono overhead,
more than likely somewhere nearer the drummer than the drum kit.
That's just yet another mono mic, it's just used as glue.
Then there's a PZM, this is something Greg tracks with,
it's a pretty cool sound.
It's on the floor underneath the snare drum, near the front head of the kick,
so you get a really cool pointy attack on the kick
and you get a lot of snare bottom in it.
On heavier rock stuff this can be a really handy mic
to kind of keep the drums sounding present, but in a dirty way.
It didn't need that on this song,
so we'll make this inactive because we didn't use it.
And then the talkback mic, this is a 57 that's pointed at Chad's head.
And as most people who have tracked drums know,
after doing it a little while,
the talkback mic sounds awesome. Always record it.
I've seen some people leave the talkback mic
just going through an input to people's headphones
and not recording it while they are tracking.
Everything sounds amazing, then they listen back
and they're like, 'Oh, the drums sound a little flat. I wonder what happened.'
It's because it's the talkback mic.
It's just a balanced microphone, it's the indirect recording approach,
and it's also pointing at the drummer's head, which...
They're wearing headphones,
so they're not really balancing the kit based on what they're hearing,
but they do tend to balance the kit based on what they hear,
and this way they learn to be drummers.
So must drummers are — unless they're completely unbalanced —
will have the kit sound pretty balanced right where they're sitting,
so that's what this talkback mic is.
And you can hear it's pretty highly compressed.
Now, that would be compressed for two reasons.
One, because it sounds awesome as a drum mic,
but what it really is is so that while Chad is playing really loud,
it's not incredibly loud in the headphones,
but as soon as he stops playing, because it's so heavily compressed
there's a lot of input gain into the compressor,
now everybody can hear him talk.
Now, you would think having all the rest of these microphones around the drum kit
you would hear Chad no matter what,
but overheads are your best bet,
and if you're not listening to the overheads loud,
you actually cannot hear the drummer,
and there is nothing more frustrating for the drummer
than to not be given a talkback mic.
And then the band all starts talking into their 57s
and they sound like radio announcers,
and the drummer sounds like he's yelling from the back of the room.
So, it's important for just the band dynamic, and it's also...
For me now, it's a huge part of the drum sound on everything I do.
Those microphones put together to be the drum kit
sound a little bit like this.
And again, this is without any additional processing,
so no plug-ins on after the fact,
and none of the parallel processing.
The only thing you're hearing, which you've heard on all of the microphones,
is my 2-mix chain which we'll talk about later on.
Let me solo up the drums.
Very natural, in a room,
the sound of a great drummer playing well.
It's...
It's a gift to be given something like that.
And then later on, when he is playing louder:
Another thing you can hear about Chad's drumming,
which to me is very impressive and it's all part of his internal dynamics, is...
I'm gonna play that section again in a second.
Listen to how much tone there is in the ride cymbal,
but then when he goes to the crash, he smashes it.
Whereas a lot of drummers,
because they're in the loud part of the song,
would be treating the ride cymbal like a crash/ride.
They'd just be slamming on it,
but that is not what this drum performance is supposed to be.
It's supposed to be still the sort of lyrical...
...bouncy drum track,
but it's got to be loud,
so all the crashes need to be smashed,
but the ride needs to still be riding.
You need to hear all the individual attacks on the cymbal,
and that comes out beautifully in this.
It also gives it somewhere to go,
you hear before the drum fill he's playing a little quieter,
then he builds it into the drum fill, and then comes back to it louder.
That is genius,
and that is what makes a good drummer into a great drummer.
It's all that little stuff, because,
if you don't do it, the drum track will still work for the song,
but what will happen is,
as a mixer you're gonna have to build all those dynamics with rides,
and try and make the drummer sound like he was doing all that stuff,
whereas for me, all I gotta do is make sure you actually hear him.
So, it's a huge thing to have that.
So now, if we go back and look at some of the individual things,
I'm not doing a whole lot to the drums
but there are just a few plug-ins here and there.
