While we've got one instrument up,
what I think that I'm going to do
is skip to my 2-bus chain
because we are actually hearing that the whole time,
which is an important part of the way I mix.
My 2-bus chain is in from the very beginning.
This chain is slightly simpler
than what's in my template right now,
but it's very similar.
Things have changed order,
but the types of tools are the same.
We are listening through this track in Input the entire time.
That means that this is the way
the Pro Tools mixer sounds for me.
I'm not somebody who likes to build up a mix
and then see what's going to work on the 2-bus.
The 2-bus is there before I solo up my first track.
I'm EQ'ing the kick drum through the 2-bus,
because otherwise,
I could go too far and I'd have to backtrack
and undo things I've already done,
because some of it is being done by the 2-bus.
I'm also a fan of doing things,
basically, in as few places as possible.
If I can EQ the overall mix bus
by adding some top end and some bottom end,
doing a bit of a 'happy face' EQ,
and that means I have to do much less individual EQ,
I'm a happy man.
The less processing, the better.
For two reasons: one,
I'd have to put in plug-ins all over the place
and EQ separately, and it's kind of boring.
And again, you have this fear of, 'Have I EQ'ed this thing properly?'
as opposed to, 'That sounds great! I don't need to do it.'
Part of it is a laziness factor,
but that real laziness
comes from being able to just mix.
I don't have to EQ everything
because stuff is already sounding good
as it goes through the mix bus chain.
That said,
I'll bypass the first four parts.
At the very end is a limiter.
I always have a limiter, it's always in this kind of configuration.
Anywhere from 0.2 to 0.5 dB on the threshold,
and then my output ceiling
is set to be whatever is the loudest it can be
with the red lights off.
So I look like a genius, but my mixes are loud.
That's what I want.
Now, because we're in a floating-point architecture,
this -0.5 dB threshold
does not mean we only have 0.5 dB of limiting.
There could be 20 dB of limiting
because it's floating-point,
it can overshoot an infinite number of decibels,
and as long as I don't shave it off
somewhere along the line before it gets here,
this limiter is where it will finally happen.
What is important to me is the gain structure
as I hit this 2-bus chain,
and then what it sounds like.
There will probably be anywhere from 2 to 6 dB of limiting on the back end,
but that's because I let my transients carry all the way through the mix.
That uncompressed kick
is coming straight to the mix bus.
It's not going through
a Drums Aux that has some stuff
that then goes through a rhythm section Aux that has some stuff.
That kick drum comes straight to the Router.
A lot of tracks.
And that Router...
...feeds these plug-ins,
and the only thing in between
is a Master fader that allows me to turn my entire mix down
until I'm hitting the sweet spot in the plug-ins I'm about to talk about.
The very first one is just color.
The threshold is all the way down.
The way the Fairchild works — this is a Fairchild 670 emulation —
is the threshold knob is like a send to the detector circuit.
Every compressor is exactly the same:
there is an audio path and there is a detector path,
and the detector path is what has a threshold on it,
and when you go over the threshold, it turns down the audio path.
That's the way it works.
The way they're set up are all totally different.
Some of them have a threshold knob
where you're actually changing the threshold.
Some of them have a knob labeled 'Threshold,' like this one,
which is changing how much audio
gets sent to the actual side-chain.
Some of them have input controls
where it has a fixed threshold that it never even talks about
and you have to crank the input to change the amount of compression.
Doesn't matter. In this case I've got the threshold all the way down,
which technically should mean I'm never compressing.
I've got the Wet/Dry control only 50% Wet.
So, I'm going through this for the emulation of the wire.
The Fairchild and the compressors like it,
like the RCA BA-6A, the Federal,
things of that age
were built to a military spec
where every component had to be working about half as hard as it could work
so that you had many fewer component failures inside of the unit,
because they were used
both for military transmissions, for radio transmissions,
but then also used in broadcast quite a bit.
The Fairchild was also then built
to be put on the front end of a cutting lathe for cutting vinyl.