So, let's go back to the Kick In,
and what we're going to do
is I'm going to go through the plug-ins,
but I'm also gonna start turning on some of the parallel stuff
because that's what really helps shape the drum kit.
So here's the Kick In,
and all I'm using is a Lo-Fi
and a Scheps 73.
I would say that's my plug-in chain
on just about every kick and snare that I mix now.
And we're not going to see that over and over in this session
because there's not a whole lot that has been done.
It's basically a little bit of distortion
and a little bit of EQ,
and I'm not using the preamp side
of the 1073 emulation,
I'm really just using it for the EQ.
And it's because I am a Neve kid,
I grew up on Neve consoles,
it's what I learned to record and mix on,
so this is the EQ that sounds musical to me.
The frequencies make sense to me,
and I'm also a fan of not having infinite choices.
A fully parametric EQ to me
is just an invitation to wank.
You're just going to be looking for the right frequency forever,
and, 'Oh my god! What if I have the wrong frequency?
And what if my bandwidth isn't right? And...'
I don't want to think that way,
I just want to crank some stuff and, 'Ooh! It sounds better! Move on.'
Here's with and without the Lo-Fi,
which, you're also going to get some gain,
but basically, it's a clipper.
I'm not using the Noise, I'm not using the Saturation,
I'm not using the Antialias, Sample Size, or the Sample Rate controls.
It's just distortion.
It just sounds more alive to me.
And then, the EQ is basically a 'happy face' EQ,
which is kind of what I do.
The high-pass filter is not in, so I'm letting all the low end through.
We've got a low shelf at 60,
we've got a little bit of 7.2 k,
and a tiny bit of the 12 k shelf.
There are a lot of people who will EQ midrange into a kick drum
because it's where the attack lives.
It just always sounds really midrangey to me,
I would much rather get that attack way up high.
And that also tends to keep it
from being right in the same range
as the vocal and electric guitars, if you've got a lot of them,
and even the cymbals.
It sort of puts it in a different space,
so here's with and without the EQ:
Do you hear the drum resonating a little more?
That's that 60.
And then the combination of the 7.2 and the 12,
which most people would think on a kick drum,
especially on an inside mic, like, 'Well, what's the point?
Unless you're mixing a Metallica record
or something that really has to have that point.
Pantera, those kinds of bands.'
Generally, you don't think in terms of point as being up that high,
but for me, it actually makes it more musical and less aggressive.
That's just the way I hear it.
So that's the Kick In,
and then, what I'm also going to do,
I'm going to leave off the sort of main stereo parallel drum compressor,
but I'm going to turn on the Kick/Snare Crush.
So this is just a shared compressor,
and it is shared by the kick and the snare,
and it is a dbx 160 VU.
At four and a bit to one.
I don't know, 4.5:1.
A tiny bit of output gain, makeup.
And then, what it should be,
and you may not see this properly until the kick mics and the snare mic are in,
is that this will just tickle the threshold.
It's a way to get the kick and snare louder,
because all of the uncompressed stuff
is coming back sounding basically the same,
though the 160 does definitely have a sound
just going through that VCA
and going through the input and output stages.
But then the attack,
because it's such a slow attack time on this particular compressor,
the attack will be much louder than the sustain,
but then the sustain comes up, so it just gives it a great shape.
I've unmuted it down here, so I will mute the send.
And I'm just going to unmute and mute the send
and you can hear what this does.
I just love that,
I think that sounds great.
And especially when we come back
to having the kick and the snare in, together,
you'll hear how that really helps them interact as well,
which is a big part of getting the drums to work for me.
Next down is the 'Kick Out' mic.
I apparently did absolutely nothing to it because it was fine,
and I'm also favoring the Kick In.
What I'm going to do is I'll play a little bit of that,
but then I'm going to add the Kick In as well
and then I'll take the Kick Out in and out, leaving the Kick In.
So you'll hear the kick sound with and without the Kick Out mic,
as opposed to just listening to the Kick Out on its own for too long.