But basically, there's just a ton of wire,
there are transformers, there are tubes,
there's all kinds of stuff, so it has a sound.
All of that said,
we're just gonna listen to the drum kit
and we'll listen to the Fairchild.
There's gonna be a bit of a gain bump.
As you pick up harmonic distortion you also pick up level,
so, don't be fooled completely by the level,
but it's just a little bit of color.
So it's subtle, but there's a little bit of harmonic distortion,
especially in the low mids.
In later versions of my template,
this actually moved after what's next,
which is a 33609 compressor,
because on a really loud dense mix,
that amount of color
would actually make the compressor not work the way I wanted it to work.
I wanted it a little bit cleaner going into the compressor,
and then get the dirt put on by that Fairchild emulation.
On this particular mix and in this stage of my career
— this was a couple of years ago —
I was fine with how the color sounded.
I would probably have to turn the mix down a little bit more going in, though,
to make sure of what was going on.
Next in the chain is a 33609,
it's a Neve compressor.
Very particular sound when you use the 100 millisecond Recovery.
It's an auto-attack, you have no control over the attack time.
The Limiter is out, so these knobs do nothing.
The Threshold is all the way up,
so I'm doing as little as possible.
I've got 2 dB of Makeup Gain
because you do lose that amount going through the compressor,
and the Ratio is at 1.5:1.
Later on, once the whole mix is in, we'll come and have a look.
I almost never have the gain reduction meters go over 4 dB.
That just sounds terrible to me
and I would hear it long before I would see it,
and that's when I would come down to my Master fader
which is controlling the mix bus level
as it goes into these plug-ins and I would turn it down.
You can see that this Router is down at -9.9.
That means as I built my balance, especially for the end of the song,
the mix was really loud.
In fact, it was almost 10 dB too loud.
So I just pull it down here, the magic of the floating-point mixer,
and that turns the mix down keeping the balance intact,
and lets it go through these plug-ins at a much reduced level.
That said, here are the drums with and without the compressor:
This just has more of the thing
that I've been talking about the whole time,
it's more of what the EQ on the kick does,
more of what the K-S Crush does, more of what the Fatso does,
more of what everything does.
It just sounds a little more alive, a little more energetic.
That's it!
Next in the chain is an EQ,
but it's a very versatile EQ,
there's a lot of stereo processing.
Basically, I'm not doing much here.
It's in Mid/Side mode,
which means that this side of the EQ
is for whatever is in the middle.
This side of the EQ is for whatever is on the sides,
meaning whatever is not completely mono.
Sometimes when people think Mid/Side,
they think that the middle is pretty wide
and that the sides are just what's out here.
The reality is that the Mid is incredibly narrow,
it's only what is completely mono.
As soon as something is even slightly stereo,
it's on the sides.
I've got a high shelf,
I'm adding 1.3 dB at 8 kHz on the sides.
Why am I not doing that in the middle?
It's leftover in my template,
it's just to brighten up cymbals and things,
but, I would never end up making my vocal more harsh.
So the vocal is right in the middle, except for the effects on it,
so I know I'm not going to affect the vocal, that's fine.
The other thing I am using is a Stereo Width control
up at 141%.
This is just widening the mix,
because the only thing that sounds better than louder is wider.
So here's with and without, just on the drums:
This, again, once the whole mix is in,
will do a little bit more to probably the strings,
how wide that sounds,
the panning on the guitars.
Another thing that's really interesting, actually,
that any of the stereo width controls will do for you:
when I'm mixing on a console,
and still sometimes when I'm mixing In-The-Box,
I will do a lot of hard panning.
Sort of LCR, I never learned it being described that way,
but it's sort of saying something is hard left, in the center, hard right.
Even if you don't necessarily mix that way,
you will very often have something hard left or hard right.
And in this particular mix, if we look at the guitars,
and I'm jumping out of order,
but, the acoustic guitar is hard left,
and the electric guitar is hard right.