Again, it's more about the resonance of the drum than anything else.
To me, that's adding the exact same thing
that the EQ on the Kick In mic is adding.
It's just this sort of length,
and there's something natural-sounding about it to me.
And I'm using that word only because
I'm trying to explain the feeling of actually...
...hearing the drummer, not just the drum.
There's something about the sound of those two together
that is more like being in the room with a drum kit than not.
Even though these microphones are both incredibly close to the drum
and you definitely wouldn't want to put your head there,
that sounds like what it sounds like to me when I hear a drummer.
Let's move on to the snare, and then you can hear
the K-S Crush with everything.
So I'll turn off the K-S Crush.
And on this particular snare track
all I did was a little bit of EQ,
so I'll just take that in and out. Again, Scheps 73.
The high-pass is in just to clean up,
it's down at 50 Hz.
I'm adding some 220.
Again, I love the Neve EQ
for most things,
but these frequencies are so well-chosen;
60 or 35 is always the bottom of the kick drum,
220 is always the body of the snare, for me.
And then, some 7.2 and some 12 k again.
What I'll do here is I'm going to take the EQ in and out overall.
Then I'm going to take just this 220 in and out,
leaving the rest of the EQ in
so you can hear how that body really changes.
So, with this EQ,
again, the top end is pretty obvious on the snare
and you hear how much that 220 is doing.
Now, me listening, solo'ed right now,
I'm thinking, 'Wow, that's too much 220!'
It's actually sounding a little less natural,
that kind of drummer-in-a-room thing.
But, one thing to keep in mind:
on these videos we spend a lot of time soloing things
and we spend a lot of time
talking about the individual bits we've done on plug-ins.
Most of this stuff, though, would be done in context.
And it may be done in the context of the entire drum kit,
but most likely, this amount of low end was added to the snare
in the context of the entire mix.
And it's what the snare needed
to keep up with other stuff that was going on,
so what I would bet is because the guitar is pretty clean,
it's gonna have a lot of low mids to it,
and it was starting to suck the low mids out of the snare
and the snare was sounding thin.
And so, adding all those extra 220 is what was helping.
That said, what I'm going to do now
is I will turn on the Kick-Snare Crush send,
so you'll hear that dbx 160.
Then I'm going to solo up both kick mics and the snare,
and that way you'll really hear what the K-S Crush is doing,
so I'll take that in and out.
So the first thing is gonna be turning on the K-S Crush for the snare,
then I'm gonna add the kicks back in,
and then I will mute and unmute the K-S Crush
so you hear just the microphones, and then with the parallel compression.
Obviously, the kick and snare are louder with the K-S Crush.
A part of parallel compression is your level comes up,
but,
this is a really good
succinct example
of why I use so much shared parallel compression,
and by that I mean
sending more than one thing to the parallel compressor.
I love what the dbx 160 did to the kick drum,
I love what it did to the snare drum,
but what I love even more
is what it does to the kick and snare.
And it's very different to what would happen
if we had two compressors,
one for the kick and one for the snare.
I'm going to play this again.
Listen to the difference, with and without,
into how the length of the snare
goes right up to the next kick drum,
and the length of the kick goes right to the next snare,
and it's because that compressor will release,
bringing up the noise until the next transient.
And it doesn't know whether it's a kick or a snare,
but whatever it is,
it's going to cut off whichever thing hit beforehand.
And it completely changes the feel of the kick and snare.
Again, it just glues them back together
and it sounds like a person playing drums to me,
a lot more than the individual kick and snare do.
Just night and day, to me.
I'm a big fan of that.
Now, I've noticed,
because I came down here in this part of the session
that the Fatso, which is another shared parallel compressor,
is actually unmuted.
I'll just show you what that stereo compressor is doing.
It's basically a Fatso.
In this session,
I think that I'm...
It's the only stereo compressor I'm using on the drums,
that's all there is.