In headphones,
especially because the intro of the song is just the acoustic guitar,
that can be very disconcerting,
to listen to a mix that only has something on the left.
When you use the Stereo Width control,
what it's doing is playing little phase tricks
so it adds some out of phase stuff to the other speaker,
which makes it sound like the thing that is hard left
is further to the left.
But in headphones, what you're actually getting is
some of that guitar is back in the right.
Really quickly,
I'm gonna go solo the acoustic guitar
and I'm going to take this in and out.
And what you're hopefully going to hear,
or even see on the meters,
is a little bit of this acoustic guitar is going to show up in the other speaker.
Shazam!
So now on speakers, and even in headphones to a certain extent,
the mix will sound wider, especially when it's dense.
But also, at the beginning of the song,
when you listen in your earbuds,
which is the way most people listen to everything now,
it's not that weird 'sucking the other eardrum out of your head feeling
because there is absolutely nothing on the other side,'
so it saves me from having to add reverbs,
or to even think about the fact that I'm hard panning.
And this is something that has been on my template for a while now,
and it stays in on every single mix
unless it causes a problem, which it can do.
One thing to watch out for with plug-ins like this
is what will happen in the low mids,
if you have a cleaner guitar that is sustaining,
you can actually end up getting crackly distortion
because of 'stereo width-type' phasey plug-ins
that goes away as soon as you bypass it.
I don't know why they are so susceptible
to that kind of material, but they are.
And last but not least in the mix chain
is the Pultec.
Just another 'happy face' EQ.
We've got +3 at 100 Hz,
and +3.5, nice and broad, at around 10 kHz.
Again, this is just to keep me
from having to individually EQ things.
I just have a nice bright mix bus with a bunch of low end.
Got the drums solo'ed back up.
Sounds like music, that's what it sounds like!
We got our 2-mix chain in.
Again, this master fader
is taking whatever is going to Router.
In this session, that is my mix bus.
It's turning it down 9.9 dB
before it gets into these plug-ins,
and then it comes out of these plug-ins
and goes down into the actual mix track,
and we're listening in Input through that audio track.
Very, very simple setup, but that's what I've got going on.
Let's look at some other instruments, shall we?
One thing that I'll mention quickly,
and again, there is another video
where I talk about my template,
and that's so I don't have to spend too much time on it here.
I have a stereo parallel compressor
that is for everything except drums.
That's the basic rule.
Sometimes the drums get sent to it a little bit.
In this particular session
I've got the percussion going to the Rear Bus,
and it's just an 1176 dual mono. That is the key.
And this was actually...
Oh, this was back in the day
before UAD supported dual mono,
so I had to build my template with two...
...Auxes that are mono,
grabbing the left and right side of the Rear Bus send,
and then there is a group that is actually grouping the controls
in case I need it to come in and tweak these.
Now, on this compressor,
if you want to see in detail what's going on,
I talk about it more on this other video,
but the only control I would ever mess with anyway is the Release time,
and it's only if the mix is sounding a little weird to me
but it's not what's going on in the mix bus processing.
Then the next place I would check is the Rear Bus
because it's handling so much of the mix itself
in the parallel compression
that it can have an effect in just how the mix feels.
We come back up to our shaker and tambourine tracks,
and there is no EQ.
They're being panned a little bit and they go off to the Rear Bus.
It's really straight-ahead.
I mean, this is probably
whatever vocal mic happened to be set up to do background vocals,
and then we had to do some percussion.
So here's the shaker:
Nothing too crazy going on.
And then with the drums
you just hear it just adds a little bit of motion
because that's what percussion is for.
This is very structural percussion,
this is not solo percussion.
You might be saying to yourself,
'Well, that's odd, why does the tambourine start on the third hit
of the cycle of four?'
There is no real reason to it, it's more,
'Okay, we get to that section of the song, we don't actually need the tambourine.
There's enough going on.'