Really quickly, on the whole drum kit,
all we've got is K-S Crush on the Kick In mic and the Snare Top mic.
We've got this Fatso,
which is on those 3 mics for the kick and snare,
as well as the Snare Bottom.
It is on the rooms and the overheads.
So this is a stereo compressor
for all of the drum kit,
and actually, looking at the session,
I'm not using it on the overheads.
I'm not sure why I wouldn't be using it,
because I usually would,
but I'm not on this particular session.
You'll see when we start looking at the overheads, though,
I have a parallel compressor just for the overheads.
What I'll do is play you that kick and snare again and take the Fatso in and out.
And you'll hear
sort of the same thing happening
with the length of the kick and snare,
but listen more just for the character of the decay of the drums,
because once the rest of the room mics are in that parallel compressor,
it's really going to change.
So it's not as specific to the kick and snare the way the K-S Crush is.
Not night and day, but it just brings up some of the room,
and again, every single step of the way,
the drums sound more exciting to me.
They just sound more like a drummer in a room
having fun playing music,
and that's, to me, what you're always trying to capture.
Not necessarily fun if it's not supposed to be a fun song,
but it's gotta sound like
emotion of people,
and that's what all of this parallel compression really does for me.
It's not just about, 'I need the kick drum to poke through
at these frequencies.' It's about the feel.
Now let's get away from those kick and snare close mics.
I'm not gonna bother with the snare bottom, it just is the snare bottom.
I'll add that to the kick and snare really quickly
so you can hear what goes on with that.
Not much.
It's pretty quiet, so I'm not that worried about what's going on there.
The only other thing that's up here is there's something called 'Band Verb,'
which I guess started live as a reverb for the whole band.
And then, in this particular session
it just became a snare reverb.
H-Reverb.
It's pretty generic, not a lot going on.
What this would be is just to give me a little extra length.
This is really trying to be like a snare room mic.
So you get extra length on the snare, but only the snare,
as opposed to just bringing up room mics.
So with these microphones solo'ed
it sounds a little unnatural, a little bit too much of it,
but, that's because these microphones are solo'ed.
In the context of the drum kit,
especially once the rest of the instruments are in,
I'm sure this is here because the snare was just feeling too dry
and too close, and I want to be able to back up
so you're hearing the drum kit, not the individual drums.
All right, let's move on
to the overheads.
Basically, all that's happening here
is there's a bypassed high-pass filter
at 58 Hz.
So, here's the overhead:
Not doing a whole lot, it's just getting rid of some mud down there.
Now, you'll notice the routing...
I haven't talked too much about the entire session setup,
but basically, in this session there is a bus called 'Router.'
This is an internal bus, and this is my mix bus.
In later versions of my template
I actually started calling it 'Mix Bus' instead of 'Router,'
but that's feeding an Aux down at the bottom of the session
which collects that bus
and is actually called a 'Router.'
It's got my 2-bus chain on it, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
And that then feeds the audio track that I print my mixes on.
So, when something is going to Router,
that's going as far down the audio chain as it can possibly go.
So, the kick and snare microphones are going straight to the mix bus.
Now, the overheads though, are going to Bus 5-6,
so I must have decided very quickly to set this up.
I didn't even bother naming the bus.
So if you look here
we've got the hat, the overheads, and the ride,
so we're just treating all four of those microphones as the overheads.
And it's feeding two Auxes.
We've got two Auxes here that both have their input as Bus 5-6,
and then their output is the Router.
We've got two copies of them going to the mix.
One is completely unprocessed.
That's this one:
And then one has
Smack on it,
on the Drums preset
because it's drums!
So here's the Drums preset.
So this is just smashing up, it's a parallel compressor for the overheads.
I could have done it with a send,
which is the way I normally do parallel compressors,
but I didn't.
So there you go, this is just yet another way to do parallel compression.
The thing that is less flexible about this, though,
is that if I wanted to EQ the overheads,
I could do it on this Aux right here,
the one that doesn't have any other processing,
but that wouldn't change the way
the parallel compressor sounds
because that's downstream
of where the audio is getting sent to that parallel compressor.
The other thing is,
if I wanted something else in this parallel compressor,
I would have to physically send it to Bus 5-6,
which is really my overheads Aux.
So, it's less flexible,
but what it means is that this is a very purpose-built
'just for the overheads' parallel compressor.
So, here's what it sounds like on its own,
and then I'll add the dry signal back in:
It does all the things a parallel compressor normally does.
Now, also,
something that's peculiar to this session
— I didn't usually do this —
is I used a master fader.
And it must be because I set up this audio routing,
and then realized, 'Wow. That's less than ideal.
I don't really have as much control as I want,
but the balance is good
and I don't want to mess with it,
but I need to do something to the overheads.'
The first thing is there's another Smack
on the overheads themselves.
Realize, though,
if I put this up here
and we adhere to my theory
that audio is like water and it flows downhill,
the audio from these 4 tracks
flows into Bus 5-6
through the plug-ins on the master of Bus 5-6,
and then, into these Auxes.
So if I put the compressor on this master fader here,
this will affect both the unaffected channel down here,
which is just passing the overheads to the mix bus,
as well as my parallel compressor.
So this is a very roundabout way
to do the parallel compression routing
the way I normally do,
but it works just as well.
I've got a compressor,
then I've got an EQ,
and then I've got a limiter.
The limiter is not doing anything
except keeping stuff from overshooting.
This might be a leftover from when the song was originally mixed on a console
just to keep the outputs from clipping,
so I'm gonna go ahead and turn this on because it won't really do anything.
And then we'll hear the compressor,
and then I will add the EQ.
This is an example of how I use EQIII quite often,
which is this sort of seek-and-destroy
to find the midrange frequencies that are bothering me.
In this case I think it was less about the cymbals,
which is where I'm usually looking,
which should be more in this kind of 3.32 range.
But there must have been something about the snare,
because when I have this EQ in, the snare sounds a lot better to me.
So there's a bit of a ring around 1 k,
so let me take this EQ in and out. And also, I'm adding a little bit of top.
I'll take this out again and just listen to the snare:
So there must have been something about the ring of the snare
that was fighting with something else,
because out of context like this,
it's not bothering me very much,
but I'm sure with the whole drum kit in the mix
there was something really bugging me.
I'll go to the end of the song where there are a lot more cymbals too.
You can hear it's also kind of cleaning up the ride cymbal,
it's taking out some of the...
...sort of rolling buildup,
which in this case happens to be in that 1 k range.
So those are all of the close mics that are being used
other than the toms.
And on the toms there's nothing going on.
I've got a limiter here just to turn them up
because they weren't loud enough.
And then the only other thing that's on the toms
is some reverb.
And I'll play you that
because that's worth listening to, I suppose.
So here's a tom fill
without the reverb:
So it's a very unnatural-sounding reverb,
and that's because it is filtered
to get rid of the top end.
And that's more about the cymbal bleed into the toms
than it is about the toms themselves.
Because cymbals in reverb is a bad thing in the middle of a song
to have show up and then disappear again.
So that's to get rid of top end going into the reverb,
then there is the Little MicroShift
because the big MicroShift wasn't out yet,
and that's just getting some chorusing.
And then into an ambient reverb,
and it's a very kind of dense, bright thing.
And again,
out of context, this sounds ridiculous.
In context, it just makes the toms sound
a little bit more like they're in the room.
This is just like that snare reverb,
so now, even though I'm just working off close mics,
it's almost like I was able to reach in
and change the balance in the room mics,
because now there's a bit more of room sound
around the snare and around the toms.
When we listen to the whole drum kit in a second,
after we go through the room mics,
I will take those reverbs in and out
and you'll kind of hear
how those drums will dry up
and sound a little less natural in the context of the kit.
I've been talking about
what makes sense in context and out of context,
and by out of context basically I mean
not listening to the whole mix.