But then we kind of want the tambourine at some point during the section,
so this is a musical decision,
more of just a mix decision,
and it's kind of this thing...
It used to happen a lot more when people were recording on tape,
because you couldn't see a waveform
and see that you were missing the first tambourine of a section,
or you were sharing the track.
So, the tambourine in the chorus
had something else on it in the verses,
and that something else lasted
a little bit over the downbeat of the chorus
so you punch out and you've just erased your first tambourine.
And you recorded that three weeks ago,
and then you realize, like, 'Well, musically, who cares?'
So it actually is a way
to kind of build the mix in a weird organic way,
and once the whole mix is in,
I probably am not going to remember to play you this spot,
but have a listen when we get to what's called Chorus 2,
which is sounding more lyrically like Verse 2.
And that tambourine will come in in sort of an odd spot
and it just helps build the song in a musical way.
It's a good thing.
Next is bass, with this we work our way down.
It's Flea, he is the man.
Very straight-ahead recording,
there is a DI track
and there are two mics on the amp.
One is just called 'bass amp' and it's a U47.
Most likely they thought they were just going to have the one,
and then they were missing something on the sound,
and so Greg added a 421 just as a second mic.
I do this from the beginning almost all the time on bass amps,
I will have a dynamic and a condenser.
In this case it's a U47 FET,
I'm sure not the tube,
and then a 421, and you just...
I stick them right at the middle
of two of the 10" speakers.
Flea usually records through an 8x10,
just pick any two speakers and if something sounds weird,
try a different speaker.
And unless something is wired strangely,
they're all in phase with each other,
so I just stick it right in the center.
And the speakers are too small and the microphones are too big
to get two mics on one speaker, so that's why I choose two.
It's not for any reason other than the logistics of trying to mic the cabinet.
Now I'll just cycle through the three elements of the bass
so you can hear what's going on.
So you can hear three very different sounds.
The bass DI is very clean,
the bass amp track,
which is the 47 FET,
is actually relatively clean
even though the bass obviously has some dirt on it.
And then the bulk of the bass sound,
you can tell from the different levels as I go through these,
is made up from the 421.
Definitely grittier, a little more presence in the midrange.
And on both of the amp tracks
I'm using a Phoenix,
which is some harmonic distortion.
It's just tape emulation, but whether it sounds
like tape or a transformer, I don't really care.
It's just some harmonic distortion
and the settings are probably identical.
There you go. I was lazy and Option-dragged.
And then there is a Helios model,
so I'm going to show you that on the 421
because it's the loudest mic.
What there is in the Helios EQ,
and it's captured really well both by the UAD model and the Waves model,
is the resonance of the EQ circuit.
So there is some resonance around the frequency,
and it could be just due to resonant phase shift
or whether there's some sort of filter design.
I don't really know exactly why,
but check out the difference in this 421 track
as I take the Helios in and out.
Really big difference in the low end.
All three basses together sound like this:
A little bit of that DI
to get the sound of the fingers on the strings, a little clarity,
but the majority of the sound is that 421 track.
There is a track called 'Bass Crush.'
I think, actually, I got rid of it. It's not in my template anymore.
This was unused in my template
for a very long time,
and it's unused in this session as well.
The only send here is to the Rear Bus.
This is going in along with everything else.
I don't think there is much point
in hearing the bass with and without the Rear Bus
because it's also all the guitars, the strings,
and the vocals and the percussion.
So once we get more instruments in,
then we'll go back and actually listen to the Rear Bus.
That takes care of the bass.
The guitars are pretty straight-ahead.
Let me clean up here a little bit.
The tracking guitar is the main guitar
being used on the song.
There is a 'close' mic and a 'combo' mic.
I think they are basically just two amplifiers.
The 'close' sounds like this:
And the 'combo' sounds like this:
And on some songs those amps were panned apart,
on some songs they were put together to make a tone.
This song is definitely one where they were put together to make a tone.
And all I've got is a little bit of EQ
on this guitar combo just for a little bit of presence.