And you've also heard me a couple of times already,
and it's probably going to happen more as we go through the rest of the tracks,
talk about, like, 'Oh, well, normally I do this,
but in this case I did something else.'
Usually what happens is
the stuff I do normally
is what I do when I'm going through track by track.
I normally put a Lo-Fi and a Scheps 73 on the kick and the snare.
In this case, I didn't even put a Lo-Fi on the snare,
but that's what will usually happen.
All the stuff I don't normally do
is the stuff that happens based on what I react to
once the mix is actually in progress.
And the sound of the snare, when it's solo'ed up,
has nothing to do with what it sounds like
once you actually put the vocal, and the cymbals, and the guitars,
and the 2-bus compression, and everything else that is going on in the mix in.
So there's lots of stuff I do as a reaction,
and I do it very quickly,
so what will happen is I'm working on, let's say, the vocal,
and the snare is bugging me.
I will scroll up to the top of the session,
I'll do something to the snare drum,
and then scroll back down to the vocal
because that's what I'm concentrating on,
but the snare was distracting me so much
I had to deal with it then and there
so that I could work on the vocal.
So that work on the snare was actually part of working on the vocal,
and it didn't bother me until I was working on the vocal.
So, this is where the stuff
that is definitely one-off for certain mixes comes into it.
And, percentage-wise,
it's very hard for me to say
how much stuff is what I would usually do
and how much stuff isn't.
Because of course, everything in my template is stuff I would usually do,
but how I use the stuff in my template could change mix to mix,
or what gets sent to certain compressors changes from mix to mix.
But it's a really important concept to get across.
I think that there is sort of a 2-stage process to mixing.
One is the 'What the hell do I have here?' stage,
and, 'How do I make it all work together?
And how do I just make it so that when I hit Play,
I don't hate myself and the song?'
And then there's the 'Oh, god! This is sounding so awesome!
How do I finish it?
And how does everything work together? And is the snare bugging with the vocal?'
or 'Wow! I want to hear the toms a little more
but they sound too dry. Let me put some reverb on them.'
That's the more fun part, but it's also the 'in context' part.
It's the part where every single thing in the mix
relies on everything else in the mix.
And it's after you've fixed problems,
gotten your general balance,
and now you're actually mixing.
I don't even consider that first part mixing,
because I like to think that mixing is fun and that stuff isn't always fun.
That said,
let's move on to some room mics.
We've got our Close Room,
which we talked about earlier having these extra compressors,
so we've already heard these guys.
And they're going straight to the Router,
but they also do go to the Fatso,
so they're in with that stereo drum compression.
So, I'll play it for you with and without the Fatso
just so you get a better idea of what the Fatso is doing.
So, to my ears,
the actual attack of the kick and snare
are not changing.
They're basically exactly the same,
but the character of the room
and the excitement of what's coming back changed completely.
That's why I do it.
We've got three of these sort of
miscellaneous microphones that we are using here.
The 251, which...
I believe some of these plug-ins
were actually put on very early on in the tracking stage.
Yes, this was put on during the tracking, so I should have really left this on.
There's no point in hearing this microphone dry.
So this is kind of a crushed up mono kit mic:
You can hear it's a very transient microphone
and we're not trying to get kick and snare out of this mic,
we're trying to get drum kit.
And then, further down the chain,
RBass.
Okay, I decided I wanted
some extra low end out of this,
because I liked the way the kick was feeling.
So you can hear it totally different in terms of what it does to the kick.
Again, out of context means nothing.
Once we get the whole drum kit together,
that's going to really give the kick some length
that it wouldn't normally have just from the close mics.
So you can see I've got three different places I'm getting length on the kick:
I've got EQ on the Kick In microphone,
I've got the Kick-Snare Crush,
and then I've got this 251 kit mic.
All of them add up
to giving the kick more length and more size.
You could do it all just on the Kick In mic,
but, I think you'd find
that you'd have to wrench it around a lot harder,
and to me, the more extreme the processing gets,
especially with EQ, the more you hear it,
because if the sort of pitch of the drum
changes at all because he is hitting it harder or choking it,
all of a sudden the character of that EQ will change a lot.
If the fundamental shifts up
because the beater is left on the head instead of coming off the head
or something like that, now your EQ is no good.
Whereas with two different parallel compressors,
one being a totally different microphone and one being a compressor,
you sort of get some consistency
out of how you're getting the length in your kick drum.
It's also just because it sounded good.
So, there you go.
So we're gonna leave that in,
and then what do we have on the back end?
We got another Smack
because it wasn't compressed enough.
So this is interesting. What I'm going to do now
is I'm going to bring up the RBass plug-in.
Because we are not actually hanging on to that low end,
we're letting this compressor just kill it.
I'm going to let you listen with the Smack in,
and I'm going to take the RBass in and out,
and what you should hear
is with the RBass out
the compression is going to be almost completely about the snare
and not about the kick, and it's not going to pump in the same way.
Whereas adding that huge low end to the kick drum
— of course, I just told you it was for the sound of the kick.
Turns out I was lying —
it's going to be more about the character of the compression,
regardless of the low end.
So you can hear that a lot of that
extra low frequency information
isn't actually making it through the compressor,
but it completely changes how that compressor reacts
to the microphone in front.
Now, I would love to tell you that that was my fantastic idea,
'I heard the way the Smack was working and decided,
Man! If I just had a little bit of sub on the kick and...'
I doubt it was that way.
I have a feeling as I was going through the individual microphones
I thought, 'Wow, the low end is really cool on that microphone.
If I put some RBass on it...'
And then later on I decided, 'You know what? It's way too clean.
I'm getting enough transient out of the close mics,
so let me try using this as more of a smashed up microphone,'
and I just left the RBass.
But I doubt I would have liked the Smack as much without the RBass.
So, happy accident,
or genius?
Not really sure.
Let's go for genius.
Next is just two
of the other microphones which we've already listened to,
the mono overhead and the talkback.
They're not a huge part of this particular mix,
they're just in as part of the kit.
They're panned right up the middle, they're quiet,
there's nothing on them, they go to the Fatso.
I'll just remind you what they sound like,
but then we're gonna go and just put the whole drum kit in.
I'm gonna take the Fatso in and out
so you can hear what that does.
All right, let's get to the whole drum kit!
Shall we?
Here's without the Fatso:
I don't even know what to say about that
other than I like it a lot.
As I'm taking it in and out,
it sounds like the drummer is playing a different dynamic.
It sounds like Chad is playing two bars quiet, two bars loud.
Or one bar?
It's...
...still natural, it still sounds like the drum kit,
it just sounds like a much more exciting version of the kit.
And, look,
I'm dealing with really well recorded tracks
of an impeccably tuned drum kit
played by one of the best rock drummers ever,
basically.
Certainly one of my favorites.
So it's not like I'm dealing with bad tracks here
and I need this stuff to make the drums work,
but the fact that even when your tracks are good
this stuff is still really, really adding
to the feel of the drum kit...
Well, it kind of indicates my entire career, basically.
In a lot of ways, but...
It just makes me happy.
It makes me happy that this stuff can work,
and it will work just as well
on terribly recorded, terribly played drums.
You're gonna have to do other stuff
to make it work in the context of the song
if you get something that's really crazy,
but these techniques just work.
And if you've seen any of my other mixing videos,
you see almost the exact same thing happening over and over and over
in slightly different amounts and flavors,
but it's because the general concept always works
and it's all about making the kit
sound big in a room,
but present
— I'm not a fan of, like, roomy drum kits —
and also exciting.
And all of the excitement
is what happens in between the transients, to me.
It's the sound of the kit itself
rattling and growling and doing stuff.
I have some other parallel processes that are here
because they were part of my template,
but none of them are actually being used,
so, we don't get to hear about those.
We're gonna have to check out a different song to hear about that.
So that's drums!