I'll take this in and out so you can hear it before I play them together.
So really it has the effect
of almost cleaning the guitar up a little bit.
It's bringing out the presence of the sound
of the pick on the strings and the tone
the same way the clean bass DI track does that for the bass.
This EQ is just lifting it,
and I would bet money,
not a lot of money because I am not really a betting man,
but I would bet money that this was done in context.
This was done very late in the mix
where I felt like that guitar was just getting lost,
especially once the rest of the band came in or something like that.
So together, it sounds like this:
And there is a send to Bus 20.
Let's find out what that is.
I don't actually remember what that is.
It might be to nowhere.
This could have been a leftover from tracking.
It might have been a send off to a tuner plug-in,
or a reverb or something like that.
Well, it turns out...
...that that's going nowhere, so we can make those inactive.
Like I'm using this opportunity to clean up my own session.
I think that's good.
And then, if you remember from earlier,
when we get to the middle eight,
the main guitar switches from the main guitar tracks,
which are actually part of the basic tracking.
So this guitar performance
is from the band's performance where we got the drums, the bass, and this guitar.
And then we switch to...
...this 'brk' (break) guitar amp and combo.
So this was done probably almost immediately
with the exact same setup,
but I've got more EQ on this.
What I will do is bypass the EQ
and whatever else is on here.
And here are the two amps together that make up this sound:
This could be just pedals
that weren't available at the time,
or it could have been that he needed to step on five pedals
and that was going to be way too distracting
while he was actually trying to play the song.
On the guitar amp
I'm taking off quite a bit of top end.
And the same on the combo.
So it's just to get rid of a little bit of that ringing,
especially on the top notes.
It's just acting like a filter.
Why am I doing it with a shelf?
I have no idea.
And then, on the guitar amp
I'm adding a little bit of that 60 Hz again.
What that's going to do on a bass
is really bring out bass, low end.
On guitar, it's going to sound kind of like cabinet thump,
it's more air around the guitar itself.
So I'm back to just listening to the amp track
and I'll take this in and out so you can hear what it does.
It just sounds better to me,
it sounds more present
and it just sounds like maybe I backed the mic up a couple of feet.
It just lets the low end of the guitar develop in a way.
And then, just to hear it,
let's hear the transition between the one guitar and the other:
Rather than panning, it really does sound like that's the main guitar.
The panning changes because we go into spacey land,
so lots of other stuff is happening
and that guitar couldn't live hard right.
And you can also see that the amps are split apart.
The 'amp' track is panned a little bit to the right,
and the 'gtr combo' is panned almost hard left.
And that would be because
there's another guitar down here,
which I'll play you next, which is split apart.
But this is more of just effects:
Pedal effects, but that combined with the main guitar:
That gives you kind of your main guitar width and effect,
so the effect is sort of octave-up delayed reverb kind of thing.
But that's very much made from that arpeggiating guitar.
Our 'Wah' guitar, which we haven't gotten to,
is also a part of the middle eight,
but I think the idea of changing the panning
was that because we lose the acoustic guitar,
which we will actually listen to next,
which is panned hard left,
that guitar felt too much on its own on the right,
so I was spreading it back across the middle.
In context, I don't think you're going to hear it move quite so much,
the strings are in,
there's all kinds of stuff going on there,
so this was basically probably
a listening on headphones-type situation decision
to not let that guitar stay completely wide.
So the acoustic, very straight-ahead recording.
Again, I believe overdubbed very quickly after the take was done.
This is probably done
because the very first time this song was mixed
it was mixed on this console.
Not in this studio, but on this console,
and this is a model of the 31102,
which is the EQ that is in this console.
I would bet when I was first doing this mix In-The-Box
that I was having trouble making it feel the same,
so I went and got my recall notes and copied the EQ.
As it turns out,
I'm just adding some 3.2 and some 220.
And then filtering out at 45, so not a lot,
but here's with and without:
More present.
Now, to me,
the sound of this EQ
is more like what a lot of people would do
by ducking out some frequencies
between the 220 Hz and the 3.2.
You could absolutely do that, there is no reason not to dip out
a little 800, 1 k, that kind of thing.
But the Neve EQs are so musical and they're broad,
that I feel like I can get the same effect
by adding the frequencies I like
as opposed to taking away the frequencies I don't like.
If there's a real problem with the sound,
that's when I reach for an EQIII,
I find the frequency range that is a problem,
set the Q appropriately, dip it out.
But if I'm just trying to make something sound better,
I like to do it by adding,
because to me, addition is better
and subtraction is getting rid of stuff that is a huge problem.
So it's really more of a philosophy than a technique,
but I would always tend to try and make stuff sound better with additive EQ.
And that would usually be on a Neve or an API-style EQ
because that's what makes sense to me.
So now, on to the Wah guitar,
which is a big feature of this song.
It's spread across three tracks.
Originally, I think probably left separate to allow for some panning.
I'm actually combining it down
into a single Aux,
and then that's going off to the Router,
but it is being sent to an effect.
I want to...
...be clear there is quite a bit going on,
and then we'll get rid of stuff.
Again, I'm leaving the Rear Bus on all of this
because it's just part of the sound.
Let me go here where he's playing a lot.
We've got something called 'gtr 2,' which is here:
Then 'gtr 2' amp 2:
Sounds very much like 'gtr 2.'
And here is 'gtr 2' deluxe, which would be a separate amp:
And here are those three amp tracks, all together:
And you are probably saying to yourself,
'Andrew, that's cool, but is it cool enough?'
And I would say, 'No! Let's add 'Wah FX' to it!'
I don't even remember what it is.
Hey! It's Little MicroShift again.
This is just to spread that guitar out,
there is some built-in delay, its 100% wet.
Just a great-sounding effect.
Just to finish up with the guitars,
that 'fx' guitar that I played you
while showing you the breakdown guitar in the middle eight
continues on to the end of the track, but the panning actually changes.
So, in the middle eight it sounds like this:
And it's leaning to the right,
which is where the electric guitar has been for the entire song,
so that helps her to keep the continuity.
So, as a listener you're not sort of drawn out of the song
to say, 'Hey! Where did the guitar player go?'
Later in the song, though, it moves over to the left and sounds like this:
And along with it is 'fx gtr2' which sounds like this:
And together, they make this:
And with all of the guitars:
So you can hear a very straight-ahead acoustic, electric, wah,
and then we have our really cool 'fx' guitars,
and we could have just done a stereo effect
like we did in the bridge,
but what is cool about this
is by having two performances
it's almost like there is some random panning
between the left and right,
between those two 'fx' guitars.
And if you didn't catch that the first time,
rewind the video about 35 seconds
and you'll check that out.
And that just helps keep them moving.
One of the reasons they need to keep moving
is because they are competing with a lot of stuff at that point.
Not just the band stuff,
but the strings are back full-bore,
plus we've got extra background vocals, things like that.
Okay, I've got one more musical element
before we get to strings and vocals,
so let me just show you very quickly what the piano is doing
and then I am going to play you a bit of the track
and we can actually have a look at the Rear Bus.
The drums don't go to the Rear Bus,
so, as we listen to that, stuff is going to change.
It's not the fairest way to hear it,
but you'll get an idea of how that helps glue everything back together.
Very quickly, I've got piano.
Low and high mics,
not that big a deal, very simple,
coming out of the middle eight into the breakdown verse.
So basically, like reinforcement octaves,
but, because all the other instruments are stripped out,
that becomes the actual piano part,
and then later on:
It's a piano part,
but it's really there for weight.
It sonically will help fill things in
in frequency ranges that other instruments aren't necessarily covering.
There's a little bit of motion in there,
and I also love that you can hear Josh doing a backbeat
*click*
in the middle of it,
because he is playing piano and you gotta feel the beat.